New Heros
To answer these questions, blizzard is creating entirely new campaigns(complete with CG cut-scenes, which lead designer Rob Pardo estimates is about 80-90% the size of Warcraft III. You’ll play human, undead, and night elf arcs. There’s no orc campaign in the main storyline-more on that in a bit.
While there’s no new playable race (alas, no Burning Legion!), there will be one new hero and two new units for the each existing race, along with tons of new spells, items, and abilities. This is the work in progress, so not all the new units for the expansion have been decided on yet, and note that those mentioned here could change over time as a result of Blizzard’s incessant tweaking.
Humans
The new Human hero is the blood mage, an offensive spellcaster with four brutal fire and chaos spells at his disposal. Flame strike is an area-of-affect damage spell, like blizzard, that rains fire on the rargeted area. Mana flare is another area-affect spell spell, specifically aimed at the enemy spellcasters. When cast, Mana Flare sends a "disco-globe" into th sky that will shoot out lightning bolts at any casters(including heros) in the area that attempt to use mana. Third is banish, a single-target spell that you can cast on an enemy of friendly unit to temporarily banish that unit from the material plane. Any banished enemy unit will be unable to attack, while a banished friendly unit will take no damage-perfect for a hero in trouble. Finally, there’s Mark of Fire, a high-level spell that will transform any friendly unit into a tough demon unit with a powerful melee attack.
Alone with the blood mage, two other units are planned for the human side. The spelllbreaker does just what it sounds like, breaks the magic of enemies into two cool abilities. Spell immunity is a passive area-of-affect spell that renders all nearby friendly units immune to debuffs, and spell steal is an auto-cast spell that steals buffs cast on enemy units(like bloodlust) and casts them on nearby friendlies. The other new unit is the dragon hawk, an aerials unit with both ground and air attacks, and one powerful spell, Fog, which can effectively disable enemy towers.
Night Elves
The night Elves are also getting a new, more offense-oriented hero, the warden. Think "elf ninja" here-fragile, with few hit points, but quick stealthy, and deadly. Her two main abilities are essentially mean to be used together. The blink ability allows her to do instant short-range teleports, while the awesome Fan Of Knives causes her to spin around and shoot knives at enemies in all directions. Sneak in, kill-everything, sneak out. Though she’s low on hit points, she’s well protected by her ultimate passive ability, Spirit Of Vengeance, which will hunt down and destroy any unit that actually kills her. It’s a nice trick-kill the warden if you must but then be prepared to die afterwards.
Blizzard had one another new Night Elf unit ready at press time: the mountain giant, a big, beefy melee unit meant to help protect the weaker archers, huntresses, and dryads through the use of his taunt spell, which will draw enemy units to him and away from others.
Undead
The undead are getting a lot nastier with their new hero, the Crypt Lord--a bigger uglier more powerful version of the arachnid crypt fiends, with both offensive and defensive abilities. Using impale, he can skewer a unit with a horn on his head and toss it in the air for major damage. Defensively, he can cast Thorny Shield, which will cause him to burrow underground ad shoot out spikes on his outer shell, making him nearly invulnerable. The crypt lord can also summon two creature types out of his body: Carrion scarabs , tough melee fighters, and locust swarm, which will follow and surround units, issuing constant damage.
No new undead units are done yet, but Blizzard did tell us about the two new abilities for existing ones. First, crypt fiends can now burrow, like Starcraft’s Zerglings, remaining hidden to all enemies but air units. Second, necromancers can now raise skeletal mages along with skeletal warriors, providing an extra layer of ranged attack.
Orcs
Finally, the new Orc hero is a shadow hunter, a troll "Island voodoo master," primarily designed to provide backup healing and defensive support, an early-game weakness of the orcs in Warcraft III. Planned abilities include Hex, basically a variation on the Warcraft II polymorph spell, which turns a targeted enemy unit into a random critter, such as a chicken, pig or frog; Healing wave, a powerful group-healing spell that casts a "chain of healing" among nearby friendly units; Serpant Wand, which summons a staff on the ground that serves as a temporary "tower" with a defensive range attack; and fourth a as-yet-unnamed spell that will render all nearby friendly units totally invulnerable until the hero is stunned or killed.
Shop Till You Drop
Along with new units, each race will also get a player-buildable shop, with unique items to specifically aid each race. The orc shop, for example, will have healing salve for regenerating hit points, while the Night Elves’ shop will sell moonstones, which immediately change the time to night. Blizzard is scattering several new items, and power-ups through the maps as well, such as the Chest of Gold, which awards you an instant 250 gold; the Tome of Retraining, which lets you unspend skill points; and the Philosopher’s Stone, which will change an item you select into a different, random item of the same level.
The frozen Throne will introduce new neutral buildings, the most significant of the which is the tavern, where neutral hero’s-such as an undead ranger- will lounge, available for purchase by any race. Tavern hero’s will function like player-built heroes, with unique spells and abilities, and once purchased can be revived as your altar upon death. (At this point, blizzard plans for neutral heroes to count towards your maximum hero limit-not supplement it.)
Numerous welcome gameplay tweaks are also in store, largely the response in user suggestions. You’ll now have the ability to queue buillding construction-meaning, if you have the resources you can effectively lay out your town in advance and order one worker unit to keep building it up. There’s now much better pathfinding for flying units, which previously tended to get in each other’s way, and in a welcome bit of news for perennial Battle.net losers, a new handicap setting will allow you to reduce the better players unit hit points in advance to even out the challenge.
Speaking of Battle.net, The Frozen Throne will shop with many new multiplayer maps as Warcraft III did, along with two new editing tools for the huge mapmaking community out there. The campaign editor supplements the world editor and will allow users to make their own contiguous campaign-linking maps together with a trigger system-that will appear on the player’s Custom Campaign menu(Blizzard is including a sample custom campaign here-and that’s where you get to play as the orcs, whose role in the main story line was essentially done.) The spell effect editor lets mapmakers edit existing spells in the game for custom maps. You can only modify existing spells-you can’t create new ones from scratch.
I wanna check out the Crypt Lord, sound sweet, But their making this to much like Starcraft from what I heard
