It's been 2 weeks since The Burning Crusade was released, and it's been a pretty good time. I've gotten Unbarc up to level 67, and replaced some (not much, but some) gear with quest rewards and a drop or 2. I think my favorite upgrade thus far is from a quest, [Battle Mage's Baton]. It's better then [Staff of the Shadow Flame], which drops off of Nefarian, and it's a quest reward. After seeing all this stuff drop in the 5-man instances (blues/greens), I'm really anxious to see what comes from the 25-man raids. With all the quests and quick instances I've been doing, I shot my banked gold from 950g to 2100g as of last night. Looks like I won't have any problems getting a flying mount when I hit 70.

Now on to some bad news (for me, anyway). With the latest patch, the mage talent Improved Fireball and Improved Frostbolt have been given a damage reduction of 2% for each point you put into it, which comes out to a spell that reduces cast time by 0.5 seconds and reduces spell damage by 10%. To try and avoid this, I tried to respec and get around that talent, but needless to say I hated it. I went all the way down to Slow in Arcane, and put the rest in fire (minus Improved Fireball). It may not seem like it, but a 3.5 second cast fireball seems like an eternety after a year of casting a 3 second fireball. By the end of the night I switched back to my old build and just dealt with the damage reduction. It's not too bad, since I just got my new staff, along with the new enchant +40 spelldamage to weapon. I even replaced my gloves with some nice socketed ones ([Tempest's Touch]) and put some crit gems into it, so my crit is building up enough to where I don't care about the damage nerf. After I get these new gloves enchanted with the +20 all damage (instead of my old +20 fire damage), I should be up to around 580ish spell damage and 25% crit with fire.