Requiem for a Blood Spec

Earlier this week, Blizzard announced that they would be gutting and overhauling the Death Knight tanking talents. The class was originally designed with three talent trees (same as the other classes), but each tree contained both melee DPS AND tanking talents. This predicament was not entirely unique - Feral druids also use one tree for both tanking and DPS - but I can see how it is a balance challenge that will only increase as Cataclysm allows more cross-tree points.

As a result, the Death Knight blood tree will become a dedicated tanking tree in the expansion. I'm a bit puzzled about why DPS blood, as opposed to frost, was chosen to get the boot, when the DK frost stance is used for tanking. (WoW.com claims that DPS blood had drifted closer to DPS unholy, which is as good an idea as any.) I'll also admit to a bit of nostalgia.

The blood spec I knew and abused in the Wrath beta is long since gone - at varying points it the beta, it was possible to spawn half a dozen blood worms and solo just about anything that couldn't one-shot you. I ultimately opted to reincarnate Cheerydeth as a rogue rather than suffer the disappointment of playing the Death Knight in a state that actually resembles balanced. Even so, I'm a bit sad to see the option of revisiting the minion horde go away.

In related news, Klep quips that shaman tanking will be the next spec overhaul. The new spec that has me really excited, only a week late for April Fools Day, is the new Frost Mage kiting/tanking setup. The Frost mage taunt will be a skill called "got your nose" that only works on frostbitten foes, and forces them to chase the mage until they can get in melee range. The ability also applies a debuff called "to spite your face" that reflects any non-melee damage the afflicted mob might otherwise be tempted to send the mage's direction.

The Mechanostrider Always Triumphs

I know I said I was parking my other WoW alts, but I needed Cheerydeth the third for a project (more on this later). As long as I was signing on, there was no reason NOT to upgrade her mount skill, for a fraction of what Rich Uncle Greenwiz makes in an evening.



As a result, the third entry in the Triumph of the Mechanostrider series.

There should be some non-filler content sometime this week, really. ;)

Argent Achievement Spam, And Yet More Alt Updates

I finally completed the last of the current Argent Tournament rep grinds last night, setting off five separate achievements and two titles. Cosmetic fireworks aside, this achievement will be needed in patch 3.2 to unlock new daily quests for more champion's seals. The seals, in turn, will reward players with a tabard that offers teleportation to the tournament grounds (where the new dungeons are located) and with the ability to check your mail or bank remotely via your squire non-combat pet.

If you too would like to spam your /guild chat with five achievements at once, Spinks has coincidentally posted a guide on the tournement earlier today.

Ding 40 x 5(6)

In other news, Cheerydeth the Third, the rogue who inherited the name I was saving for my beta Death Knight, only to decide that the released version of the class might seem underpowered compared to its beta incarnation, hit level 40 this morning.

Cheerydeth marks my 5th level 40 character in WoW, behind my Pally (70), Mage (80), Hunter (50), and Warrior (62). If you count the beta version of the Death Knight (80), that gives me significant playtime on six of WoW's ten classes. Of the other four, my Warlock sits at 24, my Shadow Priest is parked at 23, and I played a Druid through level 22 or so in the very first stress test before WoW went into open beta (no talents, since they weren't yet implemented for druids - I have also occasionally taken my wife's level 50 balance druid for a spin). I think my last attempt at a Shaman failed somewhere in the mid-teens, but I deleted that character for some inexplicable reason - I should probably give it another shot at some point, just so I can say that I've taken all ten classes through level 20.

On a whole, it speaks well of WoW's classes that I've found it worth my while to try out each of them. That said, the mage is far and away my favorite - I think I actually have more /played on the mage POST-80 than I do on all the other characters put together. The mage offers a very delicate balance; too little damage and they become very squishy, while too much damage (which is what I've got right now when tackling dailies in ilvl 213 gear) makes fights trivial. When you're actually in the sweet spot of doing just enough damage to beat foes using all the various tools at your disposal, though, you'll never want to go back to hiding behind a pet or under a suit of armor.

To some extent, that may be what appeals to me about the rogue. Having done all three plate-wearers in the 60+ range, I've had a number of opportunities for the stand-and-fight style of melee. Thus, I opted to go with a pure subtlety build - more commonly associated with PVP - that really focuses on my ability to sneak around, try and split pulls, and burst down an unsuspecting foe or two before I can be overwhelmed by a larger group. I can definitely see why the leveling guides all recommend more versatile builds (generally Combat), but my various heirloom items make Cheerydeth tough enough to compensate for the bad situations where a murloc goes running off and returns with a bunch of its friends. (In particular, having a permanent set of scaling daggers makes a huge difference since Ambush requires them.)

Holding Pattern Until the Patch?
Overall, I'm in an odd sort of holding pattern at the moment due to upcoming patch changes. I technically can be farming Champion's Seals on Greenwiz now, but it will be much quicker and more convenient when the patch hits. My Paladin, Rogue, Warrior, Hunter, Priest, and Warlock alts all qualify for mount upgrades when the patch hits (as would any new Death Knights hitting Outland). I could make the attempt at a Shaman, but I'm not really that excited about it; they'd have more available heirlooms next patch, and there are vague hints that the next expansion will offer new races rather than new classes.

It's not bad timing personally - I'm moving next week and expect a large number of home improvement issues for the remainder of the month that will cut into my gaming time. It's just a bit odd that I honestly can't tell you what I'm working for in the game at the moment. I keep doing random PUG 5-mans when the opportunity arises because I have fun doing them, but it's not as if I'm chomping at the bit to actually spend all the shards and emblems on heirlooms. Ah well, the patch will probably be good to go in a month or so, and I'm almost morbidly curious about how Brewfest will unfold.


Incidentally, this game really desperately needs a new title interface. Having a pulldown menu made sense when there were like three titles in the game, and it just starts looking stupid at this many.

Dueling Bonus Exp Weekends

This is the last weekend of the year's Midsummer Fire Festival in World of Warcraft. Though the holiday achievements were buggy as usual, the event remains a great time for leveling alts. I dusted off Cheerydeth The Third and gained about 5 levels entirely from exploring the world, unlocking almost all of the old world flight paths, and visiting bonfires. She will sign off with half of the Festival achievements, the pet, and one of the outfit pieces in case I want to pursue the holiday again next year.

(Why, you might ask, would I voluntarily spend that much time - during which I could have been gaining even faster exp by questing and killing mobs - traveling despite all my frequent complaints on the topic? I don't mind traveling and exploring when that's my actual goal. I had a fair amount of fun trying to dodge some pretty tough mobs - especially those pesky Timbermaw Furbolgs - at a rather low level. Travel is only annoying when I have to sit and watch my character return to locations I have previously reached instead of doing something else that I actually want to be doing.)

What, besides the intrusion of real life, could compete with all of that? Well, it turns out that EQ2 is also holding a bonus weekend, including tradeskill exp and a never-before-seen bonus to AAXP.

Comparing Two Bonuses
The Fire Festival has various advantages over EQ2's bonus. For one thing, it was announced in advance and does not fall entirely within a holiday weekend (during which players may have off-line commitments). It also contains actual new content (along with the aforementioned bugs), where EQ2's version simply ups the rewards for existing content. Still, EQ2's version is likely to win the weekend's battle for my keyboard.

The fact is, I'm just not all that interested in leveling yet another WoW alt. It turns out that the chase for heirlooms is merely a convenient excuse to continue running the occasional 5-man instance, which I still enjoy despite long since claiming all the relevant rewards. I've got four level-ready alts parked at various points on the exp curve, including a Horde Warrior with access to content that I've never played before, but none of them really grabs my attention.

By contrast, double tradeskill exp coupled with 100% banked vitality means that Lyriana should easily gain 3 tradeskill levels this weekend, without even trying all that hard. She only needs 8 more levels to reach the current tradeskill level cap, after which I will be free to adventure until the expansion without having to worry about where my next spell upgrade is coming from. (Also, any future alts would get a bonus to their tradeskill exp for my having a capped crafter on the account.) The AAXP bonus doesn't matter quite so much to me, since I don't really need maximum AA's to support my solo playstyle, but it's a nice additional bonus for doing content that I was going to do anyway.

I suppose the other way to look at it is that I don't really think that WoW's leveling curve needs a bonus, while I do think that EQ2's tradeskill exp curve drags a bit. I'd rather have a slight, permanent increase to the rate of tradeskill exp, but I'm now so close to the level cap that I suppose I'll settle for a temporary jump to ludicrous speed.

Another Triumph of the Mechanostrider

Cheerydeth the Third hit level 30 this morning. Thanks to a change introduced in last summer's 2.4.3 minipatch, this means that she gets to pay a visit to the riding instructor 10 levels "early". I immediately got an in-game mail from the riding instructor pointing out that I was eligible for a mount and explaining where to go (and how much money to bring). I don't know if this has been around since the summer, or if it's more recent (it may have been triggered by the achievement for level 30, since achievements can trigger mail messages), but it's good feature for players who didn't know this information.

Cheery has been making very rapid progress thanks to her rich uncle Greenwiz. She wields a [Balanced Heartseeker] with the once-coveted Crusader enchant, a [Sharpened Scarlet Kris] with the Lifestealing enchant, and a pair of the Wintergrasp [Exceptional Stormshroud Shoulders], enchanted with a [Zandalar Signet of Might]. (The enchant is currently no longer allowed due to its effects on twinking, but was not removed from existing items. It appears that patch 3.1 will temporarily deactivate high level enchants when equipped on low level characters, so presumably Cheery will be down 30 attack power on patch day.)

It may seem like she's been advancing slowly in real-time, but I only play Cheery when she has rested exp available. I'd say I'm gaining a level every 1-2 hours of serious play thanks to all the perks and general knowledge of where to find stuff. The journey should only move faster now that I have a stable of mounts to choose from. (I was torn between red and unpainted grey until I remembered that Greenwiz can rake in 36 gold in a matter of minutes - I'll set Cheery up with a random mount macro so she can pull up a random colored strider each time I summon one.) It's nice to see Cheerydeth back on a Mechanostrider after the issues getting one the last time around. :)

The Last Ride of Cheerydeth, the Death Knight

With the end of the Wrath Beta, Cheerydeth, my level 80 beta Death Knight, officially retired into the mists of history. I don’t regret the 5 days and 9 hours /played I invested in Cherrydeth The First in the slightest – the beta was a very unique opportunity to see how the development process I spend so much time writing about actually works in action. Still, in the absence of a formal end of beta event bash, I felt that Cheery deserves one last hurrah. Hopefully, you, my readers, will indulge her with one post on Player vs Developer that isn’t directly about either players or developers, but rather, one pink pig-tailed Death Knight’s ride into the sunset.


“They say that the world is ending,” Cheerydeth thought to herself. “Funny. After the struggle against Illidan, the invasion of the Scourge, and the counteroffensive by all the peoples of Azeroth into the heart of Northrend, I always figured this world would go out with a bang. Instead, they say we’re all just going to cease to be. Probably the mages’ fault, or maybe Malygos. Magic can be irritating like that.”



Cherry shook her head as she rode her motorcycle down the streets of Dalaran. A cheese vendor lept out of her way at the last minute, cursing the day the Kirin Tor allowed regular adventurers into the city. Somehow, Cheery had a hard time feeling bad for them. She’d rather be flying overhead on her gyphon than running people off the street, but apparently the mages felt strongly about not allowing flight inside the city. Some idiocy about how having people swooping in and out to conduct their business in peace disrupts the feeling of the city. Cheery wasn’t sure why a group that wouldn’t let people in unless they appeared to be powerful enough to be useful cared quite so much about community to begin with, but then, she supposed that she might make a few changes of her own if someone ever gave her a magical flying city to run.



Cheery swung by the bank to dig through the piles and piles of arms and armor that littered her vault. Back in her living days, she would no doubt have been horrified at how many soldiers of the Alliance must have fallen in battle to leave so much gear lying around for every random post commander on the continent to hand out sets of armor to anyone who could complete a basic assignment and come back alive. If she ever wanted to start her own army, she could personally equip a decent sized adventuring party, perhaps even a small raid. Cheery passed by the enchanted jewelry from the mages, the armor of the Argent Crusade, the weapons of the Valiance Expedition, and the miscellaneous shiny objects from the strange puppymen of Sholazar Basin, for something she had not dug out for a very long time.



Most of her fellow Death Knights of the Ebon Blade had been eager to replace the Saronite gear they had worn until the day that the Knights ceased to serve Arthas. Cheery, though, had carefully stashed every last item away in her vault. Perhaps the Adamantite armaments of Outland had proven more effective in combat than the crudely forged gear of the unliving Scourge, but Cheery was not willing to forget who she had become so easily. Arthas’ plague had transformed her into something neither Gnome nor mindless Scourge, and the power of the Light had returned her will and control of her mind. The jet black plates and the glow of the runeblade reminded her of whom she had been, and why she had fought so hard to protect others from the same fate.



Cheery climbed to the top of the Inn and hopped out onto the roof, again cursing the Mages’ no-fly zone for making her take the long way, to take one last look at the city. She supposed that it was impressive how a city that spent years enclosed in a bubble within the ruins of Lordaeron now hovered above the serene but nigh deserted Crystalsong Forest. Despite the forest’s central location on the continent, neither the Scourge nor the invading forces of the Alliance and Horde had established much of a foothold in the area. Cheery guessed that the explanation for the general lack of population in the area beneath the city was probably another one of those magic things she’d rather not know about.



“Well,” she muttered, “might as well take advantage of it while it lasts.”
Cheery hopped off the roof, injuring herself, and tapped the power of one of the blood runes engraved on her Runeblade to instantly heal the wounds. There are, she supposed, some perks to the un-life. The Silver Covenant had installed portals to all of the cities of the Alliance, and even Outland’s Sanctuary city of Shattrath, in the courtyard. Cheery didn’t consider her choice for long, as the moments until the end of the worlds ticked away. Without hesitation, she stepped through the portal to Stormwind and returned to where her journey had begun.




Upon materializing in the Mages’ tower in Stormwind, she let her Netherwhelp out of its carrier, and summoned a ghoul for good measure. Riding around with a ghoul seemed to make the living folks around town nervous, but Cheery was somehow alright with this. That idiotic beggar outside the Stormwind Auction House didn’t seem to bother her so much when he saw a slathering ghoul at her side; Cheery did not for the unlife of her understand how none of the heroes inflicted with The Plague during the invasion had bothered to eat him first. Cheery lept from the ramp leading down from the top of the Mages Tower, tapping the faithful Blood Rune a second time, to avoid Archmage Malin. She may not be alive anymore, but, somehow, she couldn’t quite look the man in the eye after events in the Dragonblight. Sometimes the Kirin Tor could be more ruthless than the Ebon Blade when it came to such matters.

Cheery activated her white Mechanostrider and rode towards the Harborway that she had helped build, literally a life ago. As always, the ghoul, and her intrepid Netherwhelp somehow kept up, despite the Strider’s speed. Cheery never fully understood why the Lich King had taken everything of her former life but the little blue Dragonling’s collar. Perhaps a Lich King simply did not trouble himself with such harmless creatures, despite the great speed they exhibited when their master was speeding away on a robotic strider. Cheery closed her eyes for a moment, listening to the bird’s metallic clanking.

She had kept the armor and the Runeblade that Arthas had bade her soak in the blood of the Scarlet Crusade, but she did try to keep her use of the Deathcharger bonded to her to a minimum; its shrieking was, frankly, annoying. Obtaining a new strider had been one of the first things she sought after breaking free of the Scourge. While riding it, trusting that its navigational computer would take it to her destination, it was as if she were still alive.



Finally, Cheery reached her destination. She peered out across the canals around the grand archway and the path to the harbor that sat on the coast below Stormwind. The harbor had always been there, of course, but seemingly no one knew where it was or how to get there. Lord Bolvar had commissioned a fine team from Dun Morogh to blast a path down the mountains so that the people of Stormwind could reach it, ironically right before the Scourge had invaded and more adventurers than ever had needed to reach the port, and, through it, Northrend. Cheery wasn’t sure how many of the Ebon Blade had anything from their past lives that evoked any sense of pride; certainly the deeds they did since they turned had done a bit to dull the enthusiasm for their own past. Still, Cheery always loved that archway for some reason. Perhaps its sheer practicality was enough to appeal to the ruthless sense of aggression that simmered under the surface of all Death Knights’ cold exterior. Cheery wasn’t sure, but it was here she waited for the end.

---

Cheerydeth staggered groggily down to the main room of the Gilded Rose, dusting the cobwebs from her eyes. She gratefully accepted a glass of [Ice Cold Milk] from Innkeeper Allison.

“Another rough night?” asked the Innkeeper, worried about the sleep-deprived state of her guest.

“Yeah,” Cheery muttered, “More dreams.”

“Out hunting Witches again?” asked Allison, “What was that city you lived in, Altdorf?”



“No,” said Cheery, shaking her head. “No such tall, leggy antics for me. I was my regular old, gnome-shaped Death Knight self.”

“Oh,” said Allison, remembering the night when an Argent healer had delivered a barely-alive gnome who had narrowly survived infection with the plague infesting the city.



“Yeah,” said Cheerydeth. “It’s strange, though, it’s like she was somehow going away.”

Allison thought about that for a minute. “Maybe it’s the news from the front? That we’re taking the fight to Arthas, that the Argent Dawn has launched a crusade and even the Horde has joined us in striking back after the invasion?”

Cheerydeth nodded. “Yeah, perhaps that’s it.” She munched on a chunk of [Freshly Baked Bread] for a minute. “Oh, that reminds me. I heard back from Master Shaw... err, I mean the guy from the inscription shop. They said they didn’t have anything for me just yet, but someone named Marshal Dughan was looking for adventurers in some town down the road. Maybe I’ll be out of your hair sooner than we thought after all.”

Allison smiled. “Well, I’m sure they’ll find a good use for you in Goldshire. Say, when did you take an interest in inscription?”

Cheery shuffled uncomfortably for a second, thinking quickly. “Uh, it’s something the Death Knight version of me did, seemed like it might be fun. And hey, the market for glyphs took off overnight around here. No one had heard of them last week, and now everyone seems to have a few. Certainly seems safer than my old job as an engineer.”



Allison thought back a moment to the time she went past the canal district while Cheerydeth was working on the SW Harbor gateway, only to see her perched on top of a literal wagonload of explosives. “Fair enough. Well, you’re welcome to leave your Hearthstone here at the Rose for as long as you want. ”

Cheerydeth nodded. “Absolutely. I’ll be in and out of town to visit the trainers anyway. This won’t be the last time you hear of Cheerydeth.”

FIN

Good times in Nordenwatch and elsewhere in Warhammer

Cheerydeth Lives!


I haven't quite decided what to do with the Cheerydeth name on my WoW server just yet, but it appears that there will be a Cheerydeth after the Wrath beta servers come down - I couldn't come up with a new name I liked better, so I stuck with it for my Witch Hunter in Warhammer. It's hard to top a motorcycle-riding pink pigtailed gnome Death Knight with a name that combines the word "cheery" with a deliberate misspelling of the word "death" on the irony scale. That said, a member of the inquisition who runs around with a rapier in one hand and a gun in the other isn't bad.

Trying to lure players to an Order-challenged server
As I noted earlier, I'm playing on one of the first servers to be given an exp bonus in an attempt to lure in fresh Order players. This was a nice attempt, but it looks like it may fall short.

There are enough low-level Order players to make an attempt to control the newbie zones, but the increases certainly have yet to trickle up into tier 2 content. There's also the question of what happens when the bonus expires on Thursday. If the bonus was what actually swayed people to roll Order, taking it away just as players are getting out of T1 and into the content where it takes longer to level is not a good plan. However, by pre-announcing that the bonus is for one week only, Mythic painted themselves into a corner. If they extend the bonus, they will create the perception that it hasn't been successful (and, by extension, that the server's Order side is REALLY underpopulated), which may further hurt recruitment. If, on the other hand, the job actually isn't done, not extending the bonus means, well, not getting the job done.

Treating the wrong symptom, instead of the disease
Meanwhile, Syp reports that Mythic is considering releasing a no-scenario ruleset. This is a backwards and potentially damaging mis-reaction to the problem. On most servers, the population heavily favors Destruction. As a symptom of this problem, the few Order players tend to go play instanced scenarios (battlegrounds if you're from the WoW crowd), where they can't be stomped into the ground by superior numbers, and the Destruction side sits in their fortified keeps wondering why no one is attacking them. Given that Destruction is the majority, and that non-instanced RVR was intended to be the game's real endgame, this means that a large number of players are unhappy.

Taking away scenarios won't magically make those out-numbered Order players mindlessly throw themselves at Destruction-controlled keeps solely for the Destruction players' amusement. Instead, they will either re-roll somewhere else in the hopes of gathering together enough Order players to field a competitive battle, or they will quit the game. Worse, the false promise of more RVR on the no-scenario servers would lure players from existing servers, gutting their communities. I hope Mythic does NOT go this route, cause I think they will regret it.

No Chickens in Scenarios


Someone posted a while back that, if you managed to gain a level that made you ineligible for the scenario you were currently in, you would be turned into a chicken for attempted ganking of lowbies. It appears that this is no longer true. I carefully killed nigh-trivial wolves to get my exp just shy of level 12 before entering Nordenwatch, where I promptly gained level 12... and failed to turn into a harmless chicken. I apparently took out my frustration on the hides of twelve destruction players. Boo to Mythic for nerfing chickens in scenarios! :)

Beta testing the exp curves
Cheerydeth has had her progress hindered by exp curve issues before. The difference is, that was during a BETA. Mythic has been making some major changes to Warhammer's exp curve, especially in the higher end content. (At the risk of harping on this point, Mythic did not allow access to during the open beta, but they assured everyone that it had been thoroughly tested, and the community promptly decided that anyone who doubted their word was just a carebear WoW-playing naysayer.)

Obviously, fixing problems is better than not fixing problems, but I'm not sure how many points you give back to a company for fixing problems after they're charging money for the game when the issues should have been obvious during testing. (Lest Warhammer fans think I'm being unduly harsh to Mythic, take a look at my coverage of LOTRO, or, for that matter, WoW - I'm working on a TBC retrospective that would warm your hearts. I named the blog "Player vs Developer" precisely because game design is sometimes an adversarial activity.)

What are you waiting for, go get it back!
The other curve Cheery is having trouble with is the gear reward curve. I'm leveling almost entirely via scenarios, because I'm having a lot of fun in scenarios. The problem is, I haven't gotten any gear upgrades in five levels. You see, the PVP reward gear vendors are located in keeps. The keeps that Destruction owns 24/7 because there are so many more of them. Mythic's loading screen "helpfully" suggests that, if the enemy has a keep, I should go get it back, as if there actually are enough players from my side on the server to accomplish this task.

There is a workaround - guilds that have reached level 6 are allowed into a tavern (provided their faction's capitol city is not currently in the possession of the enemy, which has not happened yet but may happen sooner than Mythic expects) with a gear vendor. Unfortunately, there are only a handful of Order guilds on my server that have reached level 6 on my server, and none of them appear to be wandering the low level content recruiting. (Not that ANYONE other than gold spammers uses the in-game chat for any reason.) So, I'm reduced to solo grinding the first stage of deserted public quests for gear (since there are few, if any, groups working the local public quest scene).

Maybe I'm just on the most deserted Order side in all of Warhammer, but it would have been nice if Mythic had anticipated that this type of situation might arise.

So.... you really hate this game, don't you?
Not at all! I realize that you might get that impression from reading several pages of criticism, but there's a reason why I'm STILL PLAYING this game despite all those points. I'm playing lots and lots of PUG RVR scenarios. This is content that I hate being forced to do in WoW, and I love it in Warhammer, even when I get a terrible group that gets steamrolled. That's a tremendous accomplishment on Mythic's part.

At the end of the day, when I'm disappointed with Mythic, it's because getting this part of the game right was the hard part. Getting the incentives right to balance the rest of the game should have been easier. I'm like a disappointed family member here - I'm disappointed because I like the game, and I really feel like it has a lot more potential than it's living up to at the moment. The tragedy would be for the game to finally get into shape after many players have already left. Life, war, and WAR, aren't fair like that sometimes.

Beta Review: Death Knights

Yesterday, I posted the first part of my Wrath Beta review. I gave a harsh review to the new profession, Inscription. Will Cheerydeth, my beloved Death Knight, suffer the same fate in part 2? Time to talk Death Knights!

A different kind of melee
Classes in WoW can be boiled down to two characteristics; how much damage do they deal, and how much damage can they take/avoid/mitigate/heal. The Warrior deals a fair amount of damage and mitigates pretty well. The Mage and the Rogue deal more damage and aren’t so good at taking damage, but they can attempt to avoid damage from stealth or range. The Pally deals very little damage, but gets very solid durability (perhaps the best solo) and even the option to heal others. Where does the Death Knight fall on the scale?

The Death Knight is definitely closest to the Warrior. At the moment, DK’s appear to skew towards avoidance over mitigation due to the lack of a shield. In exchange, they seem to deal more damage than warriors, despite substantially improved self-healing abilities compared to pure DPS classes. I don’t know so well how the class stacks up as a tank, but it is as tough as any class out there for solo content. The DK also has a few unique tricks, such as Death grip (pictured to the left), which physically pulls casters right to you (in the process ensuring that you won't have to deal with any adds). Even without all its pets, the DK has a lot of tools to work with while solo.

That said, I think the class will not be largely successful at alleviating the “tank shortage”. You can get people to play a class that has the capacity to tank, but that doesn’t give them the gear or skill needed to do so. In practice, I avoided the tanking-related talents almost entirely in my spec experiments, and, even though they’re scattered over multiple trees to allow any spec to potentially be a tank, I suspect that other solo and DPS players will do the same.

The Hero Class
Hero classes were originally envisioned as an evolution of existing classes, but that option simply wasn’t feasible this far out from launch. What would Blizzard tell people who picked the wrong base class for the hero they wanted sometime back in 2004? How would Blizzard simultaneously upgrade classes for every class (and, potentially, spec, since some of the hybrids would NOT be amused to hear that their hero class only does one of their roles)? It did not make sense. The compromise was to make NEW classes (well, ONE new class at the moment) and call them hero classes.



Starting the Death Knight at level 55 has several advantages. It allowed Blizzard to skip players past the less-impressive portions of the level 20-60 game, instead offering a new starting area with an impressive plotline that does its best to explain how Death Knights wound up in the Horde and the Alliance. (The new plot does NOT do much to explain why Death Knights feel the need to take a ten level detour in Outland before going after their true foe, Arthas, but I suppose there isn’t really much of anything in game that explains exactly why characters go to a specific area at a specific level.) I’m sure Blizzard is also hoping that the higher starting level will encourage players who don’t current have alts to try one out; there’s less time investment, and, again, players get to bypass the least impressive content in the game.

I don’t dispute that the higher starting level makes sense in the lore, or that it allows Blizzard to pace the acquisition of new abilities nicely over the 25 levels that Death Knights have to level 80. I do, however, think the level is going to cause serious problems by skewing the alt population towards Death Knights. A new DK starts with excellent gear, solid weapon skills, all the flight paths in the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, a good headstart on first aid and weapon skills, and an epic ground mount, on top of 54 free levels. That’s a lot of bribes to pass up to start a new character at level 1. Between the head start and the strong solo capacity, there is no better choice for an alt to take up some misc tradeskills for you, or perhaps do daily quests if your main doesn’t farm very well. I strongly suspect that Blizzard is going to have to offer higher level alts of other classes at some point in 2009 or risk having the game’s population skew more heavily towards the Death Knight than they intended.


There may be a few Death Knights around Azeroth after Wrath launches....

Specs and uniqueness

The level 80 Death Knight panic button spell, Army of the Dead, causes you to be surrounded by, well, an army of the dead.

The Death Knight has a mix of complexity and rhythm. Compared to other classes, the DK has a total of four different types of resources (three flavors of rune, and a runic power bar) that dictate what abilities the DK can use. On the other hand, the need to wait for specific runes to regenerate means coming up with a rotation that uses all of your available runes, in the process greatly encourage hybrid talent specs. Despite the power level of dual specs, the DK talent trees each have their own strengths and feel. The Blood tree continues to offer up healing, the Unholy Tree turns the DK into a melee pet class (a relatively unique role in WoW, with apologies to any melee hunters in the audience), and the Frost tree offers burst damage (along with good AoE abilities).


Another novel DK talent brings you back as a ghoul after you die.

The other thing that really struck me about the Death Knight was that I actually liked playing a character who uses a 2-handed weapon. Warrior 2-handers never appealed to me because of the potential for rage starvation when a slow swing misses. Pally 2-hander specs as of TBC consist largely of turning on a damage seal and watching the character autoattack, with some options that do a bit more damage in exchange for burning off your mana bar very rapidly. I haven’t spent much time with either class in beta, so I don’t know if they still have these problems, but the DK definitely does NOT suffer from a slow swing speed. Blizzard has largely avoided “on next melee swing” abilities with the DK, and the constant regeneration of runes over time ensures that you will not be too sad if the occasional swing misses.

Should you re-roll Death Knight?
I can’t answer this question for you, but I can give you some tips. If you are currently playing an Enhancement Shaman (melee DPS), any Pally, or a Feral Druid, you should ask yourself if it matters to you that you will no longer have the ability to help heal others as a Death Knight. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on how strongly opposed to healing you are. (Likewise, if you’re playing a Rogue, re-rolling DK would allow you to take up tanking in your spare time; whether this is good depends on your desire to be able to tank.) In fact, if you’re just interested in being able to tank the occasional 5-man dungeon, DK’s may be more appealing to you than some classes, as they have the option of taking some tanking talents in any tree. If you're willing to allocate a few talent points to the tanking goodies, you should be able to tank without a respec.

You should also ask yourself how much you care about your rep, soulbound cosmetic rewards, etc; these things cannot be transferred to your new DK. Another playstyle question you might think about if you raid is how much work you're willing to spend on group buffs. A Pally has to manage a pile of blessings, and a Shaman has to juggle totems. By contrast, the vast majority of the DK’s group DPS boosts are passive, and will be stacked on while you fight. (There is one exception, the DK’s answer to Battle Shout, which boosts melee DPS stats and has to be re-cast every 2 minutes.)

Personally, I won’t be changing my main, as I love my mage dearly. My Fury warrior might be in more danger of being replaced with a Death Knight, should Titan’s Grip etc prove unimpressive, but that’s a question for a while from now.

Overall
The Death Knight still has some balancing issues to resolve; finding the right place DPS-wise in comparison to other classes (which tend not to have the DK’s self-healing tools), and the Frost spec still needs a bit of work IMO, but overall the class is very well done. Blizzard has done a great job with the storyline, abilities, and general feel of the Death Knight. I’d love to have seen more than one hero class in the expansion, as having only one new toy is only going to exacerbate the alt population issue (which I believe is going to need to be dealt with in the first year of Wrath). Overall, though, I think that WoW’s first new character class is a good one, and a positive addition to the game.

Ding 80!

When Wrath was announced, my reaction to the idea of a melee hero class was pretty underwhelmed. If you had told me that my first level 80 character would be a Death Knight, I wouldn't have believed you. I REALLY wouldn't have believed you if you'd said that I would have said level 80 character a month and a half before the expansion launches, by leveling straight through the entire Wrath of the Lich King beta. And yet, here I am.

Overall, I've been pretty impressed with the home stretch of Wrath. Poor Cheery got nerfed into the ground a few patches back, but now they're adjusting things back to a reasonable level. I've also picked up some decent gear from questing (including a fair amount of actual tanking gear). Zul'Drek and the Storm Peaks didn't impress me as much (indeed, a fair number of Storm Peaks quests remain broken), but Icecrown has some very fun quests including a fair number of daily quests. Meanwhile, Death Knight glyphs are finally in the game, as are inscription recipes that actually use skill-level appropriate ingredients; the profession has come a huge way in the last two weeks and is now pretty close to ready to go.

I have a kind of mini-tradition where I bring my retail characters to Shadowmoon Valley as they get very close to level 70, in order to ensure that the kill that pushes them to the level cap is a felboar (in honor of the famous boar grind carried out by Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny). I haven't really seen many boars in Northrend, so I wound up gaining that last level off of a misc daily quest. As a consolation prize, however, I may not have had boars, but at least now I get to ride a Hog.

Balancing Death Knights

Well, the Death Knight beta honeymoon is over. Blizzard spent the last two patches gutting the numbers on Death Knight DPS (along with many other classes), presumably so that they can get all the nerfs out of the way and let the news for the remainder of beta be buffs and other goodness. The results are, well, jaw-dropping for anyone who has been playing the class previously.


A greater role for autoattacks
One of my earliest posts regarding Death Knights pointed out that I was able to fight higher level mobs easily in part because my weapon skill and hit rating didn't matter; there are talent bonuses to the hit rate of special attacks, and runes regenerate whether or not my autoattacks miss (unlike a Warrior/Bear's rage bar). Well, autoattack damage is relatively similar to what it was (after all, Blizzard will be trying to balance all the melee DPS specs in the nearish future), which means that almost all of the nerfage came off of Death Knight special attacks.

After seeing this in action, I wish they'd gone the other way. My biggest complaint about the design of the original Paladin was that the class was about casting your seal and then AFK auto-attacking for a minute or so. The DK felt more interactive than other melee classes precisely because so much of its damage output came from active skills on the player's part rather than passively waiting for white damage to pile up. The Frost tree feels especially hard hit, not necessarily because it sucks, but rather because the whole point of the tree is to get a combo going for a large burst number. When the payoff for your combo is an unimpressive number, well, it makes you question why you went to the trouble.

Death (again?) to ghouls
As I've long maintained, one of my favorite aspects of the Death Knight is the Ghoul pet. Fighting side-by-side with your minion is a different mechanic from the true pet classes in WoW. The good news is that my little pets now get a random name each time I replace them, and the bug that prevented Unholy DK's from sacrificing their pets for health has finally been fixed. The bad news is that the little guy seems to be dying. Often.

Part of the problem is that I am struggling to hold aggro over my own pet. Most DK's are going to have at least some points in Blood, probably including threat reduction while in Blood Presence (the DK's DPS stance). Combine passive threat reduction with a drastic reduction in DPS and suddenly the little biting critter is pulling aggro off me. I'm not sure if he's actually squishier than before (I think he is, but the fact that I was killing mobs so quickly may have masked that), but I'm at the point where I'm messing with my spec to try and do a better job keeping the poor little guy (un-)alive. I suppose he is supposed to be expendable, but, as things currently stand, he dies so often that you're not going to get much use out of the little guy at all unless you spec for Night of the Dead.

Ironically, Unholy DK's now feel like they have more healing capacity than Blood DK's, thanks to frequent access to Death Pact and more diseases to proc off of Death Strike.

Picking up the pieces
Obviously, Blizzard had to do something to DK's in order to prevent them from being completely overpowered compared to other melee classes. This is not going to be easy, especially with the distracting patch 3.0 PTR presumably going live sometime in the next week. I just hope they can find a way to balance it without losing the balanced for awesome feel that the class had before they fixed it.

Shaping up for WoW 3.0

Maybe it's the natural progression of the beta, or maybe it's a sudden push to get patch 3.0 done before too many players leave for Warhammer, but either way, the current beta build has done a bit to polish up some major features.

Isn't that the cutest little pink pig-tailed Death Knight you ever did see?


I made Cheerydeth a pink pig-tailed gnome for irony, but even I will admit that her new haircut may be over the top. Her bangs (or whatever those things are) actually cover her eyes in her profile picture above her health bars. :)

Still, the good news is that the barber shop is up and running, and Cheery's now got a pair of big old hoop earrings (which exist in Wow currently), and the "cute" hairstyle. If "cute" gets on my nerves, there's another one with longer dangly braids that's kinda like the Dwarven hairstyle, or I could always go back to the original. Also, it appears that pink is safely remaining a choice for gnome DK's after all (it was disabled in an earlier build, and I couldn't use the hair color toggle on Cheery, not that the barber shop was working well at all at the time).

In a related story, there's supposedly a banshee-like reverb effect on Death Knights now, toggleable on the sound options menu. I couldn't really hear a difference, and I'm not prepared to have Cheery's voice change on me after so much time /played anyway, so I clicked it off.


Inscription v1.5

I last messed with Inscription a month ago, and they've now finally added actual glyph recipes (and the ability to advance past 125 skill). Well, kind of added.

Druid glyphs are in and require skill-level appropriate ink to create. I don't actually have a druid, and level 1 druids don't have any glyph slots (World of Raids says they first open up around level 15). Most other class glyphs have what I presume to be placeholder reagents that, for no real reason, include Mageroyal (which I don't have that much of). There are recipes up to/past 400 skill, but Blizzard forgot to add the Master/Grand Master level skill unlocks, so Cheery is currently stuck at 300/300. I will say that the pigment system (previously called pomaces) gets old when you need one more skill point off of a yellow recipe and you get one attempt per five herbs, especially since you need five of the SAME herb. Ah well, I only had to do a little bit of supplemental farming on top of the stash of herbs I had from leveling herbalism.

I couldn't make any glyphs for Cheery because there aren't DK glyphs yet, but I did make a glyph for Greenwiz. I right clicked it and was able to add it to one of the three major glyph slots in his spellbook. Then I had to find something tall to jump off of to take damage so I could tell if it was working (which it wasn't). The things I do for this blog!

It's worth noting that thee actual glyph says it has a 1 hour cooldown, but I'm pretty sure that's just for re-applying the same glyph to your spellbook. It's hard to tell how expensive re-glyphing will be; at first glance, it looks a lot closer to the cost of potions than the cost of enchantments, but I suspect that most recipes do not have finalized materials yet, and the "rare" pigments are hardly used at all in beta. Still, I suppose Blizzard felt they had to do something to save the raiding crowd from themselves (I can already see the threads complaining about the cost of re-glyphing for each boss fight), and thus the cooldown.

P.S. If anyone has a druid on the US PVE beta server (Northrend) and wants some free glyphs (I had to make a bunch of them to level), send an in-game mail to Cheerydeth. Offer good while supplies last. Player vs Developer productions takes no responsibility for bugged or non-functional glyphs, or for any future buffs/nerfs to said glyphs.


Coming Soon to a PTR near you?
Like I said up top, these improvements to stuff that hasn't really been working in beta to date could be coincidence. It's also possible, however, that they're considering getting the PTR's for patch 3.0 up and running ASAP (perhaps even BEFORE Warhammer's Sep 18th retail launch?), and decided to push on these features now to get some minimal closed beta testing in on them beforehand.

The current build is a lot less crashy than the previous one. While there are some bugs in a few of the 77+ questlines, but the game is definitely getting close to finished with the 70-80 content. If we're really rounding out the misc features like the barber shop and inscription now, it is possible that all but the raid portions of the expansion are actually going to be in place within the next month or so. (As far as I know, there is no raid content testing yet, but level 80 hasn't actually been available for that long yet.)

It looks like we are looking at a PTR for patch 3.0 in September, perhaps a live launch for 3.0 in late October (I don't think they'd mess with the revamped Brewfest), and quite possibly a retail launch for Wrath in early-mid November. I hadn't been expecting any earlier than late Nov/early Dec, but things are starting to fall into place in the Wrath beta now. Perhaps Soon (tm) will ACTUALLY be soon (or at least sooner than we thought).

Level 75 Death Knight Update

Well, the beta servers appear to be down for the day (hopefully for a new build, the current one has been giving both my computer and the server a lot of problems), so I suppose that means it's time for a beta update, starring Cheerydeth!

How much content should we need to level through?


My perception of the level 73-75 range may be skewed by the changing beta Exp curve. When last I updated Cheery's exploits, Blizzard had just ramped up the exp gain dramatically to see how that would work. The answer was not so well, so they ramped it back down a notch. I would easily be level 76 by now, perhaps even approaching level 77, had exp been at its "current" (perhaps soon to be changed again) level.

I wound up completing many of the solo quests remaining in the Dragonblight, both in the neighborhood of the re-located citadel of Naxxramus, and Wyrmrest temple (home to the dragon aspects). After that, I did basically the entire zone of the Grizzly Hills (which left me halfway from 75 to 76 as I entered Zul'Drak). I did abandon some of the later Dragonblight quests (since I outleveled them while doing both starting zones), along with most/all of the group and instance quests in both zones. I also didn't mess with the unfinished World PVP daily quests in the Grizzly Hills. Still, there is very little left in Northrend for under-75 characters that I have not done.

I suppose the good news is that you will get to see all of the cool content on your first pass through Northrend. The bad news is that there will be very little room to branch out into when leveling alts. Worse, Zul'Drak appears to be entirely neutral faction quest-givers, which means that you won't get to see different content if you level both an Alliance and a Horde character. In fairness, I don't typically skip entire major quest hubs in TBC content either (though Cherry never set foot in Nagrand, the Netherstorm, or Shadowmoon Valley, except to buy her flying mount training), but it's nice to have the option to blow off quests that have mediocre rewards or are otherwise a pain in the tail.


Quest variety is good

This is not what it looks like, I can totally explain.... no, no I can't.

If you're going to have to repeat all the quests on every character, at least the quests are good. I'm constantly discovering new things I didn't know were added to the game. In one example, there are a pair of warring tribes of Furbolgs in the vicinity of one quest location, and you can temporarily keep one of them off your back by killing the other tribe. In another, you can now individually target mobs and their mounts (see the unfortunate-looking screenshot). There's also a village that goes from friendly to hostile with you as you complete a questline, and some misc vehicles and guest appearences by lore characters.

It's also worth noting (if you don't get this from the screenshots) that there is actually a lot of varying scenery in Northrend. From Tundra to forest to icy wasteland (hopefully this one won't dominate everything you see at level 80) to jungle, Blizzard has done a good job making sure you don't get bored. My personal favorite is a ruined Iron Dwarf city (below), which takes the layout of Ironforge and covers it with overgrowth and ancient technology. Really, all of the art is head and shoulders above the stuff in the old parts of Azeroth.




Death Knight Talent Updates
The most recent build finally nerfed the overpowered bloodworms, this time making them so weak as to make them relatively useless. This was good for me, though, because it encouraged me to try out Unholy and Frost.

The Frost tree has a good core AoE talent spell that hits for double damage on targets affected by Frost Fever (a DK disease that you can spread around relatively easily) and is a guaranteed crit after any autoattack crit. Froststrike, the 41 point talent, does frost damage instead of physical (bypassing armor), and is also a guaranteed crit after autoattack crits. Both remind me a lot of my frost mage; you have the potential for some HUGE damage numbers with the right procs (though there may be a few bugs in the accounting, I probably shouldn't be critting for 4.5K damage on everything in a 10 yard radius).

The Unholy tree may actually be the new Blood tree in terms of healing efficiency. Death Knights have two baseline disease debuffs that they can apply to enemies, and Unholy specs get access to two more. The amount of healing you get out of Death Strike scales with the number of diseases you've got up, and I've gotten up to a whopping 3.2K self-heal crit with all four diseases going. (This may or may not also be bugged.) It's also hard to overstate the survival bonus of having a controllable pet out. Overall, I do about the same damage as Blood or Unholy, but the pet's damage makes stuff die faster (so I take less damage), and he can off-tank adds if I get multiple mobs. Bugs in the current build are keeping Unholy DK's from detonating their ghouls or sacrificing them for health, so this tree is only going to get better. In some ways, I'm fine with that; the melee pet class angle isn't really one that WoW has explored much.


The Perils of being a Beta Tester

I wouldn't trade the time I've spent in beta for anything in the World (of Warcraft). That said, playing through all this content in beta is definitely decreasing my anticipation for the expansion's actual launch. Don't get me wrong, the solo questing is as good or better than ever, it's just that I'm already going to have done most of it by the time the expansion goes live. I'm also concerned that the experience may ruin Death Knights for me. I love Cheery dearly, but it seems like she's always benefiting from one bug or another. Somehow, I think that playing the finished product may be disappointing, because it'll be weaker than what I'm used to.

I don't really say this to make y'all feel sorry for me or anything, but perhaps this will make those of you who didn't get beta keys feel a bit better. :)

Borean Tundra Complete

Cheerydeth has cleared out (to my knowledge) all the outdoor quests in the Borean Tundra, including one that requires a cheap new Engineering item (which I had to buy off the AH for 200G because the Grand Master trainers are only located in Dalaran, where my Engineering Pally cannot yet venture). She is currently a third of the way into level 73 (had she entered Northrend after the exp nerf, she would be just starting level 73), which means that the current state of EXP in the beta allows a level 68 character to reach 73 by clearing BOTH of the two starting zones AND some of the earlier quests in Dragonblight. She is currently halfway from revered to exalted (!) with the Valiance Expedition, halfway from honored to revered with the Kalu'ak Tuskarr, and halfway from friendly to honored with the Kirin Tor.

Scripted Events Abound

Like the Howling Fjord, there are many more scripted events in quests than ever before. A typical quest might enlist a small flight of dragons to bombard foes from the sky while you swoop in to complete an objective. Also, I never cease to be surprised to turn in a quest and unlock yet another followup. These followups aren't necessarily difficult (though one quest line leads to a showdown with one of Arthas' minions and a very nice blue weapon reward), but they're worth the time due to the 20K exp rewards.

New and interesting incentives

One corner of the zone features an interesting look into Murloc culture courtesy of Druids for the Ethical and Humane Treatment of Animals, complete with a convenient excuse for Blizzard to reuse the Blizzcon Murloc costume as part of a quest (the costume is strictly limited to a single area, but I suspect that won't stop people from abandoning the questline so they can take it for a spin in the future). It's also got an interesting new mini-grind: the [Winterfin Clam].

While completing this random set of murloc-related quests, you'll have the opportunity to loot clams from the ground and/or from enemy murlocs. These are a soulbound currency that I presume will be going into the new Token storage page when Blizzard implements that feature. Anyway, the clams are good for some swimming-related comsumables, hats for Cloth and Leather wearers, and a trident (Cheery's first Polearm). The Polearm was actually a bit pricey (100 clams), but the hats are priced at 50 clams, which is maybe 10-15 above the number of clams you're likely to collect while doing the quests in the area. So, you've got the option of grinding out a few more clams if you're interested in getting something, and it allows Blizzard to include some interesting but perhaps slightly below top notch items (e.g. Polearms, not the most common weapon choice out there). And it's optional in a way that many Outland rep grinds weren't due to the sheer number of rewards; there was almost bound to be something you want on any given faction quartermaster.

In short, it's kind of a light version of a rep grind, not as immediate as a quest but not as involved as grinding thousands of whatever. I hope they'll use this system more.

Dead End at the Dungeon

Cheery snaps a few pictures while falling to her doom, thanks to a quest that fails to provide a teleport back down from the platform with the boss.

Unfortunately, one thing that hasn't changed from vanilla WoW to TBC to Wrath is that major questlines tend to lead into 5-man dungeons. In fairness, there is a lengthy questline in Borean Tundra that leads to an encounter with Arthas that can be beaten by 2-3 players, but there's an entire corner of the zone (surrounding the Nexus, home to some 5-mans and the raid against Malygos) where ALL the questlines dead end outside that blue portal. I only had one dungeon quest from the Howling Fjord, but I've got three in Borean Tundra. It's a bit frustrating to have put in all the work to see the story unfold but then be forced to join a PUG (which are increasingly hard to come by if you're not a tank or a healer) to get at the final chapters.

Vehicles Need Some Work

Finally, I'd like to touch on vehicles for a minute. The good news is that the basics are in place on vehicle quests in various zones of Northrend and the new DK starting area. In some cases, the "vehicle" interface comes up in situations that you might not traditionally think of as vehicles, such as riding a Mammoth into battle against poachers. The bad news is that the system still needs some work. In other zones, I've frequently had problems with bugged or unresponsive controls (the Mammoth wasn't a problem, but it was a comparatively easy quest). The good news is that the new code allows Blizzard to code many more diverse things to ride on (including several kinds of planes, tanks, dragons), and these new rides get a lot more tricks than the old "throw a bomb over the side" versions. I think it'll be a good system over all, but it's clearly not ready to go live just yet.

Parting Thoughts and Moving On
The Borean Tundra is an interesting zone and the quests are well-crafted. I still prefer the Howling Fjord, but this thing is better than any single zone of Outland. Obviously, I can't comment much on difficulty, since I was over-leveled for just about my entire time in the zone.

From here, I've got some open quests in the Dragonblight and some in the Grizzly hills. I'm half tempted to jump ahead into the Hills for now so that I can actually tackle even level content again, but I guess it'll be a mood thing. I'm also looking at essentially permanent rested exp state from here on out (I can't spend the stuff fast enough), so that alleviates my earlier concerns of running out of quests. More Northrend (and the city of Dalaran) awaits!

Northrend Exp Update

Blizzard is clearly in "troubleshoot the exp curve" mode, having expanded the amount of EXP required for levels 70+ by 80% in the most recent patch. This is almost certainly an overadjustment in the opposite direction (it was a bit too fast previously). Anyway, I was feeling concerned about getting poor Cheery stuck in a hole that I couldn't dig her out of exp-wise, so I decided to backtrack into Borean Tundra.

What's the damage?
I have one major subzone to deal with in BT, having cleared all of Howling Fjord and the first Alliance questhub in Western Dragonblight previously. This got Cheery to level 73. That's the good news. The bad news is that I hit level 71 prior to the exp nerf. Had I needed the extra 80% for the 70->71 transition, I would still be bogged down in level 72 as I moved into higher level content in Dragonblight. That's not entirely a disaster; I also started Northrend at level 68, which consumed about 1.2 million experience prior to level 70.

Taken collectively, my guesstimate is that a level 70 character entering Northrend now would hit level 73 if they clean out both starting zones. On the other hand, most players aren't going to want to have to complete every single quest in both zones, especially on multiple alts.

A growing role for rested Exp?
One of the quirks of the escalating EXP curve is that rested state experience is starting to play a larger and larger role in the game. In WoW (and subsequent games, such as LOTRO), characters accumulate a bonus that gives them double experience for killing monsters (but not quests, discovering geography, etc). For each 8 hours you spend logged out in an Inn or major city, 5% of your exp bar converts into rested bonus (to a maximum of 150%). In my experience, this bonus amounts to about a third of my experience leveling via questing at midlevels in WoW (one third is the base exp amount, and the last third is quest completion bonuses).

At low levels, this bonus makes you level faster, but isn't a huge deal. Moreover, it's easier to use it all up and get stuck with the regular rate of exp gain. Once Blizzard starts setting the exp for your next level at 2.3 million, however, the 15% of your exp bar that converts into rested state if you log off for 24 hours is over 300K. The good news is that someone who plays an hour or two a night no longer needs to worry about using up all of their rested state. Heck, I had to sign off early last night due to server instability, and I had more than enough rested state to carry me through a lot of questing today. The bad news is that, if you do somehow run out (or have to log out somewhere that isn't an Inn), you may have a harder and harder time making your next level.

Time will tell, and this won't be a problem for players who juggle a lot of alts with rested state, but players who want to burn to the cap for raiding/arena may not be happy.

Howling Fjord Complete

The Howling Fjord is finished.

Well, maybe not entirely finished. There might be a thing or two that needs work, like this dude's hair, or the vehicle quest that was too buggy for me to complete. But, those issues aside, I've finally cleared what appears to be all the quests in the zone (including the outdoor small group quests, thanks to the overpowered Death Knight).

What has Cheerydeth done?

Well, my previous comments that I was just about done with the zone appear to have been slightly premature. The remaining quests all turned out to have followups, and sometimes those had followups as well. Throw in the group quests and I managed to hit level 72 before wrapping up. In the process, I maxxed my herbalism skill (which was, in fairness, at 410 when I left Outland), hit revered with Valiance Expedition (I did complete the daily quest five times to unlock a pair of achievements), and honored with the Kalu'ak (the neutral Tuskarr faction). Overall, levels 68, 69, 70, and 71 took me about 22 hours in Northrend. I did have the benefit of rested exp from time to time, since I was careful to log off in places where I could rest, but it certainly wasn't 100% of the time. Perhaps with full rested Exp I wouldn't have needed to do any Borean Tundra quests to get from 68-72 (again, remember, levels 68 and 69 combined add up to about as much as level 70, level 71 doesn't boast nearly so wide a jump).

How is the zone?

It often seems that the most recent zone Blizzard has worked on is the best, and this one was no exception. As my screenshots may show, there are a lot of fun things that happen on quests, in addition to the usual kill/loot variants. Actually, I'm not sure if I've seen a single escort quest yet, which may be a good thing since the difficulty there usually comes from the stupidity of the NPC's. There is also a major story arc going on, complete with a cameo by Arthas himself (who shows no signs of remembering a Death Knight he personally welcomed to the World (of Warcraft); if only I could do 139 million DPS...). There is some snow, especially towards the north of the zone and along the coast, but the place is far from a frozen wasteland.

What's next?
I decided to leave behind the rest of Borean Tundra (I completed most of the quests in Valiance Keep, and some Tuskarr quests later in the zone) in favor of pushing the envelope towards tougher content, as I've outleveled most of what I would face in the rest of that zone. It appears that the next zone on the agenda is the Dragonblight, a snowy, dark place and home to the re-located Naxx. I might cut my stay there short and move on to the Grizzly Hills (rated for levels 73-75) if I get bored due to Cheery's insane solo capabilities. After all, it's not every day you get to gank the wandering elite mobs that you're supposed to run from, and smite the frost wrym solo.