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The Lich King is Coming - Part 1

The Lich King is Coming - Part 1

Changes to 60-70 leveling curve

If you have characters that have not yet reached level 70, you'll get a helping hand. The level curve from 60 to 70 will get noticeably easier - by about 30%. If you are quick, you could level one more character to 70 for the expansion during the last month! After the expansion is live, the full level curve from 1 to 80 will be longer than 1 to 70 used to be, but this change smooths things a bit.

Some existing reputation "grinds" are also re-tuned to make them easier. The most notable one is Timbermaw Hold - you will notice that the reputation gains towards the faction are doubled.

New shadows

As patch 3.0.2 is effectively the whole Wrath of the Lich King with the exception of any new areas or Death Knights, it also brings in the upgraded graphics engine with the new shadows. A lot of improvements have been made to the shadow code during beta. So much, in fact, that our earlier article about the new shadows is mostly obsolete. Bugs are gone and these days the shadows run quite smoothly at maximum settings on any modern gaming system - there is virtually no performance hit if you have a fast DX10-level video card. Those with older computers can still fall back to the old shadows, and the performace in existing areas should not be any different.

New shadows - Ogrimmar has never looked so good.

New graphics settings let you put that graphics card to some use even in World of Warcraft!

Achievement system

Ding! Achievement Unlocked! It's time to start another "race" with your fellow players - collecting achievements. And when Blizzard brings in Achievements, they bring them in a big way. There are almost a thousand different things to unlock and collect. Some are so easy that almost everyone with a level 70 character will instantly have them already when the patch hits. Some give you a reason to go and do some existing content again for a little reward. The rest... there are some for the truly hardcore as well. Remember, the bigger your achievement score is... well, some who do not "get it" claim it indicates lack of "life", whatever that means, but for the WoW junkies, it's a whole new reason to run around doing all kinds of things - even things that do not drop shiny epics!

Many things tracked by Achievements have not been tracked before, so rewards for every past deed will not appear with the patch. A lot of work has gone towards applying as many of these retroactively as possible - for example, if you have any quest completed that can only be completed by slaying the final boss of an instance, that is going to give you credit for clearing the place. Same goes for possessing any bind on pickup loot from such boss - if you have kept that obsolete piece of armor from C'thun that you fought hard for two years ago, you are credited for clearing that raid instance. Sadly in some cases there is no way for the game to know if you have done something that is now worthy of achievement - and in such case you have to go and do it once more.

There is also a set of retroactive achievements that are considered to be impossible to attain any more - either because the feat is no longer possible for a player to do, or because the achievement is tied to something not available to all players. These are gathered under "Feats of Strength" and award no achievement points. Examples would be the "Champion of the Naaru" and "Hand of A'dal" titles, any titles from the old PvP ranking system or maybe holding a Murloc Suit that was handed to people who attended BlizzCon 2007.

Inscription (up to 375)

Inscription tradeskill and the related ability to improve your character with glyphs also goes live with the new patch. You are limited to 375 skill like with all other tradeskills until the expansion actually launches, but this gives you plenty of time to get a good grasp of the new tradeskill. In short, Inscription allows you to turn herbs into inks, and inks can be used to create scrolls and glyphs. Glyphs could be considered to be items that "enchant character" - each class has a wide selection of possible glyphs, and each character has three major and three minor slots for them at level 80. Each glyph improves a specific spell or ability. Major glyphs give noticeable advantages while minor glyphs give tiny bonuses or fun cosmetic modifications. For a full list of known glyphs, check out WoWHead.

Inscription also allows easier enchanting using special scrolls that can be enchanted and traded freely - no need to hunt for enchanters for every little enchant you need. Some special enchants will be limited to "in-person" enchanting like today, but most can be enchanted to inscription-made scrolls for easy sale at the auction house.

Barbershop

Fancy a new haircut? All major cities will also get their own barbershops. In addition to changing your hairstyle, undeads will be able to tune their rotten jaws and taurens will be able to tweak their horns. It's not a full-on plastic surgery, but you'll be able to change the look of your character quite a bit and there are some new hairstyles as well.

Just snip a bit from the top...

Taurens get to pimp their horns and facial instead.

Major UI code changes

As the game changes, the code that runs the user interface changes with it. The 3.0.2 patch brings many obscure yet important changes to the UI code. There are no sweeping changes that would make specific existing addons impossible to implement, but almost every addon requires code updates. Remember to update all your addons - most have already been fixed to work both with the current game and the new patch, and those that required a more complete rewrite tend to have new versions or replacements already done. You can look up specific versions that are guaranteed to work with the new patch on all major addon sites - for example, WoWInterface has a special section for "WOTLK Beta" addons.

And you should fetch updated versions for all your addons now, and save a copy of "WOTLK Beta" addons that currently do not work in live servers - Addon sites are bound to be hammered on the patch day.

New Mount and Pet UI

You can also free up some valuable bag space in your inventory and in the bank. All those mounts and vanity pets will turn into items that teach you a summon spell for that mount/pet, and they will all go to a new UI on your character sheet. This should make it manageable to go for those "collect 50 mounts" and "collect 50 vanity pets" achievements, as you no longer need to litter your bank with them.

And trust me, you need the new interface - Blizzard has recently gone all mount-happy, and the expansion brings many new ways to travel, including the engineer-crafted motorbike.

It is still unclear how Riding Crop and other similar mount speed enhancement trinkets will work. At some point they were supposed to turn into mount enchants - requiring you to buy a crop for every mount - but that got later scrapped. So far in Beta they are still normal trinkets just like before, and it looks like they may stay that way as it would get seriously expensive to "enchant" each of your mounts if you have more than 50 of them... Perhaps they'll add separate "mount item" slots in the new UI at some point for those riding crops and carrots-on-a-stick?

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