Will you be able to level Dranei/Blood Elf during the 2.0.3 patch?
Or only after the opening of the portal?
I cannot speak for TwinStar or the Kronos team, but I can tell you what happened on retail back in the day...
Patch 2.0.1 was the initial patch for Burning Crusade, it is essentially what was installed onto your PC after you bought and loaded up your Burning Crusade game discs. On retail, the game ran for 33 days on this patch. You can Google for the exact/full patch notes, but here are the most important things to know about 2.0.1
- Your game client is no longer "vanilla", it's Burning Crusade (in the private scene this means you'll be running a 2.4.3 client)
- Draenei and Blood Elves are available to use, starting from level 1 of course
- The new starter zones are available (Ghostlands and Azuremuyst Isle)
- All classes now have access to their 41-point BC talent trees
- All of the initial BC stat changes and class mechanics/updates are implemented
- Level cap remains 60, and the Dark portal is closed (so no access yet to Outland)
Patch 2.0.3 was the
actual opening of the Dark Portal, allowing players to now cross the Dark Portal (therefore going into Outland and starting the new quests).
We will be providing new players a chance to catch up and join in time for Outlands (likely between 1-2 months, but no number has been finalized yet).
Thanks for the heads up Davros! It's important to know that those 33 days where Blizzard was on 2.0.1 functioned as a final PTR of sorts...making sure everything was in good shape before allowing players to move into Outland. It was not meant to be a form of "catch-up" for new players.
I'm also not saying that Kronos should honor what Blizzard did back then and model after that, but this is a
very important subject for anyone with characters on K1/K2 and eventually K3 that has/will spend enormous amounts of time playing Vanilla. None of these players (read: 95% of the player base) will want to sit in a patch 2.0.1 state for months while Kronos caters to a few players who decided to sit this round out and just wait for KronosTBC to arrive. What this effectively does is just extend your Vanilla timeline out,
tacked on at the end of it's timeline, when everyone wants to do something new.
Anyone who is going to sit and wait, well...good for them! That's their choice. Anyone who has been (or continues to be) living under a rock, and suddenly discovers Kronos 18 months from now, well...great! But let's not penalize everyone that has played on K1/K2/K3 all that time by making them wait another few months to play BC so a few late arrivals can "catch-up".