Wintergrasp Lake Opens in WotLK Beta 8770

On Friday, August 8 at 2pm PST, Blizzard shutdown the beta servers to implement a new build. The file size is 489MB.

Wintergrasp Lake keeps track of your rank and displays it onscreen with a buff on your top-right corner. It seems certain ranks give you access to certain features.

Wintergrasp Lake (World pvp) is now open. A bit buggy, but players can now test and report bugs until the next patch. When a siege vehicle is available at one of the bases, you can hover your mouse over it and you will see an arrow symbol that indicates you can aboard it. The UI will immediately shift to the siege weapon’s UI mode with that vehicle’s special abilities. The Alliance Wintergrasp Siege Engine has a Ram ability that does 100 damage and knocksback an enemy. To use the canon in order to siege a building you can click the X (cancel button) to dismount, then place your mouse over the canon. You will see the mouse cursor transform into a round bolt. Click it and your character mans the canon. You will see a up and down bar popup on the top corner below your character icon. This level positions the angle of your canon for a close or large range.

There is a smaller siege weapon named Wintergrasp Catapult, of Undead Forsaken design, that does a lot of damage to vehicles and players with a constant stream of fire in shape of a cone cast in front of the vehicle. It lasts around 8 seconds, and you can click it again to continue doing damage.  You can obliterate a player that is running on their feet with this fire streams by chasing them while they flee.  The Wintergrasp Catapult vehicles are perfect to engage the bigger siege weapons in close proximity.

The Wintergrasp Shredders have a rocket jump ability that sets you flying across the field through the air, but has a 5 minutes cooldown. This may be used in emergency situations when you need a quick escape route.  It has a smaller jump that helps narrows a gap of distance or keep your shredder in boosted movements that make it hard for enemies to click you. You can use the blades to cause damage to vehicles and players, and the best use for the Shredder definitely is the rocket launcher to work as a anti-air unit. Siege Weapons can destroy the Shredder pretty fast. Keep moving constantly to avoid siege projectiles.

The Wintergrasp Flying Machine has two attack modes. One is a missile that is shot in the same direction as your airplane, the other one is a series of missiles dropped down toward targets below. There is an ability to increases the airplane’s speed for a sudden escape.

Right now Wintergrasp is a bit buggy, but I could see siege weapons destroying buildings slowly. You can attack bridges, and you can see chunks bursting in all directions, until the building or bridge are destroyed completely. I noticed you can take control of buildings by staying near them for certain amount of time. The flag will then shift to your faction: Alliance or Horde.  Seems to work like Halaa in Nagrand. You can see a blue/red bar on the top-right indicating who is winning.

I am looking forward to playing Wintergrasp once the bugs have been ironed out. That won’t stop me from trying out the bugged version, nevertheless. Share your comments with other fans.