mek

Can we please please PLEASE not repost the same stupid DK-speculation-pontification over and over and over again? Keep it to the general boards. We don't care if you think a new class is the end of the world, they're announced, and we have zero details so your speculation is worth approximately nothing. Post here with INFORMATION.

The Opening Ceremony is at 11am, more details possibly then. (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/ will probably go online then)

 

Vodang

Whatever it is, it's large. The figure on the right is standing next to what looks like a human that is only coming up to its knee. A new race in Northrend, perhaps?

 

Bogeywoman

I can't see anything good happening re: Death Knights.

1. You have a choice. Priest, rogue, warrior, warlock, or black-hearted bestial necromantic warrior servant of Arthas named DEATH KNIGHT? If you thought all the healers dropped out of sight when BC came out, wait until they can be shadow plate casters.

2. Loot tables weren't annoying enough -- now we need another class with 2-3 armor sets that no other class would dream of wearing (shadow damage plate, hooray) that can drop along with all the ret and feral gear.

3. What distinguishes these guys in any respect from paladins? Tanking + damaging spells is a niche already. That sound you hear is a million paladins screaming in terror at being completely obviated by the new flavor of the month.

4. Unless they're a completely different faction all their own (in which case, they'd have trouble getting healers), this is even more jarring than blood elves joining Horde.

 

Nezralix

If guilds are desperate to beat that content, then having level 80 skills/talents/equipment will certainly help them to do that. There's just no point in holding up the entire game for a year just so a small minority of players can say "yeah, we killed <boss X> before the expansion" (which wasn't a big deal before the expansion, incidentally, and won't be a big deal now). Especially now that the content has essentially been laid out and beaten. There are still another *six months* until the point where TBC came out this year, and it certainly won't come out before then, so I would see no issue with another expansion in that time frame. There just isn't the same amount of content in TBC that there was in pre-TBC, so there's no reason to think it should last as long.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

Calm down there sparky. Let's wait 30 minutes to learn more first okay

Check out my friend's bitchin' Lord of the Rings Art

 

andastra

And the worst part of it is that you get used to whatever abilities and button setup you have at the time. You also set up your buttons depending on what abilities you have at the time. Every time you get a new ability, especially a class defining one later on, you have to redo your button setups. I'm leveling my hunter alt from 60-70 right now (currently 66). With steady shot and kill command and having arcane shot become better, I redid my buttons. I still press the wrong one every now and then.

 

◊ Kyth

I'd far prefer a system without a total reset like they did before. But supposedly a full reset is how you are "fair" to "casuals" (whatever those two words mean.)


Personally I'd have preferred finishing Naxx :/.

 

heel

I guess the new level cap is confirmed to be 80 now. Which means, within months, we're all going to have to level again. Not looking forward to that - leveling is way too strenuous to happen once a year. We've killed Archimonde and Illidan, and are currently farming them . . . why? The inevitable gear reset will render every item we have useless. We've just been told:

"There is nothing meaningful or productive that your guild can do until the expansion, at which time, you're all going to have to take a week off of work to grind ten new levels - again. Also, you're going to have to completely rebuild the guild - again - because those months and months of nothing are going to completely decimate your roster - again. GLHF."

This is not appealing. Death Knight or no Death Knight, I think that this sort of expansion model has to have a lot of hardcore raiders contemplating leaving the game. Half a year of nothing, one week of hell, three months of rebuilding, all building up to a scant three months of stable progression . . . no thanks.

 

Cathela

PLEASE STOP SPECULATING.

PLEASE STOP DISCUSSING HOW EASY OR HARD IT IS TO LEARN A NEW CLASS.

Leave this thread for information, please?

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

mek

Maybe you should consider finding a hobby you enjoy.

WoWInsider just put up a pretty serious gallery of the Exhibition Hall.

 

Perception

The concept art shown there is most likely the new Viking race called the Vrykul that lives up in Northrend. They'll be featured in the first 5 man instance at Howling Fjord called Utgarde Keep. I'm really looking forward to seeing a lot of original content and lore this expansion since there really is not much known about Northrend to date.

A tiny snippet of information on the Vrykul from WoWwiki states: "Utgarde will be inhabited by the Vrykul, a Viking-like race bent on proving their strength to the Lich King, who will raise the most worthy of their warriors to serve him beyond the grave."

 

Stoic

A slight tangent from the thread topic, but regardless this is pretty much just the way the game works. If you really think about it, nothing you do in this game is permanent. Sometime in the future, WoW will die and be replaced by the next big new game. Everything you've worked on with regards to your character and any accomplishments you've done in game will be gone.

The only thing you really get to keep is the memories of the fun you've had and the people you've met. And really, that's what's important.

 

Muggins

It looks like the figure 'next' to him is actually behind him drawn in a perspective fashion (if you have a look at his boot it melds in behind the 'bezerker/knight' boot) and seems to be rather upset about something, while the prospective death knight/viking doesn't seem to care too much.

At least thats how i saw it, trying to stare at the fuzzy picture is actually starting to make my eyes cross.

 

heel

This is not a particularly productive suggestion. I enjoy competitive progression, and then, after we've beaten everything, I enjoy relaxed farming with friends to prepare for the next raid zone. I don't enjoy a paradigm which makes farming pointless, and I certainly don't enjoy an expansion model which ensures that my guild will collapse once a year. The former was WoW, and I enjoy/enjoyed it. The latter seems like it will be WoW, and I'm voicing my displeasure.

 

Chantinelle

With apologies in advance to Cathela...
There's one big problem about allowing flying mounts anywhere other than Outland, though - once you have one, you can bypass a truckload of obstacles. It's the difference between making your way to wherever and fighting past all the demons and dreadlords guarding it and just swooping in overhead and zipping into where you want to be and carrying out your mission quickly before flying off again. Once you hit 70 and got that mount, though, nothing was stopping you going anywhere.

We take our windriders and the like to Northrend and unless the skies are chockablock with roaming hostile beasties, it's going to invalidate much of the on foot content. With that being the case, the expected approach would be 'your swift mounts only move at 60/100% speed because of the extreme cold but hit 80 and get riding skill 375 and you can get these whizzy 100/280% Tauntauns' or something thereabouts.

 

• Tecton

I hope and pray for Uldum to be opened up. That place has fascinated me since I did the quests while levelling.

Also, levelling from 60-70 was fun when everyone was levelling together. Granted, it's not so much fun when you're doing it on your own, but when the whole server is barrelling through the levels together, it's tons of fun, I found.

 

Caligula

I don't think this is true at all. 50+ guilds on my server have downed KHM (out of 85). 40 have Gruul. 25 have Magtheridon. 17 have VR. 14 have SSC bosses down. 6 have killed Vashj and 2 have Kael down and are in BT/Hyjal.

Out of the 85 guilds recorded, approximately 50% have cleared the first 25 man instance. And about 1/3 have completed the 2nd. That's a pretty good spread for being approximately halfway through this expansion time period (if you figure the next one will be out in 6 months).

It's not like Naxx where one or two guilds per server were clearing it when the expansion came out.

 

• Viator

At what point has an MMO done anything differently though? It's not as though this is some sort of new thing. Diku's release game, raid, raise cap, raid, raise cap, raid, etc, etc. That's the game. It's ALWAYS been the game even if everyone who hadn't played an M MO before realized it.

Mages have a set time that they want you to ask for food, and that time is pull #4 of the night. You may notice them putting a little snack table down before the raid, that's them cooking the food for you to demand on pull 4. --Nork

 

• Falk

After a 10 minute discussion on #ej, we ended up with the following educated guesses based on all the little bits of unconfirmed information running around:

- Death Knights will be closely tied to the continuation of the Ashbringer questline.

- New Death Knight characters will start at lv63 and cap at lv83.

- Death Knights will not be able to interact with any normal player/faction.

- Death Knights will have 4 talent trees, but unfortunately only 21 talent points (starting with 1 when you create the character)

- The four talent trees are: Meteor, Hand of Rag, Void Zone, and Holy Wrath

- The 21-point talent of the Void Zone tree is "Invisibility"

- Death Knights can only take part in the new PVP Battleground that Blizzard is adding - "Deathknight Wing Basin" where you battle teams of 40 Horde or Alliance players.

- Trainer skills include Shield Wall, and "Mounted-combat-while-indoors".

- Death Knight class is prone to ridiculous server lag and more often than not Death Knight characters that die will not properly be ported to the nearest graveyard but instead be stuck near their corpse, unable to resurrect.

- A small team of beta testers have been playtesting the class since WoW 1.11. Unfortunately, as proper specs were not enforced and the groups of four ended up with 3 hybrid off-spec instead of a min-maxed devastating combo of 4 Meteor Death Knights, the test only met with partial success and only against unorganized teams.

- Death Knights get a special faction channel in which you can listen to other mobs talk. ([Defias Cutpurse]: GOD DAMMIT LAGGING)

(p.s. sorry for the massive derail; I thought it was kinda funny in the midst of all the rampant speculation going on)

 

Fleebenworth

And by extension, it's the way MMOs must be made right?

 

andastra

It could also be it's too cold for your flying mounts to fly with so you need a new mount to fly with come level 80.

 

Talgog

http://www.worldofraids.com/news/expansion/leaflet.jpg

Live demonstration today, just chill for a bit.

Better picture of the leaflet, also.

 

mek

This is wild speculation based on the assumption that WotLK will function like TBC in gear-resetting, but TBC was unique in that it in