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

Liz Skuthorpe | Aug 21, 2008 11:19 AM

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.

New talents & trees
As with BC and other major patches, most classes have had a considerable revamp for the level grind to 80. The introduction of Death Knights also means class balance needs to be sorted out again and class roles are being reconsidered.

On the plus side, my boomkin loves the new Balance tree – although druids do still suffer from bloated trees (for all specs I think) the mere fact that ‘roots’ are now usable indoors makes them far more viable as an instance/raid member.

But those bloat issues are still a bit of a problem; for moonkin to be really effective as a caster they need to dump a lot of points into balance, which wouldn’t be so much of a problem if there weren’t good talents such as Omen of Clarity over in restoration. It would be nice to be able to run a 40/21 split (or whatever the equivalent Wrath split will be) like other classes. Feral and Resto have similar issues but I guess we’ll see more down the track.

Kings of AoE? What?
And this brings me to mages (and the requisite mage QQ); talents seem to be all over the place in the beta. Single target DPS seems to have had a nerf and the Fire tree (nominally the raid spec since BC) has had more AoE talents and spells added to it.

Mage has been my preferred class since the original release. I’m lukewarm about new talents such as Hot Streak (after three consecutive crits, you have a chance to get 100 per cent crit bonus) and World in Flames (increase to your AoE damage). And Living Bomb simply doesn’t do it for me; if Blizz really wants mages to be the ‘kings of AoE’ as they’ve suggested they really need more stamina and a chance to AoE from distance. Otherwise you may as well roll for our kidney.

Druids still have a lot of hard decisions in their late game builds.

Inscription
Just like Jewelcrafting in BC, the new profession, Inscription, will be added to the game with Wrath. Inscription will allow players to create scrolls and other items for single use or to act as enchantments or item enhancements on gear. As with most professions inscription has a complementary profession; in this case it's herbalism. Scribes harvest herbs and use them to create magical inks which they then scribble away with on parchments.

Inscription also uses the skill ‘Milling’ to draw trade items out of bunches of herbs – pretty much like ‘prospecting’ in Jewelcrafting. You need a stack of five of the same herbs, e.g. a stack of five peacebloom, to mill out some Alabaster Pomace in order to create Moonglow ink. So, if you'd like to make a bundle of gold come expansion time, get your herbalist stock-piling low-level herbs as lazy peons power level through the profession.

Apprentice level grants the ability to create Scrolls of Spirit, Stamina etc., as well as interesting items like Scroll of Recall – now everyone can zip around like mages. Well, maybe not mages - let's go with shammies. At the very least it will make those damned Children's Week escort quests easier to complete.

Proof that WoW devs still have a wicked sense of humour.