World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Previews
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Blizzard sees the Death Knight as a kind of multipurpose tank. He can't use a shield, instead picking between dual-wield and two-hander setups. The Death Knight will get something called presences, which work somewhat similarly to Paladin auras in that once activated they'll stay on until you switch them off. Unlike auras they'll only apply to the Death Knight. Those that Blizzard showed off included a blood presence, which augments damage per second (DPS), and an unholy presence, which apparently is best used for PvP as it increases attack speed and the speed of your global cooldowns.GameSpy.
Along with the presences comes an entirely new resource system. The Death Knight won't use energy or mana or rage to activate abilities, but instead use a system of runes and runic power. 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 Death Knight will also be able to place disease-type debuffs on enemies for special effects. For instance, he can use a blood strike ability that does an amount of damage based on how many diseases are currently affecting a target.
Our tour of Northrend began with introductions to three of the people primarily responsible for bringing it into being; Jay Allen Brack, Lead Producer, Tom Chilton, Co-lead Game Designer and Jeff Kaplan, the other co-lead Game Designer. Kaplan wasted no time in showing us the new world map with Northrend, the location for Wrath of the Lich King, rendered in all its glory about half-way between (and well to the north) of the two "old world" continents of Azeroth and Kalimdor. While the place may not be familiar to people who entered Blizzard's world via the MMO, old-school RTS fans -- particularly those who spent time playing through Warcraft III and its expansion -- know Northrend through and through. It was here that Arthas betrayed his friends, his people and lost his soul in his quests to destroy the Scourge, eventually becoming what he had been fighting.Curse.
The Northrend in Wrath of the Lich King is obviously far larger and more detailed than could have been shown in an RTS. What took us by surprise, though, was the sheer size of the landscape. Northrend is quite a bit larger than Outland, the area explored by players in Burning Crusade. That means not only are there larger numbers of zones to explore, many of them are so large that they've been divided into "sub-zones," much like Terrokar Forest and the Auchindon Waste in Outland.
Aside from the Death Knight information, which you can find in the next section, a major announcement during the presentation was the fact that raiding in World of Warcraft is changing again. No, you're not getting 40-person raids back. Instead, each raid instance introduced in the expansion will use Heroic Dungeon technology, allowing both 10- and 25-person versions. This means that if you prefer the smaller-scale 10-person content, you'll still be able to challenge Arthas in Icecrown Citadel -- the most prestigious raid zone of the expansion.
Of course, this isn't the only good news. The content will also be tiered just like a 25-person raid progression -- each with their own separate progressions -- ensuring players take on the content they want, and only that content; not having to do 10-person content to unlock 25-person, and vice-versa. Loot will still be better in 25-person raids, but Kaplan assured us that you'll see a clear progression, with multiple tiers of 10-person content, at the same growth rate as the 25-person content.
