Beta Blog 4: Wrath of the Lich King

Glyphs and item enhancements
Inscription has come a long way since its first introduction a couple of weeks ago. As suspected, enchanters and scribes are able to put their wares up on the Auction House rather than having to spend hours hawking their trade skills in a major city – a time consuming and frustrating endeavour for people selling and often frustrating for buyers who had trouble finding people with that skill when they’re online.

Glyphs have been added to the game and these class specific enhancements should be very interesting to play with. A Glyph panel has been added to the Spellbook featuring three major and three minor Glyphs. As part of this week’s shopping spree I picked up Glyph of Insect Swarm, Glyph of Entangling Roots, and Glyph of Rebirth for my druid. Unlike enchantments, there’s sometimes a payoff to be made when using these kinds of glyphs – for example the Insect Swarm glyph increases the damage done by the spell, but removes the element which reduced the targets +hit.

I’m very much looking forward to testing mage glyphs such as Glyph of Improved Scorch (which applies all five applications of the Scorch debuff when one scorch is cast). There is a one-hour cooldown for this (and many other) glyphs; It will be interesting to see how these new elements play out in the game and whether they affect party balance – it may affect play-style for people who mainly solo or run five-man instances.

World lore
I’m a bit of a lore-geek, truth be told, and yes I love RP servers, so it was great to come across some Arthas-oriented quests in the Dragonblight zone. A Wintergarde Keep quest line sees you following in Arthas’ footsteps and using seeing stones to see visions of the past – in this case Arthas finding Frostmourne in a cavern in Northrend. It’s a great little scene and interestingly includes some of the different human models that you find scattered throughout the new continent. Having watched this now, through, I can say with authority that even when he was human, Arthas was a bit of a jerk.

Arthas - a prat even before he died.