Via Gamespy and Worldofwar.net, we finally have a good idea of what rolling a Death Knight will be like. A lot of the rumors seem to have panned out, but others have not. All I know is that at this point, I am full speed ahead to make a Death Knight my new main come WoTLK. There's a lot of meaty info to dig into, so let's get to it after the break.

World of Raids has more info up from the Games for Windows spread about Wrath of the Lich King. Eliah posted the zone list yesterday, and while we've heard some of this stuff before, there are a few juicy new tidbits.

• On the Sunwell, it seems the Burning Legion is using the Mana Forges in Netherstorm to power the Sunwell and summon Kil'Jaeden. The instance will have 6-8 bosses, and Kil'Jaeden will not be fully summoned when you fight him (which is supposed to explain how 25 level 70s can drop him).
• Dalaran will have one or two instanced dungeons in it (!), and will not have Auction Houses. It will have portals, including maybe one to Shattrath.
• There's some good Death Knight info, including a new AoE spell called Death and Decay. Blood runes will be damage oriented, Unholy runes will be utility and DoTs, and Frost runes will be CC-ish abilities.
• Finally, Inscription will give players the ability to sell scrolls (is it just me, or did the developers clearly say at BlizzCon that inscribers wouldn't sell scrolls?), and they will only be able to update "core spells"-- Priest's Mind Control no, Hunter Freeze Traps yes. Get ready for a round of QQing about what "core spells" are.

Don't get too excited-- the expansion is still a long way away (and Zul'Aman is coming much sooner than Arthas will). But it is good news, especially the idea of dungeons inside Dalaran. Creatively implemented dungeons seeped in lore are always a good thing.

Update: Changed Mind Control back to Mind Vision. And apparently it was just me who thought devs said no scrolls at BlizzCon.

Thanks, Meth!

Can you imagine if every time someone talked about healing, they called it "adding blood" instead? In China, the word people use for "health" is "xue," which means "blood" (and is pronounced a bit like "shweh"). Traditionally in Chinese role-playing games, the health bar (or "blood bar") is red, instead of green.

Now when you think about it, having a "blood bar" does make a certain sort of sense. After all, when you get hit by monsters, you lose blood, and any healing you take from others would have to somehow restore your blood to your body as well as sealing up all the holes in your flesh. Of course without healing, all those holes in the flesh would also prevent a warrior from swinging his sword around so freely, or at least make him limp a bit. But realism isn't really the issue here -- the idea of "blood" or "health" as a measurable quantity is just something we need as a symbol to represent the video game mechanics in an emotionally meaningful way.

A game like WoW can't possibly be as complicated as real life; it would hardly be as fun as it is if it were. Instead, it needs to use real life metaphors as an access point to get you involved in the game, while in the end it's still all about numbers. Stripped of metaphorical words like "health" (or "blood"), playing World of Warcraft might look a bit like this:

Player 4837 says, "I'll reduce your unit's primary points with my unit's special 'large-scale point reduction ability!' Pwned you!! haha!" only to be countered with Player 7490's response: "Oho! but my unit can use my secondary points to exchange for primary points, and make up for this loss! Noob!"

Talk about boring! But underneath all the "fireballs" and "greater heals," this shifting of numbers around is exactly what we're doing when we play, no matter where we are or what language we speak.

In China, of course, the points and numbers are exactly the same, but it makes sense that the underlying metaphor would be somewhat different. For them, "adding blood" to a wounded teammate feels just as natural as when we say we are "healing" them -- but when you translate their "blood" metaphor into our language, it gets pretty weird!

Well color me impressed. While the rest of us are talking about soloing Stratholme and UBRS, Compactd of Bloodscalp isn't bothering-- he's already turning the Outland instances into solo material. He's walked all over Blood Furnace (he says it took him 2 hours), all by his lonesome.

I'm no expert on Pally specs or gear, but if his gear currently on the Armory is any indication, he's specced holy, but geared like a DPSadin, with 674 spell damage. He's wearing a Shaman helm, strangely enough, and while I don't know if he actually carried it through BF with him, he's also running with the Six Demon Bag. Surely a spell damage trinket would be better than that, right?

But I guess you can't complain with results. Next up: Slave Pens?

[ via Paladin Sucks ]

I'm not sure whether we should file this under "I'm glad Blizzard doesn't do this" or "I wish Blizzard would do this!" but Chinese gaming company Moliyo (who run the MMO Cabal Online) is offering banned players an interesting method by which to reactivate their accounts. What do you have to do? Simple! Donate blood, and they'll unlock your banned account within three days. And if you're an active player, you can receive a special game account for participating.

This is, to my knowledge, a completely unique way of going about reinstating banned players -- while supporting a good cause. And asking players to donate blood is no more time-consuming than Blizzard's usual procedure for restoring stolen accounts, which requires notarized documentation proving your identity. (And will still likely take several weeks for Blizzard to investigate and restore any missing property, which doesn't always happen.) Perhaps Moliyo's way is easier in the long run -- though, being a needle-phobic, I'll stick to the usual customer service queues.

People have long noted that quests to gather animal parts usually have illogically low drop rates. There are enough hoofless zhevras, talonless harpies, eyeless buzzards, and brainless basilisks running around Azeroth to confuse a whole university of evolutionary biologists. ("Hey, maybe they knew adventurers were killing them for their horns, so they evolved illusionary horns! Huh? Huh?") Strangely, bosses always have their organs, but only if you're on a quest for them. Maybe that's how they got to be bosses, because they weren't randomly missing their hearts and ears and such.

The lore's explanation for this is that when you're fighting the beasts and demons, a lot of their organs get squished into an unusable state. So if you don't find a horn on that satyr, you chopped it in half with your sword, and if you don't find a brain in that ogre, you used Mind Flay one too many times. This works for most things, but one of the Hellfire Peninsula quests really tests this idea.

You're supposed to return orc blood to an apothecary. A warrior guildmate of mine got extremely frustrated by the low drop rate, and asked, "I'm hitting these orcs with an axe. Shouldn't there be blood all over?" Try as we might, we couldn't think of an explanation for it. A mage might have fried up all the blood with a fireball, and maybe a warlock or hunter's pet could have drank the blood before the character got to it (ew), but a warrior can't really do anything to keep blood from being unusable.

Can you think of a reason why the blood might not have been there? Have you run into anything as confusing as this while looking for various body parts?