The introductory event for World of Warcraft’s Wrath of the Lich King expansion is in full swing today. Players can now be infected by a zombie plague, attack other players for their delicious brains, pass the infection on and build an army of the undead.

I headed off to Booty Bay in the tropical jungle of Stranglethorn Vale to check the disease out for myself, where boxes of plagued grain had been spotted.

Having acquired the disease from a compliant undead outside the capital of Stormwind, I headed south to the jungle while the timer ticked down.

Upon dying and coming back as a ghoul, I checked out my new abilities. As a zombie, you do piddly damage and you move painfully slow. Alone, you’re a sitting duck. Seems appropriate.

You also get a special attack that reduces the target’s armor, a projectile vomit that slows enemies in the area and infects them if they stay too long in the cloud, a lurch that lets you and other nearby zombies more faster, a feeding growl that attracts other nearby NPC zombies and a self-sacrificing explosion that infects everyone in the area.

Zombified, your health ticks slowly down. You have to attack things to get it back. You can zombify the ambient non-player humanoids, and with the feeding growl, you can lead them around a little bit.

I raised a few zombie ogres, and we ganged up on a level 45 druid who needed to kill the ogres for a quest. After taking him down, he reappeared as an undead, and I sent him on his way with a friendly “Brains!”

Working my way down to Booty Bay, I discovered a couple other ghouls had the same idea as me and were camping the gates to the town, having already infected the goblin guards. We tagged a bunch of mid-level players as they left the town, but they probably found someone to clean off the disease before it killed them.

A pack of zombies is deadlier than the sum of their parts. With enough of them, you can maintain a fast lurching speed and rapidly tear off people’s armor. Even with these advantages, a player character isn’t going to have any trouble killing or running from the zombies.

There’s Argent Dawn healers at the gates of the big cities, cleaning off the disease for free and exploding any zombies who happen to come near, which is what eventually happened to me. Paladins, priests and druids can all cure the disease as well. At the moment, there’s no real danger of an epidemic. It doesn’t really seem like the kind of threat that will shake the world up and trigger the events of the new expansion.

However, one of the Blizzard designers said on the forum “It sure does seem containable, doesn’t it? ”. Looks like things are going to get worse before they get better.

Popularity: 2% [?]