Week of WoW: The Burning Crusade - Day 3: Hellfire Peninsula

We stocked up on quests - mostly "fetch this item" or "kill these dudes" kind of stuff - and started exploring the area around Honor Hold. We didn't get very far before getting hailed by a miner just outside of town. Ah, the classic "trouble in the mine" quest. We jumped right in, hacking these little creeps (similar to the rat-like Kobolds from Azeroth only bulkier and with a battlecry of "Oh yeah!" instead of "You no take candle!") to pieces in the depths of the mine.

When we emerged from the mine covered in monster blood, we talked to the harried miner who offered us a quest reward that stopped our heart for a second. This guy wanted to give us a necklace with stats that rivaled the necklace that we were currently wearing... a necklace we'd spent weeks earning in a long quest chain in the Eastern Plaguelands. Flabbergasted, we logged out and immediately re-logged onto our Draenei who was parked in the Exodar. We jogged to the auction house to check out some of the other gear available from Outland and were shocked to find that, on average, the Good (green) items in the Burning Crusade expansion rivaled most Epic (purple) raid sets.

At first, we were a little depressed... all those months of running Molten Core for nothing. Then we realized that these phat lewts (WoW -ese for "fat loots" aka good gear) were dropping off of common monsters. Incredible new weapons and armor sets were being harvested in Outland right this second and we were wasting our time crying about the hard-won gear we couldn't wait to upgrade from. The bottom line seemed to be that the Outland was a veritable land of milk and honey where bits of uber-elite gear dropped like grains of sand through an overturned hourglass.