World of Warcraft players were given a bit of a surprise when they logged on today! Blizzard decided to push the Infectious Zombie mechanic of the current Scourge Invasion event overnight, throwing gasoline onto the fire of the Scourge uprising.
Players have been a bit disappointed with the Scourge Invasion event, and a big part of that was because there was no real presence of the Scourge in capital cities, one of the main selling points. While players could find a handful of ghoul mobs in cities, there was no real threat.
Now, however, Blizzard has gone ahead and given the players the tools they need to be the menace they want to be. If you’ve ever wanted to be the zombie in a zombie movie, you’re in luck – now, you can totally kill all your friends! Fun!
As a plague needs people, you’ll find the event more active on servers with a higher population. Wyrmrest Accord on the Horde side, for example, was absolutely filled with zombies, as it’s one of the most highly-populated servers one can pick.
Orgrimmar was packed to the point of there being a considerable amount of lag, and even now there are hundreds of skeletons filling the city, especially the Valley of Honor. Silvermoon also was hit rather hard, with players struggling to escape due to the lack of flying in the zone.
If you become a zombie, you’ll have five options to kill others. The first is a simple infectious bite, which is the primary way to transmit the plague to others and create more infectious zombies. When someone has ten stacks of infected – or dies while infected – a new infectious zombie is born.
Infectious zombies also have access to a ranged AoE attack, an ability that calls other zombie NPCs to help, a speed-up buff, and a suicide attack that causes the zombie to explode for high damage to all enemies around them.
As this is a player-vs-player scenario, players will need to have PvP enabled, which is done by right-clicking your portrait. War Mode is not necessary and highly discouraged, as it would put the player in a different instance from players that don’t have War Mode activated!
Once you’re infected, if you don’t want to be anymore, just die! Dying as an infectious zombie will send you to the graveyard like any other death, letting you walk back to your body and ressurect.
This is a pretty sudden kickoff, as most players were expecting to see this arrive with the weekly reset this Tuesday. But with a zombie invasion now in full swing, players have more content to hop into!
