World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm Facts Emerge

14 Jun 2010 at 17:21:10 by Bill Vaughan

Following a press event at the weekend, several juicy new facts on World of Warcraft's upcoming expansion, Cataclysm have been revealed.

The long list of interesting tidbits to come from the event is topped off with the news that the heralded Path of the Titans system that was due to arrive in the expansion has been scrapped. Instead, the Inscription profession will be sexed up, and will add a medium glyphs tier.

One of the most popular and well-known events in Warcraft lore, the War of the Ancients, will be re-enacted in a new Caverns of Time instance, which is planned to go live between patch 4.1 and patch 4.3. The heroic Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep instances are also due to arrive sometime in patch 4.1.

Many of WoW's starting zones have been redesigned to include phase technology, doing away with the need to 'queue' for that certain quest mob because it will only appear for the person with the quest, and several of the old quests that required players to gather X number of Y item have been scrapped in favour of story-based missions.

The Exodar will have a portal to Stormwind, and the new Alliance race, the Worgen, will get their own little district within Darnassus.

The new Guild Achievements system will include rewards for completing the original dungeons. While we're on the topic of those, vanilla favourites Stratholme, Scholomance and Dire Maul will all be revamped to fit in with the current theme in Cataclysm, and made into level 85 instances. It's said that there will be new bosses too, so if you're like me and have a certain amount of nostalgia for those places, make the most of them now before the expansion hits.

The zone of Westfall as we know it has been changed dramatically, and most quests there will focus on the Cataclysm event rather than the Defias, as they do now.

The daily quest hub will be Tol Barad, which also happens to be the PvP zone, like Wintergrasp is currently. There will also be vehicles here like Wintergrasp too.

The expansion will be the biggest downloadable patch that WoW has ever had, but Blizzard will be releasing it in increments over a four month period before the game launches, as each redesigned zone has been completed. In other words, as soon as the first download starts, we know to mark our calendars.

We can expect a pre-launch in-game event similar to the zombie invasion that hit WoW before WotLK, with elementals bombarding the game's major cities more frequently and with more intensity as the launch day approaches. This invasion will begin three weeks before launch, and the last three days is predicted to be “utter chaos”.

One of the last nuggets of new info is that the entry-level raid will be the Bastion of Twilight, and the end boss will be Cho'gall, leader of the Twilight's Hammer.

As always, keep on top of all the latest WoW news over on our dedicated WoW channel.

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