Abigor
09-19-2007, 01:05 AM
From The Warlock's Den forums
Some Wrath of the Lich King news
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I grabbed the newest issue of "Games For Windows" magazine today because warcraft was the cover story. It contains a lot of awesome info about the 2nd expansion. Some of you may already know about a bunch of this stuff, but I thought I'd post it all anyway because the article made me really excited and I wanted to share all this news with anyone who hasn't heard. This isn't really a very organized post, I'm just gonna heap all this info on you guys in no particular order. I basically just paraphrased from the magazine.
The article was started off with an apology for The Burning Crusade by Chris Metzen, VP of creative development at Blizzard. He said, " It had a lot of high concept-ideas, high-concept environments, but other than some really nice moments, there was nothing really personal about it." Personally I think that BC is pretty cool, so if Bliz is not totally happy with it they are really setting the bar high for Wrath.
Basically what I got from the article was that they really want to greatly increase the immersion factor with this project. "Metzen hints that the quest chains, dungeon crawls, and narrative hooks of Wrath may all just be part of Arthas' master plan." Chris says, "He fought the good fight, fought as hard as he could, and ultimately he went nuts up in the far north. The bad guy used him as the hammer. The bad guy sent him home to kill his dad, kill his people...and loose the Plague on everything he fought to protect. Now all these crusading heroes, with all their epic gear, and their good intentions and nobility and all that horseshit flood into the far north...and he's pretty much waiting to reel them in."
He went on, " We want to add some layers of psychology that put you in strange moral situations of how you fight the good fight that mimic some of Arthas' own experiences... By the time you reach level 80, by the time you stand toe to toe with this bastard, do you still have your pretty principles and morality, or is it a mirror relection?"
The Zones of Northrend
At the moment, Northrend is split into 10 zones. They are:
Howling Ford (68-72)
Borean Tundra (68-72)
The Dragonblight (71-75)
Zul'Drak (73-76)
Grizzly Hills (74-76)
Azjol-Nerub (74-78)
Sholazar Basin (75-78)
The Storm Peaks (77-80)
Icecrown Glacier (77-80)
Lake Wintergrasp (Outdoor PvP)
Enter through Howling Fjord or Borean Tundra and fight your way to Icecrown Glacier where the Frozen Throne awaits. Wrath also introduces WOWs first outdoor PvP zone in Lake Wintergrasp as well as Azjol-Nerub, the first "outdoor underground zone" - a cave under Northrend, vast enough to house massive structures, even cities.
Lake Wintergrasp
A completely optional pvp zone in the middle of the continent, it is a non-instanced warzone complete with destroyable buildings and seige weapons. Like BC, the world pvp will feature many long lasting buffs granted in different areas to the faction that controls certain areas of Lake Wintergrasp.
Known Instances
The Nexus - a winged dungeon similar to Hellfire Citadel. Will contain a "beginner" dungeon, a higher end instance, and a raid. It is the ancient home of the Blue Dragonflight.
Utgarde - again, winged zone with multiple instances owned by the Vrykul, natives of Northrend.
There will also be a new Caverns of Time instance based upon Arthas' culling of Stratholme. This new instance will let you follow in the footsteps of Arthas as he slaughters the town of Stratholme. If other CoT instances are any indication, your goal will not be to stop him, but to ensure he completes his task. Morally hazy, yes... but how far is too far? Metzen admits they haven't figured out the exact mechanics of the encounter yet.
The Death Knight
The first ever Hero Class - but it's implementation may be different than you expected. "One of the ideas we had for Death Knight was that you'd convert your character into a Death Knight," says lead designer Tom Chilton. " You would stop being a level 80 mage or whatever and become a Death Knight. But when we ran it around the team, it was too common a sentiment to feel like, well, I don't want to lose my existing character. I'll just create a new level 1 character that I intend to make a Death Knight and power him to 80... and this drill would become some weird hoop you'd have to jump through."
So instead, you will unlock the ability to create a death knight by finishing a quest chain that will allegedly by comparable in difficulty to the warlock's dreadsteed chain. This can be done by any of your existing lvl 80 characters at which point you can make an entirely new Dread Knight character which will start somewhere near lvl 60 (no exact confirmation yet).
The Death Knight is a plate wearing hybrid dps/tank. They do not have any mana, rage, or energy. Instead, death knights have a "rune sword interface" below their health bar that displays 6 runes of different types - blood, frost, and unholy. Different spells and abilities will require the expenditure of various runes and using a spell willl darken the rune for a cooldown period. In general, blood abilities are damage, frost are control, and unholy contains utility and DoT mechanics but none of these roles are set in stone. No word yet on talents or available races. It should be mentioned that the death knight, and any other heroic classes yet to be implemented are NOT more powerful than standard classes, just different. An advanced alt, minus the low level grinding.
New Profession: Inscription
Allows you to customize skills and abilities in your spellbook. "You are permanently changing your spell kit," says Tom Chilton. "You might find recipes to inscribe your fireball with increased crit chance, or increased damage, faster cast, or lower mana cost- so it's almost like a talent system within the profession system." Unlike enchanters, inscribers will be able to sell an actual physical item like tradeable scrolls.
The Burning Crusade isn't over yet...
Before we set sail for Northrend, Blizzard has some Burning Crusade loose ends to tie up. They come in the form of 2 new raid zones: 10-man Zul'Aman and 25-man Sunwell Plateau both of which will be implemented in separate patches in the coming months.
Zul'Aman
Designed to be the next step after Karazhan for a seasoned 10-man crew. It is an outdoor raid instance in the Ghostlands, home to forest trolls including Zul'jin the leader of the forest trolls. This raid ditches the usual reputation reward system in favor of a timed challenge similar to the good old 45 min baron run. Bosses all drop their usual loot, but if you clear the first 4 within the set (and extremely taxing) time limit you'll gain access to some extra awesome goodies.
Sunwell Plateau
On an island north of Silvermoon City the blood elves toil to reignite the source of their ancient power, The Sunwell. Unfortunately for all, rebuilding the sunwell is just an excuse to bring Kil'jaeden, right hand man of Sargeras into the Old World from Outland. This is basically one last 25 man raid before Arthas is let loose. Expect 6-8 bosses ending with Kil'jaeden himself.
That's about all the info I have. Hope you enjoyed the read.
Some Wrath of the Lich King news
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I grabbed the newest issue of "Games For Windows" magazine today because warcraft was the cover story. It contains a lot of awesome info about the 2nd expansion. Some of you may already know about a bunch of this stuff, but I thought I'd post it all anyway because the article made me really excited and I wanted to share all this news with anyone who hasn't heard. This isn't really a very organized post, I'm just gonna heap all this info on you guys in no particular order. I basically just paraphrased from the magazine.
The article was started off with an apology for The Burning Crusade by Chris Metzen, VP of creative development at Blizzard. He said, " It had a lot of high concept-ideas, high-concept environments, but other than some really nice moments, there was nothing really personal about it." Personally I think that BC is pretty cool, so if Bliz is not totally happy with it they are really setting the bar high for Wrath.
Basically what I got from the article was that they really want to greatly increase the immersion factor with this project. "Metzen hints that the quest chains, dungeon crawls, and narrative hooks of Wrath may all just be part of Arthas' master plan." Chris says, "He fought the good fight, fought as hard as he could, and ultimately he went nuts up in the far north. The bad guy used him as the hammer. The bad guy sent him home to kill his dad, kill his people...and loose the Plague on everything he fought to protect. Now all these crusading heroes, with all their epic gear, and their good intentions and nobility and all that horseshit flood into the far north...and he's pretty much waiting to reel them in."
He went on, " We want to add some layers of psychology that put you in strange moral situations of how you fight the good fight that mimic some of Arthas' own experiences... By the time you reach level 80, by the time you stand toe to toe with this bastard, do you still have your pretty principles and morality, or is it a mirror relection?"
The Zones of Northrend
At the moment, Northrend is split into 10 zones. They are:
Howling Ford (68-72)
Borean Tundra (68-72)
The Dragonblight (71-75)
Zul'Drak (73-76)
Grizzly Hills (74-76)
Azjol-Nerub (74-78)
Sholazar Basin (75-78)
The Storm Peaks (77-80)
Icecrown Glacier (77-80)
Lake Wintergrasp (Outdoor PvP)
Enter through Howling Fjord or Borean Tundra and fight your way to Icecrown Glacier where the Frozen Throne awaits. Wrath also introduces WOWs first outdoor PvP zone in Lake Wintergrasp as well as Azjol-Nerub, the first "outdoor underground zone" - a cave under Northrend, vast enough to house massive structures, even cities.
Lake Wintergrasp
A completely optional pvp zone in the middle of the continent, it is a non-instanced warzone complete with destroyable buildings and seige weapons. Like BC, the world pvp will feature many long lasting buffs granted in different areas to the faction that controls certain areas of Lake Wintergrasp.
Known Instances
The Nexus - a winged dungeon similar to Hellfire Citadel. Will contain a "beginner" dungeon, a higher end instance, and a raid. It is the ancient home of the Blue Dragonflight.
Utgarde - again, winged zone with multiple instances owned by the Vrykul, natives of Northrend.
There will also be a new Caverns of Time instance based upon Arthas' culling of Stratholme. This new instance will let you follow in the footsteps of Arthas as he slaughters the town of Stratholme. If other CoT instances are any indication, your goal will not be to stop him, but to ensure he completes his task. Morally hazy, yes... but how far is too far? Metzen admits they haven't figured out the exact mechanics of the encounter yet.
The Death Knight
The first ever Hero Class - but it's implementation may be different than you expected. "One of the ideas we had for Death Knight was that you'd convert your character into a Death Knight," says lead designer Tom Chilton. " You would stop being a level 80 mage or whatever and become a Death Knight. But when we ran it around the team, it was too common a sentiment to feel like, well, I don't want to lose my existing character. I'll just create a new level 1 character that I intend to make a Death Knight and power him to 80... and this drill would become some weird hoop you'd have to jump through."
So instead, you will unlock the ability to create a death knight by finishing a quest chain that will allegedly by comparable in difficulty to the warlock's dreadsteed chain. This can be done by any of your existing lvl 80 characters at which point you can make an entirely new Dread Knight character which will start somewhere near lvl 60 (no exact confirmation yet).
The Death Knight is a plate wearing hybrid dps/tank. They do not have any mana, rage, or energy. Instead, death knights have a "rune sword interface" below their health bar that displays 6 runes of different types - blood, frost, and unholy. Different spells and abilities will require the expenditure of various runes and using a spell willl darken the rune for a cooldown period. In general, blood abilities are damage, frost are control, and unholy contains utility and DoT mechanics but none of these roles are set in stone. No word yet on talents or available races. It should be mentioned that the death knight, and any other heroic classes yet to be implemented are NOT more powerful than standard classes, just different. An advanced alt, minus the low level grinding.
New Profession: Inscription
Allows you to customize skills and abilities in your spellbook. "You are permanently changing your spell kit," says Tom Chilton. "You might find recipes to inscribe your fireball with increased crit chance, or increased damage, faster cast, or lower mana cost- so it's almost like a talent system within the profession system." Unlike enchanters, inscribers will be able to sell an actual physical item like tradeable scrolls.
The Burning Crusade isn't over yet...
Before we set sail for Northrend, Blizzard has some Burning Crusade loose ends to tie up. They come in the form of 2 new raid zones: 10-man Zul'Aman and 25-man Sunwell Plateau both of which will be implemented in separate patches in the coming months.
Zul'Aman
Designed to be the next step after Karazhan for a seasoned 10-man crew. It is an outdoor raid instance in the Ghostlands, home to forest trolls including Zul'jin the leader of the forest trolls. This raid ditches the usual reputation reward system in favor of a timed challenge similar to the good old 45 min baron run. Bosses all drop their usual loot, but if you clear the first 4 within the set (and extremely taxing) time limit you'll gain access to some extra awesome goodies.
Sunwell Plateau
On an island north of Silvermoon City the blood elves toil to reignite the source of their ancient power, The Sunwell. Unfortunately for all, rebuilding the sunwell is just an excuse to bring Kil'jaeden, right hand man of Sargeras into the Old World from Outland. This is basically one last 25 man raid before Arthas is let loose. Expect 6-8 bosses ending with Kil'jaeden himself.
That's about all the info I have. Hope you enjoyed the read.