Hello everyone, and welcome once again to my World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK) Beta Journal. In this entry I am going to discuss the various things that have taken place in my Beta experience in the last week. This includes running Drak'Tharon Keep, getting to Dalaran, exploring a bit more of the world, and my overall impressions this week.

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The Lich King appears at the end of the instance

I left off last week's beta journal saying I was off to run another instance. Since then I have run the great troll instance of Drak'Tharon Keep several times. As a result of this exploration a preview guide and a gallery have been posted and a video will appear soon. While the preview guide gives a run through of the instance, I wanted to give a little more of an opinion on it here.

Drak'tharon Keep is an amazing little instance. Once again Blizzard seems to have found the right mix of trash creatures and bosses. There are 3 mandatory bosses in the instance and 1 optional one. The pace is very fast between them all and it never lags. Best of all at the end of the instance, with the proper quest, you get to witness a great little cinematic featuring Arthas the Lich King himself. This is a great level up instance that players will not want to miss as they progress through the expansion.

Having reached level 74 in the beta I gained access to Dalaran, something that I was very excited to do. Since getting into the expansion I have wanted to get there but did not want to "cheat" my way there using a port or summon, I wanted to get there naturally. If you can call it that since you end up teleporting there.

When you turn level 74 you will get a quest from one of many quest givers, in my case it was one in Dragonblight, but it can be from any number of places. The quest teleports you automatically to Dalaran where you appear in a room with another quest giver that teaches you how to use the teleportation stones to get to the ground and back, after all the city of Dalaran floats way up in the sky above it's zone.

Once there, I set out exploring the city. Two things that most players notice right away, the city is very compact, and very confusing. With all sorts of loops in the city is is easy to get turned around at first and almost everyone is lost for a little while. Once you have been there a few times though, it becomes second nature to get around in it. It is not quite as good as Ironforge, which is still the easiest city to get around in, but is pretty close.

There is an inn where you can set your hearth to and a wide variety of profession trainers, vendors, and much more. The city has an arena and an instance located right inside of it which make iver very different and very cool! There is however no class trainers or auction house, so as with Shattrath you must use the provided portals to get back to other capital cities to train or sell items. There is a flight point in the city though, but it did not connect to anything for me, so it was back to the ground for me to continue exploring.

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The Lich King appears at the end of the instance

I was told I needed to get the flight point from the tower in Dragonblight to get out of Dalaran to the south so that is where I headed. I had not quested much in Dragonblight yet, so took the opportunity to do so, especially around Wyrmrest Temple (referred to as the big tower in Dragonblight). Once I got the flight point there, I could freely fly to and from Dalaran.

My impression of the Wrath of the Lich King beta continues to be very high this week. The content I have seen is amazing, and it just keeps getting better as I move up in the level range. The zone of Zul'Drak as an example is stunning, and very different from any other zone yet seen. The whole zone is a giant temple that you move around on from one layer to another.

This week with the patch Blizzard dropped the experience requirement to level a little more this week (around a 10% drop) which should make leveling a bit easier. I did not move up far on the experience bar due to this, but leveling still felt a bit slow, so this is a welcome improvement.

The only real issue I have had with the beta is getting into it and staying in it. Being a beta server it is down quite often for maintenance, crashes frequently, has strange lag spikes, and more odd behavior. These always seem to occur when I get time to get into it, and start a group or start to quest. Oh well, it is beta, so I can't really get mad about it. It is frustrating at times though, especially when it happens several days in a row at the time I have to explore in it.

Level 80 pre-built characters have become available on the servers, so I have started to look at higher level content now and will run through a few high level zones this week and weekend. So with that in mind, I leave you until next week.


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Disclaimer: The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of the Ten Ton Hammer network or staff.


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Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

About The Author

Byron has been playing and writing about World of Warcraft for the past ten years. He also plays pretty much ever other Blizzard game, currently focusing on Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone, while still finding time to jump into Diablo III with his son.

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