Preview

Hands On With The Wrath Of The Lich King Beta

August 18, 2008

I would be what you would call a casual World of Warcraft player. I have one level 70 character – an Alliance female mage – and a few alts that I really could give two shits about. After I hit 70 I screwed around with the PvP Battlegrounds stuff for quite a while, but stopped questing, and I wasn’t going to do raid after raid after raid to have a chance in hell to get one piece of good gear. Especially when once Blizzard drops their next expansion for World of Warcraft – Wrath of the Lich King – all your top gear is going to be crap compared to what you’ll be able to get when you progress past level 70.

I had cut myself off of WoW about six months ago. I had to. I was horribly addicted to the game, and it was time to get clean. Well, actually play other games. That all ended a few days ago when I got access to the closed beta for Wrath of the Lich King. I must have stared at the beta access e-mail for 10 minutes. Do I really want to go back to Azeroth and tempt myself with trying out the new Death Knight hero class? Do I even want to set foot on the new continent of Northrend? Am I really going to try and tackle all of the newly added achievements? Just like the crack whore that I am, I began downloading the beta and installed it.

After playing through the entire Death Knight opening sequence I have one thing to say. I’m royally fucked.

When you first start out the expansion, you have the option of creating a Death Knight, a champion of the Scourge (yes, the Scourge that you have fought for the last few years). The Death Knight wields a Runeblade, can disease enemies, and raise minions to do your bidding. As the story goes, you were given a dark rebirth by the Lich King himself – Arthas – and you deal directly with him and his cronies. In the starting section of Ebon Hold, a floating area in Eastern Plaguelands, you’ll immediately speak with Arthas who has granted you immortality to team up with the Scourge to battle it out with the Scarlet Crusade. This all felt rather odd considering the fact that my main character is a goody two-shoes Alliance character, but as I played through it – the whole plot starts to make sense.

Death Knights start at level 55. At the outset you have no skill points, and a limited set of attacks that include Death Grip, Icy Touch, Plague Strike, Blood Strike, and Death Coil. Your main weapon however is the Runeblade, which you’ll create almost immediately at a Rune Forge. Here you affix some sort of rune that will determine what kind of bonuses your attacks will have such as frost, fire, deflect percentage, spell damage, and more. Since I was soloing this area, I opted to add a 3% chance to heal, and increase strength by 30% for 15 seconds.

While I’ve always been torn to roll a new character and put another time sink on my plate, Blizzard is making it even easier to level your character. In fact, the whole Death Knight beginning area – which will see you level from 55 to 58 – can be done in one sitting. As you quest through this area not only can you run 75% faster in Acherus, you’ll also pick up talent points with almost each quest you complete, and you’ll murder someone and get their mount. Loot drops are excellent, and quest rewards are mainly blue gear that will ramp up your equipment quickly. Even if you die in the beginning area, you’ll get one free resurrection every 10 minutes. While there are challenging quests, for the most part, it’s pretty easy.

I don’t want to spoil how the story plays out, but what I will say is that I never really followed plot points of WoW too closely before – but everything about this Death Knight plot line sucked me in. This beginning area for the Death Knights is truly remarkable and memorable, and as you learn the ins and outs of this new character class, you’re quickly going to realize one thing – you’re definitely going to want to level this sucker all the way up to 80. Thanks Blizzard. Now we’ll be doubly screwed.

The quests are extremely varied, and there are only a few “kill 10 of these, 8 of these, and collect 20 of these” quest types. Two quests that really blew me away had me hop on a cannon turret and blow away 100 soldiers, and better yet, a flying mount quest which had me pilot a Wyrm and decimate a heap of enemies. If you thought the bombing quests in Outland were a treat, Lich King has stepped it up a notch.

I do have one problem though. The Death Knight beginning zone is over too quickly. I powered through it in one long session – a few hours – and after that, you’re into the level 58 zones again that you’ve already done. Blizzard is promising the trek from 58 onward in Outland will be speedier, but I’ve already done that run already. Granted, it won’t take quite as long as when I originally made the push, but for as awesome as that beginning Death Knight section is, I just craved more new areas to explore with my new character.

So for now, the Death Knight is going on the backburner, and I’m taking my main into Northrend and checking out all of the new content that awaits me there. For as fast as I leveled from 55 to 58, it’s going to be a bit longer to progress my mage past the 70 mark. I’ll have my report from Northrend sometime next week. Until then, my addiction continues.

–Billy Berghammer