The Lich King is Coming - Part 2
The big day is nearly here. On the evening of Wednesday 12th of November, at the stroke of the midnight, Wrath of the Lich King will go live. To hit the new areas you need an expansion box with a DVD and a new expansion CD-Key to upgrade your client and account, but once you have fought the massive queues, secured your box, installed the expansion and upgraded your account - what then? The new continent of Northrend awaits - and we got some hints and tips for you! Note that this article contain some spoilers. All the expansion-related information has obviously been available online for months due to the open beta, but if you want to avoid knowing anything about the content in Northrend before heading out yourself, watch out - from page 2 onwards this article will contain some details that you may want to avoid. Launch Day! It's a big day - it's even in the in-game calendar! Wrath of the Lich King hits on 13th of November, 00:01. Actual launch will be somewhat of a tiered event. Here is the best information I've managed to gather - this is not 100% confirmed, but is based on Blizzard announcements and experiences with the Burning Crusade launch. It should be noted that none of this applies to the localized asian servers (China, Taiwan and Korea). First you should note that there are actually two distinct groups of Blizzard-administrated servers. EU
US
In general, Wrath of the Lich King and associated content is enabled on the server at midnight server time. Box availability in participating retailers is at midnight local time. That means in some places you may get your game box before the servers flip the switch while in some places you get it later (UK is the most obvious example that comes to mind). It is theoretically possible that the the Russian servers might be the first ones who get to play the new content, however this is unconfirmed at this time and I can't read the Russian forums to find out for sure. However, for practical reasons (mainly account upgrade/database issues) it seems likely that EU Blizzard will delay the start on those servers until it's midnight Paris time and the rest of the EU servers get the expansion. It is also almost certain that all the US servers will get the expansion enabled at midnight EST, as there is no way to know where the players actually live - so whenever you can get your hands on a box and CD-key, if it's past midnight on the east coast, the expansion is live no matter what the actual server time is. That's how it worked with Burning Crusade and it's highly likely this is how it works this time around - and again, it's due to the account upgrade page being same for all. West coast players will have a slight disadvantage during the early rush as the expansion has been live been up for three hours when the box sales begin on the west coast. But that's nothing compared to the raw deal dished to the Oceanic players in places like Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. Their retail release date is actually midnight, 14th of November, almost half a day after the US launch time. It's highly likely that their servers will get the expansion enabled earlier with the US realms (midnight EST), but it's not much use as boxes won't be officially available until 14th - unless you can somehow secure a copy in advance. Those who absolutely want to be online at midnight EST might resort to buying a CD-key online and using a tweaked beta client or one obtained by other means. Northrend Opens Storm Giant is the Fel Reaver of Northrend, ready to stomp on unwary lowbies. In any case, there is no patch - the content will just be turned on as it's all already there, patched in when 3.0.2 went live, just dormant until the launch. The only thing that will happen is that at midnight the servers will disconnect all players, turn on the Wrath content and immediately allow you to re-login. If at that time you have the expansion installed and account upgraded, you can immediately head out to the new areas. It remains to be seen if the ongoing in-game event will progress to some kind of a conclusion just before midnight. Rumors indicate that the Lich King might trash the old lands a bit... That also means there there is no harm in installing the client ahead of the launch time - you can already log on the live servers with a Wrath client if you somehow can get one - it works just like the old Burning Crusade client, no difference. DVDs will actually have a bit old version of the client (3.0.1) and when installing the expansion, the installer will apply 3.0.2 and 3.0.3 patches from your current client folder as well (hope you didn't delete them - if you did, you get to re-download them). Fully patched Beta client also works right now and should work when the expansion goes live. All you have to do is patch the beta client (beta has ended, but you can still patch), then replace wow.exe, launcher.exe and realmlist.wtf with ones taken from a live client and it should work but is completely unsupported by Blizzard. The remaining bits of the equation are the CD-Key used to upgrade your account and the server "flag" to enable expansion content for those with their accounts and clients upgraded. For those you have to wait for the actual launch time. Pre-Northrend ChecklistThere are also some things you should remember before Thursday. Arena Points Will Be ResetWhile honor points carry over to the expansion, if you have played arena and have any unused arena points, do note that current arena tier will no longer give points and all arena teams and rankings will be wiped on Wednesday the 12th. Any personal points can be spent until character hits level 71, but any items requiring a specific arena rating will be impossible to obtain until level 80. So better do any last-minute arena shopping right now and remember - when you ding 71 your arena points will be zero. Level 70 Quests Will Give Experience AgainIf you want a small boost to the start of the leveling phase, you can gather up and collect a full log of completed level 70 quests - just don't turn them in yet. On the big day, you can turn them in for experience rewards. It should be noted that the rewards are smaller than for quests at Northrend so this is not really as huge deal as it may initially appear. Last I checked, level 71 required approximately 1.6 million experience points, and even with 25 quests ready to be turned in, you are hard pressed to gain more than 200.000 experience for turning them all in, so it's not a good idea to waste too much time on this - but it's possible to gain a small advantage if you are determined to push towards 80 as quickly as possible. Check Bank & Inventory SpaceYou'll need a ton of space for all the new stuff. It is too late to sell any existing crafting materials at old prices, so it may be smart to just hold them for later re-sale when they become rarer on the market. Early on, with many leveling up new Death Knights through the Outland, there may be surprising demand for Outland stuff. Same goes for any Death Knight-related gear, enchants, gems... plenty of demand for those after the big day, at least until the initial dash to level up DKs dies down. In any case, you really should strive to have plenty of pack space - Blizzard has gone nuts with quest-related items in Northrend, and during beta it was not unusual to find your inventory littered with 10-15 quest items - not stacks of items you collect for quests, mind you, but quest items handed out by the NPCs and used to do things during a quest. Add in all the loot and you'll want plenty of room. No need to carry around that alternate spec gear set, resistance gear or other raiding-related junk, over 50 empty bag slots is a good goal. Respec, If NecessaryFor most classes, the optimal spec for leveling and questing is not the same as the optimal spec for "endgame" - either PvP or PvE raids. So, most likely it's time to respec and get used to the leveling spec. In some cases, the hardcore players might even want to re-enchant and re-gem some items to optimize everything to the maximum. Update Your AddonsAddons available today will work, but if you have old ones they might unexpectedly break in the new areas, so better update all your addons - preferrably today, as the addon sites might end up overloaded on the big day. Then it's finally time to prep for the first rush. On Wednesday you might want to park your character at the travel hub of your choice - Undercity or Orgrimmar for the Horde, Menethil Harbor or Stormwind Harbor for the Alliance.
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