So I got a key early this week for the beta for the next expansion for the ever addictive World of Warcraft - Wrath of the Lich King. So I’ve decided that I will start writing some articles on my experiences whilst playing through the beta.

So to start things off, I thought I’d lay down a quick background about my time playing WoW up until this point and my first impressions of playing a Deathknight and completing the starting area zone.


Background

I’ve been playing WoW since before The Burning Crusade expansion was released, but not a long time before, originally starting my WoW addiction whilst on holidays from work for a couple of weeks in August 2006.

I originally started as a PVE realm care bear by rolling an Alliance mage on Proudmoore. After reaching the low 20s with this character, I went back to work after my holidays were up and discovered that all of the guys I work with that I’d heard previously talking some gibberish about “looting the damn core hound” and “feign death macros” were all playing as Horde on the PVP realm Stormscale.

So given that most of the people I knew who played WoW were Horde on Stormscale, I figured this would be the best place to ultimately play. So I created a new character, after a false start creating an Undead Warlock, I ended up with a Troll Mage.

So to fast forward a bit, I hit 60 in November 2006 and managed to hit up several raid instances before BC was released – Molten Core, AQ20, BWL, ZG and Onyxia. Stepping forward to the present now, my mage is now located on the “Oceanic” PVP realm Thaurissan and I raid with a guild that is currently in the Sunwell Plateau raiding instance and are working on M’uru at present.


Getting Started

After downloading the initial 1.88Gb client, followed up by another 800Mb spread across 4 patches, I was ready to go. As anyone who has installed WoW before knows, it’s quite a slow game to install so to get the game to a playable state took literally all night once all of the patches were downloaded and installed, so by the time it was ready I was going to bed and I didn’t get a chance to give it a go.

So last night was early maintenance on live WoW realms, so a damn good excuse to hit up the beta realms with the new Death Knight class (I was still waiting for my mage to be copied across), not that I really needed an excuse anyway right?


Death Knights

Death Knights (DKs) are the new “hero” class that is being introduced with the WotLK expansion. DKs start off at level 55 in a special starting area located to the east of the Eastern Plaguelands zone and are under the command of the Lich King.

The attack mechanics of a Death Knight from a simplistic point of view do draw some parallels with playing a Paladin. You start by using disease debuff abilities on your target and then use an attack which has its damage increased by the number of diseases currently affecting your target (so sort similar in theory to the seal and judgement system of paladins).

As you progress through the initial quests, you start gaining some blue armour upgrades and you learn how to do runeforging which allows you to put special enchants onto your weapons. As you progress through the starting area, you’re attacking the Scarlet Crusade (you might remember these guys from various places around pre-TBC WoW) as you learn the different spells and attacks for a DK, acquire the ability to summon your own Deathcharger mount (pictured to the right) and just generally lrn2play a DK.

There are quite a few small things that can easily be missed that tie into the overall storyline with some of the quests that you do and miscellaneous items you pick up along the way. So that I don’t completely spoil it I won’t go into details, but I definitely encourage anyone who does eventually level a DK when the expansion is released to stop and read the quest text properly and some of the items that you pick up as it does add to the overall background and feel of playing the class.

Once completing all of the quests which basically results in the domination and destruction of the Scarlet Crusade in the starting area, you then escort High Lord Mograine in a timed event attack on Light’s Hope Chapel. Without going too much into this event (you need to see it for yourself), this eventually leads to your release from the Lich King’s command and into the normal world.

I didn’t rush through it, and hadn’t cheated by reading up on how to do the quests beforehand. Overall it took me 2-2.5 hours to complete the Death Knight starting area.


Bugs

Well this is a beta right? Well I ran into 2 bugs whilst playing the DK, the first of which was one of the quest giver NPCs (a banshee) pathed around a bit, and at one point reached a spot where she was floating too high off of the ground over an indent in the ground that you couldn’t get close enough to talk to her to hand in the completed quest. So whilst I waited 1-2 minutes for her to path back to a spot where she was in range to speak to, I logged a bug report.

The other annoying bug currently I came across in Undercity and Orgrimmar (and other cities do the same thing as well I hear – it’s a known bug), and that is that you can’t mount up. If you’re mounted when you go into the city, you stay mounted fine with no issues, but as soon as you dismount, you can’t use your mount again until you leave the city. So this was rather annoying when I dismounted in Orgrimmar to check the auction house and then wanted to proceed across to where the new arena is located to check it out. So I just had to leg it over there on foot instead.


Anyway, that’s it for now. I’ll do some more writing about my experiences once I’ve taken my mage into the first zones of Northrend. I’ll leave you with a few screenshots I've taken around the place so far:

- Death Knight - character selection screen
- Death Knight starting area questing
- Light's Hope Chapel - Death Knight event
- Orgrimmar Arena