Blizzard announces World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
Posted by inpheaux on August 3rd, 2007 at 4:29 pm
As expected, at this year's BlizzCon, the big story is the announcement of the second WOW expansion: Wrath of the Lich King. Also as completely expected, Wrath opens up the region of Northrend, and pits players up against the Lich King Arthas.
There is, of course, more than just that. Here's the rundown of what new goodies you'll be getting:
- New Continent: Northrend (Bring a jacket)
- New Hero Class: Death Knight
- New Level Cap: Level 80 (And you'll need those extra 10 levels to have a chance against Arthas)
- New Profession: Inscription (They write stuff, apparently)
- Other New Stuff: A ton of new quests, more battlegrounds, even more new dungeons to raid (5, 10, 25, and 100-man raids, specifically), new items, new monsters, new character customization stuff (hairstyles, dances, etc), and so on.
1up has further details on how the Death Knight will work:
"World of WarCraft's first Hero Class is a plate-wearing tank/DPS hybrid that works a little something like this: When players hit level 80, they'll be able to embark on a quest (similar in difficulty to the Warlock's epic mount quest, back before the level cap was raised to 70) that unlocks the ability to create a Death Knight character. The Death Knight starts at a high level (somewhere around 60 or 70, though Blizzard isn't certain yet), so you won't have to grind your way back up all over again. It's intended as an alternative, advanced class for end-game use only."
And a tiny little snippet about what Inscription does:
"Wrath of the Lich King will introduce a new profession called Inscription that will let players customize individual spells and abilities in their spell book -- to change the cooldown timer on a Fireball, for example, or alter the crit rate of a healing spell."
No release date at this time, but the expansion was in some kind of playable state at BlizzCon today, so they're farther along with it now than they were at E3 2006 when they announced Burning Crusade. I'd guess that we'll see a beta start up this fall/winter, with a release in Spring 2008. In the meantime, Blizzard will be posting details about new stuff in the expansion on their expansion website, and right now they've got a couple screenshots and a teaser-trailer.
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