This Persistent Life: Lich King Predictions

Death Knights will be no big deal

Think back to when The Burning Crusade launched. Everyone and their dog rolled up Blood Elf or Draenei alts. Fast forward two months, and the new races' representation across most servers seemed to normalize. I predict the same thing will happen with Death Knights. Once people start hitting the new level cap and unlock the ability to create Death Knights, there will be a veritable surge. But once the luster wears off, it'll be back to business as usual. Now, I won't deny that the idea of Death Knights has a certain cool factor that could easily lend itself to Rogue and Hunter-style overrepresentation. I just think that people are underestimating how attached they're going to be to the max-level characters they unlocked the Death Knight class with in the first place.

Blizzard has openly stated that, apart from the unique way in which the class is made available, Death Knights will no more powerful, inherently (theoretically, anyway), than any of the other classes. Taking this into consideration, the allure of being able to experience endgame level 80 content with a character you've dumped tons of time into will probably edge out the novelty of the Death Knight class for anyone who isn't truly whole-hog about the idea.

That said, I think the class sounds pretty bad ass. The whole rune-carving-in-lieu-of-rage-or-mana thing sounds pretty enticing, and the idea of tanking with a two-handed weapon without being laughed out of an instance makes my mouth water.

I just hope that the initial deluge of Death Knights don't ruin it for everyone else.

Siege weapons will be a novelty, and not much else

It pains me to make this prediction, and I truly hope that I'm wrong, but I don't think siege weapons will be meaningfully represented outside of the planned battleground that's being designed around them. The designers talked a big game during the Blizzcon presentation; among other things, they mentioned that they were devising ways of implementing the siege mechanics into the game's PvE elements. But it's simply hard for me to envision these sorts of game elements existing outside of a few token examples.

It's a no brainer to assume that the Lake Wintersgrasp, the full-on PvP zone that's being designed into Northrend, will have siege elements built into it. As a whole, I'm very enthusiastic about this zone; it shows that Blizzard is taking steps to remedy the existing non-instanced PvP deficit that currently exists in the game. But I'm just not buying the fact that "siege warfare" will be anything more involved than Halaa-style bombing runs. Again, I hope I'm wrong.

That said, it would be lame of me to offer such a blanket criticism without making some constructive suggestions, so here goes: make it so that players with the engineering profession can create siege engines, or else other sorts of devices that interact with them in some way. This kind of player investment will really give the concept legs, and it will pave the way for a more involved implementation down the road. Secondly, it would be cool if the designers were taking the long view with siege warfare, and thinking of ways to make it jibe with such inevitable additions as guild housing, and guild-oriented PvP.

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