Leveling Down

Hey boss, got another quest for me?

While I didn’t take too much to the Burning Crusade expansion when I tried it about a year and a half ago, I gave Wrath of the Lich King a shot since Blizzard was offering a 10-day trial. I figured, if anything, it’d give me another article to write up. I only had an epic’ed out level 60 mage that I burnt out with back in the original release, and ended up skipping the first expansion, The Burning Crusade. Read on if you’re curious about what I went through when I tried logging onto my level 60 that I hadn’t logged on with in years. That and my experiences with the Death Knight class.

One of the first things I noticed was the new Achievement system like on the Xbox.

Logging back on as my end-game level 60
There was a sense of pride I had with my level 60 several years ago. After all, I had run so many raids and did so much planning to get my mage to where she was that day. I eventually burnt out because I realized that with all of that work I put into the game, it was all meaningless when new content and items continued to come out and make my planning and hours of grinding obsolete. What was the point running a dungeon over and over again to get a drop only for it to be replaced months later by a newer, better item? I couldn’t beat the game. So I stopped.

Coming back to the character years later was definitely quite weird. First of all, I already forgot how to play, and I had a full talent tree that needed to be specced but I had no idea where to put the 49 or so points. The mage talents had changed so much that I didn’t know what to do. The thing was, the talent tree even went further down since players could now level to 80. I was also overwhelmed by all of the items I was carrying. I had hundreds of gold, but my entire bank and nearly every single item slot in my bags was filled up. I had no idea what half those items were for anymore. Raiding gear? Fire Resist gear? What is all this?! It also didn’t help that here I was sitting at the bank in Ironforge, and all of these Level 80s are running around trying to gather people for instance runs. I guess some things never change.

In any case, I was too overwhelmed. I tried continuing where I left off, which was pretty much the beginning of the Burning Crusade expansion land, but it’s so boring out there killing boars and whatnot. Plus, I kept getting ganked by level 80′s! Apparently I didn’t take the “Commander” title out of my name soon enough so I was a nice honor target. My old character wasn’t as easy to resume as I thought. So instead I said, “Forget this – maybe I should start fresh with the Death Knight.”

Creating my new Death Knight, Ryoma

My Death Knight Experience
The Death Knight is a new class offered in this World of Warcraft expansion, available to anyone that has at least one level 60 character on any server. The Death Knight is evil so maybe I should go with Horde on this one. And I never got to play as the Blood Elves, so a Blood Elf Death Knight named Ryoma was born.

The Death Knight starts off at level 55 instead of level 1, so in a sense, it’s kind of a good way to continue the World of Warcraft game if you skipped out on Burning Crusade like I did and had no idea what to do with all of your items and stuff you collected in the original game. It’s a fresh start but not too far back.

How did the Death Knight play? Honestly, it was kind of boring – sort of like a debuffing rogue I guess. I liked when I was the Warrior class I could just charge into any enemy at the hit of a key and the rage meter was neat. The Death Knight sort of has a Scorpion “Get Over Here” type of thing where he pulls an enemy towards him. Unfortunately, the cooldown is quite long on that so it’s not like you can pull every enemy you see that way. His attacks all seem to be based off of different debuffs on units, which when used increase his action bar. Once high enough the action bar allows the Death Knight to use certain skills like Death Coil, a ranged attack that either damages enemies or heals friendly undead units. But in the end, I think I just liked my mage a lot more and the glass cannon style aproach to fighting in World of Warcraft.

The Death Knight campaign itself is actually pretty good. It’s only about three hours long, but I thought it had a decent amount of variety. There were some initial quests where you talk to the Lich King, then take on some quests that deal with killing the Scarlet Crusade. It was kind of neat because if you were a Warcraft III player, you could see how there was a flying Necropolis over the human area with the undead pushing upon human territory.

Back in my day, we had to save up money to get a mount. Nowadays the kids just steal ‘em?

I undertook a mission where I had to go “steal” a mount to make it my own, kill civilians and Scarlet Crusaders, and even sneak/disguise myself as a human to get by certain areas. Every mission reward was basically a blue item to replace all of the green gear I started with, so in a sense it was a pretty good hook to keep playing to get all of those shiny blues. There was also a lot more variety and imagination in some of these missions as well. It wasn’t just the simple “Kill 10 enemies” or “collect 5 drops” – there was definitely effort put into the story. Collecting ghouls, dueling other death knights, ambushing a lone human scout, infiltrating a fortress, etc. You even rode a Frost Wyrm mount and were ordered to kill foot soldiers on the ground. There were a couple of those “kill x number of enemies” quests, but I thought it was neat that one was assigned to me by Baron Rivendale, the boss of the Stratholme dungeon.

Hurling blasts down upon Scarlet soldiers can be pretty fun!

What I also found interesting was that as the missions went on, you would see the land changing, as the blight would spread out to consume the human area and more ghouls and eventually Abominations would be walking around, culminating in the full scale attack of the human land when you’re on the Frost Wyrm. At first I wondered how the heck this sort of persistent change could take place because other players were also wandering around this same world as me. I mean, if they were still doing the keep infiltration missions, wouldn’t my full-scale attack on the Scarlet Crusade impact that?

I realized what had happened and it’s kind of a genius idea that Blizzard did. Basically, each section of the storyline was its own instance of the same zone. So even though the land looked the same, you would only be on that instance if you completed the right quests for it. Perhaps there were three instances for that same Death Knight world in total – one for the early stage, one for the mid stage, and finally one for the end. That’s how people can still be running around and not be interrupted with your quests – they’re in that same zone because they are on the same zone-related quests as you.

After I completed my assault mission, the Lich King asked me to move on to the next area, where I would join Highlord Darion Morgraine as he leads thousands of Scourge with an attack on Light’s Hope Chapel. When you agree to the battle, there’s a 5 minute countdown before it starts (I guess to allow other Death Knight players to join in). Once the five minutes were up, the entire Scourge army rushes Light’s Hope Chapel and proceeds to attack any humans defending it. You get a massive buff, which ups your damage into the thousands and regeneration such that it is impossible to kill you. All you do is wail away at any human enemies you see. I thought it was awesome.

Buff allowed me to land a 14k critical attack

Eventually, Morgraine fails and admits defeat to the paladin Tirion Fordring. The Lich King himself appears and admits to the fact that he sent Morgraine on a mission that was expecting to fail. Mograine gets pissed, helps Fordring attack the Lich King, and the Lich King retreats. At that point Morgraine believes that the Death Knights have fallen because they should no longer follow the Lich King, and tells me to go make friends with the Horde (or Alliance, if you’re an Alliance Death Knight) by giving me a letter to give to the side’s leader.

Once I got warped to Ogrimmar, I was to deliver a letter to Thrall that allowed me to ally myself with the Horde. It was very jarring to suddenly be warped to the front of Ogrimmar, where I found dozens of high level Horde players dueling. This was in stark contrast to there being almost no other human players around in the Death Knight starting zones. I made my way towards Thrall in his thrown room, but along the way orc guards boo’ed at me, throwing rotten fruit and objects at me denouncing me for being a Death Knight. Pretty cool and atmospheric!

“Today marks the first of many defeats for the Scourge! Death knights, once in service of the Lich King, have broken free of his grasp and formed a new alliance against his tyranny!”

Eventually I delivered the letter to Thrall and he commanded that everyone in the Horde army was to accept me as one of their own, and it felt like the end of Star Wars when I turned around, looked at the crowd, and smiled. But I didn’t have a medal. I simply sat down and logged out. Joking of course, but yeah once the Death Knight campaign was complete, I wasn’t about to go mix it up back with the regular people looking for 5-man dungeons and all that. That was the last thing I wanted to do. I was done.

A dancing Death Knight gnome. Now I’ve seen it all…

Every race can make Death Knights?
Part of me doesn’t like the idea that Death Knights are not only open to both sides, but to every race as well. It’s almost making a mockery of it, but I guess it’s honestly the easiest way to making “everyone” happy. After all, Blizzard probably had a lot of headaches trying to balance content when there were Shamans on Horde and Paladins on Alliance. I decided to push it a little and go silly: a Death Knight Alliance gnome. I wasn’t about to play through the Death Knight starting zone again, but I just wanted to see if it was possible and sure enough, I had a dancing Death Knight gnome. Something just didn’t sit right with me after that that someone so dark could have such a silly dance…

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