Sands of Ulduran

I think Sands of Ulduran sounds cooler than Strand of the Ancients.

http://www.wegame.com/watch/Jayde_PvP_Video/ - a shortish pvp video featuring a fbe DK in the new battleground. Looks really good, actually - the first WLK thing that I've seen that looks fun, as opposed to cool (Frostfire Bolt), bad (lots of stuff), or handy (Flourish). Plus it's a beautiful zone - reminds me of Azshara with its muted colours.

From what I can tell the battleground is very similar to the Assault style of maps from UT, with an attacking team trying to achieve a number of objectives (capture points, it looks like) and a defending team trying to stop them, and after either they capture the last point or the time runs out the teams swap. I assume that once both teams have finished the team that finished first, or had more points remaining, or something like that is the winner.

There were a couple of siege weapons (demolishers and turrets) and gates for them to knock down, but I didn't really see how much they impacted on the game. I assume that the gates can't be damaged without a tank, though. More importantly, though, the battleground was wide and open, the teams seemed to be moving mostly in tandem, and the battles seemed more balanced rather than one team running one-by-one into the other team's death squad and getting systematically slaughtered. It might be a fluke - the terrain and style of play might not actually promote teamwork more than the existing BGs - but I really hope not. It looks like fun. Of course, considering that as far as I could see the whole lot of them were wearing either TBC raid gear or WLK levelling blues and greens, the video's unsullied by resilience - so it's probably safe to assume that the fun will be sucked out of it in short order.

On a different note, the DK gameplay looks cooler than I'd expected. Being, of course, a longtime Inquisitor fan, the anti-magic side of the DK is what interested me in them originally, but I was put off a bit by how confusing the rune system combined with all their different kinds of melee attacks and diseases was. I could sorta see how they work from this video, though. Frost DKs look especially appealing - heavy meleeists with tons of roots, snares, silences, most of which are 30yard ranged, plus Death's Grasp for yanking, Anti-magic Shell for screwing over casters even more, and what seem to be the remnants of Shatter combos (which are awesome).

Even so, though, I don't think I'll be playing a DK in WLK.

...Heh. Funny, that. I assumed I wouldn't really be keeping up with what was happening with WoW when I quit, at least until Wrath's actual release, yet here I am getting all excited over a 10-minute low-quality movie.

I guess that while you can take the raider out of the raid, you can't take the raid out of the raider.