Caution: Slippery When Wet

I've already mentioned the fun I have with death knights' spell Path of Frost, which lets them run and ride across water at full speed as long as they're not taking damage. I got to wondering...is the span from Rut'theran Village at the base of the new damaged world-tree Teldrassil to Darkshore on the Kalimdor mainland accessible via Path of Frost?

Yes. But it's close. Next time I'll use some kind of riding speed enhancement.

For my non-WoW-playing readers...if that yellow bar nearly depleted in the picture above had gotten all the way to zero, Spiderheart would have started taking drowning damage. That would have cancelled Path of Frost and slowed her progress even more. But as it is, a tick or two later, she crossed into the safely shallow waters around the spiky islands that dot the Darkshore coast, and from there on to the nearest harbor was safe travel.

Not a water sign, nor an earth sign, nor an air sign...

All death knights can summon ghouls. For those who lack the relevant talents in the Unholy tree, these are unnamed; they come in as "Risen Ghoul", last a couple minutes, and die. Unholy-specced death knights can make theirs last longer, or indeed permanently. (Well, until they get destroyed. Then it's time to summon a new one.) The names are chosen at random by matching A and B parts, and anyone traveling around death knights sees the patterns pretty quickly.

I do believe that there's a Firesign Theatre fan somewhere in Blizzard's staff, I must say:

Death Knight, Part 5: The Epilogue

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

One of the things I've done while sick is start another death knight. For a year or two I played a night elf warrior named Spiderheart. (Her upbringing had been, shall we say, not full of parental love.) Eventually I bogged down and felt that none of the mid-60s options to me were working out, and there were guild problems, and what with one thing and other the character went first into retirement and then into oblivion.

Now she's back as a death knight. (That story will follow another time.) And while I took a peek at the death knight starting zone as it is "now" in game time in the gap between the 3.0.2 patch and the actual release of Wrath of the Lich King, I realized that I hadn't done so since the expansion came out. So Spiderheart went and checked out what remains of the Scarlet Enclave. It proved a nicely melancholy sort of place.

New Avalon is empty now, even of ghosts. The Ebon Blade left behind banners, but there are no guards; neither the Scarlet Crusade/Onslaught nor the Scourge seems to want to interfere with the place now.

The citadel is almost completely gone—not much of a surprise after the assault by undead wyrm that concludes the Lich King's assault, of course:

The pond that lay beside the blacksmith's shop got completely vaporized in the final assault, and the siege engine that toppled into the gap is still smoking:

The inn, which was full first of desperate citizens hoping in vain for escape and then of Scourge troops planning their assault on surviving defenses, is quiet as well. I note here that this particular design has been in WoW since the beginning and I have yet to tire of it:

The cauldron whose construction so occupied er Noth the Plaguebringer in phase 2 of the attack still bubbles and releases its toxic brew, but it's untended now:

Overhead, the Ebon Hold remains, filled now the rebellious death knights who face Northrend and Icecrown and seldom, one suspects, ever think much about what's below:

I daresay that not one player in a hundred or a thousand ever goes to look at this stuff or thinks much about it if they do. And yet here it is, not just stock ruins but some customization as well, rich in ambience. I was reminded of one of the prose poems by one of my very favorite horror authors:

When all the landscape is dying, descending fragrantly to earth, we alone rise up. After light and warmth have passed from the world, when everyone stands melancholy at the graveside of nature, we alone return to keep them company. This is our season to be reborn. The supple swish of summer trees has become a dry rattle in a cooling wind, and our ears begin to tingle as we lie dark and deep in our beds. Crinkled leaves scratch against our doors, calling us from our lonely houses.

When the world goes gray on its way to white, every living heart summons us with its fear; and, if circumstances are favorable, we will answer. We take as many as we can back to the grave with us, because that is our task. Our senseless cycle is out of nature's season: we go our own way, deviates of matter longing to bring an end to the charade of all seasons, natural or supernatural.
And we are always dreaming of the day when all the fires of summer are defunct, when everyone like a shriveled leaf sinks into the cooling ground of a sunless earth, and when even the colors of autumn have withered for the last time, dissolving into the desolate whiteness of an eternal winter.

—Thomas Ligotti, "Autumnal", Noctuary

Death Knight, Part 4

And here I am again, tidying up some loose ends of posting.

• Death Knight, Part 3
• Death Knight, Part 2
• Death Knight, Part 1

All right, to recapitulate: the novice death knight is now free of the Lich King's control and part of the new-found undead resistance effort calling itself the Ebon Blade. One last thing remains: to take a letter from Tirion Fordring, the paladin who forced Arthas to flee, introducing the bearer and the Ebon Blade to the leader of one's faction - Thrall for the Horde, Varian Wrynn for the Alliance. I'll get a picture of the Alliance-side version sometime. For now, here's what happens when a newly freed death knight enters Orgrimmar and makes his way to Thrall's throne room:

And now the death knight is at liberty. What comes next? Oh, I'll cover that in due season. :)

Death Knight, Part 3

• Death Knight, Part 1
• Death Knight, Part 2

Last time, I left off with Cleitus surveying the changed landscape of Havenshire. New commanders enter into the picture now (along with another look at that falling-to-the-Scourge taint in earth and sky)...

...including one familiar to many WoW players, Baron Rivendare, usually seen in his stronghold at the end of the undead wing of Stratholme:

It turns out that I'm regrettably short on screenshots for many of the specific quests that follow. But then they're more interesting to play than might show in pictures, too: they take the death knight against various opponents in the same general context. There's the slaughter of any available defenders and citizens within New Avalon's walls, then the unraveling of some mysteries about what the Scarlet Crusaders are up to. It emerges piece by piece that the leaders and select followers are heading off on an unknown mission. The death knight has to torture information out of Scarlet troops, then get shipping records to clarify what's going on, and finally go in disguise to get documents from the general on the spot, so as to learn that the leaders are following a vision given to General Abbendis to the then-still-mysterious lands of Northrend.

Along the way, the death knight is also pushed to demonstrate their allegiance to the Lich king and the Scourge, including executing prisoners, one of whom has some significance for the death knight. This is the night elf version, which is more poignant than the blood elf one, though the overall thrust is the same:

This is Cleitus in disguise so as to go get the General's documents. It's a good thing that the Scarlets are so zelaous that they will just assume that the glowing eyes and bloody runeforged sword are, er, tokens of holiness or something. The Scarlet Crusade is better at the courage thing than the clue thing.

The Scarlet scheme revealed, Cleitus returns to the Ebon Hold once more to deliver the news and find out what's next. The third wave brings the end to New Avalon. The Light King is now down at ground level to direct the assault:

The weapon of choice for this last wave is the undead wyrm. The death knight gets to rain down fire from above:

In terms of mechanics, the dragon works much like the cannon (and therefore like other vehicles, including trucks ("It flies like a truck." "Fine. What is a truck?")), with the death knight tilting and panning the dragon to aim its fiery breath:

The defenders aren't helpless. They have large ballistas, squads of riflemen, and mages all doing their best. It's quite a challenge.

But the outcome is never really in doubt. The defenders slain, Scourge troops move in for the slaughter, and the Lich King dispatches the death knights on hand to help with an assault on Light's Hope Chapel, a nearby stronghold for both the Scarlet Crusade and the Argent Dawn. It's an eclectic force, too, with some of the very largest things I've yet seen in the game:

As Mograine gives the word to begin the assault, many, many, many ghouls pull themselves out of the ground, wave after wave of them:

The ensuing fight is a glorious rumble. At least, it is until the Scourge's forces find themselves unable to advance, thanks to one man:

Cleitus had no idea who this guy was, but I do. He's one of the two main characters in Chris Metzen's short novel Of Blood and Honor. In that story, set after the collapse of the Horde and the closing of the Dark Portal at the end of the Second War, paladin Tirion spares the life of elderly orc Eitrigg, who in turn saves him from the emerging Scarlet Crusade's kill-them-all zeal. Eitrigg is in WoW time the senior advisor to Horde leader Thrall and giver of good counsel at some key moments. Tirion, on the other hand, appears in WoW in a quiet exile in the middle of the Plaguelands, where he sets characters on a remarkable quest chain I'll write up another time. It ends with Tirion paying a large tragic price for having stood by a long time and vowing to re-make the collapsed Order of the Silver Hand.

Now he's here, having brought together members of the Argent Dawn and the Scarlet Crusade into a new organization, the Argent Crusade. And he's got access to the power of something hidden beneath the chapel, strong enough to confront Mograine with a vision of himself as he was as a boy, yearning to fight the undead along with his father. Mograine realizes that he doesn't matter to the Lich King any more than, say, the victims of New Avalon, and gets more than a little annoyed. At this point, enter the Lich King himself to deliver a smackdown on Tirion:

To everyone's surprise, except perhaps Tirion's, it doesn't work. The death knights present now turn on the Lich King, since being disposable trash isn't really what they were after. The Lich King flees without admitting that that's what he's doing, and Tirion speaks once again, telling those who remain that even now there's a chance for them to do their world some good.

But first there'll be some cleanup to do, which I'll cover in the fourth and last part of this.

Death Knight, Part 2

• Death Knight, Part 1

First, a quick supplement to the first post. The gryphon seen more clearly:

Death knights get distinctive mounts. First Cleitus had to steal a horse from the Scarlet Crusade's corral...

...then cross into the shadowlands to defeat one of the dark lords who transform living horses into things that can withstand the undead, demons, and their environments...

...and finally, having impressed the master horseman, could summon his own deathcharger, as seen here against the Ebon Hold:

The first phase of the assault is straightforward. Death knights slaughter defenders of Havenshire, the farms outside New Avalon proper, and Havenshire citizens, and gather up the magical arrows shot by the skeletons seen previously. The interesting thing here is that it's straightforwardly bad deeds—the citizens try to flee, beg for mercy, the whole deal. There is no question but that at this point, Cleitus and his comrades are completely on the wrong side.

"Pulling" is MMO jargon for anything a player has their character do to make one or more enemies c'mon over here for a fight. It can be an arrow or gunshot, or a spell, or a shouted taunt, or any of a number of things. Death knights have a very literal pull in the spell Death Grip:

It yanks the victim through the air to land right in front of the death knight. There may be a day when I grow tired of it, but that day is for sure not this day.

Then comes gathering reinforcements, Scourge style. Cleitus got a poison gas dispenser and directions to a nearby mine. Sometimes the gas just kills a living subject and unleashes a vengeful ghost, but sometimes it makes obedient ghouls, and at the end of successful questing, every death knight has a coterie:

The ghoul master at the Scourge base breaks them down into parts for later use while the death knight gets on with other chores. Specifically, it's time for some mass destruction. This was my introduction to the wonderful world of large weapons in the Lich King era. Cleitus infiltrated a Scarlet Crusade dock...

...seized control of an available cannon, and went to work:

Scarlet soldiers swarm up to make him stop, of course, but the cannon turns out to have an electrical-discharge defense to help repel boarders:

A hundred soldiers gunned down and it's time for Cleitus to leave, with the last blue sky Havenshire will ever see:

These are the trainers waiting for him and his comrades back up in Ebon Hold. Each specializes in one of the three talent trees available to death knights. The lich Amal'thazad, master of cold:

The necromancer Lord Thorval, master of blood:

The blood knight Lady Alistra, mistress of the unholy:

When Cleitus returned to the ground, the old camp lay largely abandoned. Remaining soldiers pointed him to a new forward base, and he saw that Havenshire had been conquered, the front line now at New Avalon itself:

This is the phasing I've written about before. As I played, I shared the changed space with all the other players who'd started characters at about the same time—within a span of a few hours, I gather, and so long as we were doing the same set of quests. Those who finished them up went on to phase 3 just as we'd all left phase 1 and those working on it behind, when our characters carried reports of early victories back up to Ebon Hold.

It's a wonderful addition to the WoW arsenal, and I'm very grateful to the other MMOs who showed it could be done, and done well.

To be continued, of course.

Death Knight, Part 1

You've faced the rising power of the Scourge and its master the Lich King, and you've realized that you, at least, are not going to stop it. Maybe you fell fighting it and then joined its ranks, keeping more of your mind than most undead. Maybe you despaired of life's prospects and joined up with it out of a sense of inevitability. Maybe you embraced the darkness willingly. One way or another, you find yourself in the heart of the Scourge's growing empire, the floating necropolis known as the Ebon Hold, and facing your new overlord very directly.

That's the setup for the new death knight character class. I'll be illustrating my experience with it via my blood elf Cleitus, supplemented occasionally with pictures taken while playing night elf Syyind.

This is what I saw first: a balcony of the Ebon Hold, with valkyries on either side and the Lich King himself straight ahead:

Cleitus, in the standard regalia of the new death knight initiate (with helm and cloak hidden, as is my wont):

One of the valkyries:

And the Lich King him/itself, who acknowledges the new recruit...

...and sends them off to Highlord Darion Mograine, who handles a lot of the actual operations of the Hold:

(One nice touch is that the Lich King is often talking while nobody is at hand, sometimes to himself and sometimes obviously giving orders or receiving reports telepathically. His voice is a presence in the character's mind from time to time throughout the starting sequence.)

Training gets right underway with the character taking an available sword, learning the basics of runeforging to make it magical, and adding runic power. The death knight gets a whole bunch of new graphics of supreme coolness, like this flaring and cooling pattern after successful runeforging:

The new recruit wastes little time with the sword unbloodied; the next step (which I didn't end up with good shots of) is to select any of several shackled unworthy initiates...

...and duel them down. (The target gets time to retrieve weapon and armor, but even so, it's a pretty harsh setup.)

Then it's time to spy out the targets of the Lich King's next assault, on the Scarlet Crusade-built enclave of New Avalon in the eastern Plaguelands:

And then it's down to the launching point for the invasion. Yes, that is a skeletal gryphon with blue fel energy glowing in its chest cavity, as with the dragon in the Lich King trailer.

The invasion's launching point looks like what you'd expect a Scourge gathering to look like:

New Avalon is, at this point, still in good shape:

Notice the contrast between the tainted sky and blighted ground around the Scourge camp and the field where Cleitus stands, down the slope from those archers. That's all going to change, thanks to Cleitus and the army he's with.