Oyayu

After getting up and finding a beta invitation in my inbox, I spent most of the day basically downloading the client, and patching it. After a 2gb client download, and another 750mb or so worth of patches, I finally had it all up and ready to go.

The login screen itself is the first striking thing you will notice, as with TBC we’ve had a change of scene and are presented with a striking blue ice tundra, with a skeletal dragon to boot.

I copied my hunter over, but the first port of call was obviously to create a Death Knight, that is a post in its own rights though, so I will leave that until tomorrow when I have escaped the confides of the Death Knight starting area. You can check out some screenshots from my first few escapades as a Death Knight in the WotLK Beta screenshot gallery.

Back to my Hunter. The talent trees have undergone a mass of changes, but to keep it simple at this point of time I decided to revert to my favoured Beastmastery grinding tree, with the new talents in it and the new pet changes, this was still the obvious choice to me. The end-of-tree talents allows you to tame a variety of so-called “exotic” pets - which I was exceedingly excited to hear included the Devilsaurs from Un’goro crater.

Once my spec was taken care of, I hopped on a flight to Un’goro to find myself a Dinosaur. Rawr! It didn’t take me very long, and after a brief spell as the worlds largest ice cube, I had myself a massive new pet. I named him Schozie after a friend, and set him to work to test him out. I have included a video below so you can check him out!

The next thing for me to check out was the barber shop. I was happy to see that both my Undead Rogue and Blood Elf Hunter could both have pig tails now. The interface itself is still a little buggy I found, you had to really get the camera in just the right position to even be able to see your own character, but other than that, paying 7g for a new hair cut is a good way of keeping an expanding economy under control I suppose. Not that my Hunter needed another gold sink after respeccing at least 3 times a week on various whims, it was a massive achievement if my respec costs were ever below 50g…. I digress. The hairstyles on offer are just models you can see on other races in effect, the pig tails are blatently from gnomes, and I’m sure when I dig a little further there will be many other same models from other races, but that doesn’t really matter, it lets you add some variety, which is always good.

So all-in-all, my first few steps into Wrath of the Lich King have been as expected, there are some changes, there are some similarities, hopefully tomorrow I will get around to the nitty-gritty of Northrend and trying out some of the new quests they’ve put in.