Ah, World of Warcraft.

Love it or hate it, the game now has enough pop culture saturation to be a bona-fide videogame landmark on par with anything to ever come along. With almost 12 million subscribers worldwide, several TV commercials in multiple languages, a line of books, another line of comic books, oodles of fan-made machinima, a trading card game, and even its own branded version of Mountain Dew (complete with somehow-unobtrusive in-game advertising tie in), chances are you're at least obliquely familiar with the game at this point if you're even remotely in step with anything having to do with videogames.

There's also a good chance that, if you don't already play it, you hate it, but if you fall into that category, there's not really much to be said here. By this point, hating on WoW is a national pastime for the remaining few people who don't play it, and this new expansion doesn't bring about the kind of radical change that would be required to quell that. It's still an MMO, it still carries a monthly fee, and it's still going to inspire your friends and coworkers to say inscrutable things like "Some moron retadin wanted to tank our heroic in greens!" If your eyes have already glazed over, don't even bother. Nothing to see here.

Still with us? Good. So with all that said, we'll go ahead and assume you've got some kind of general knowledge about the game itself, and will instead focus on the changes Blizzard has brought to the table with both its most recent expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, and its subsequent major update, Patch 3.1: The Secrets of Ulduar. Conversely, a good place to start for the total Warcraft Neophyte would be our reviews of the previous games in the series: World of Warcraft and World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade.

A couple caveats before we begin:

See, one of the things that makes reviewing a Massively-Multiplayer game so tricky is the fact that shortly after a review goes live, the game generally changes due to updates (sometimes pretty dramatically, as has been the case with Wrath) and just like that, the original review becomes obsolete fairly quickly. Blizzard reps have stated a few times that even the term “patch” is really just a carry-over misnomer at this point. While bug fixes surely get rolled into the updates, the main focus is really just to add more stuff, making them less like patches and more like mini-expansions you get at no additional cost.

The other major problem with reviewing this type of game is that the time commitment required is not only huge, but a fair chunk of the game requires having a sizable group of people to play with fairly routinely over a long period of time if the reviewer is to have any hope to see any of the endgame content. As a result, endgame content tends to get left out of reviews, which is somewhat backward when you consider that the endgame is where a vast majority of players are going to be spending their time once they finish the comparatively brief climb to the level cap.

The author (whose character can be seen here by way of evidence) has participated in every currently-available boss encounter in the game along with a fair bit of Player versus Player combat, so we can go over all that, but is by no means ultra-hardcore or anything; if you're looking to get into really serious raiding schematics with pie charts and spreadsheets and whatnot, there's not much we can do for you here. The author is also a dyed-in-the-wool Hordie (as are most people with souls) so all of this is going to be written from that perspective, though the difference is negligible for the most part.

All good? Alrighty, here we go:

Part 1: Bringing Everything Up to Date

As happened previously, the newest expansion has brought the game's version number up a full increment and we are now at World of Warcraft v. 3.x, a change that will take effect whether you have one expansion, both, or even neither.

On the tech side of things, the game's engine has gotten yet another overhaul and now looks better than ever, with the draw distance increased considerably and the lighting, magic, and weather effects receiving tweaks to look a bit more impressive. Shadows can now also be enabled, and at the higher settings can be quite pretty indeed, though cranking up the shadow quality can have a massive impact on performance. Even at the lower settings, though, it adds a lot to the ambiance. Watching the sun set over Thunder Bluff as long shadows are cast across the plains has never looked better.

On the weirder side, the increased draw distance has a few unintended side effects. You can now see right off the map in some areas of the world where featureless areas were previously hidden by the lower draw distance. Not a big issue at all, but it's sort of disconcerting to be able to look out from a wind rider and see a massive right angle wall of single-textured brown rock past the mountains on the horizon.

Character models got a bit of an upgrade, which is better than nothing, though this option has to be toggled on from the graphics menu. The “classic” races still look a lot more rough around the edges than the newer Draenei and Blood Elves, but everyone has had their model textures smoothed out a bit, which, taken into account with the vastly better designed armor, helps hide how long in the tooth some of them are getting.

Overall, the system specs haven't changed too radically. If you could run the game at a reasonable rate before, the additions won't affect performance too much, and in the Classic and Burning Crusade areas, the change is hardly noticeable, with maybe a minor dip in framerate if there are a lot of shadow-casting objects around. The only problem older systems might run into is the ever-increasing size of the game itself, which as of this writing has ballooned to 16.6GB, significantly larger than most modern PC games.

Part 2: Changes

With version 3.0 have also come a wide batch of minor but notable core gameplay alterations that re-work how some things function in the game. Thankfully, almost all of these are steps in the right direction, and remove or change previous annoyances that seemed like dusty holdovers from back when the game was strongly modeled on the original EverQuest. Veterans will probably complain about how the game is continually being “dumbed down” and “catering to casuals,” but it's telling that almost none of the changes to the core mechanics were to make the game easier; just faster and more streamlined.

What it really boils down to is Internet schadenfreude, i.e. “We didn't get our mounts until level forty, and they were insanely expensive even then! All the new players should have to get them that way too!”

Well, get over it, because if this is any indication, the streamlining will continue unabated.

Leveling, overall, is now much faster than in previous versions of the game due to a combination of factors. Difficult enemies have been reduced in strength on the world's main map, with the stronger “Elite” class of enemies now almost entirely confined to the game's instanced dungeons. Travel time has been reduced, with player-owned mounts now cheaper to purchase and available earlier. More graveyards have been scattered around the old areas to speed up the process of coming back to life if your character dies. PvP Battlegrounds can now be queued up from anywhere using a simple drop-down menu on the minimap. Players can now be summoned into instances. Mounts and pets are now one-use items that will teach you a “spell” to summon them as opposed to permanent items that take up an inventory slot. Reputation increases are dolloped out far more generously everywhere you look. Gold is infinitely easier to come by. Buttons to use quest-specific items are now included in the interface, so you no longer have to drag and drop them into one of your action bars. And yes, there are now “heirloom” items that count as bind-to-account as opposed to bind-to-character, meaning you can purchase powerful items on one of your main characters, use it until you find something better, and then send it to one of your other characters where it will be useable at every level and will scale appropriately – in effect, you can gear out all of your characters with the same gear, eliminating the need to hunt for new gear on new characters more or less entirely.

The list goes on and on, and the message is clear: Blizzard wants you to get through the “vanilla” portions of the game as quickly as possible so you can get to the new stuff, and if the patch notes for version 3.2 are any indication, this is only going to get more and more extreme.

This puts the game in the weird position of actually being faster and less grindy than some of its single-player counterparts, a process that speeds up even more if you have a friend invite you to the game or you're working on your second or third character. The leveling speed is now on par with single-player games like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest and you're actually forced to do a lot more on-foot traveling in Fallout 3 than you are in World of Warcraft.

Another fairly massive addition is an Achievement System a la the Xbox's Achievements or PlayStation's Trophies.

The difference here is sheer magnitude. While you might expect a good-sized high profile console game to have maybe 50 achievements, Warcraft easily blows them all away by having 931 as of press time, with more being added in with each content patch.

These achievements are wide-ranging and cover just about anything you could be expected to do in the game. There are entire subsets of achievements for PvP content, PvE content, being among the first groups to kill a big boss, having a high reputation with several factions, participating in the holiday events, exploring all the regions of the world, completing a lot of quests, and so on. Also, unlike their console-based progenitors, these achievements often come with material rewards attached. Earn a particularly hard-to-get achievement and it might come with a unique mount or a title you can attach to your character's name, so you could show up to other players as “Morgmorg The Insane” or “Salty Seelhadraj” or any number of other names and titles. True, they generally don't actually do anything, but it's a neat, unobtrusive way to show off.

While these changes may not be enough to convince all the naysayers that the game is really any different at its core (and to be fair, it really isn't) it might be enough to convince curious folks with limited playtime to give the game a shot. If you've ever tried getting friends or family to give the game a whirl with you, it's far more newcomer-friendly now than it's ever been before.

Part 3: Servants of the Lich King

While the updates to the existing game are significant, the real meat and potatoes of the update is the additional content of Northrend, the raising of the level cap from 70 to 80, and the addition of a new Hero Class called Death Knights.

We'll start with Death Knights because they, along with their new starting area, embody one of the biggest design changes going forward.

As with the Burning Crusade before it, Wrath introduces a new starting area where players creating a Death Knight get to play through a new, unique quest line that sets up their plot in the main game's setting.

Now, if you read that and mentally snorted at the word “plot,” that's not an unreasonable reaction.

While the Warcraft Lore is very widely fleshed out, comparatively little of the actual backstory made it into the game proper, at least initially. Part of this was a desire to move the plot forward from Warcraft III, and part of it was that Blizzard was probably pretty reluctant to have a bunch of faceless players wipe out major established characters in the game's lore. So, they cooked up a bunch of new villains (the Fire Lord Ragnaros, the Black Dragons Nefarian and Onyxia, the Old Good C'Thune, the Blood God Hakkar, etc. etc.), tied them into their own fairly loose plotlines, and had the players kill those instead. Some of the plots were fairly elaborate, but they tended to be discrete events divorced from any of the stories established in the previous games, and even then most players who were able to complete those storylines had long ago stopped paying attention to them and were “in it for the loot.” It's a little hard to maintain plot coherency when you've been killing the same dragon over and over for weeks on end.

It wasn't until the final content update for vanilla World of Warcraft that finally one of the villains from the previous game, Kel'Thuzad, reared his head with the unveiling of his floating pyramid dungeon Naxxramas. Even then, that content had the dial set so ridiculously far into “Super Ultra Hardcore” territory that a vast majority of the game's players (with some estimates as high as 94%) never got to even set foot in it. Naxxramas didn't even have an exit; the only way out was to die, or win. Needless to say, it wasn't very popular.

The Burning Crusade alleviated that somewhat, with the game's story going from window dressing to having a much more direct impact, and playable characters from the previous games showing up as final bosses in dungeons. This was a nice step in the right direction, but in practice not a whole lot changed. Illidan, anti-hero of Warcraft III, only made two cameos outside of his final appearance as a boss encounter. Other characters like Lady Vashj and Prince Kael'Thas, major players in Warcraft III, seemed to do nothing but sit in their respective doom fortresses waiting for the players to arrive and kill them. Sure, it was neat to see them if you got there, but seeing as these guys were the final bosses of major raid instances that required a massive time commitment to ever get through, that was a pretty big “if.”

So it's unbelievably refreshing to see that, right from the get-go, Arthas, the titular Lich King of the expansion, is all over the place.

In fact, make a new Death Knight character, and he's the first thing you see. Just standing there, looking out over the balcony of his floating fortress. The most powerful being currently in the entire lore of the franchise, and he gives your starting Death Knight their first quests.

Not only that, but all the other bosses from Naxxramas are there, scattered around as quest-givers. They'll squabble with each other, fill you in on their backstories and personal rivalries, and all the while have you partaking in quests that not only move the plot forward, but seem to make permanent alterations to the game world itself, which is a new trick the game can do called “phasing” which we'll get to in more detail later.

Suffice to say, the plot here is actually plot. Create a Death Knight and you're treated to an actual honest-to-god RPG experience that wouldn't feel out of place at all in a single-player game like Morrowind. Your actions are shown to have actual, lasting impact on your surrounds, everything moves at a rapid clip, and all the major players are right there in front of you instead of squirreled away in some castle you're not even going to be able to approach for another 60 levels.

Actually, Death Knights forgo a good chunk of the leveling process entirely and start the game at level 58, eliminating the need to level in the “Old” parts of the game whatsoever. To make matters even more interesting, the Death Knight class itself is intentionally overpowered until the early 70s where it begins to plateau off a bit and fall in line with the standard classes.

Death Knights fall into a strange place, power-wise. They can deal very high levels of damage and wear plate armor, but can't use shields and generally favor two-handed weapons. They can summon ghouls as pets and can even raise fallen comrades temporarily as the undead, but generally don't crank out the kind of pain a well-geared rogue or a mage can. On the other end of the spectrum, they make for decent tanks despite the lack of a shield and truly shine on a few boss fights, but Warriors, Paladins and Bear Druids don't really need to fear for their day jobs. They're good tanks, but not too good.

Weirdly, any race can be a Death Knight, the only class in the game where this applies. Annoyingly, a very sizable chunk of the player base has opted for Blood Elves, at least on the Horde side. While this isn't really any stranger than, say, a Gnome Death Knight hacking away at your ankles, it does sort of homogenize them a bit. If you want to stand out as a Death Knight, go for Troll, which seems to be a rare breed.

The final oddity for Death Knights is that, for the entirety of their starting quests, they're actually not affiliated with the Alliance or the Horde, but rather the Scourge. This means that, for the first time since the very early beta stages of the game, Horde and Alliance races can communicate freely with each other. Over the course of their starting quests the respective races eventually join their proper factions, at which point they forever lose the ability to communicate cross-faction, but it's still a neat little quirk.

Taking into account the unique starting mechanics, the fact that you begin the game quite powerful right out the gate, and the high degree of interaction and plot development present, it's not a stretch at all to say that the Death Knight starting zone is not only the best starting zone in the game and an excellent introduction to the expansion, but is probably one of the cooler things in the game period. Trying to go back and create a new character in the original starting zones is downright painful by comparison, and it throws into massive relief just how wide of a gap there is between the design philosophy of Warcraft from five years ago and where it's at today.

Part 4: Up North

Luckily, the Death Knight starting zones are just the tip of the proverbial (and in some cases literal) iceberg. The same design approach carries over into the new zone of Northrend, and you only have to spend an hour or two wandering around to see just how much tighter everything is.

Gone is the massive sprawl of the earlier Warcraft zones. Each area in Northrend is carefully laid out to minimize waste and cram as much neat stuff in there as possible, with the quests acting as bread crumbs to lead players to new zones and areas as they progress. Set pieces and major events are commonplace; while you still have a few standard “Go to place X and kill Y number of Z” quests, by and large everything has been greatly enhanced in terms of variety.

While the game takes place in a frozen wasteland, there's still a lot of variety to be seen and no two zones look the same. There are a few minor quarrels with some of the design if we want to be really nitpicky, though. Starter zone The Borean Tundra wasn't a real great choice to have as the first thing new players might potentially see. It's mostly flat, is a little too big (though nowhere near as bad as, say, The Barrens), and doesn't seem to have a whole lot going on, visually. The other starting zone, The Howling Fjord, is much more impressive, and all the zones after that all have some kind of visually interesting element to them, so you sort of wonder if maybe they ran low on time while finishing up poor old Borean.

Still, it sort of makes up for it by having interesting quests. You may not have a whole lot to look at, but the 'Tundra sports some of the more amusing quests in the game, and adheres to Blizzard's new policy of having boss characters that actually do things instead of waiting for the players to show up and fight them. Kel'Thuzad himself can be seen holding court right out in the open, surrounded by several extremely powerful minions (who will cheerily tear you limb from limb if you get too close). You don't have to fight him; he's just there for window dressing, but it makes for some remarkably badass window dressing.

Even more surprising, there's actually not that much emphasis on group questing, an about-face from the group-heavy quest structure of Burning Crusade. While there is still a fair batch of quests that have to be done with the help of friends, they're generally the final quest in a long chain and aren't required to advance farther. If you don't have the time or manpower to do them right away, you can always come back later when more friends are on, or even come back and try to solo them when you're a bit tougher.

There's a much clearer sense of direction in the quest layouts as well. While the original game was simply a sprawling landmass to explore and Outland was just a condensed version of that with flying support, Northrend pointedly starts you at Point A and treks you through the first few zones with an obvious purpose in mind, culminating in the epic Wrathgate event and subsequent one-man power trip known as the Assault on the Undercity, which I'll let be a surprise if anyone hasn't seen it yet.

The Wrathgate deserves special mention because there's simply never been anything like it in the game before. It's the final capstone on a long meta-quest the player is put on the path to as soon as they arrive, so slowly but surely as you progress through the Northrend quests a larger story is being told and the forces of evil are shown to be on the move. At the conclusion of this quest chain, the game actually cuts to a full-blown five-minute long prerendered cutscene, complete with full (and superb) voice acting, dynamic camera angles, orchestral music, a Braveheart-style battle, the works. You can almost hear the programmers cackling with glee as they made the thing, content in the knowledge that it would be something that nobody on the player side was going to expect.

They were right. It's all fantastically epic-feeling and completely dispels that nagging feeling that the player is just one of many and therefore you can never really do anything in an MMO.

For all intents and purposes, the Northrend portion of Wrath of the Lich King plays like a single-player RPG - a very good one - that happens to have other players wandering around in it. A good part of this is due to the aforementioned Phasing technology introduced in Wrath. What this means is that events in the game can occur permanently for one character at a time. Let's say, hypothetically, that in the course of one of the game's quests, you kill off a major NPC. Thanks to Phasing, that NPC will stay dead, permanently, just for your character. Other characters who have not completed the questline will still be able to see him, but he'll be dead for you.

This leads to the occasional bit of weirdness, where you and a friend will be flying along, and suddenly you'll enter an area (say, the Wrathgate, where this phenomenon is easily observable) that you've phased to a different point of and they haven't. If you've completed the Wrathgate event, the area will look very different to you; if your buddy hasn't, it will appear completely different to them, and they'll have to “catch up” to where you are in the story in order for you to be able to see each other in that area. It's a little strange, but it's still a vast improvement over simply leaving the world static and having plot events that have no discernible bearing on the “real” world. Minor spatial weirdness is a very small price to pay indeed considering the huge hurdle this technology gets around for storytelling MMOs, and Blizzard should be commended for coming up with a pretty novel solution. Good job, guys.

Part 5: Kill 'em All

If Player versus Player is your thing, not a whole lot has changed in Wrath, with one notable exception: Wintergrasp Fortress. Rather than take the approach from Burning Crusade, Blizzard opted this time around to have a single outdoor PvP-Objective driven area while leaving the rest of the continent free of overt PvP objectives.

Wintergrasp is a single large area surrounded by mountains on all sides, and well elevated above most of the other zones, with towers in the south end and a large multi-walled fortress in the north. Only one faction can have control over the fortress at a given time; if the Alliance are currently in power, their banners can be seen fluttering from the parapets and the NPCs in the fortress will be friendly to them; vice versa if the Horde controls it. Every two and a half hours, an event begins where the faction that currently controls the fortress can defend it against an attack from the opposing side. The defenders get to make full use of the mounted turrets and assorted weaponry that dots the walls of Wintergrasp Keep itself, while the attackers get control of a handful of goblin workshops and the large towers on the southern end of the map.

If the attackers can break down the walls of the keep and fight through the defenders to shatter the front gates before the time limit runs out, then the defending team loses and control of the keep switches sides. The defenders have to make the decision to either hole up in the keep, or send out attack parties to try and destroy the towers on the southern end of the map, which will shave time off the clock to hopefully prevent a takeover. If you've ever played an assault map in an online shooter, you'll quickly see where Blizzard got their inspiration. This is essentially Unreal Tournament meets World of Warcraft.

Adding to the fun is the new vehicle system. The siege tanks from the Warcraft strategy games make their first controllable appearance in the MMO version, and players can build vehicles to pilot on the field of battle. Catapults, three-man destroyers, and siege engines can all be brought to bear on the enemy, along with hand-held rocket launchers and wall-mounted cannons. In the later stages of battle, it's not uncommon to see ten or more vehicles per side rolling around knocking down everything in their path as everyone scrambles for either a last ditch defense effort or a final push on the keep's main courtyard with everyone slinging every spell and ability they have at each other simultaneously. It's pure chaos.

It's also insanely fun.

Even folks who normally shy away from PvP will find that Wintergrasp is an absolute blast. There's relatively little penalty for death (as usual for PvP in Warcraft) but in a clever move, Blizzard has implemented an auto-balancing system of sorts that gives a powerful boost in power to whichever side has less people.

This is represented as a player buff called “tenacity.” Outnumbered 4 to 1 on the battlefield? No problem, since tenacity will make you roughly four times more powerful, meaning one lone tenacious defender can hold their own against a sizeable pack of opponents, and possibly even come out on top despite overwhelming odds. Health, damage, mana, and armor are all temporarily jacked up to impossible levels to give the undermanned side a fighting chance. It's not a sure win, and a drastic difference in combatants on one side will still favor the side with more people, but it goes a long way towards preventing shutouts and a skilled group of small defenders can still easily win the day against a much larger force. It's shockingly well balanced, all things considered.

The rewards for partaking are also very high, which helps ensure attendance when the battles roll around. It's not uncommon to walk away from a Wintergrasp battle with thousands of points worth of honor, even on the losing side. The main benefit to gaining and keeping Wintergrasp keep is twofold. Whichever faction controls the keep gets a continent-wide buff that increases experience gain, which is a nice thing to have. The controlling side also gets access to a small raid instance, the (very easy) bosses of which will drop PvP-oriented loot in addition to a random piece of powerful PvE-geared armor, making it a worthwhile goal to pursue.

There's a few downsides, though.

On populated servers, a heavy Wintergrasp battle can cause noticeable lag for everyone on the entire continent, meaning that even those with no intention of taking part in the battle still sometimes have to wait it out because the game becomes unresponsive as it tries to keep up with all that warfare going on just over the mountains. The other problem is Wintergrasp Lake's location. It's a huge zone parked right in the middle of the continent, meaning that if you want to fly from one end to the other on your own mount without getting dismounted over the PvP Zone, you'll often have to make a wide detour around it; flying over Wintergrasp is forbidden and will land you a quick ticket off your flier, though Blizzard has said that this will be addressed in an upcoming patch by allowing flight over the zone provided the players stay “well above” the ground.

The other addition to PvP is a new battleground called Strand of the Ancients, which is sort of like a Wintergrasp-Lite with the same idea of attack and defense. Combined with minor overhauls to the previous battlegrounds as well as a new one on the way, that'll bring the total up to six battlegrounds plus Wintergrasp plus the popular Arena option, in addition to an increase in general World PvP due to the new achievement system – kill all the opposing faction's world leaders, win a Black Bear mount! While it isn't the total overhaul to PvP that some players are pining for, it strikes a nice balance and gives those who prefer it a lot of options.

Part 6: Dragons and Dungeons and More Dragons

So that's more or less the single-player, or at least no-group-required portion of Wrath. What about the dungeons and instances?

This is the point where we're going to set up and really talk shop, otherwise this review is going to be another ten pages long (at least) while we go over every last piece of terminology to make sure everyone can follow what's being talked about; instead, read this:

“We were doing the daily heroic and some stupid PUG shaman, who kept ripping hate and breaking sheeps the whole time, tried to ninja the purple resto trinket off the boss even though he was enhance.”

If you just turned your head sideways and made a confused noise, go ahead and skip straight to the bottom. We'll wrap it up at the end for you.

Everyone else, here's what Wrath brings to the endgame.

Heroics:

All 5-man dungeons have a heroic mode, same as Crusade. The difficulty scales a little more appropriately this time around though, so there aren't any more weird occurrences where you have a heroic that's actually higher on the difficulty scale than a raid (Heroic Burning Crusade Caverns of Time instances go ahead and raise your hand). The usual loot rules apply, with all loot upgraded to level 80 blue-level gear on Heroic and a single decent epic dropping off the final boss at the end. Badges are doled out for boss kills, again similar to the token system used in Crusade, and they can be traded in for some raid-level loot once you collect enough. The Heroic Daily quest also makes a return. Overall, it's very similar to the system used to keep the dungeons appealing in Crusade with one minor twist: there is no longer any attunement keys needed whatsoever, and they're all available right from the get-go.

In fact, it's worth mentioning that so far, nothing needs attunement. That entire mechanic seems to be done away with entirely. Whether you like that or not probably depends on how hardcore your guild is, but overall it's really a change for the better. Less time-sinks, more content for everybody.

Heroics still remain on a 24-hour lockout, same as usual.

As an aside, the other thing that seems to have been done away with is the requirement for any kind of Crowd Control. Most packs can be pulled with no CC. Though it's useful in a few places, it's no longer required and most groups with sufficient gear simply ignore it. This over-simplifies things a bit for some of the dungeons, but at the end of the day isn't too big of a deal. Older players might yearn for when the dungeon pulls required a little more finesse, though, which is understandable.

10 Man vs. 25 Man:

In an effort to make raid content accessible to smaller guilds, all raids now have both a 10- and 25-man version, with the 10-man versions being the easier of the two with slightly more forgiving mechanics and less of an emphasis on class-specific roles. Some bosses also lose an ability or two in the 10-man variant, but most fights are simply scaled down. Graphics, scale, and general fight mechanics remain the same on both versions, and raids are saved separately, so you can be saved to both a 10-man and a 25-man version of the same dungeon without fear of overlap.

The 7-day lockout applies for both versions.

Hard Modes:

A fairly new mechanic is the hard mode. Hard modes are optional methods of fighting the bosses that prove more of the challenge than the “standard” means of fighting them. Killing the bosses in this fashion will award better loot and usually some kind of achievement. Which brings us to...

The Obsidian Sanctuary:

The first real raid encounter in the game, The Obsidian Sanctuary is similar to the single-boss-style dungeons from the previous versions of the game (Onyxia's Lair and Magtheredon's Lair). The boss here is Sartharion the Onyx Guardian, a surprisingly talkative Black Dragon who holds the distinct honor of being both one of the easiest and one of the hardest boss encounters in the game depending on how you go about fighting him.

Sartharion resides in the center of his volcano lair in a small island surrounded by lava; on the ridge above him is an assortment of black dragonflight members and three “Twilight Drakes”: Vesperon, Tenebron, and Shadron.

The “normal” way to do the fight is to march around the upper ridge of Sarth's lair, kill his buddies one at a time (who offer fairly weak resistance despite taunting the party when engaged), and then move on to the big guy himself. Killed in this fashion, Sartharion only puts up fair resistance at best, essentially a tank-and-spank with a single movement element where the raid must move out of the way of some lava waves he will summon from either side of his lair. He can usually be killed on the first night of attempts, and pick-up groups to kill him are quite common.

The game changes considerably for hard mode: engage Sartharion with one or more of his Twilight Drakes still alive. Do this, and they will join in the fight and help him, making the fight much more complex and, if you leave all three of the drakes alive, extremely difficult. Sarth gains a large extra percentage of health per drake left alive, and his flame breath goes from being a mild annoyance to instantly fatal unless the tank and his healers blow their cooldowns - we're talking 50,000 points of fire damage or more on 25-man, enough to roast even an extremely well-geared tank to a cinder in one go. Add in the fact that you're fighting his drake allies (all of whom have their own large list of special abilities they can and will make use of) in addition to Sartharion simultaneously, and the fight becomes effectively impossible without a high level of gear and lots of practice. Goes without saying that you shouldn't engage in a pick-up group for a three-drake Sarth run unless your server is full of particularly skilled players or you relish the idea of a massive repair bill with no loot to show for it.

Up until the release of Ulduar in patch 3.1, fighting Sarth with all three drakes alive (commonly referred to as “Sarth 3D”) was considered the most challenging fight in the game, requiring careful coordination of saves on the tank, ample flame resistance, several offtanks, and some seriously geared and attentive healers to pull off.

Naxxramas:

It's back! Yep, the previously most-feared instance in the game has been relocated from its original location floating above the Plaguelands and now hovers above the Dragonblight in Northrend. It's also been re-tuned to go from a level 60 40-man dungeon to an entry-grade level 80 10- and 25-man dungeon.

Unfortunately, of all the new raid content brought in for Wrath, Naxx is far and away the weakest example.

All of the original bosses return to reprise their roles, with Stratholme's Baron Rivendare getting hopped up on steroids to replace High Commander Mograine in the four horsemen encounter. Heigan still has his safety dance, and Loatheb still has a healing-prevention aura, but the difficulty and complexity of the original fights has been greatly toned down, and Naxx as a whole is a lot more forgiving than its original incarnation ever was.

Note that this in and of itself isn't really a bad thing; Original Naxx was insanely difficult, and as mentioned earlier in the review, only a tiny percentage of the playerbase ever got to even step foot inside the thing. In that regard, this is still a “new” instance to many players. The main problem is that the insane level of difficulty was kind of the whole point of Original Naxx. Take that away and you're left with what is honestly a fairly lackluster collection of boss fights, most of which revolve around a single mechanic and who are tied together with a series of trash pulls that are AoE'd into oblivion with fairly minimal effort. The phrase “faceroll our way through Naxx” was getting tossed around fairly early upon Wrath's release, and it's not hard to see why. The graphics are same-y and while the layout is interesting, it's killed by the low quality of the architecture, a lot of which has not aged well (check out the skulls that adorn the platform the 4 Horsemen stand on – they wouldn't look out of place in the original Quake). To be fair, it's not all bad. Sapphiron's Lair looks incredible, and running around on the pipes in the construct wing is great fun, but considering the interior of the dungeon isn't anywhere near as impressive visually as the land it's floating over, it seems like a bit of a wasted opportunity to go back and really bring it up to date.

On the plus side, the bosses now all have spoken dialogue, so you get to actually hear them yell at you while you're fighting. Even that isn't without its little quirks, though. Blizzard re-dubbed the audio for Kel'Thuzad as well, whose original voice actor now voices the Lich King. To avoid having a same-ish voice for both the big baddie and his primary underling, all of Kel'Thuzad's audio was re-dubbed, and the general consensus is that it doesn't sound quite right, which is true enough. Kel'Thuzad no longer has his erudite, clipped tone and now kind of sounds more like a generic baddie. Not a deal-breaker, but still weirdly out of step with Blizzard's usual level of polish.

All this adds up to a raid dungeon that's interesting enough at first, especially while it's being learned, but grows stale a lot more quickly than it probably should. It's too easy and too drab to really maintain the kind of long-term interest you need to make something at least marginally as interesting the 20^th time you've run it as it was the first.

It's thrown into even more contrast when you stack it up to some of the newer fights, like...

The Eye of Eternity:

In keeping with Blizzard's policy of bringing out the Big Names for the Wrath expansion, The Eye of Eternity represents the first instance of the players being able to confront and, somewhat shockingly, kill a dragon aspect. In this case it's Malygos, the Blue Dragon Aspect, and the battle doesn't disappoint in terms of scope. There's no trash to deal with whatsoever, but note that in order to even engage Malygos, at least one person in the raid must have a key dropped from Sapphiron in Naxxramas (this is the only current example of an “attunement” needed in Wrath, though it's far less strict than anything that's come before).

This is a fun fight, though. Three phases long, with each phase being radically different in execution and strategy, making it practically a boss rush-style encounter.

Malygos is quite a bit more difficult than any of the bosses in Naxxramas, and provides and excellent challenge to any guilds looking to test their coordination without having to go through a fight quite as punishing gear-wise as Sarth 3D. Skill and awareness will persevere over gear in the Malygos fight, and the excellent pacing and epic feel of the encounter (especially the final third) go a long way towards keeping it interesting without being too frustrating. Expect for your guild to have to burn a few nights to learn him, but once you get the fight down he's a fun challenge each week with some excellent loot.

Note that, like all the bosses in Naxxramas, Malygos has several achievements associated with him but no real “hard mode” to speak of. The closest he gets is simply an achievement for killing him quickly; it doesn't change the fight mechanics beyond the need to simply drop him faster.

Either way, he's a great fight to see if your guild is ready for...

Ulduar:

Pronounced “OOL-doo-arr,” this is the first real, proper, full-sized raid dungeon to hit Wrath, and it's a doozy.

Blizzard clearly heard player's complains that Naxxramas didn't offer much in the way of challenge, because Ulduar has been tuned to grind inexperienced guilds to paste should they attempt their facerolling-Naxxramas tactics against it, particularly the 25-man version. Even trash mobs require genuine care to defeat without casualties, and bosses will often have four or five different mechanics to watch for during a fight, as opposed to the more common two-maybe-three of Naxxramas fights.

Everything also shines much more brightly in Ulduar. The graphical upgrades and design aesthetic that were so painfully lacking in Naxxramas? Not a problem at all here. Ulduar is massive, intricately detailed, and loaded with great voice acting, excellent animation, and even a very well considered plot. Lore heads rightly love the place, and all the care and attention to detail shows in spades. If the reason that Naxxramas seems relatively neglected is because the Blizzard staff were busy fine-tuning Ulduar, then consider all forgiven because it was totally worth it.

And it's accessible, too, pulling the neat trick of being challenging without being exclusive.

While it isn't super punishingly difficult normally, well over half of the bosses in the instance have hard modes similar to Sartharion, and even includes a “secret” boss of sorts who can only be accessed by killing five of the other bosses in their full-on hardmode to obtain the necessary parts for a key to his room. This was clearly a dungeon designed with longevity in mind, and Blizzard has been furiously fine-tuning it since release to make it hard enough to offer a challenge, but not so hard that it becomes inaccessible to most players.

In this regard, they've largely succeeded. Clearing Ulduar from front to back is still a fairly major undertaking for most guilds, but the challenge isn't prohibitive – hammer away at it and you'll get it soon enough. What is prohibitive are the hard modes, which often make the bosses orders-of-magnitude more difficult to defeat, but result in them dropping far better loot, awarding specific achievements, and generally granting bragging rights to the guilds that can pull it off.

Part 7: At The End Of The Day...

So after all that, it really boils down to two things.

Either you already play the game and have this expansion, or you quit a while back (or maybe never started) but your curiosity is piqued.

In the end, we can honestly say that there's enough new stuff here and it's done in a progressive enough fashion that if you gave up on the game earlier, it might be worth another shot. Blizzard has actually gone out of their way to address many of the issues that folks who simply didn't enjoy the usual MMO grind would object to, and along the way have found a great way to inject some single-player grade importance into the player's actions while still making it work in an MMO environment. It's because of stuff like this that the current player base keeps playing; you'll always have the die-hards who will play no matter what, but the fact that Blizzard is able to not only keep virtually everyone on board and continue to grow on top of that is a testament to the fact that there is clearly a lot of time and money spent on keeping this game evolving, and they're not afraid to perform major shakeups to the formula if they think it'll be to the game's benefit.

This is why the game still works.

Overall: 9.5/10

If you're going to get into an MMO, you pretty much can't go wrong with World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King. As far as this type of game is concerned, Blizzard has effectively perfected it, and they're coming up with innovations to the formula faster than their competitors, who seem to be aping conventions that Blizzard themselves are rapidly abandoning. If a game is going to come along that's going to dethrone World of Warcraft, it will have to drastically redefine the entire formula from the ground up; in the meantime, this is pretty much as good as we could hope for, and there's new content on the way, as usual.