World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King is a video game that consists of 8 releases

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Travel to the arctic continent of Northrend in Blizzard's second and latest expansion to the most popular MMORPG ever made.

Overview

In Blizzard's latest expansion for World of Warcraft, players will travel to the frozen continent in the northern wastes of Azeroth. The Lich King Arthas has set in motion events that could lead to the extinction of all life on Azeroth. With the armies of the Undead Scourgeand the necromantic power of the plague threatening to sweep across the land, only the mightiest heroes can oppose the Lich King's will and end his reign of terror for all time.

Players will be able to travel through 10 zones in total; however many of them will be restricted by the player's level. Wrath of the Lich King will introduce many new features, including the increase of the game's level cap to 80, hundreds of new items, quests, creatures, and spells, as well as siege weapons, new character customization options, updated graphics and special effects, new factions, and more. Additionally, Blizzard is debuting the Hero class, a highly anticipated feature which will incorporate skills and abilities previously too powerful to implement in earlier installments of the game.

Northrend

The continent of Northrend features 10 new zones for players to traverse through during their adventures against the Lich King Arthas and his enormous army of the Undead Scourge.

Howling Fjord

Howling Fjord is the home of the menacing Vrykul who have recently heard the call of the Lich King. In order to face this new foe, the Alliance has taken over the former encampment of Prince Arthas called Valgarde. The undead Forsaken have also set up a new base that features brand new Forsaken architecture called Vengeance Landing. Both camps will be one of two entrance ways in which players will enter by their own faction's transportation. The zone features tons of new quests which have players battling against this new ally of the Lich King. Two dungeons are also located in this

Northrend

area: Utgarde Keep and Utgarde Pinnacle.

Borean Tundra

Borean Tundra is the home of the Tuskarr, a race of walrus-like men who inhabit the area. Along with the Tuskarr, the Naga and the Blue Dragonflight make their presence known in the land. The Naga are mysteriously draining the water from the zone for a devious plan. The Blue Dragonflight inhabit a region of the zone known as Coldaara which contains The Nexus. The Nexus contains two dungeons where players fight against the Blue Dragonflight and ultimately come face to face with the Blue dragon aspect, Malygos. This is the second zone in which players will choose to enter Northrend in Wrath of the Lich King.

Grizzly Hills

Grizzly Hills is a woodland area that is home to the Furbolgs and their home city, Grizzlemaw. A band of Ice Trolls from Drak'Tharon Keep have been entering the zone to cause havoc on the land. Drak'Tharon Keep is the main dungeon in this zone.

Dragonblight

Dragonblight is the zone where old dragons near death come to die. It features all 5 dragonflights in their own shrines in the zone but most notably is a titan building called Wyrmrest Temple which has been taken over by the Red Dragonflight to be used as a embassy for all dragonflights. The shrines themselves have come under attack by the undead Scourge to raise new undead dragons to serve the Lich King and build his army. The Scarlet Onslaught, previously known as the Scarlet Crusade, have set up a base of operations in this zone to drive the scourge out of the land. In order to take the fight against the Lich King and his forces, the Alliance and the Horde have set up two bases which surround the entrance to Icecrown, Angrathar the Wrath Gate, to prepare for their siege towards Arthas' doorstep.

Zul'drak

Zul'drak, home of the Ice Trolls, features glorious troll architecture and the strongest troll warriors. This zone houses the necropolis, Naxxramas, which has returned from its campaign against the living in the Eastern Plaguelands.

Lake Wintergrasp

Lake Wintergrasp is the brand new world PvP zone in Wrath of the Lich King. Players will battle in this zone to earn new rewards and benefits for their faction as well as embark on brand new quests.

The Storm Peaks

The Storm Peaks features the continuation of the Titan storyline in Wrath of the Lich King with the dungeon of Ulduar open to all adventurers that are willing to brave the halls of the ancient Titan base.

Sholazar Basin

Sholazar Basin is a complete duplication of the Un'goro Crater zone on Azeroth. Expect to see prehistoric creatures in this zone.

Icecrown

The base of operations for the undead Scourge. It is here in Icecrown where the Lich King sits atop his mighty throne and orders his troops to do his bidding. Heroes that set foot upon this zone will face creatures stronger than they have ever faced before. Those who wish to battle the Lich King in person must be ready for perilous journey they must undertake to step face to face with death itself.

Dalaran

The magical city of Dalaran has moved north. Leaving its former settlement in the Eastern Kingdoms, the Kirin Tor, led by Rhonin, has risen Dalaran from the ground and moved it to Northrend to face against the Blue Dragonflight and their crusade to rid the world of all magic-users. In Wrath of the Lich King, Dalaran will become the new Shattrath of Northrend and will feature all that Shattrath had to offer in Outland including portals to cities and battleground masters to both Alliance and Horde. The city can be accessed either on foot or on a flying mount.

Death Knight Hero Class

This new expansion introduces the first Hero class, unlockable if a player has a level 55 character. It is designed to start at level 55 and will fill the role of either a damage dealer or a tank but players will be limited to one Death Knight per account per server.

The first hero class introduces a new concept, the new two part resource mechanic: runes and runic power; Most of the classes abilities will use these runes of which there are 3 types. Your character portrait offers a deadly sword with 3 pairs of these different runes which represent the different runic powers of blood, frost and unholy and each with a different color representation. .Although these slots show 3 lots of pairs, similar to the socket system these are only guides as you could at times need 4 or 5 slots using blood powers so If a person wants four Blood and two Unholy runes then they can do so. Abilities use up these runes and take 10 seconds to charge up so while the class will have non runic standard abilities the can use many of their special and more powerful abilities will use these runes.

This offers a unique game mechanic meaning not only do you choose the talent trees of your class which represent once again frost, blood and unholy trees but to adopt what runes you will use in your available slots for the situation you are in and then to use these runes wisely and at the right times to ensure you can use them again once they are recharged. However, at any time in which you use a runic ability that has an enemy as the target, it’s going to build up this runic power. The Runic power fills up in your weapon and represented in the character portrait where the backdrop sword visually shows these charges of energy. IF a player does not use this runic power for what ever reasons it will deteriorate over a given time similar to a warrior and druid in bear form's rage bars.

As mentioned the Death Knight will be a tank and damage dealing class but not only this the Death Knight will tank through its damage and will do this through duel wielding weapons removing the need for a shield in the class but to correctly tank the class needs to maintain its damage and thus introducing the key point to its success as a tank by the player. Despite being a melee class the Death Knight also has spells and can call upon unholy abilities like summoning ghouls from dead players (who can control these) or dead NPC's to aide it and much more.

The Death Knights talent trees are of course, Blood, Frost, and Unholy. Blood is a tree focused more around health. A blood dk gets more health the more enemies they kill, making them almost unkillable by mobs, and can quickly level, but don't do a lot of damage. Frost is a tanking tree, with limited damage and powers, but with heavy emphasis on armor and defense. The unholy tree is focused around damage and spells, like a warlock in plate.

New Features

Achievements

World of Warcraft's achievements system comes through many requests for more things to do other then grind, raid and pvp in WoW. Following the success of the XBOX live achievement systems and Warhammer Online's Tomb Of Knowledge, Blizzard will now be offering more than 750 individual achievements covering every aspect of gameplay, including world exploration, PvE, PvP, professions, and character development. Some achievements will unlock game rewards such as guid tabards, pets and titles. All of the rewards are only cosmetic as the achievements system is NOT like arena or PVP points and will not offer you in game improvements to your character. This is an open system and easy to develop with and blizzard plan to add more constantly after the launch.

Categories of Achievements vary from simple action unlocks such as getting a haircut or defeating a member of each race in your opposing faction to progress achievements which consist of how many hugs you give out to how many times you die. Meta Achievements unlock when you complete other achievements such as exploration unlocks which will lead to the World Explorer title, quests, honorable kills and items in your position including skills and professions.

Hero Class: Death Knight

Arthas, a Death Knight

The Death Knight will be World of Warcraft's first hero class. Death Knights will use the power of runes engraved on their swords to cast spells and use abilities. They are melee dps / tanking hybrids, who draw power from runes, rather than mana or rage. Also of note, unlike current tanking classes, Death Knights tank without shields. The talent trees available to Death Knights are Unholy, Blood, and Frost.

Some abilities available to Death Knights:

Unholy Blight - "A vile swarm of unholy insects surrounds the caster for a 10 yard radius. All enemies caught in the swarm take 34 damage per sec and are plagued with a disease that can stack up to 3 times. Lasts for 1 sec per 10 runic power."
Lichborne - "Draw upon unholy energy to become undead for 30 sec. While undead, you are immune to Charm, Fear and Sleep effects, and your horrifying visage causes melee attacks to have an additional 25% chance to miss you."
Summon Gargoyle - "A Gargoyle flies into the area and bombards the target with Shadow damage modified by the Death Knight's attack power. Persists for 1 sec per 8 runic power up to 1 min." (Obtained through talents)
Army of the Dead - "Summons and entire legion of ghouls to fight for the Death Knight. The ghouls will swarm the area, taunting and fighting anything they can. While channeling Army of the Dead, the Death Knight takes less damage equal to his or her dodge plus parry chance."

Players need a single character of level 55 in their account in order to create a Death Knight, which starts at level 55 rather than level 1. The player will then go through a series of Death Knight starting area quests that will take you to level 59 or 60 and give you full gear, receiving the pieces as rewards for each quest. Going through these starting quests is required, and once completed you are released into the world.

New Profession: Inscription

Inscription; Glyph Interface

The new profession will allow players to augment the cooldown, damage, or mechanics of a spell using glyphs. Every player will have a new page in their spell book in which up to 6 glyphs can be put.. It will work on melee and ranged and spell abilities. Players that choose this profession will be able to create scrolls which are can be traded and sold in the auction house.
Some examples of the profession include decreasing the cast time, increasing the damage or area of effect for an ability. Blizzard has stated that Herbalism will most likely be the gathering profession used for this new professions reagents, since creating the ink and other reagents is done by grinding up herbs.

Dungeons and Raids

One of the main new feature in Wrath of the Lich King is that all raid content will be available as either a 10 or 25-man dungeon, with completely independent progression paths.

Both the 10 and 25-man versions will have the same layout and the design of the dungeon will remain the same. However, each will be adjusted, tuned, and balanced for its player size. This will allow more players to raid the content of Wrath of the Lich King in their preferred play style. However players who raids in the 25-man dungeons will receive higher quality and more loot than those who play the 10-person versions. The new expansion will add 3 new raid dungeons and 12, 5-man dungeons (8 for leveling up and 4 max-level, each with heroic versions) at release.

New Dungeons

Utgarde Keep (two 5-man wings, levels 70-72 and 80)
The Nexus (two 5-man wings, levels 71-73 and 80, and a 10/25-man raid wing)
Drak'Tharon Keep (5 Man)
Gundrak (5 Man)
The Violet Hold (5 man)
Chamber of the Aspects (10/25-man raid)
Ulduar (two 5-man wings, levels 77-79 and 80, and a 10/25-man raid wing)
Azjol-Nerub (two wings, levels 72-74, level 73-75)
Icecrown Citadel (10/25-man raid)
Naxxramas II (level 80, 10 and 25-man raid)
Caverns of Time: Culling of Stratholme (level 80, 5-man instance)

Collector's Edition

As with The Burning Crusade expansion pack, Blizzard Entertainment are releasing a Limited Collector's Edition of World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. The behind the scenes DVD will offer developer interviews, trailers, cinematics and footage of the panel discussions from BlizzCon 2007.

Limited Collector's Edition

The Limited Edition will come in a special box that contains many exclusives, including:

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King on DVD-ROM.
The Art of World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, a 208-page book featuring never before seen images from the game.
An exclusive in-game pet: Frosty, the baby frost wyrm.
A behind the scenes DVD containing over an hour of developer interviews, the Wrath of the Lich King intro cinematic with director’s commentary, and more.
The official soundtrack CD, containing 21 epic tracks from the game, along with exclusive bonus tracks.
A mouse pad featuring a map of the newly opened continent of Northrend.
Two World of Warcraft Trading Card Game March of the Legion™ starter decks, along with two exclusive cards available only in the Collector’s Edition.

System Requirements

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King will be using an updated graphics engine, allowing the developers to use new special effects, shader, fire effects and realistic shadows in the game.

PC Specs

OS: Windows XP (Service Pack 3), Windows Vista (Service Pack 1)

Processor:

Minimum: Intel Pentium 4 1.3 GHz or AMD Athlon XP 1500

Recommended: Dual-core processor, such as the Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2

Memory:

Minimum: 512 MB RAM (1GB for Vista users)
Recommended: 1 GB RAM (2 GB for Vista users)
15 Gigabytes Hard Drive space

Video:

Minimum: 3D graphics processor with Hardware Transform and Lighting with 32 MB VRAM

Such as an ATI Radeon 7200 or NVIDIA GeForce 2 class card or better

Recommended: 3D graphics processor with Vertex and Pixel Shader capability with 128 MB VRAM

Such as an ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT class card or better

Sound: DirectX-compatible sound card or motherboard sound capability

Mac Specs

OS: Mac OS X 10.4.11 or newer

Processor:

Minimum: PowerPC G5 1.6 GHz or Intel Core Duo processor
Recommended: Intel 1.8GHz processor or better

Memory:

Minimum: 1 GB RAM
Recommended: 2 GB RAM
15 GB Hard Drive space

Video:

Minimum: 3D graphics processor with Hardware Transform and Lighting with 64 MB VRAM

Such as an ATI Radeon 9600 or NVIDIA GeForce Ti 4600 class card or better

Recommended: 3D graphics processor with Vertex and Pixel Shader capability with 128 MB VRAM
Such as an ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA 7600 class card or better

General Information Edit

Game Name	World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
Platform(s)	Mac PC
Publisher(s)	Blizzard Entertainment
Developer(s)	Blizzard Entertainment
Genres	Add a new genre MMORPG
Themes	Add a new theme Fantasy
Original US Release	Nov. 13, 2008 need a fuzzy date?
Original US Release	Q4 2008 know the real date?
Aliases	WoW, WotLK, WLK

Trivia

Which class was added in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion?

Warrior
Priest
Death Knight
Warlock
Druid

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PC	1 review
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Associated News

2.8 Million People Are Playing Wrath of the Lich King
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Blizzard's Trying to Trap Me!
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If World of Warcraft had wizards and cyborgs it'd be way better. Actually, it probably already has cyborgs, doesn't it? Whatevs, just watch this video.