Beta Blog 2: World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Welcome to Stormwind! Now 50 per cent more open to attack!

Having spent some of last week getting the novelty of Death Knights out of my system (more to come though) I decided to start my journey through Northrend this week. As a member of the filthy Alliance this involves travelling to Stormwind and its spiffy new harbour. If you’ve visited Stormwind recently you probably noticed the Dwarven engineers waiting to blow a hole in the wall around the city at the western end of the canal district. Come expansion time you’ll find a broad avenue down to the harbour as well as the newly returned King of Stormwind, Varian Wrynn – glad to see he finally got out of that Naga prison on Alcaz Island.

The trip from Stormwind to Northrend is via a rather awesome looking paddle-steamer – it looks a little like the SeeD ships from FF8, actually. After the trip Alliance players arrive at Valiance Keep in the Borean Tundra, which is a pretty huge questing area, with starting quests kicking off at about level 68+, much like Outland kicked off at 58+ in Hellfire Peninsula. Starting in the zone earlier than that is probably doable, and I’ve seen quite a few Death Knights in the zone at lower levels so grinding out a couple of levels with just kills is possible, but quests probably won’t be available to you until level 68.

Stormwind's brand new harbour.

It’s canon
As with the first expansion this zone lays out the narrative for the rest of the new continent – quests here are all about fighting off the Scourge, introducing the Tuskar race as well as the mages of Dalaran and starting players off against Malygos and the Blue Flight.

Old Malypants has woken up and realised the world is pretty much crap and decided to do something about it. Sadly if you’re a magic user and mortal, this pretty much puts you on his shit-list. So, he’s sending out his own sorcerers and dragonkin to take out the magical trash, as it were. These quests should lead to the Nexus instance (as soon as I can find a damn group in the middle of the night, US-time, bleh).

There are some great new ways to travel in Northrend.

We also find DEHTA in this zone, which is fun if you’ve ever thought Hemit Nessinwary was a little zealous in his attempts to eradicate all life in the Eastern Kingdoms, Nagrand and now Northrend. A word of warning though; if you do have to kill an animal for some reason, don’t go anywhere near the DEHTA druids until the ‘Blood on your Hands’ debuff has worn off (it’s only three minutes) those druids pack a punch and aren’t afraid to kill you dead. If only my own druid was that leet.

Having now run around the early zones in Northrend I think that Blizzard got the order wrong, the storylines for this expansion feel to me like they should have put it out before the Burning Crusade. After all, the Scourge have been a big problem for such a long time, it feels a bit like we got sidetracked with Outland. But, having said that, let’s hope that Blizz learned from whatever mistakes were made with BC and can avoid the same in Wrath.