More Wrath of the Lich King Coverage

Blizzard sees the Death Knight as a kind of multipurpose tank. He can't use a shield, instead picking between dual-wield and two-hander setups. The Death Knight will get something called presences, which work somewhat similarly to Paladin auras in that once activated they'll stay on until you switch them off. Unlike auras they'll only apply to the Death Knight. Those that Blizzard showed off included a blood presence, which augments damage per second (DPS), and an unholy presence, which apparently is best used for PvP as it increases attack speed and the speed of your global cooldowns.

Along with the presences comes an entirely new resource system. The Death Knight won't use energy or mana or rage to activate abilities, but instead use a system of runes and runic power. As lead designer Jeffrey Kaplan explained to us, the Death Knight will be able to equip combinations of runes (blood, unholy, or frost types) onto himself and consume those runes to pull off his special abilities. Once used, the rune will then enter a cooldown phase, set right now at 10 seconds. Kaplan explained it won't be that much of a pain to switch around your rune setups, but you won't be swapping them in and out after every fight.

As runes are consumed you'll build a runic power meter which can be used to fire off different types of skills. And it sounds like the Death Knight will have plenty of weird skills and abilities to use. No word yet on the specifics of his talent lines, but we did get to see abilities like plague strike (bonus weapon damage and damage-over-time effect), death coil (spell that does damage or heals undead friendly targets), and cage of ice (freezes target in place). The Death Knight will also be able to place disease-type debuffs on enemies for special effects. For instance, he can use a blood strike ability that does an amount of damage based on how many diseases are currently affecting a target.

Beyond that there are even stranger abilities such as grip of death, which physically pulls a target toward you and forces them to attack, which is useful for tanking. Instead of a pure resurrection spell, the Death Knight can raise ghouls either from the corpses of fallen enemies or from group members. If you target a dead foe, the ghoul will then function like a pet with the ability to stun, apply diseases, and huddle to survive burst damage. When used on a deceased friendly target, the player will be resurrected... but as a ghoul. So they don't get their own body back, but they can run around like a crazy person in ghoul form for a while. Death Knights also get a deathcharger, a class-specific steed, in both normal and, after a questline is completed, epic versions.

The other major addition in Wrath of the Lich King is the new continent, Northrend, which sits in the north of Azeroth's in-game map, in between Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdom. Blizzard says it's overall a larger area split into a larger number of zones than Outland, the fantastical territory added in last year's Burning Crusade. From what we saw, this seems to be true, though we only got to see four new areas, the starting zones of Borean Tundra and Howling Fjord and two mid-level zones called Grizzly Hills and Dragonblight. Before we get into those, we'll talk about two other zones Blizzard detailed that were inaccessible during our hands-on time.

First up is Zul'Drak, a large zone blanketed by misty grey skies, trees covered with thorny growths, and strange lanterns and lights bobbing throughout. The zone itself is built as a tiered ziggurat sort of thing, so as you progress to its center you'll be moving upwards across levels of land. It gives the zone an odd, artificial look, since the ground is mostly flattened to accommodate its artificial topography. The trolls of the zone apparently sacrifice various woodland animals to gain new types of powers, though we weren't specifically told what they were. Across paths and winding through the arches of overhead aqueducts float groups of bats, and as you move higher into the zone you'll find more and more snow on the ground.

Also in the zone is Drak'Tharon Keep, a stone-walled dungeon wreathed in cobwebs and populated by trolls, abominations and other oddities. There's also a giant T-Rex boss, which was included mainly because Blizzard thought T-Rexes are cool, which they are. Eventually you'll move outside of the dungeon and into outdoor courtyards, then up the keep's ramparts to a final boss encounter atop a tower. Though the final boss skin had not been applied to the character model there, the scene was still impressive as there loomed a menacing Necropolis (remember from Warcraft 3?) in the background.

Then there's Sholazar Basin, an area Blizzard described as being a sister zone to Un'Goro Crater. It's a tropical zone with lighter skies than Un'Goro's heavy green mist, circular in shape, and features jutting stone structures dotted with crystals. Populating the zone are the wolvar, wolverine people, and the oracles, an evolved type of murloc, who function as opposing factions. You can quest for both sides for reputation gains, and it'll be easy and expected for you to switch between the sides. Longtime World of Warcraft players will also recognize famed hunter Hemet Nesingwary, who's crashed his ship in this zone and is actually being opposed by an environment-friendly group called D.E.H.T.A. (Druids for the ethical and humane treatment of animals).

Of all the zones shown, Dragonblight seemed to be the largest. Its landscape looks sort of like somebody dropped a concrete plate onto a mountain range, with grayish, violent spikes of land jutting up in unnatural formations. Around the zone can be found graveyards for the five aspects of World of Warcraft's dragon-kind, which range from lush idyllic gardens to menacing fires and caves and all are ringed with dragon bones. It seems Arthas has taken notice of all this and started corrupting and resurrecting the remains, bringing them back into the world as ferocious frost wyrms, which from what we saw were floating toward Wyrmrest Temple at the zone's center.

The temple serves as a meeting place for all the types of dragons and seems to be under attack. We say "seems" because all the animations aren't in yet. When you get up to Wyrmrest's base you can see tens of dragons in the sky along with frost wyrms, but they don't do much aside from float around. Occasionally a few dragon models would fall to the ground dead, giving us the impression that there was, in fact, a fight going on up above.

You can fly up there too. By talking with an NPC at the base it's possible to ride up to the Wyrmrest's peak, which turns out to be quite a distance up, on a dragon's back. At the summit you talk to a huge elf named Alexstrasza the life-binder, whom will likely give you quests and let you gain reputation. Ambassadors for all the other dragonflight aspects ring the top floor as well. From there you can head back to the ground or go to the middle of the temple where there are more NPCs who would, we'll assume, give you more quests. Underneath the temple was a green glowing heart-like object hovering in midair and an instance door which, unfortunately, wasn't activated when we tried to walk through it. According to Blizzard, inside will reside a raid target.

Also in the zone is Naxxramas, one of the raid dungeons in the game. Blizzard has switched up how the raid progression works in Wrath of the Lich King. Now all raid dungeons can be attempted by either 10 or 25-man groups. Jeffrey Kaplan filled us in on more of why this decision was made. Blizzard says it will continue to monitor the community's feedback on how this works, and if changes need to be made, they will be.

A few other sections in Dragonblight are the Wrath Gate, where you'll meet Arthas for the first time, and the crystal vice, a section filled with ice giants and large worms, with phantom-like walrus people, hyenas, polar bears in the outlying fields. The Scarlet Crusade makes an appearance here as well, only now they're known as the Scarlet Onslaught. Like the rest of the zones, Dragonblight was an interesting area to explore because it wasn't just a flat expanse. The terrain varied quite frequently, the line of sight was often broken up by irregular landscape formations, which gives everything a more authentic feel even if there are floating scourge temples above barfing down some type of greenish filth.

Before we get to the expansive starting zones, there's still Grizzly Hills, which proved to be the most visually appealing area. It didn't seem strikingly new like the content in Outland, but it had more of a naturalistic feel. Think redwood forest and you'll have a good idea of how it looks. The zone's clear skies and bright sunlight illuminated the forest floor underneath gargantuan trees, the centers of which were sometime carved out to accommodate a winding pathway. Like Dragonblight, the terrain was rough, uneven and hilly, and contained plenty of micro-areas to keep things interesting, including spots where bands of wild horses galloped. Players will find Venture Company representative milling about, as well as a Furbolg colony and number of Worgen who've taken up residence in a fallen city-sized tree. New types of dwarves are wandering around as well. They dwell, not surprisingly, in structures tied to snowy mountains and in a sister city to Ironforge. In a brief fly-through of the place, we can say the city looks just like Ironforge with the same entrance and same walkways ringing its outer edge. The main difference is this city has an open roof and earth giants hurling boulders down into it, doing damage to the stone architecture already overgrown with plant life.

Then, finally, there are the starting zones. Borean Tundra and the Howling Fjord are located on the eastern and western sides of Northrend. Blizzard implemented a nice feature where you can quickly warp between the two zones and Dragonblight by talking to dockmasters at the camps of a walrus-like people. So if you don't like the Howling Fjord, you can just flip right over to the Borean Tundra. In the Alliance starting towns we checked out there were also portals to Shattrath and instant warps to Menethil Harbor and Theramore Isle.

The Borean Tundra is a large, desolate area, and the one in which we spent the majority of our time questing. Landscape features included spikes of land in the center topped with Dalaran wizards in some instances, an expanse of gnome-constructed pools, arid plains across which packs of rhinos roamed, and jagged rocks ringing sea-side murloc huts. We followed a few quest lines out there, including running missions for D.E.H.T.A. tasking us with eliminating hunters and divers in the area and working for an undercover agent in a murloc village. The agent had infiltrated the murloc encampment by donning a murloc suit similar to the one given out to attendees of last year's Blizzcon event. By running a few quests for him, we got the ability to actually talk with murlocs in the camp, have one of them repair our equipment, and run quests for them against an infected camp across the cove.