World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Preview

GameSpot has hammered out a World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King preview after spending some hands-on time with the new Death Knight class at Blizzard’s Worldwide Invitational event.

When you first enter the world with your Death Knight you have no talent points to spend and a very limited array of skills, but thankfully this is rather rapidly corrected as you reach Light’s Hope Chapel and meet the Death Knight trainer the aptly named Siouxsie the Banshee along with a few other associated NPCs. Tooled up with 45 talent points to spend you can take advantage of the three skill trees, though there aren’t many additional skills available until you clock up a few more levels.

The Frost tree also allows you to give your weapon a temporary icy enchantment, which adds frost damage to your attacks and gives your melee blows a chance to lower your enemies’ frost resistance, as well as imbuing your weapon with a nifty blue glow. This, combined with the red glow imbued from one of the speed-boosting talents make the Death Knight a rather impressive-looking foe as he slashes those before him.

The Blood tree is more useful in parties, with abilities to improve your Blood Presence, boosting your total health and those of your party, as well as granting the useful Mark of Blood. This spell will have particular use in instances and party running, as it grants your entire party 10% of their maximum health when a marked creature dies, as well as transferring five percent of the healing done to the marked creature to all your party members.

The final tree we got to play with was Unholy. This is reminiscent of the skills attributed to the Necromancer in Diablo II, and looks likely to come into its own at higher levels when you can summon minions to fight by your side. It brings back the old favourite spell Corpse Explosion, as well as boosting the strength of you and your summoned minions and increasing the damage and effects of your disease-related spells.

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