Battlemouth

8/20

My story starts when I received an invite to World of Warcraft’s Wrath of the Lich King closed beta test. At first I was shocked, then skeptical knowing they had already sent out invites. Finally I was ecstatic that this was no scam, I had actually been invited into the beta.
To start playing you have to first download the client, some 1.88 Gigs of data which installs as a separate WoW program. As I sit here writing this, some 3 and a half hours after starting the download, I still have yet to play. It took forever to download; it took forever to install and now? It has to download and install an indeterminate number of patches. At least this game has stayed true to its roots. In fact, as it’s going now, I’m not going to have time to play before work at 5…
Some time later…

So I have come to the decision everyone else is beta has also agreed on: Death Knights are freaking awesome. Any race can be a Death Knight and gets a looks upgrade. You have a sort of ghostly pallor and some sweet glowing blue eyes. One you’ve made your character, you start at level 55, right next to the Lich King himself. You get some quests running around learning the Rune system, which is very interesting but works extremely well, and getting your first weapon which you do not start with. You get a sweet blue two-hand sword and a choice of runes to inscribe into the sword to begin with. Inscribing runes into your weapon is basically like enchanting with the ability to change it at will without any mats as long as you are near a Rune Forge.

Once you have your sword, you get started on possibly the best starting quests ever. You get to control a giant eye ransacking a town for observatory purposes, you get to duel both players and NPC’s and take 100 elites by cannon in possibly the most fun I’ve ever had. Between pretty much destroying a town constantly and getting a mount within an hour, Death Knights are awesome.

One of my favorites was one of the very first where you take control of a giant flying eye and float over a town observing certain parts of it. Naturally the citizens do not take well to a giant eye observing them so they try to shoot you down. Took me a few tries to notice I had a “Call down Ghouls” spell. Wicked sick. It calls down like 4-5 ghouls onto an area and they start attacking everything. There’s a very small cooldown and it requires no real mana. I had the town up in arms very quickly.

Of course I have yet to get into the real meat of the starting quests. You start under the control of the Lich King but where do you end up actually leaving his power and joining your faction? I don’t know yet, stay tuned.

8/21

So I opened up the launcher today and guess what! Another 700MB patch came out today! Lovely. After spending a good half hour downloading and installing the new patch, I get on to some interesting revelations. First of all, going back down from the starting area to the fighting area, I notice a lot of changes from when I was playing the other night. Asking around I find the whole starting area is actually an event instance sort of deal. Things change as you complete quests. So now the Scourge armies have advanced on the town I was massacring last night and now I have to deal with the Scarlet Crusade leftovers. There were a few basic kill-this-many-guys sort of quests and a get-this-stuff-for-me quest. But the real awesome one was the inquisitor one. You get set up with a set of pokers you dual wield in an effort to procure information from some Scarlet Crusaders. Basically go and act as a fury warrior/rogue and wreck some people until the quest says so. But both you and the Crusaders have some set lines to say which either come off as arrogant and awesome or just plain funny. It’s also nice to note that I have been playing for a combines few hours and I’m very close to 57 right now. They might decide to nerf the leveling curve though. I think the main idea is to be 60 when you’re all done starting.

Of course one of the problems running on a test server is that it does require frequent down times to change bits or whatever. So naturally my night was cut off short with the sever going down.

8/22

So today I pick up right where I left off earlier, running some errands as the Lich King’s Army prepares for war against the Scarlet Crusade. I started off slow, just doing some simple quests and collecting stuff. Some interesting things but none out of the ordinary. One of the more interesting things you have to do is kill a being of your own race that’s being held prisoner. It’s basically a way to introduce that maybe your character is being controlled by the Lich King and doesn’t necessarily want world destruction but maybe fight for the good of the people. But your prisoner realizes you are still bound under the King’s control and sacrifices himself asking you to break free and fight for your own people. I may have possibly cried a little at the Tauren’s story.

Then things took a turn for the awesome. One of the quests requires you do fly a dragon and raze the town of their militia and just all-around kick some ass. Basically the Lich King himself gives you a bone dragon and tells you to go kill 150 Crusaders and 10 ballistae (correct term for more than one ballista). So you go up on a giant winged dragon and shoot down frost bolts. The frost bolts do an ungodly amount of damage with splash and can take like 5 guys normally, more if you’re good. In the meantime, since you will want to be doing this as soon as the expansion comes out, there will be about 10 other people trying to do this at the same time. Plus there are NPC’s on dragons doing the same thing though not at the same extent. The whole thing turns into the thing that Dragon Wars movie should have been, people killing people on dragons.

Then after that, you return and a little bar pops up saying the “Battle for Light’s Hope Chapel” is beginning soon. Battle? Light’s Hope Chapel? Sounds good, let’s do it. You end up following Mograine into a giant battle with about 20 other players and a ton of NPC’s in a giant, awesome, instanced battle and it is possibly the most fun I’ve had in a long time on WoW. The battle ends with Mograine and Fordring both realizing the true evil behind the Lich King and how he sent both you and all the people around you including Mograine to their supposed deaths. Realizing this, all the fighting stops and the Lich King steps in. Fordring tries to finally kill the King only to have him revealed as a mere shadow. After he disappears, Mograine creates the Knights of the Ebon Blade, the Death Knight faction from here on out and you pass out…

You wake up in the non-instanced starting zone which is now the Ebon Blade stronghold and you get a new sword and a spell teleporting you back to the zone whenever you want. You are done with starting a DK finally. For me, all the quests dumped me out right at 58 and I had the chance to just sprint over to the outlands to start leveling to 68 so I can go to Northrend. However I choose to head to Undercity and look around a bit. First thing I noticed was that there is a barber’s shop in UC now. For 4 gold you can redo your hairstyle with some extra styles not available from the beginning included. I got my horns done in an exquisite fashion which proudly matched my helm. From here I just hopped on a flight to Stonard and ran to Thrallmar through the gate. And here is where I leave you. It’s goning to take me a bit to hit 68 before I can show you Northrend so it might be a while. Until then, what do you think?