Oct

18

WotLK Priest Enhancements

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In a recent post on the official World of Warcraft forums, Blizzard had this to say about Priest enhancements in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion:

“Though some priests have found a use for the discipline tree, right now, it doesn’t quite have a solid purpose/goal, but rather seems to act as a supporting tree. This is something we plan on addressing with Wrath of the Lich King. Originally, the goal of the tree was primarily intended to provide staying power, vs. the holy tree which provides throughput.”

Oct

10

New Voice Chat Tools for WotLK

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In a recent interview, Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan talked about the new voice chat tools to be introduced in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion:

“We’ve just started implementing the voice chat on the test servers. It’s an important evolution for WoW. Lots of players are used to running that kind of system using software like Team Speak or Ventrilo. Now we want to implement this in WoW for many reasons.

Firstly, we want vocal chat to be available to every player, including those who don’t have the technical knowledge to install and set up that kind of software. We also wish to ease the lives of players who constantly have to alt-tab to switch between their software and WoW or play in a windowed mode.

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Sep

15

First Instance Map - Utgarde Keep

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Games for Windows published an early map of Utgarde Keep, the first instance in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

Unfortunately the map is a little empty but the folks at WoW Insider did a little research and filled in some of the (potential) details and encounters based on what they saw at BlizzCon and from other news from around the net.

Definitely worth a look.

Sep

5

Enchantments in the Auction House

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On the EU (French) World of Warcraft forums Blizzard poster Thyvene confirmed that enchanters will be able to auction off enchantments at the auction house with the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.  I don’t know about you, but I won’t miss all that enchantment spam every time I’m in a city…

Aug

31

Lich King End-Game Content

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In a recent interview, Jeffrey Kaplan (lead designer for World of Warcraft) had this to say about what they’re including in Wrath of the Lich King as far as level 80 end-game content:

There’s a few things. We’ve a number of instances. We’re doing instances to cover all the levelling up experience as well, not just end-game instances. We’ll have five-person instances at the end-game and for the levelling up experience.

We’ll also do the heroic dungeons again, so that provides a lot of end-game content right there. We’re going to do a 25-person raid game.

We’re going to focus on bigger raid instances, meaning more like Naxxramas with lots of bosses rather than the smaller ones like Tempest Keep.

The big lesson we learned from The Burning Crusade was that our ten-person instances are extremely popular. So for Wrath of the Lich King we wanted progression in the ten-person raid game for the players… who want to stick to that ten-person cap.

We’ll also add a new arena, and there’ll be new arena awards.

Something we introduced in patch 2.1 - that we’re going to be [building on] in upcoming content patches as well as Wrath of the Lich King - is our system of daily quests.

Daily quests make for good end-game content for players who don’t want to PvP, who don’t want to do instances, who don’t want to raid and don’t want to group - they just like doing quests by themselves.

Daily quests are quests you can do once per day and then it resets the next day. And to alleviate the feeling that those create grinding or repetitive content, we’re coming up with daily quests with randomisation.

Aug

24

New Locations, Faces, and Races

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Do you want to know what locations, famous personalities, and races you’ll find in Wrath of the Lich King? You’re in luck because Blizzard Poster/Community Manager Salthern has compiled a list of everything you can expect from the expansion.

So far, Northrend’s Zones are said to be around the size of those in Outland. Players will be given the option to start from two different zones: Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra. Salthern then proceeded to give details about all the locations as well and pretty much everything else you can expect to encounter in Northrend:

Locations:

  • Howling Fjord:
    • Your first chance to go up against the ancient Vrykul in their instance Utgarde Keep.
  • Borean Tundra:
    • The home to the Tuskarr.
    • Parts of Borean Tundra are being melted down for water by the Naga.
    • Garrosh Hellscream has established a base of operations at Warsong Hold.
  • Grizzly Hills:
    • The home of Furbolgs and their city of Grizzlemaw.
    • Also home to the ancient Dwarven City of Thor Modan.
    • The land is largely covered in forests - an example of our desire to make sure that not all zones are just snow and ice.
  • Dragonblight:
    • The home of Wyrmrest Temple, the ancient meeting place where dragons go to die.
  • Lake Wintergrasp:
    • A new non-instanced PvP zone with Siege Weapons, destructible buildings and multiple objectives with lasting effects. Players on Normal realms will automatically be flagged for PvP when entering this zone.
  • The Storm Peaks:
    • Containing Ulduar, the ancient Titan city in the Far North.
  • Capital City:
    • The Kirin Tor, led by Rhonin, have moved Dalaran to Northrend as a final front in their war against the Blue Dragon Flight. The Blue Dragon Flight, following a strengthened Malygos, are now attempting to purge all magic users from Azeroth.
    • It will act as the central neutral city floating above Northrend - a Shattrath of the North.

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