Wrath of the Lich King – A Brief Glance

I was planning to let my account just sit and rot forever, as I originally never intended to touch this game again. One day, a friend of mine wanted to buy my account. Seeing as this will allow me to actually quit and never touch it again, I activated my account with the 10 days free trial to play around for a bit.

I originally intended to write an article on the Death Knight, but collecting pictures while playing through the starter quest line proved to be more painful than I imagined (with an addition of several unfortunate accidents which resulted in deaths), so we’re stuck with the first bits of the new continent for now. Death Knight article will come out sometime this week.

I’m on my Blood Elf paladin, and she’s part of the Horde. Apparently the Horde is more into style than that Alliance, so instead of going in by boat, we get to go by zeppelin. The downside to this is we’re stuck with a bunch of walking corpses (I don’t like Forsaken).

The very first impression is that, Northrend is not as…”exotic” as Outland was when we first stepped through the Dark Portal. Well, that is to be expected, as you’re still on the same world you were for the first 60 levels. Of course, the good side to this is that it cuts down on computer’s requirement, as with my old computer I had to turn everything down to minimum.

I'll admit, this is pretty cool

What I found quite strange is that, once entering the new continent, there are no “orientation” quests. Rather, you’re thrown into action right away with the usual collect this, kill that, and so forth. The length of chain quests, if memory serves correctly, also seemed shorter shorter. There was one escort quest, which involves rescuing some dude, watching over his ass as he burns things and make sure he doesn’t get himself killed. At least he runs, unlike the old ones where a snail could even beat them in a race.

Burn...

I lol'd at this XD

The change in quality of items are somewhat similar to the transition from vanilla WoW to TBC. At least comparing some of the good gears (which I don’t have =/) from Burning Crusade with crap gear you get straight away, the good gear are still better. However, for average guys like me who barely played, I’m happy with the new stuff I’m getting.

Some (if not, most) classes have gone through major changes. I can’t say for the rest, but my paladin is now ten times more powerful and around five times easier to play. After a few quests and a second weapon change, I was shooting 1.6k melee crits every other hit (as opposed to…say…600 before), plus the benefits spell damage from attack power and instant heals on certain special attacks, it’s nuts.

I was still using my 75 DPS spear at this point.

Still using old weapon

When I used to play, all I really cared about were the casual quests which somewhat lead to the progression of the lore. I wasn’t one to run dungeons, even the regular 5 man stuff. When I was playing earlier, a few guys were looking for either a tank or a damage dealer, so I went and had a go.

The tank was high leveled so I could pretty much let loose with everything I’ve got. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that another spell changed. Apparently, I had one more damage spell that I could have used (Exorcism, that orange melty skull thing). Even so, I was third for DPS, with the hunter only beating me by half a percent. Not bad, especially since I wasn’t putting in much efforts.

That said, I’m not a complete noob when it comes to these stuff. I’ve done a few dungeon runs before. What I like about them is that you’ve got a mini story by itself in there, that and the NPCs actually yell stuff instead of spam texts. Just like the Burning Crusade dungeons, a fair bit of character control is required for different boss fights. There are instances where you need to do certain things as opposed to just sitting there and spamming attacks.

The main reason why I didn’t like running dungeons is the patience that is required to come with you when you’ve got less competent players. They’d either ninja your loots, or you get a lot of this:

Which came with the benefits of broken equipments as well as tons of time wasted. Time is the big thing, and the unnecessary frustration, which is why I tend to stay away from them, although my lack of committment prevented me in getting into good guilds (not that I really cared).

This run was overall successful, a few blunders here and there made us wipe twice, and it took two attempts at the final boss because we tried to four man it (healer went AFK to eat dinner, our druid tank switched to healer and the hunter’s pet tanked). A level 80 paladin helped out and we cleared him. Unfortunately, I was booted off before I was able to claim my rewards, probably due to my account being on trial version.

Overall, this game is known for the committment of the players, which is the reason why I can’t bring myself to continue playing. That and, the money saved from this fueled my hobby (some what, WoW is much less expensive). I can’t say much about the expansion as a whole, because a) most of the good stuff are at the end and b) whether you like it or not, you NEED it to keep playing. Plus, I don’t really find it “fun” and find it more of a hassel or a demand than anything else. Good thing my account will be gone in August, which will help pay for the Saber goodness in the fall ^^;