BradyGames Guide: Wrath of the Lich King

Creating a strategy guide for any game is a huge undertaking, but creating something for the likes of the behemoth that is World of Warcraft takes it to a whole new level. Thankfully for us mere mortals, Bradygames have taken this challenge head on and produced a 345page guide Wrath of the Lich King jam packed full of Warcrafty goodness.

I was in the middle of a play session when the postman arrived with my copy, which was good timing as I was in need of some assistance finding a certain location on the map, this was all part of my ‘Operation must get all fog of war gone’ (a small annoyance of mine.) I quickly found the right page and was greeted by a splendid looking map, identical to the in game ones so no chance of getting things confused. Around its borders were smaller thumbnail styled images of the major locations within the map, and using it’s helpful lettering key, where a letter next to the thumbnail is represented on the big map, it took me all of 5seconds to realise I was totally in the wrong place.

Maps are just the start of it though, and while the map section has been put together superbly, the guide offers a great deal more.

Each class has its own section towards the start of the book, each containing detailed information on spells and abilities, talent trees and also a section going into a bit of detail regarding any changed spells and talents, along with any new ones. This was a nice surprise for me as I wasn’t expecting anything as detailed to be found within its glossy covers. The Death Knight gets a nice chunk of pages dedicated to itself, well, we need to make the new guy welcome…don’t we? Along with a similar setup to the other classes in terms of spells and talents, there’s also a very handy quest analysis on all of the starting area quests all Death knights are faced with.

No MMO is complete without quests and Wrath of the Lich King is no exception, it’s probably good then that nestled away towards the back of the book is almost fifty pages of questing data. You need to know who starts or finishes a quest, no problem! You want to know the rewards in terms of exp, gold, and items, again no problem!

I was particularly interested in the dungeons section, more importantly to see how more depth would actually be put into it. After spending a good while reading through the databanks of information regarding some of the dungeons I myself will be encountering in the next few days, it’s safe to say that it should now be a lot smoother in terms of the nasty stuff i.e. me dying a gruesome and horrible death. Each dungeon is treated to a various bits of information, be it the basics such as where it’s located and how many people you’ll need, to detail boss strategies. One thing I did find handy was the quest section, where it told of any quests that could be completed within the respective dungeon, something I found very handy as last night I was 100k’s worth of experience better off.

Professions and Achievements are also covered, much in the same way as quests, the later being very handy as I find the in game achievement UI to be very cumbersome, having them all down in front of me is a lot quicker than scrolling through section after section for what I’m after.