Tier 8 Preview and BlizzCast 7

admin January 30 2009 8:20 am 8 Comments

Boubouille over at MMOC posted some pictures of a few tier 8 sets and then followed it up with a nice video. He pulled them from the game files and not all are available yet, but the most important (at least to us) is. Below is the video he made as well as the screen shots of the Death Knight set.

BlizzCAst 7 was also released recently. In it Jeffery Kaplan, J. Allen Brack and Chris Metzen talk about the lore of WotLK, upcoming patches and wrap up WotLK. I’m not going to post the entire transcript, you can see that HERE. I will post some of the DK related info that looked interesting:

BlizzCast
Nethaera: Okay. So what was the most difficult decision that was made during the development process? You have all these ideas up in the air. What was it that made it so difficult?

J. Allen Brack: I think it was difficult to narrow it down from the 29 hero classes that we’ve got completed and which one we were going to go with.

Jeffrey Kaplan: Yeah. I think the class choice was super hard and eventually we had it down to three front runners which was pretty cool. We were talking for awhile about a necromancer. He would kind of be a range caster, do a lot of corpse explode, that sort of thing. Things we ended up incorporating into the death knight. We also had a cool idea for a rune master. That was going to be more of a melee type. Think rogue or monk type character, but death knight ultimately fit.

Crygil: Let’s shift gears a bit and take a look at some of the cool newer players. The Order of the Ebon Blade. Definitely very exciting, very new, very cool. How long has it been around? Where has it been in Azeroth?

Metzen: – Order of the Ebon Blade. So, obviously we made this thing up recently. The origins of the Order really kind of get their start with (this sounds like a plug but..) the Ashbringer comic series that Mickey Neilson is currently writing for Wildstorm. This is really the origin (in a roundabout way) of the death knights, certainly the origin of the sword and the Mograine family and Ashbringer legacy, but I think all of that really rolls one-to-one into the creation of this current order of death knights, who Darian Mograine is the chief of. Really, I think the origin of the group plays out in the death knight starting area, as you get your start as a death knight on the Lich King’s payroll. Then ultimately the intervention at Light’s Hope Chapel, by Tirion Fordring, really allows the death knights to win their freedom.

While they are still very dark and wielding very dark powers, at least they are not on the Lich King’s payroll and they are out to kind of make him pay. So, I think, in a lot of ways, we’re still kind of talking about how it will play out longer term in the world, like post-Lich King, as we deal with Arthas and put him down and dispense that justice. What happens in Northrend after that? What is the ultimate fate of the Lich King and ultimately, what is the fate of this Order of these very dark anti-heroes? When they’ve completed their mission, what do they do now? They can never go home again and eternity is a very long time if you’re one of these cats. I think that’s definitely a question we are still discussing and working through. We have some pretty cool hooks for the Order of the Ebon Blade, potentially how they play well with the Order of the Silver Hand, the paladins and the Argent Crusade. But I think a lot of that is still being discussed.

Spread the DK:

8 Comments »

Neuromancer said:

Anyone catch this on that post?

http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?topic=36792.0

Death Knight (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Blood of the North
Blood of the North was the first of the Death Rune talents we implemented, largely to fill a hole in the deep Frost tree. At the time it needed to be 5 points or Frost had to backtrack a lot in order to go deeper.

But the other two trees ended up with cheaper versions of the talent and Frost has changed so much that I don’t know that it needs to be 5 points any longer. This is something we might look at for 3.1. (Source)

Shadow of Death
We will be applying a hotfix that will make it so that it will no longer be possible to use this while in Arenas. (Source)

# 30 January 2009 at 11:00 am

Mandie said:

I love my DK and I love my mage, but I would be scared of a mage came up in that T8 gear to me lol.

# 30 January 2009 at 11:27 am

- said:

*cry*

I wanted Rune Master to be the next hero class. ;_; Now I know that they incorporated it into DKs I know it probably won’t be a possibility anymore. *sigh*

# 31 January 2009 at 3:56 am

Rakcheral said:

Why do rogues get the cool extra animation (the tentacle spark looking thing) from their T8 shoulders and everyone else just gets a glow or some weird fog trail?

# 31 January 2009 at 8:29 am