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The Lich King is Coming - Part 1

The Lich King is Coming - Part 1

It's expansion time for World of Warcraft, and once again the game is getting a major shakeup. In fact, the pre-expansion "bridge patch" could be called the biggest change to the game since launch. Previous expansion, The Burning Crusade, only added some new talents and slightly tweaked some of the classes. For the second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, just about everything changes. Most of the changes apply to everyone and they arrive a month before the actual launch of the expansion.

I'm sure almost everyone has lost track with the constant stream of patch notes from the Wrath of the Lich King beta - in fact, even Blizzard has stopped trying to keep them up to date. In addition to the hopelessly outdated patch notes, there is an ever larger pile of unofficial notes about changes that people have noticed. Most of that is details, and not really important for the average player. When the final patch 3.0.2 finally does go live with full official notes, you might want to look up the specific details related to the class you play most, but for the rest... here is a summary of all the important bits that will rock the World of Warcraft next week.

Patch 3.0.2 - Echoes of Doom

Next week? Yes, next week.

While Wrath of the Lich King is scheduled to go on sale 13th of November, the bridge patch, "Echoes of Doom", is currently scheduled for the week after BlizzCon 2008. That's 14th of October 2008 for the US and 15th for the EU. While this date has not yet been firmly confirmed, Arena Season 4 is scheduled to end on 14th of October. Barring any last minute showstoppers, it's a fairly sure bet that the patch will also come on the same day.

A lot of noise has been made about all the new features included in the expansion, but in reality the majority of changes and new features will come, free of charge, to every player - even to those who don't have The Burning Crusade - in patch 3.0.2. These changes include;

New spells and talents

Forget what you knew about the talent trees of your favorite class - or any class, for that matter. All talent trees have received major tuneups and new talents have been added. The highest talent in every tree takes now 51 points, mostly to balance the fact that characters will receive ten additional talent points on the way to level 80. This changes a lot even at level 70.

Many classes also receive completely new spells and talent-related abilities. Druids get a normal resurrection spell, Fire mages get to toss around a Living Bomb, Restoration Shamans get a heal-over-time spell, Hunters get a whole new pet system with a separate talent points and talent trees for pets and so on. Every class is changed in some way.

New raid buff system

Majority of the class changes are related to the massive re-design of buffs and de-buffs in the game. Many short-term buffs in WoW are currently limited to your group. Warrior yells a Battle Shout for extra attack power for his group. Shaman lays down his totems for his group. Shadow Priest generates massive mana regen boost for his group. At the same time many debuffs stack, and raiding in Burning Crusade degenerated to a state where specific raid bosses pretty much required specific classes and specs to be present to ensure maximum synergy within each raid group.

All this is going to be history. It's going to take a while to re-adjust to the new system - all buffs are going to be raid wide - one character will be able to give his beneficial effect to the whole raid. On the flipside, none of the debuffs you pile on the boss to help with the kill will stack any more. Once a certain type of debuff is there, it can only be overwritten by another stronger debuff of the same type. This removes the benefit of certain types of debuffs that used to stack.

As the old spells and talents would have generated grossly overpowered situations, many spell and ability changes can be tracked to this massive modification to the underlying gameplay. Couple of most noticeable examples would be the fact that Bloodlust/Heroism, while raid wide, leaves you unable to receive another Bloodlust/Heroism for 5 minutes or the fact that the massive mana boost from Shadow Priests is getting toned down a lot. Beyond the noticeable changes to some specific abilities, if you play alone or in 5-man groups it's not a huge change, but for those who raid it's a whole new game. Those who want all the gory details, here is a handy list about the buffs, courtesy of Elitist Jerks.

Related to this change, all existing raid bosses get a round of nerfs to their hit points to ensure that raids under the new system are actually still able to kill them - and, well, the "word on the street" is that the nerf is quite massive so if Kalecgos used to smash your face when your guild last tried him, perhaps it's time to go and take a look after 3.0.2.

Spellpower, unified +hit, +crit and +haste

Even those playing mostly alone will notice the other major change to game mechanics. Items, enchants and gems providing Spell Damage or Healing bonuses will all change to unified Spellpower stat, which affects both Healing and Spell Damage. At the same time the numerical values for healing bonuses are cut roughly in half (the exact ratio is 1:1.88) but in reality this is just a cosmetic change - 1000 spellpower gives the same effect as 1880 healing power used to give.

Pre-3.0.2 - Healing and Spell damage are separate

After 3.0.2 it's all just Spellpower

Separate bonuses to spell hit, melee hit, spell critical rating, melee critical rating, spell haste and melee haste are also being merged to just "Hit Rating", "Critical Hit Rating" and "Haste Rating". Each will affect both spells and melee, bringing much rejoicing to those classes that deal both melee and spell damage.

Some classes also find that their underlying stat mechanics got changed. Notable examples are Protection Paladins and Enhancement Shamans. Goal is to combine some of the loot types to a bit more universal item styles. It used to be that many high end drops were any good only for a specific class, but starting next week, sharing is the name of the game. It also means that in the expansion there will be less unsuitable loot to be disenchanted. There will still be some class-specific drops, and most existing class-specific items stay limited to the class while their actual stats get changed together with the spellpower and hit/crit/haste changes.

In summary; Your character sheet may show some quite different numbers, and your gear may give some new bonuses, but in the end it should be all good - just as before, or better.

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