Wrath of the Lich King: Beta Tidbits (PC)

We tend take it as a truism that MMOs can be can be reduced to a series of grinds -- ones that we consensually undergo because the rewards are somehow worth it. If you look at WoW, the nature of the grind may have evolved a little bit, but it hasn't really changed. At first, we grinded instances and raids for boss drops. Then the honor system came along, and we began grinding ranks. And when the honor system changed, we did it for points -- and often, no real effort was required on our part (forward to 5:27).

But the grind truly came into its own once The Burning Crusade launched. Badges of Honor -- which have become more and more liberally dispensed as the expansion was iterated on -- made it so that we had an incentive to run even those dungeons that we liked least. They did away with the notion of the rewardless instance run; regardless of whether or not you got a bauble from a boss, the handful of badges you'd walk away with would net you something useful. Eventually.

We've gotten used to incremental rewards for time spent. There's a lot to say about this, but that's outside of the scope of this piece. Blizzard too has gotten much better at building systems into WoW that work around our willingness to be incentivized in this way.

Effort Sink

Introducing: Heirloom items. Following yesterday's beta update, a player found these fascinating items on a badge vendor, which prompted a response from Lead Designer Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan on the forums. People who've been playing MMOs for a while will be familiar with the concept behind them. Essentially, Heirloom items are bits of gear that are tied to your account, as opposed to "bind on pick-up" or "equip" items, which you can't transfer off your character. They're meant to be transferred between all your same-faction characters on the server you purchase them on. Remember how in older MMOs, you could get a nice piece of gear and recycle it between every other character you subsequently created? That's what's going on here -- though of course, Blizzard has put a few twists on the concept, adeptly fool-proofing, in my opinion.


Special thanks to the WoW community for this screenshot.

Primarily, Heirloom items will scale in level depending on who equips them. This will happen every 10 levels. In the case of armor, they'll change type once your characters cross level thresholds that permit them to equip stronger classes. For instance, a piece of mail armor for a warrior will turn into plate once you level to 40. In terms of relative power, the items will be comparable to equal-level blues. And as far as enchants go, you can throw anything on them that you'd be able to cast on a level one item.

Blizzard reps went on to mention how the designers have plans to expand the "Bind on Account" concept further down the road, as well as to enable ways for players to acquire this kind of gear outside of badges and Wintergrasp shards. But for now, it looks fairly certain that you'll have yet another reason to continually rerun whatever ends up being Lich King's answer to heroic Mech.
WoW's never really solved the problem of racial abilities. No one's ever provided us with a compelling reason to make anything other than a Gnome warrior or Undead rogue if you intend to do a lot of PvP. Tons of solutions exist, some of them admittedly pretty radical, like making racial abilities unusable in arenas, or simply pooling all racials, and allowing players to choose the ones they want. Perhaps not surprisingly, WoW's designers seem to be opting for the most challenging approach: scrapping "problem" racials, and designing a whole bunch of new ones.

There are a few mentions of improved racials, both on the boards and in-game. Trolls, whose selection has widely been regarded as complete garbage since WoW launched, have a new passive ability called "Voodoo Shuffle," which grants them a 15 percent reduction in movement-impairing effects. The Blood Elf racial "Arcane Torrent" has also been simplified to a straight two-second AoE silence, accompanied by a mana drain effect.


This placeholder hints at things to come for Human racials.

According to a post from Tom "Kalgan" Chilton on the boards earlier this morning, some big changes are in store for Humans and Night Elves. Humans will be getting an ability called "Every Man for Himself," which will essentially mimic the functionality of the PvP trinkets, removing any effects that result in loss of character control. It'll be on the same cooldown as the trinkets. The net result, as deduced by the community, is to give Human PvPers a free trinket slot. Lucky Humans.

As for Night Elves, Shadowmeld will see a big change-up. It'll work a like a combination of Feign Death and Vanish: When you cast it, you'll go into stealth, and enemies will lose aggro, and automatically lose you as a target. The latter effect also applies to opposing players, making it potentially more useful than you may originally think.

If Blizzard can implement such meaningful changes to every race whose abilities are hurting, then this is truly a good deal. But if, say, Trolls aren't going to become any more viable, than perhaps the designers have bitten off a bit more than they can chew.