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World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

Clean Slate

As with the Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King "reformats" the endgame of World of Warcraft. Everything that was meaningful at the previous level cap of 70 is now pretty much obsolete. There is no reason to visit any of the old raid instances and Outland has been reduced to a leveling zone between level 58 and 68. Someone might still want to steamroll through the old raid content for some achievement points at level 80, but that's it.

Due to this complete re-start on the meat of the game, vast majority of the expansion acts as a replacement for the old stuff. The list of new features is surpisingly short; Death Knights, Phasing, Championing, Vehicles and changes to the way many crafting professions obtain high-end recipes. Some of these features, like phasing and vehicles, have already been tested during Burning Crusade in minor roles, but Wrath of the Lich King takes these features to the forefront.

Death Knights

The big selling point of the new box is the first "hero" class of the game, Death Knight. In reality they are just a regular class that happens to start the game at level 55. Early bits of Death Knight's career are set in Eastern Plaguelands in a special starting area inaccessible to others. The "newbie experience" explains how a Death Knight would end up serving Horde or Alliance and teaches the player some basics about DK abilities, dishing out new buttons for the quickbar over time. You also receive a suitable blue-level gear set and talent points up to level 55 over time. By the time you are done with the excellent introductory storyline, you are at level 58 with appropriate gear, full compliment of talent points for your level and the bulk of the abilities DKs have in their arsenal. The rest will come as you start leveling normally in Outland.

New Death Knight - Master and Apprentice.

Death Knights start at level 55, from a flying fortress high above the Eastern Plaguelands.

As a class, Death Knight is a hybrid that feels a bit like a Arms Warrior with spells, but with plenty of unique twists. Rune power system, while far simpler than the earliest pre-launch information initially hinted, is somewhat similar to the Rogue combo points, yet different and unique. The three spec trees, Blood, Frost and Unholy, cannot be immediately pigeonholed for specific play styles as the design goal has been to provide different ways to do the same thing depending on how exactly you allocate you points in each tree. Some tank with Unholy for added multi-target threat, some prefer Frost and it's added survivability, some go for Blood and it's superior single target threat. Same goes for pure damage dealing and leveling - I guess Unholy is probably the most popular leveling tree right now, but once again, any of the three talent trees can be made to work in any common role - tanking, DPS or solo. If this is the Blizzard's new way to design talent trees, we could be in for some interesting times in the long run.

As Death Knights can't use shields, they are designed to be effective tanks with a 2H weapon. Currently they can be used to tank any content in the game - mostly because of the issues with the content difficulty level - but in theory they are specialized in tanking magic damage dealing mobs. Future raid content will determine how well DKs will perform in this role, but today they can tank anything just fine. When specced for DPS, they can pull off some fairly impressive numbers as well, and I'm sure they will be the new Flavor of the Month in PvP when Arena Season 5 starts in mid-December. It's still early days, but I'm sure that being the big selling point of Wrath of the Lich King, the class will be kept competitive.

New Content Mechanics - Phasing

Wrath of the Lich King brings into forefront two major mechanics for level-up quest content - Phasing and Vehicles.

Phasing could be defined as a game system that allows the game world to change for you based on different conditions. Phasing is often used to simulate the passage of time in a world that so far has been considered to be timeless. At the most basic level, it allows same location in the world map to be seamlessly used multiple times for different content.

Death Knight starting area works like this - it has three separate phases with different mobs, npcs and quests. Everything except the basic underlying terrain changes depending on the quests you have completed. These phases are also completely inaccessible to non-Death Knights. Anyone else arriving to the same point on the map would just see the area deserted as all the players, monsters and NPCs existing in the exact same spot are completely invisible as the content exists in another phase. In the case of DK starting area, the phases are considered to be events that happened in the past - once you are done with the starting quests the storyline proceeds and the world changes to what it is "today".

Argent Crusade camp - at first there is a massive horde of undead outside and you get to fight them.

After the battle is over, corpses litter the field and new quest NPCs appear.

In Northrend, Blizzard has taken Phasing further, blurring the line between a MMO and a single player game in a major way. In early zones, Phasing is used in very minor ways - complete a quest for the Taunka refugees by picking up some supply crates and the crates appear in their camp. Cute little visual trick, but nothing major to write home about. Quest NPCs can also show up based on completion of earlier quests. However, further you go in Northrend, more and more quests start changing things in the world.

The earliest major example of Phasing is the Wrathgate questline - after completing about 20 quests related to the storyline of Northrend, you are sent to a Horde or Alliance base near the massive Wrathgate at the northwest corner of Dragonblight. The camp is filled with faction military and you are given a questline to complete that involves the dragons of the Wyrmrest Temple. When you are done with it, something extraordinary happens - you get an actual cut scene of a major lore event and the storyline changes the game world for you. From that point on, the area around Wrathgate is forever different - the armies of both Horde and Alliance are gone from their bases and the front of the Wrathgate is filled with corpses and burning wrecks, marking the scene of a recent battle. Should your friend come to the same spot without doing the quest, they would see the pre-battle scene and wonder what you are babbling about.

The Wrathgate story then continues and you are sent to the capital of your faction in the old world - except that it's a phased "instance copy" of the capital with some major changes due to the storyline. Without spoiling too much, events of the questline allow you to actually participate in a major lore event of WoW storyline, all thanks to Phasing. Similar storyline-based events also change major parts of later zones. The two level 77+ zones, Storm Peaks and Icecrown, are filled with phased areas and the questlines turn the dial all the way to "epic". Completing questlines open up new allied settlements and flight paths and effectively you have to complete all the major quest lines in these zones to "unlock" the final versions of each zone with all available NPCs and quests open to you. This is a much more radical change for a MMO than it sounds, and it works great.

Phasing can be used in many other ways as well. In the overland PvP zone, Wintergrasp, it's used to provide different environment for Horde and Alliance. Whoever is in control of the zone gets to reap some rewards as additional high-value monsters spawn in the outlying areas of the zone visible only to the faction controlling the Wintergrasp Keep at any given moment. Phasing is also used to "instance" small areas of the world for specific quests, and it's usually done in such a manner that unless you specifically know to look for it, it's completely seamless.

Phasing was actually first used in Burning Crusade as a dry-run test with the Isle of Quel'Danas and it's associated daily quests - as people completed various tasks on the island the environment changed with additional quest givers and vendors. These phasing steps were permanent and advanced the storyline for everyone, but in Lich King the technology was taken to the logical conclusion with player-specific world states based on what you have done in the game. One of the related quests involving "phased" version of a section of Blade's Edge Mountain was also used to test the technology long before Wrath of the Lich King. Props to Blizzard for thinking long-term and working out the technology before actually betting tons of expansion content on it.

New Content Mechanics - Vehicles

The other big feature of Wrath of the Lich King content is the use of vehicles. In this case a vehicle is a slightly inaccurate term - it included cases where you might be driving around a catapult or a goblin tree-cutting machine, but it also includes quest-specific temporary mounts with special abilities and quests where you temporarily control another creature or morph into something different. The technical term used in AddOn development is a bit more descriptive - your character is considered to be "possessed". This is another feature seen first in Burning Crusade. Teron Gorefiend used to turn people into ghosts in Black Temple and the final battle with Kil'Jaden in Sunwell Plateau included dragons that players had to control. Once again, Blizzard was playing with new code in a minor role well before going nuts with it everywhere.

On the most basic level, as you board a vehicle, mount up or become some other creature, all your existing skills and abilities are temporarily disabled. Instead of the usual spells and abilities you get a single quickbar with new abilities that you have to use to complete a given task. In a way, the pre-Wrath of the Lich King zombie invasion event nicely prepped everyone for the concept - when you turned into a zombie from the plague your abilities were replaced by those of the zombie. Wrath of the Lich King uses the same system, except that the Blizzard quest developers have seriously gone over the top with the mechanic, providing many fresh quests where you get to drive or outright become something completely different.

Sadly these quests have some drawbacks - your character level, abilities and gear plays no part in these quests and the general difficulty level seems to be tuned so that even when you are completely unfamiliar with the abilities that just popped to your quickbar it's laughably easy to complete the required task.

Vehicles also play a major part in battles at Lake Wintergrasp - both sides can use various war machines when fighting over the control of Wintergrasp Keep.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Road to Level 80 - Part 1Page 3: Road to Level 80 - Part 2Page 4: Road to Level 80 - Part 3Page 5: Gameplay, FeaturesPage 6: Features, cont.Page 7: Raids, EndgamePage 8: Visuals, PerformancePage 9: The Annoying BitsPage 10: Conclusions, Scoring

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