Dragon Army - World of Warcraft Arthas Icecrown Patch Released

Posted: 5454 days ago

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World of Warcraft Arthas Icecrown Patch Released

It’s finally here. After years of waiting to see the conclusion of the epic tale of the fallen hero, players in the World of Warcraft will finally get to meet Arthas face to face in the final big patch of Wrath of the Lich King.

Patch 3.3 goes live today at 11am PST on US servers and will go live tomorrow in Europe at 11am CET.

Arthas has been sitting in Icecrown since players fought to the end of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne.

Fans have been playing World of Warcraft for five years to find out what happened to the tragic hero. Having had numerous meetings with the Lich King during the third expansion, including a long chain quest in Icecrown itself, and the ability to travel back in time through the Caverns of Time to play through the Culling of Stratholme, now the end has come.

Blizzard have pulled out all of the stops for the Icecrown Citadel, it is no exaggeration to say this will be the biggest and the best raid instance ever conceived, driven by both a strong narrative and the chance for players to access the new Tier 10 loot.

One of the decisions Blizzard has taken is to open up Icecrown progressively rather than all at once. This will force players to focus on the carefully and lovingly crafted boss fights episodically before building up to the final encounter with Arthas himself.

Like Naxxaramas before it, Icecrown Citadel will be split into four wings, each wing will represent another level of the citadel which will be unlocked over a period of months. Each wing contains three boss fights and one final boss in order to complete the wing. Players will only be able to face Arthas once his four lieutenants have been defeated.

The Lower Spire, which is the first wing of the citadel will see players encounter Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, the Icecrown Gunship Battle and Arthas’ most powerful Death Knight, Deathbringer Saurfang.

For non-raiders there will also be 5-man instance content to explore with Icecrown which will give casual gamers a chance to experience some of the stunning new citadel.

In addition to Icecrown Citadel, players will also see noticeable changes to the way the game plays in the day-to-day activities. The Looking for Group mechanics have been changed radically so that players will be able to get into dungeons quicker and easier than before without waiting for 30 minutes spamming the trade channel with “LF1M Tank daily hc”. The main change is that players will be able to instance with others from different servers in much the same way that the Battlegrounds work for pvp.

Anyone who is familiar with the addon QuestHelper will long ago learned how much easier it is to grind and quest when mobs are highlighted on the map with directions of where you need to go to kill your quest target. Blizzard have integrated a similar system into 3.3 to make questing easier and less frustrating.

All in all, 3.3 looks set to serve up some of the best content Blizzard has ever delivered. Quite how they will top this with Cataclysm seems impossible at this stage. However, as Greg Street told IGN: "We've got to make everything more epic than the last. That’s something I used to stress about a lot. 'There's no way we to top this! What can we possibly do?' Every time I think that, our team manages to pull something out."

Source: http://gnews.com/entertainment/World-of-Warcraft-Arthas-Icecrown-Patch-Released-912831010546.html

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