Frostmourne launched on September 19 as the most systems-heavy Wrath release of the year, and Whitemane's own pre-launch primer ("Very Short Guide to WotLK Rebuffed") is the best single document on how those systems behave in play. This guide condenses it into the numbers and rules you need while leveling — and flags where each system deliberately stops.

The road to 80, with two twists

Normal progression is accelerated: faster XP, reputation and professions, auto-learned spells, 10-gold dual specialization, AoE looting, and free Apprentice Riding with a level-20 mount. Two optional layers sit on top:

• Hardcore Mode — selected at character creation. One life; death ends the character. It runs at x1 XP and is fully isolated from the standard ruleset.
• Item Quality Upgrades — the leveling lottery described below.

Quality Upgrades: the item color lottery

Eligible quest rewards, Bind-on-Pickup dungeon and raid drops, and crafted items can roll a quality upgrade when you obtain them. The rules that matter:

• The item keeps its item level but gains the larger stat budget of the new quality — a green quest reward can become rare, a rare can become epic, and even an item level 200 Heroic blue can come out epic.
• Upgrade chances differ by source: quest rewards and dungeon/raid drops have their own rates, while crafted items use deliberately restrained chances so professions stay valuable without becoming predictable.
• Direct upgrades to epic are intentionally rare — the project explicitly wants an epic roll to feel like a shareable moment.

This system does not replace raid or PvP gearing; it exists to make the journey spikier without moving the endgame ceiling.

Personal Loot: only in level-80 Heroic Dungeon Finder

At level 80, Heroic dungeons formed through the Dungeon Finder use player-first Personal Loot for supported boss rewards, in this order:

1. The system picks an eligible player first.
2. Only then does it pick an item from that boss's table for that player.

You can set a Loot Specialization independent of your active spec — a Fury Warrior can play Fury while collecting Protection gear. There is no Need roll to snipe and nothing to ninja.

The boundary is explicit: Personal Loot applies only to level-80 Heroic dungeons via Dungeon Finder. Lower-level dungeons have too-flexible item pools and leveling specs to make the same rules produce sensible results.

One currency system instead of seven

The emblem sprawl of original Wrath collapses into five currencies:

The rolling caps are the important part: your earned total never resets weekly. Week one allows 1,600 Valor, week two 3,200, and a missed week simply remains earnable later — catch-up by accumulation instead of use-it-or-lose-it. Conquest works identically at 2,000 per week, and since Deadly gear has no rating gate, the raid-or-die dynamic of original arena gear is gone.

Heroic Naxxramas: mechanics, not multipliers

Every Tier 7 boss carries separate 10/25 Normal and Heroic profiles, and the Heroic layer adds mechanics rather than stat scaling. Documented examples:

• Kel'Thuzad loses his Phase 1 and gains an attackable phylactery plus a new final phase
• The Four Horsemen stack a raid-wide Dirge per kill
• Gothik gains a forced-reunion Soul Convergence
• Thaddius resurrects into an escalating race

The design intent: Normal teaches the raid, Heroic tests it. Normal opens September 30 (possibly earlier on feedback); Heroic follows October 7 with a Normal-clear requirement.

Domination and the other endgames

Domination lets a level-80 character solo legacy Vanilla and TBC raids under an auto-applied player buff. Its output feeds Collections and transmog — not gearing — so old raids become a collector's route rather than a gear farm.

Because mounts and companion pets are account-wide at launch (appearances, transmog and toys follow), what you collect in Domination matters to every character you make. Combined with collection achievements, hidden secrets, and the always-available Hardcore track, the design goal is that max level has more than one valid answer to "what do I do tonight."