#0 - Oct. 23, 2008, 4:39 a.m.
Heres a few tips to help you make your zombie apocalypse the best you can.
1. Safety in numbers. As you've probably noticed the zombies are really squishy. Really, really squishy. So group up. The more the merrier.
2. Building the Army. After you've gathered your potential zombies to be, gather somewhere quite. Outside the capital gates, hidden in unused corners. Anywhere lacking in players and, most importantly, those damn healers. Get one guy infected from the crates and gather round, as soon as he turns he should explode, infecting the rest of you, and run back to his corpse. After the ten minutes pass and the main group has popped zombie mode you should have at least 5 zombies. Then just mangle and infect anybody else who wants in and start moving.
3. Keeping healthy. As i said, zombie are squishy. To combat this use the spit attack as often as possible, and try to hit as many of your undead brethren as you can. It only gives a small heal, a few hundred hit points at most, but with 40 of you spamming it every CD it really adds up. Furthermore, any non-zombies will be infected and slowed. Leading us nicely onto our next point.
4. Converting the unbelievers. Annoyingly, there'll be plenty of people trying to get in your way. Any combat NPC's will attack you on site, as will a lot of players. For both the tactic is the same, just zerg em down. Spam the spit attack on everything and everyone and pop mangle every CD. Not only does it damage and infect your targets, it reduces their armor by 3%. I've seen this stack up to 20 times, making it very effective for taking down just about anything. If ranged classes attack you, spit em and have someone pop Lurch. This will slow them and cause all zombies nearby to get a pretty good sped buff. Once 10 or more zombies catch a target, there is little they can do to survive.
5. NPC Zombies. They pretty much suck, all they do is auto-attack and, although they do infect, they attack randomly and often choose terrible targets, such as healers or lvl 10 civilians, the latter making terrible, terrible zombies. However, if you manage to get a decent amount of em (each person can command up to four with one of the zombie spells) they can help the zerg. Still, you'll mainly use them as cannon fodder to distract guards and healers.
6. Argent Healers. Avoid them like the plague. Well, not the plague, avoid them like the cure. They spam some sort of holy cure, which jumps like chain lightning, hitting up to 4 at a time. The debuff lasts for 10 seconds and stacks. 3 stacks = death. Unless you have an decent amount of zombies just lurch past em as quickly as possible. The one NPC zombie you'll recruit for killing them is not worth the 5 player zombies you'll lose. However, one you've got 10 or more zombies you can just focus fire em down and only recieve one, maybe two, stacks before they're dead.
7. Infection targets. Pretty much anywhere is good to attack, capital cities being my personal favourite. Sure there's more resistance, but your unwilling recruits will be a higher level and, lets be honest, its much more fun destroying a capital than it is some small town or quest hub. Battlemasters and Auctioneers make good zombies, and there tend to be more people around to eat. Just watch out for those healers. Sadly faction leaders can't be infected. I tried and not only was Thrall immune, he crit me for 28k ;< However, Vol'jin and the gnome king can be infected, so do your best to kill that damn gnome.
Bonus points if its an enemy faction capital, although any is good.
8. The Shade. Rumours have been going round that somewhere in each capital is a undead shade that can only be seen while in zombie mode. This shade supposedly patrols the city and gives a quest to any enterprising undead that manage to find it. This is uncomfirmed at the minute, but I'm doing my best to find it.
9. Brains!
10. To the doubters. Xerses helpfully provided 4 most excellent reasons to join us for dinner.
1) Being able to speak, trade and interact with the opposing faction
2) Temporary unfriendly to every former NPC and player, with no long-term consequences whatsoever. Free combat with said NPCs without affecting your reputation.
3) New form with its own abilities, with which you can also infect other players and eventually make them friendly.
4) Freedom of doing 1, 2 and 3 in any location. - Xerses
11. The Apocalypse. Pictures of our unholy crusade in action ;D
http://img159.imageshack.us/my.php?image=zombies1un1.jpg
http://img233.imageshack.us/my.php?image=zombes2uu2.jpg
http://img233.imageshack.us/my.php?image=zombies3mb0.jpg - Rounded of Stormreaver
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjMiDZIY1bM - A lovely video nicely summing up the situation in game and on the forums.
That about wraps up this episode, stay tuned for updates and hopefully pictures of our zombie apocalypse. If you can think of anything I've missed, please post it and I'll edit it in, along with pics of your scourge crusade.
[edit] Are links clickable now? :-)