hey want all professions to have some unique draw

As lead designer Jeffrey Kaplan explained to us, the Death Knight will be able to equip combinations of runes (blood, unholy, or frost types) onto himself and consume those runes to pull off his special abilities. Once used, the rune will then enter a cooldown phase, set right now at 10 seconds. Kaplan explained it won’t be that much of a pain to switch around your rune setups, but you won’t be swapping them in and out after every fight. As runes are consumed you’ll build a runic power meter which can be used to fire off different types of skills. And it sounds like the Death Knight will have plenty of weird skills and abilities to use. No word yet on the specifics of his talent lines, but we did get to see abilities like plague strike (bonus weapon damage and damage-over-time effect), death coil (spell that does damage or heals undead friendly targets), and cage of ice (freezes target in place).

The new cloth is Frostweave

I approve. One new metal will be Cobalt. The new cloth is Frostweave, but we knew that already. Lake Wintergrasp (the outdoor PvP area) will have daily quests, a continent-wide buff, and probably something like today’s Spirit Shards. I plan to stay well clear of it, but hopefully the world PvP fans will have something to keep themselves entertained. Chamber of Aspects will initially be a short Onyxia-like raid, and they may use that area to expand with other aspects later if they want to. Another raid, in the Nexus, will allow players to ride on the back of drakes and use their abilities during the fight. This sounds quite chaotic and also pretty cool. The devs think they didn’t reward PvE enough in BC, and will try to reward it more in Wrath. I tentatively agree; PvP seems to be an easier way to epics for many players. We may see PvE ladders on the Armory, so we don’t have to resort to WowJutsu. Honestly I like Jutsu, so we’ll have to see what the Armory brings to the table.

he number of badges could quickly become intimidatingly large

Published by adminon August 4, 2008in Uncategorized. Closed
“Some more information on Wrath has bubbled to the surface. This is like Christmas every day for me! I’m very excited. New bits in today’s installment of Facts of the Lich King: Some Wrath mounts will be able to take passengers (!), and ground passenger mounts will work in the old world as well! This sounds awesome — although it might be boring to be the one who’s not driving, it could also let you take a break. And being able to cart around lower-level characters in the old world will really speed up those instance runs. Trainers and AH will stay in the old world. Not surprising, but incredibly irritating. At best, it’s a minor inconvenience and burns your Hearthstone timer. At worst, you’re stuck in Stormwind for an hour when you could be doing much more interesting things, all because you wanted to respec or buy some mats. Not to mention the leveling-up process — going back to the old world every level to train was obnoxious in BC, and it’ll almost certainly be obnoxious in Wrath. Dalaran will be in one of the final Northrend zones. I’m not sure where I stand on this. Shattrath being in one of the earlier BC zones meant that players raced to it to be able to get back and forth between Outland, and possibly skipped content. On the other hand, if you have to go back to the old world just as much in Wrath as you did in BC, it’ll be a giant pain not to have easy access to portals while you’re leveling. We’ll see. Blacksmiths may be able to add sockets to items that don’t have them. Obviously this will have to be balanced with caution, since it could easily become overpowered; there are some nice gems out there. They want all professions to have some unique draw, similar to the epic BoP blacksmithing weapons.

we’ll call them A, B, C, and D for simplicity

Here’s why: The addition of death knights to the game is in many ways like the addition of blood elves and draenei in The Burning Crusade. Many people made new characters just to see the new zones, but many others wanted to level their mains through Outland first. Many of those players who tried out the new races only played up to a certain point and then stopped to go back to their main characters. We never saw a flood of draenei and blood elves outnumbering all other races of Azeroth, and for the same reason we will not see a flood of new death knights. There are different things to do in the expansion, and different people make different choices about which to do first. There may be a contstant stream of new death knights, maybe even a river sometimes, but death knights will just feel like the newest kid in the WoW class, not a plague of locusts infesting the entire town. There’s also a huge difference between trying out a death knight, and choosing one as your new main character. Wherever death knights start out in the world may be a crowded area for a while, but most players won’t ever level them out of that starting zone. Unlike the Jedi in Star Wars