Posts with tag undead

One of the things that caught my eye in the Ulduar preview that was posted awhile ago is the description of Yogg-Saron. The flavor text describes him as 'the Old God of death.' Considering our big target in this expansion, the Lich King, that's extremely interesting.

Wrath of the Lich King has heavily hinted at some sort of connection between Yogg-Saron and the Scourge, though we never quite find out what it is. The Scourge make heavy use of Saronite, an ore with Yogg-Saron himself as its origin. When the Alliance investigates this ore in the Dragonblight, they discover the Scourge says Yogg-Saron's name with some degree of hate and contempt.

A lot of people fear there's a "puppet of the master" thing surrounding the Lich King, that he's not actually his own power, he belongs to Yogg-Saron. I find this unlikely for one really big reason: The Scourge hates Yogg-Saron, and everybody else that we've run into that have fallen under Yogg-Saron's will either love him utterly or serve him faithfully. If you go to the Saronite Mines in Icecrown and do the quest Slaves to Saronite, you see just how faithful some of his servants become once they've been controlled. If Yogg-Saron were controlling the Lich King, we'd see a very different Scourge.

This installment of All the World's a Stage is the twenty-sixth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class (or profession!) well, without embarrassing yourself.

Too many people roleplay alchemy as a glorified fast food restaurant, with typical phrases such as, "Would you like some healing potions to go with your strength elixir?" or "If you give me just one more herb I could throw in a mana potion too..." Of course, the game mechanics often put us in the salesman position. Limited supply and demand force us to compete with other alchemists for herbs and customers, so to some extent we may have to deal with the capitalist food chain to matter what we do.

But there's so much more to an alchemist than just magical boosts and bonuses! An alchemist has the potential to be the other mad scientist! Why should they let engineers have all the fun? Just because engineers can craft their own vehicles and whatnot doesn't mean that alchemists don't have something (or someone) of their own to experiment on.

Today we shall take a closer look at the depths of madness which alchemists are capable of reaching, if only they dig a bit into the unlimited supply and demand of the imagination.

Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, where each week blogger and columnist Alex Ziebart answers your questions about the lore and history of the World of Warcraft. Ask your questions in the comments section below, and we'll try to answer it in a future edition.

We seem to be plagued with Scourge and Lich King sorts of questions lately, but that's to be expected. We're all playing Wrath of the Lich King, so it's far more likely we'll get Scourge questions than, say... Naga questions. I welcome your love of undeath with open arms.

Nic asked...

What do the tally marks on Highlord Bolvar's shield represent? Battles? Years in exile? One night stands? Or are they there to just look cool?

I have a few alts on an RP realm that I visit from time to time, and I remember thinking to myself at one point: "These characters are a bunch of deadbeats." I'd gotten too used to the alts on my main realm being a bunch of pampered brats, spoiled rotten by the presence of a hardworking main, so financial discipline had grown to be a thing of the past.

Not so on another realm where you don't have a main, and I realized that unless I went back to a few monetary basics, my alts would wind up dancing naked on mailboxes in pursuit of gold. This is a fine tactic with a long and storied history, but when your most promising alt is a level 16 Undead Mage, you're up the proverbial creek. No one wants to see a rotting, naked corpse.

So I started not being a deadbeat, and it was with surprise and delight that I logged on to find the little tyke sitting on a pretty respectable pile of gold by level 21 -- as in, he can afford to pay for his level 30 mount and training several times over, and still have enough left over to train himself all the way to 45 even if he doesn't make another penny.

This installment of All the World's a Stage is the seventeenth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself.

Priests in the World of Warcraft are a single class that incorporates a wide variety of characters. They are best known for casting spells that call forth the power of the Holy Light, but the priest using these spells in the game mechanics doesn't necessarily have much connection to the Light as such -- rather they have a connection with their own religion which grants them similar effects to those of the Light.

When WoW was being developed, Blizzard realized that night elves and trolls, for instance, would not follow the Light in the same way humans and dwarves do, so they tried to represent a bit of this diversity through race-specific spells. It didn't work out, though -- some were too powerful, while others weren't worth reading about, much less putting on one's action bar. The end result was that they made some of these spells universally available to all priests, and completely removed the rest. Here the lore had to surrender to the game mechanics in order to provide the best game balance.

In roleplaying, however, there is a lot of room for players of different races to behave differently, and draw their powers from totally different sources. Greater Heal, for instance, could come either from the Light or the power of Elune. A Shadowfiend could either be a spawn of the Forgotten Shadow, or a dark trollish voodoo spirit. If you are roleplaying a priest, the only thing that really matters is that your character have some sort of faith or profound belief, which could serve as the source of their divine magical power. A priest's magic revolves around his or her strong beliefs and ideas -- but what those beliefs are is entirely up to you.

This installment of All the World's a Stage is the sixteenth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself. It's also the first installment with a title that rhymes!

The Mage is the foremost master of magic in the Warcraft universe. Although all the other classes excluding the Warrior and the Rogue use magic of one sort or another with equally wonderful effects, the Mage is the class that's named after the stuff.

But what is magic? What does it feel like to harness it? Does the mage have to do a strange ritual or utter incomprehensible words in an ancient language in order to cast her spells? Other fantasy settings often have one or more of these elements together, but as far as I can tell, Warcraft lacks them.

Arcane magic in the World of Warcraft is an ever-present energy field surrounding the whole world. Mages access it by concentrating in the magic energy within themselves, feeling it rush through their body, and directing it as they please. Those spells that require reagents need an extra focusing item with magical properties of its own in order to bring about the desired effect, but for the most part, fireballs, frostbolts and arcane explosions can be created through the mere act of will on the part of a properly educated mind.

This installment of All the World's a Stage is the fifteenth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself.

The Warlock is the ideological counterpart to the Paladin. Where paladins strive to wipe out evil wherever they see it, warlocks enslave those evils and use them for their own purposes. Being a warlock is all about harnessing the most wicked, corrupting, and evil forces in the universe.

Why are these forces evil, you ask? Aren't magical powers neutral in themselves depending on how you use them? Isn't killing with one weapon more or less the same as killing with another? Well, if you consider that a warrior basically cuts or bashes things, and a paladin cuts or bashes and brings down the righteous energy of justice. But a warlock uses curses and spells, which, like horrifying biological weapons of modern days, destroy his enemies' minds and eat away their bodies from the inside; wreaks massive havoc with great explosions and persisting fire; and sucks the souls out of people and creatures and uses them to power even more horrifying abilities, such as summoning demonic creatures who would just as soon pluck out your eyeballs as look at you.

To suffer at the hands of a warlock is significantly more excruciating than the attacks of any other class -- a slow, painful, torturous, agonizing death. If warlocks existed in modern earth, their abilities would be against all international agreements on human rights and rules of warfare; they would be squarely in the evil company of terrorism, drug-trafficking, slavery, and biological germ warfare development.

And yet if your warlock works for the Alliance or the Horde, he or she claims to do all of these things all for the greater good.

This installment of All the World's a Stage is the fourteenth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself.

You might say that paladins are the guardians at the gates of hell -- they fight evil wherever it penetrates into their world and they take the fight to the evil's source in the hope of quenching it forever. Although they focus on guarding their people from undead and demonic forces on the rise, paladins actually stand against evil everywhere, including the evil in their own hearts.

Being a paladin means that you have a relationship of some sort with the Holy Light, that mysterious force of goodness and faith that flows to some degree within all living beings with positive intentions. Most paladins (and many priests) believe that when you do something that you believe to be good, the power of the Light increases in you and your connection to the rest of creation is strengthened, whereas doing something evil (such as acts of greed, despair, or vengeance) will darken the universe and weaken your connection to it. Whether this belief system is a religion or a philosophy is open to interpretation, and seems to depend in some part upon which race you are.

There are three sorts of paladins in World of Warcraft, aligned with the humans, the draenei, and the blood elves. All of these share certain similarities, but each has its own differences as well.

This installment of All the World's a Stage is the thirteenth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class well, without embarrassing yourself.

The Warrior is not merely a well-trained fighter who loves his weapons and armor and takes great care to wield them well -- inside each one is a boiling cauldron of rage and passion. By and large, warriors feel at home on the battlefield because it is the one place where they can express themselves, where they can finally let go of all the restraint society imposes on them and unleash all their emotions. Without his raging passion, a person would be much better suited to some calmer form of work -- it is this unquenchable fire which sustains a warrior, driving him into action in the midst of mortal peril.

Alliance warriors tend to focus more on training and weapon mastery, sometimes downplaying their rage so much that you hardly even see it. Some warriors like this (even in the Horde sometimes) may be so stoic that even they do not believe that they have any emotions whatsoever, although I doubt anyone who watched them fight could really agree. Something's got to make you willing to put on all that armor and risk death every day.

But Horde warriors are more likely to display their rage, bloodlust, and other aggressive emotions much more freely. Of course, it's possible that a Horde warrior could have a collection of stuffed animals, write poetry, and even play hopscotch with children, but their rage lurks deep within, and the essence of their profession is to let it loose.

We only have one or two days of Ask a Beta Tester left, ladies and gentlemen. Very soon, it will be no more. Who will care about beta questions? We'll have the expansion in our hot little hands! Forget the beta, we'll have the real deal. We've actually had a lot of fun doing this for you guys though, and we're kind of sad to see it go. I like to think you guys have had fun with it, too. You know, beyond drooling over the Wrath screenshots and information.

With that in mind, I'd like to ask all of you a question: Would you like to see something similar to this continue past Wrath's launch? Obviously it wouldn't be about just Wrath's beta, it would be more about the game in general. Leveling, patches, content. Short questions that can be answered in a paragraph or two. I don't know what we'd call it. Ask a Guy Some Stuff has a ring to it, though.

jared.daniels asked...

I won't be getting the WOTLK expansion for a few days after the launch. What do you suggest I do until I can get the DVD?

The zombie invasion has hit phase four. We can see that the scourge are full out attacking cities now, and the plague debuff will now turn you into a Zombie after a short period of 2 minutes. There are necropolis appearing all over Azeroth.

Argent Dawn representatives are being spotted around capital cities. The new raid boss in Karazhan, Tenris Mirkblood, is now active and dropping one Arcanite Ripper (a 2H axe), a Vampiric Batling for each raid member, and two badges for each raid member. You can get to him by going through Attuneman, clearing him, and then moving up the stairs behind his room. We've got a strategy guide up now with details on how to defeat him

You can see the location of the necropolises on the world map - they are indicated by little purple skull icons.

A Haunted Momento has been confirmed to drop from rare spawns around the necropolises- it's a leather ball type item that you throw to someone. Whoever has the momento gets to have a wraith follow you around! Pics after the break and in our gallery.

Big Update: Click the Arcanite Ripper and play it like a guitar!

Late night updates: There are Argent Dawn healers appearing at most flight paths (if not all) around the game. They are making is so the flight path NPC does not become a zombie anymore. We have a semi-confirmation of the Lurch buff increasing in speed to 125%. But we also have conflicting reports.

Continue reading after the break for the latest information.

In case there was any confusion about yesterday's post, I intentionally linked only to the films featured previously here on WoW Insider. The other three movies will be covered as we go along this week and the original post will be updated as such. Today you'll see Dead Rain 2: Deader from Bear on a Trampoline, which took Runner Up in the Drama/Romance Category for the BlizzCon 2008 movie contest. Although I'm not a horror/zombie movie fan, I was incredibly impressed with this film, a sequel to last year's Dead Rain. Even though I love the Snacky films, I don't think it's fair that Dead Rain was included in the same category with those films since it's impossible to compare the two films.

Deader's story picks up where the first one left off, with our two heroes mourning their losses and continuing to fight off zombies. There are so many things to like about this film: the grainy black-and-white film style, the high-contrast dramatic flashes, the genre homages (forced perspective camera angles, peeking through holes at the zombies, pop-up gotchas), and the wonderful cinematography. The only thing I wish is that the audio volumes were more stable. I had to ride my dial a few times to hear the dialog over the music or sound-effects. But the storyline was fantastic. The twist caught me completely by surprise and made me say, "Holy cow!" (Only, of course, "cow" was not the word I used. I live in a PG-13 household, so sue me.) I thought, "How the heck are they gonna get out of this?" Well, you have to watch it yourself to see.

Tomorrow we'll look at Mercy of the Sea by Sleeping Dog Productions and Friday we'll see Fruit of Elune by Myndflame.

[Via WeGame]

If you have any suggestions for WoW Moviewatch, you can mail them to us at machinima AT wowinsider DOT com.