World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Expansion Pack is the latest in the WoW saga. This expansion pack is rated "T" for Teen by the ESRB. Players must have World of Warcraft to play this expansion.
By: Simon "Soulrift" Ludgate
Published: Sep 20, 2008
Updated: Sep 2, 2010
World of Warcraft’s first expansion, the Burning Crusade, was somewhat stingy on the new class front. All it did, afterall, was add the unique classes to the other teams, allowing for Alliance Shamans and Horde Paladins. A nice improvement, to be sure, but players who had Horde and Alliance alts and had already played both classes were left wanting something truly new. And that’s exactly what they’re getting with Wrath of the Lich King, World of Warcraft’s second expansion.
Wrath features the first hero class, the Death Knight. By ‘hero’ class, this simply means that you have to have a level 70 character before you can make a Death Knight, but it doesn’t replace your character or anything like that. Also, Death Knights start at level 55 rather than level 1, allowing players to bypass all that content that they’ve completed ever so many times before. By the end of the Death Knight tutorial area, where you rapidly collect all those talent points you were missing, you’ll be all set to jump straight into Outland.
Death Knights feature plate armor and plenty of both offensive and defensive powers. They fit a similar role to warriors, where they can serve as damage dealers or tanks. Death Knights have a unique class mechanic in the form of runes. DKs have two each of three rune types: frost, blood, and disease, and different powers use combinations of these runes. One power might use one of each, another power might use two of the same, making the powers incompatible. Runes reset after a short duration, so all the powers are accessible, but the combinations of powers require some careful planning by Death Knights to maximize their effectiveness. Death Knights also get a few very interesting spells, including the ability to revive dead players as ghouls with a whole new set of ghoulish powers. My favorite? Corpse explosion! Boom!
Of course, there’s also a whole new area for “unheroic” characters too. Northrend features a whole series of zones in the north of Azeroth, and can be reached by boat from a number of old and new ports. Unlike Burning Crusade’s Outland, however, Northrend features parallel paths for questing and leveling. New arrivals can start in both the Borean Tundra and the Howling Fjord. I suspect that this was put in place to help divide the players when the expansion starts and avoid overcrowding in one zone. I, for one, remember all the constant Hellfire Peninsula crashing! Also, despite being in the frigid north, the new zones actually have a wide variety of terrains, ranging from icy plains to verdant jungles.
One of the interesting concerns was how to deal with flying mounts in Northrend. Flying mounts were introduced in Burning Crusade and allowed max level players to bypass a lot of terrain and monster obstacles and navigate quickly around the map. Had flying mounts been accessible when Wrath of the Lich King was released, players would be zipping around, skipping past all that hard work Blizzard’s level designers put into the new zones. On the other hand, if flying mounts were entirely eliminated, players would probably be pissed off. So, to compromise, flying mounts are locked until players complete a line of quests to gain access to Dalaran at level 77.
Dalaran, of course, is the new neutral capital city in Wrath, similar to Shattrath from BC. I really don’t like how it’s inaccessible until level 77 though. Navigating Northrend without any sort of central hub, which is even more difficult due to the parallel progress paths, leaves something to be desired. The worst part is that there’s no quick transit between Northrend and the rest of the world until you get to Dalaran. One of the best parts of Burning Crusade was riding to Shattrath, setting your hearthstone, and using the portals to go back to the major cities to train.
{slot15}Still, transit issues aside, Northrend is jam packed with a lot of very cool and creative quests. Sure, there’s plenty of the ‘kill a dozen monster’ quests, but the creative quests keep on growing. One quest I particularly enjoyed involved training a falcon to hunt other birds, starting with hapless turkeys and moving on to other birds of prey. Another quest required players to take control of giant harpoon ballistae and shoot mounted drakes out of the sky.
Along with the addition of ten more levels comes the slurry of new skills and talents for all the old classes. A lot of these directly address some of the biggest demands from players, things like Titan Grip which allow warriors to wield two-handed weapons in one hand, and Metamorphosis that allows warlocks to turn into a demon, just like Leotheras or Illidan. On the other hand, while the new talents are pretty exciting, most of the new spells are downright dull. My hopes to see an improvement to the warlock Infernal summon, which saw no love in Burning Crusade, again goes ignored. Can’t they at least upgrade it to summon an Abyssal? All warlocks get is a cone damage effect and the ability to teleport to a pre-set spot. Meh!
Of course, there’s still time for new stuff to be added, and changes continue to improve the new expansion as player feedback is contributed to the ongoing beta test. The full Wrath of the Lich King is due out on November 13th, 2008. Looks like a happy holiday season afterall.
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