The Pillaging of Northrend, Part One of OMGLOTS

OKay, so I picked up my copy of WoTLK at GameSpot last night at the local GameStop (just about the only reason I'd buy from them, as they have the "We don't know you and don't care to know you" corporate attitude on release day for anyone who didn't pre-order (for everything). I got it home without incident, installed and watched the re-patching process begin (which I expected). Checked for a few addon updates, everything was go and I managed to drag myself out of a conversation on IRC to finally login at just before 2:00am. Yes, it was an interesting conversation but the XP rate kinda sucked.

Valgarde

Next stop, NORTHREND. Being that my guild leader had already scheduled a little raid on Utgarde Kep for Friday night, I figured it behooved me to take the gorilladin over to Howling Fjord via Menethil Harbor (it's the dock on the far right in case you're wondering). This takes you more or less straight to Valgarde, and what do I see the moment I get off the boat? A dwarf with a big, beautful exclamation mark over his head. YAY! Did I mention I like the way dwarves think? With dwarves, everything is simple... It's either about beer, digging things up, or getting into fights. This guy was of the latter sort, and a few clicks later he's instructed me to go talk to the head buttkicker and tell him "I'm all out of bubblegum". Excellent.

The one thing you're going to notice the moment you start running around there is that there's no screwing around with trying to find the skill trainers. Every profession is represented by somebody who is within about 200 yards of the dock, with more than half of them immediately on the left the moment you set foot on soil. More clicks later, I finally see some upgrades to Fishing, Leatherworking, First Aid, Skinning, and Cooking, so hello Achievements! For people doing cooking there's a pile of new recipes. 80g disappeared almost immediately and I practically rush back to the docks for some quick fishing while I wait for Opheria to come over from the other side of Northrend. Ooops. You can fish there, but not well. Buy some shiny baubles for your fishing pole while you're poking around at the Inn. The fish are deeee-licious and have almost absurd regen numbers. Did I mention it's been awhile since I've seen upgrades to anything? I still don't know what's up with the suckerfish I was catching, but I'll look it up later. For now, I can tell you that apparently like lampreys, they must be clinging to other fish because I never caught one alone.

So it turns out Utgarde keep is quite a bit closer to Valgarde than I expected. I could have run there in under two minutes, but instead I ran around doing the 6-7 quests that lead you pretty much to the door and the two quests that send you inside. Utgarde Keep looks more than a bit like Castle Greyskull, by the way. Heh. It is not a simple building with an instance maw at the front. There's stuff inside, lots of stuff. Particularly stuff in the form of people in cages. Backtracking a bit there was a quest to collect keys to free these guys.

Now this bit is cool. Basically, since Valgarde went up, the giants have been pouring out of the hillsides to try to disrupt things, and no one quite knows why. Talk to the shaman with the questionably large bucket of incense (like, Grateful Dead concert-sized bucket) with the questionable looking smoke coming out of it. He'll put you on the path to finding out with some incence of your own, because the incense lets you see into events that happened in the distant past. We're talking really distant in Azeroth terms... 15,000 years. Not to spoil things, but I suspect these giants may be precursors to humans since the first thing you find is a giant couple arguing about what to do with this new weakling baby which sure as heck looks like the typical, blue eyed and squishy-looking human to me. Later on you'll see a whole bunch of giants arguing about why they're having these sickly wimp kids, and their King declaring himself a god. Hoo boy god-kings are nothing but bad news. Thankfully they won't see you but haha DON'T try to take a poke at The Lich King hanging around nearby.

Anyway, back to Utgarde Keep. In the tradition of Deadmines, there's actually a lot of Utgarde Keep before you even get see any instance entrances (of which there are three and I still only saw one, and it wasn't the right one). Remember those guys in cages? If you collected more keys than you needed, they'll be extra handy here because when you free them, unlike other places where the mobs just run off with a muttered "THXBAI!" once you free them, these guys will fight at your side for about three minutes or so to repay you for your help. Like, really fight at your side. Paladins, Priests, Warriors, Rogues, they all do their class-defining things, like heal and buff you. Whoohoo!

Anyway, that's as far as I got with that before camping to make a DK just to check it out.

Deathknights

After carefully cloning Eshk as Ishk the Deathknight (pretty sure I got the hair right, I haven't seen it in ages, but at least I am sure I'm not bald like I was in closed beta) I started poking around. There's a number of new books and papers scattered around to fill you in on the backstory and goings on. Just to confirm, as a Deathknight at this point you are working for the Scourge, i.e., "the bad guys". Just roll with it for now. One of the books you'll want to pay special attention to as it lists the rolls of new deathknights and a little bit about each of them. Apparently they noticed me, but I must not have made much of an impression judging by what's in the book. I found another paper promising eternal pain in a very personal way for anyone who dares desert, so that's probably not something you want to even think about for awhile.

In any case, since at the core of our greedy little hearts is avarice topped with powdered greed, it seems we've got more in common with Deathknights than one might expect. You'll see the Baron Rivendare hanging around, as well as a few bosses from Naxxramas and get to talk to them a bit (Oh yes, VOTE FOR ISHK!) and before you really even get two hours in you'll steal a horse and a get a whole bunch of blue armor, so if you were worrying over finding a mailbox to get your new twink gear out, don't bother. You really don't need it.

I will drop a few suggestions for dealing with being a DK. If you're using action bar addons, make a "Possess" bar because you'll need it. The new vehicle UI kicks in at least five times before you hit 57 and it'll be more than a bit frustrating if you don't see these shiny new buttons. QuestHelper can help you a bit, but mainly, you don't need that either. Blizzard has learned from years of development work and it shows here. Instructions are very clear, and a few NPCs are even snarky about it because let's face it, if your purpose in life is killing and pain and someone says to bring them some human skulls, where to get them should be pretty darned obvious.

A few things that were tripping people up that I'll drop entirely non-spoiler hints about...

1. The Red Arrows (hunters will recognize these easily) mark your targets--you are looking for little buildings because they're in a village.
2. Torture is not supposed to go quickly and dead people tell no tales--take your time with it, have fun!
3. Ghouls are not very bright and will wander off easily. Don't let it bother you.

New AI

You will notice almost immediately as a deathknight that the Scarlet Pansy Crusade behave differently than you're used to. In fact, they'll flee at the drop of a hat if you play your cards right, i.e., be a terrifying embodiment of death and destruction. Separate from this, when you're punting around in the wild, herds of animals are rather likely to scatter when you plow into them.

Anyway, the battery meter is telling me I have limited time left, so I'll cut this off here and stop rambling. You should close the browser now and make with some pillaging!