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Comment by Tyrsenus

This page is for the Lich King "placeholder" which was used in classic Naxxramas. The Lich King would speak (but would not appear) to Kel'Thuzad from Northrend after players defeated Sapphiron (see screenshot), and it was picked up by the Wowhead client. See here for his other appearances.

The lore below is outdated, but I'm leaving it for posterity. Visit Warcraft Wiki for updated lore: https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Lich_King

The Lich King is the coalescence of the souls of Ner'zhul and Arthas Menethil, creator of the Plague of Undeath, and the master of the Scourge.

Ner'zhul, elder shaman of the orc Shadowmoon Clan, was deceived by Kil'jaeden into binding himself and the Horde to the service of the Burning Legion. He sought to defy Kil'jaeden after discovering his true intentions, but Kil'jaeden was warned by Gul'dan of his impending betrayal. Ner'zhul was allowed to live to witness the corruption of the Horde and the subsequent First and Second Wars. When the Alliance invaded Draenor following the Second War, Ner'zhul began opening portals to other worlds in attempt to escape Kil'jaeden's wrath for failing to conquer Azeroth. Upon crossing through a portal, Kil'jaeden apprehended Ner'zhul and tore his spirit from his flesh, but kept him alive, allowing him a chance to still serve the Legion. Kil'jaeden granted him unfathomable power, and imbued his soul to a runeblade and a suit of ancient armor, creating the entity known as the Lich King. Kil'jaeden sealed the armor and blade within a frozen crystal and cast it into Azeroth, where it fell upon Icecrown Glacier on the remote arctic continent of Northrend. Using his will alone, the Lich King created the Plague of Undeath, killing the denizens of Northrend and resurrecting them as his mindless slaves. His human agent Kel'Thuzad brought the Plague to Lordaeron.

Prince Arthas Menethil, a paladin of the human nation of Lordaeron, was assigned to investigate the Plague. He watched in horror as citizens fell to the disease and were resurrected to fight against him, diminishing his faith in humanity as well as forcing him to question his peers and motives. He tracked down and killed Kel'Thuzad, but the undead holocaust continued unchecked. Seeking to end the Plague at its source, he traveled to Northrend, where he acquired Frostmourne, believing it could grant him the power to end the Plague and be the salvation of his people. Unfortunately, Frostmourne was the runeblade Kil'jaeden bound to the soul and will of the Lich King. The Lich King's voice commanded him, and proved to be the tipping point that made him turn from the Light and humanity. He returned to Lordaeron as the first death knight of the Scourge, killing his father the king, laying waste to Silvermoon, corrupting the Sunwell, resurrecting Kel'Thuzad as a lich, invading Dalaran, and assisting in summoning Archimonde into Azeroth. With the arrival of Archimonde, the Lich King was no longer needed by the Burning Legion and secretly turned against them to ensure his survival.

Following Archimonde's defeat on Mount Hyjal, Arthas eliminated the remaining Burning Legion and human forces from Lordaeron. The Lich King's power began to wane and Arthas was called back to Northrend. There he was met with opposition from Illidan Stormrage and his new Sin'dorei and Naga forces. Arthas defeated (but did not kill) Illidan, and rose the steps of Icecrown Citadel to meet his master. At the Lich King's command, he burst open the frozen throne, releasing the enclosed armor. Upon crowning himself with his helm, Arthas' soul conjoined with Ner'zhul's, creating one of the most powerful entities to ever walk Azeroth.

More details on the history of the Lich King are outlined in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne, as well as in The Birth of the Lich King, The Lich King Triumphant, and the official site.

The Lich King is a primary, but thus far unseen antagonist for both Alliance and Horde in the World of Warcraft. He commands the Scourge forces in the Eastern and Western Plaguelands, Stratholme, Scholomance, Naxxramas, Eversong Woods, Ghostlands and the Isle of Quel'danas. He will have a more pronounced role and players will have the opportunity to contend with him in the upcoming expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.

Comment by 31441

Blizzard had pointed out that we don't fight or kill Illidan. It's more like getting in his way. And I hope to god that we don't ever fight the Lich King as that can create major havoc in the story line of Warcraft in general.

Comment by 16943

Blizzard did point out that we "get in his way", but i do beleive in the EU forums a CM pointed out that we just don't get to kill him in this expansion, kind of like a Majordomo thing where a chest drops or something.

Comment by Allakhazam

Err, no, you've mixed places. Hyjal and Northrend are way different areas, separeted by thousands of miles.

Edited, Jul 31st 2006 at 8:37pm EDT by Antlan

Comment by Allakhazam

i want a pic from him!...and an autograph :P

Comment by Allakhazam

actually the lichking is Arthas AND Ner'zhul... instead of reading the books in wow, you should play Warcraft 3:Reign of Chaos, and its Expansion, The Frozen Throne... blizzard sometimes mixes their own stories around alot... Arthas was once a Paladin, wanting to much to rescue his people from the Scourge, even took a cursed sword, to kill his enemies... the sword took his soul, corrupted him in the process, he became the champion to the Lich King... in the end he Freed the Imprisoned Lich King, the ex-orc Ner'Zhul, leading shaman of the horde, took his magical helmet, created by the burning legion as a vessel that contains his spirit, his soul, his mind... as both minds, both entities, merged, a new creature of unnamed power was created... and that one is waiting on the icy continent, known as northrend...

well, i dont think the lich king will be able to be attacked, until there will be another addon, with northrend as a new continent...

SPOILER ALERT: if anyone wanna see the merging of both: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cax2oTsiaRo

TIP: for everyone who own Warcraft3(+TFT), to watch the FMVs without getting in the game, just open the MPQ files with Windows Media Player...

-GLORY TO THE SCOURGE-

Comment by Allakhazam

so you can see the lich king for the very first time in-game?

Comment by Allakhazam

The Lich King is ARTHAS, I remember the video when he puts Ner'zhul helm on his head, and the lich king says "Now, we are one" (great video, btw). So, are we seeing Arthas here? or something else? like another lich :P

Comment by Allakhazam

Could someone get a pic of the hologram?

Comment by Allakhazam

A Kel'Thuzad : Im gonna kill you
B Lich King : But Kel i'm your father
A Kel'Thuzad : oh noes

Comment by Allakhazam

Is there anyway we can get to northrend? Or the area where atrhas is?

Comment by Allakhazam

Private server?

Comment by Allakhazam

What hologram? What pic?

Comment by Allakhazam

http://www.scrollsoflore.com/warlock/worldmap.gif

Comment by Allakhazam

So which would this be, Arthas or Ner'zhul? I actually don't think I've come across a book yet that talks of the death of Arthas, so maybe that's who it is.

Edited, Mar 14th 2007 7:30pm by johngoforth

Edited, Mar 14th 2007 7:35pm by johngoforth

Comment by Allakhazam

ok first of all i dont really think that u can compare it to Star Warz... just cause there are holograms Naxx is basically a mad scientists lab....
so you would think that they would have better Technology then the regular races of Azeroth.... + with modern technology we already have holograms not very 3D but we have them for warfare & spying on enemy territories.... & things like that...
ok just so i know has anyone seen the Lich King anywhere otehr then in the opening video of WoW?

Comment by Allakhazam

Does anyone happen to have a picture of him ingame?

I wanna see what World of Warcraft's done to him.

Comment by Allakhazam

I'd love to see a pic of the hologram if anyone can get one.

Comment by Allakhazam

Here's what bothers me about this, and hopefully Allak can shed light on this with their further investigation. Isn't the Lich King suppose to be sitting on the Frozen Throne, high up in the mountains of Kalimdor? In fact if you venture into that wonderful, demon filled area of Winterspring and into one of the caves there you find an instance that is currently blocked by a large metal gate (not unlike the ones in Stormwind, only more ominous looking).

Comment by Allakhazam

From what I've read, the first and true Lich King was named Ner'zhul, and Kel'Thuzad was his follower. Kel'Thuzad brought the plague to Lordaeron, and he is the one who named the minions of the Lich King the 'Scourge'. Arthas came along later when the Lich King's ice throne was failing. The best two books I've found on this are at the end of Scarlet Monastery's Library and in the town hall of Darkshire. I forget where I read the one about the Lich King summoning Arthas to take his place.

Edited, Mar 14th 2007 8:47pm by johngoforth

Comment by Rothia

DON'T NERF SAPPHIRON
Posted by Pazorax | WoW Developer | Blizzard Forums | 2020-11-11

Hey everybody!

We recently completed testing Naxxramas on the PTR. A big thank you goes out to everyone who helped us find bugs or exploits we could fix before release. We often get questions about how we decide what counts as a bug, and what’s worth changing, so I thought you might enjoy a deep dive into our investigation of Sapphiron’s Frost Aura.

TLDR for anyone who only wants to know the conclusion: We’re changing the spell to tick every 2 seconds consistently.

When Sapphiron is engaged, the entire raid is affected by a Frost Aura which reads: “Deals Frost Damage every second”, but many players reported that it should be every 2 seconds. Our first thought was, “that was the Wrath of The Lich King version,” but we know that in a game as complicated as WoW, there can be surprising and unexpected interactions, and a lot has changed over the last 15 years. When a current behavior doesn’t match players’ or developers’ memories, it always makes us a little suspicious. Sometimes it turns out our memories are wrong, but we’ve also seen it lead to the uncovering of an unexpected interaction, so, it’s usually worth a look, and that was certainly the case here.

We looked at many old videos, and though some were from the wrong expansion, we were able to find videos that showed the original fight. The videos actually had evidence of both tick rates within the same fight. The Frost Aura seemed to mostly tick every 2 seconds, but occasionally tick once per second for a bit, before returning to ticking every 2 seconds. We also checked in our reference server, and the behavior was the same as we saw in the videos: mostly 2 second ticks, but occasionally a brief streak of 1 second ticks, before returning to 2 second ticks.

Perhaps the most useful clue was this post from WoW game designer Daelo in 2009, in which he describes fixing Sapphiron’s Frost Aura so that it does “the damage that was seen previous to the 3.0.8 patch”:

"We just hotfixed Sapphiron's Frost Aura so it should do the damage that was seen previous to the 3.0.8 patch regardless of the size of the raid or your server's performance. This should be 1200 every 2 seconds in Normal, and 1600 every 2 seconds in Heroic. You'll notice that the Frost Aura debuff you have no longer has a duration that refreshes. The tooltip also incorrectly lists the damage as occurring every second. The tooltip error will be fixed the next time we make a client patch available."

This certainly suggests that it was doing damage every 2 seconds prior to the 3.0.8 patch, but this was a hotfix to the Wrath of The Lich King version of Naxxramas. We’ve already found other differences between the original and Wrath of The Lich King versions of Naxxramas, so while this post was helpful, it wasn’t enough to satisfy us on its own. It contained an important clue about the debuff duration refreshing, which led us to suspect the DoT refresh might be clipping the damage tick. In WoW Classic, when you refresh a DoT, it resets the timer on the periodic damage, and can cause you to miss ticks, and since the Frost Aura has a 5 second duration that gets reset throughout the fight. It was a good bet that the damage timer was getting reset then too. Of course, we already reproduced that behavior in WoW Classic, so that still didn’t explain the discrepancy between the two.

At that point, we dug further into the game code and found the difference in the way Sapphiron re-applies the Aura. In both reference and WoW Classic, the aura re-application was done as part of an Action Trigger which fires every 2 seconds. However, in the original code, action triggers share a timer with periodic spell ticks, and action triggers were always processed first. In modern code, they run on independent timers, so a long-running action script won’t delay a spell tick.

This meant that when Sapphiron re-applied the Frost Aura in reference, it was guaranteed to clip the damage tick that was about to happen, leading to every other tick getting skipped. In modern code, the damage tick and the reapplication are both scheduled to occur at the same time, but are controlled by two separate timers, so either one might happen first. It just so happens that in this encounter, the reapplication generally happens after the DoT tick on the same second, so that players got the full damage on every tick, instead of every other tick.

But this mystery isn’t solved yet. What about those occasional one second ticks we saw in the original videos and in the reference server. They were rare, but if the reference code is guaranteed to do the refresh before the damage tick, how were they ever ticking at once a second? It turns out that the Frost Aura application didn’t always succeed, and if it failed, the existing DoT happily ticked away doing damage once per second until the next refresh attempt 2 seconds later, like this:

Time (seconds)	Event	Damage
0	Aura #1 Applied	0
1	Aura #1 ticks	600
2	Aura #2 Applied (clips Aura #1)	0
3	Aura #2 ticks	600
4	Aura #3 fails (Aura #2 ticks)	600
5	Aura #2 ticks	600
6	Aura #4 Applied (clips Aura #2)	0
7	Aura #4 ticks	600

Since Sapphiron is 3 levels higher than the player, the spell can only miss 1% of the time, but that’s what explained the occasionally 1 second ticks we saw in the videos, and with our reference.

We also reached out to the original designer, who still works at Blizzard, on a different game team. After we described our findings, he agreed that the intended behavior was for the damage to be every second, and the fact that the reapplication of the aura was clipping a tick of the DoT was a bug that wasn’t noticed or fixed until Wrath of The Lich King.

So where do we go from here? We often must carefully consider a conflict between original intent and original behavior. There’s no one right answer in all cases, but for this case, the original behavior is the correct decision, and we plan to fix this in much the same way Daelo did in Wrath of The Lich King. In modern code, we have a way to reliably apply an aura that deals damage every 2 seconds as long as the boss is alive, and we’ll re-write this ability to use that method, just as Daelo did in Wrath of The Lich King.

While the behavior that led to it originally occurring every 2 seconds instead of every 1 second was a bug, it was consistent enough as to be indistinguishable from a text bug in the Aura description. Choosing to go with the original intent would result in almost twice as much damage as players experienced in 2006, so in the end that makes this decision pretty clear.

I hope you enjoyed that trip through our development process. See you in Azeroth!

DON'T NERF SAPPHIRON
Posted by Pazorax | WoW Developer | Blizzard Forums | 2020-11-12

Hey everybody,

I wanted to drop in and give one more update. Astute readers of my earlier post may have noticed that the original implementation had a 1% to do an extra tick of damage, and while that’s pretty minor on average, taking an extra tick of 600 damage can create a dangerous streak that can make the fight significantly harder, especially if you don’t have much Frost Resistance.

I’m really happy to share with you that after I made my post, our newest team member added an effect that exactly reproduces the 1% chance to have an extra tick of frost damage, so you’ll have something even more true to the original difficulty.

Watch out for those damage streaks! It’s cold in there!

Blizzard: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/dont-nerf-sapphiron/709636/48
Wowhead: https://classic.wowhead.com/news=319065/wow-classic-deep-dive-into-sapphirons-frost-aura-frost-damage-dealt-every-2-seco

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The Lich King

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The Lich King

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