On the horizon!

"So" you say. "Kaziel, what's up? What's going on. ¿Qué Pasa?"

Well, my friends, it seems like the next expansion is finally set to be revealed. In about 2 days hence, on the opening day of BlizzCon, you can expect to hear more details about the second WoW expansion. The only thing that has been confirmed is it's title: Wrath of the Lich King.

This title confirms a number of things, foremost of which is that the expansion will add the continent of Northrend as a playable zone. While it was highly likely in light of the folder named "Expansion2" with Northrend textures in it, that wasn't confirmation. With the name of the expansion confirmed, it's pretty much set in stone.

Other rumors abound, the biggest of which is a new class: Death Knight. A plate wearing melee/caster-tanking/DPS hybrid class. Sorta like a paladin, only without the healy-bits. Now, the details on this class are really up in the air. Most sources are claiming that Death Knights will be a Heroic Class (or some variant of that name), and will only be opened up by doing a quest chain or something like that. My views on that can be summed up with a quote of a post of mine:

I find the idea of the Death Knight being a hero class a really annoying idea on multiple fronts:

First off is the idea of having to do stuff to open up the class. This makes me doubt it a bit. On the one hand, the event chain could be easily soloed, at which point one has to ask: Why bother? Why go to such great lengths to open up something that will be available to pretty much anyone anyways? On the other hand, if the chain of events requires doing group quests, 5-mans, and possibly even raids, they will end up excluding people from accessing an entire class, which is just bad business. I would really doubt they would do the latter.

Next, experience. If you take someone who's played their class from level 1 to level 70, and at the same time, take someone who's never played this class before and put them in the same situation, the player who has never played before will obviously be far worse off than the person who leveled the entire way up. Dropping people into the game at level 70 (which is probably where they would "start") would be a nightmare as players tried to figure out how to play their new class, use all the new abilities.

Related to them starting at a higher level is professions. Whether you like it or not, professions are directly tied to where you can go and survive, or more commonly, your level. The higher level you are, the greater quality materials you have access to. So in order to level up their professions, the player basically needs to spend the next 2-3 weeks going back to old zones and leveling up their professions, or spending through the nose to level up their skills. Not fun.

Finally, the most minor note would be gear. How are you going to start them out? They can't pop into the game fully formed, but only wearing cloth or even plate white gear and a crappy white weapon (like a level 1 does). They would summarily be devastated. And obviously you can't expect them to send money from an alt. What if they completed the quest to open up Death Knights on their Alliance character and roll a Blood Elf Death Knight. Now they are 70, and pretty much naked, with no ability to get access to their gear. And they can't drop them into the game with a ton of money or normal green or blues... just sell them and make a small fortune. This one's minor because I can see a semi-easy fix: Bring them into existence with Blue quality gear that can't be sold.

Anyway, I digress. Even if the Death Knight is a hero class, if it's a tanking class that can cast without healing, I'm so very very there. I don't care what I have to do, I will do it. I will sell my soul to the Lich King if need be! If I'm really lucky, Death Knights will also be able to dual wield. Even without that, I will finally get the class I wanted: Paladins who can't heal. *glee*

Either way, we can expect more details in about a day and a half, when BlizzCon starts on Friday.

Side note: For details on this, check out both http://mmo-champion.com and my post over at Subcreation forums.