It is still unknown exactly when the expansion will ship, but Amazon.com is already taking pre-orders!

If the release of The Burning Crusade is any indication, you had best pre-order, and pre-order early!

To ensure you get your copy, pre-order yours today!

The towering, ominous Utgarde Keep is a sight impossible to miss for players arriving in Howling Fjord, and likely the first dungeon experienced in Northrend. The design process behind Utgarde Keep, and the other dungeons of Wrath of the Lich King, has evolved from years of experience developing for World of Warcraft. In this article, the World of Warcraft design team explores the goals and overall philosophies at the foundations of the five-person dungeons of Northrend, and gives us a behind-the-scenes look at Utgarde Keep itself. Let?s start the tour.

From http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/features/dungeons/utgarde.xml?rhtml=y

• A more personal experience in WotLK. You will feel more engaged in the overall story.
• Death Knight will start our around level 60 (nothing new here)
• Some information on flying mounts and confirming they will not be immediately usable.

It is a good read, head over and check it out!

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King PC Preview

Q u o t e:
-Everyone will roll death knight alts because they startat lvl 60, so they have less work to do.

We do hope a lot of people try out the class, it should be a lot of fun. But we also know that people have their preferred style of play so we don’t expect everybody to drop their current character(s) and play the Death Knight exclusively.

Q u o t e:
-It forces you to master a class in high-level areas where you need to know your class to suceed, and most new Death knights won’t know how to play their class at all.

Just leveling up to reach Northrend will take time and should provide players some great experience in learning the new class.

Q u o t e:
-You will get less hours out of your death knight alt.

I’m a little confused here, but are you saying that it’s a problem that you can’t spend more hours at lower levels?

Q u o t e:
-Other classes will fall out of favor for alts, because they start at lvl 1, wheras Death Knights start at 60.

I’m not sure that other classes falling out of favor as alts is really a big deal, but I wanted to clarify that the starting level of the Death Knight has not been finalized, but they will start at a higher level as a level 1 Death Knight doesn’t sound quite right.

Q u o t e:
-The massive flood of Death Knights will clog battlegrounds, making matches extremely uneven (No class variety, so less heals, druid bufs, etc.)

While a lot of people may make Death Knight alts to try out the class, especially near the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, not everybody is going to level them to 80 or switch them to their main character. Also, both factions will be interested in playing the Death Knight, so any lack of heals will probably go both ways.

Q u o t e:
-The lack of levels to obtain takes away what makes WoW so fun: Leveling up and gaining new abilities.

They will still need to level through Outland and Northrend which can take a fair amount of time.

Q u o t e:
-New players will have to wait months to try a class they may have wanted from the beginning.

We have not finalized way that the Death Knight will be unlocked yet, if that is what you are referring to.

We have wanted to make Hero Classes for a long time and we feel the Death Knight will be a fun one to start with while adding a great new element to the game for players to enjoy fighting with… and against.

Bornakk also went on to answer a few other questions. When questioned about a 3rd faction, he replied:

While hearing murloc noises already makes me shudder, the Alliance and the Horde are a strong basis to build a story of conflict and war for players to experience and we have no plans at this time of adding a third playable faction. We are happy with the way the two factions are “interacting” in the game and plan to continue weaving the story around them.

And when questioned about the way vanish works:

While we are always evaluating abilities and making changes as appropriate, we have no current plans to change how vanish works. Hope that helps.

Source

We’re mindful of space concerns, and increasing the base backpack size is certainly a possibility for the future. We have other space and storage increases currently in the works for release before Wrath though, and we’ll be talking about those soon?.

I’ve often wished I could replace my stock backpack with an Imbued Netherweave Bag, but getting it by default would be great! And ‘other space and storage increases’ is definitely of interest as well! We’ll see what happens!

Roughly translated, Thyvene says:

The developers plan to give to enchanters the possibility to sell their enchantments at the auction house, nevertheless this shouldn’t be implemented into the game before the next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.

I would assume that it would be an item like Glyphs and such that will allow you to enchant an item by clicking on the item, and then on your armor, much like Armor Kits and such.

• Howling Fjord (68-72)
• Borean Tundra (68-72)
• The Dragonblight (71-75)
• Zul’Drak (73-76)
• Grizzly Hills (74-76)
• Azjol-Nerub (74-78)
• Sholazar Basin (75-78)
• The Storm Peaks (77-80)
• Icecrown Glacier (77-80)
• Lake Wintergrasp (Outdoor PvP)

- There is concept art of Dalaran and The Nexus - both look pretty cool. The Nexus looks like this huge purple beam of magic shooting towards the sky, with rings surrounding it that look like little islands you could probably land on with a flying mount.
- Metzen says he doesn’t want the end of Arthas’ story to be predictable, as he says a “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I expected” type of feeling.
- Metzen feels the Burning Crusade never really had an “ending” moment. Killing Illidan wasn’t it because he didn’t like the Legion either. So Sunwell will be it
- The Blood Elves are trying to reinvigorate the Sunwell using energy ported from Netherstorm (i.e. the Mana Forges), but supposively rebuilding the Sunwell is an excuse to summon Kil’jaeden.
- There is that quote that someone posted earlier in the forums that Kil’jaeden is not fully summoned, thus you can kill him with 25 lvl 70s.

Zones

- Dalaran will have one or two instanced dungeons in it (like Stockades or Ragefire they said).
- Dalaran won’t have Auction Houses or class trainers again (*sigh*). Same bass-ackwards reason as with Shattrath. It will probably have portals like Shattrath though, and they said possibly one to Shattrath as well.

Dungeons

- Sunwell area will have “tweaker Blood Elves, high on magic” and 6-8 bosses.
- Info about Utgarde: will be similar to Ramparts, but with more memorable moments to break up the “pull-rest-pull-boss” structure of other instances (way they put it). One is a giant flame forge that kills you if you step into it, but if you kill the workers operating it, it dies down. Another is a guantlet area like in Shattered Halls. One boss will be a Lich, another will be a Vrykul who summons scourge minions.
- There’s a map of Utgarde Keep (low level dungeon).
- It mentions the Stratholme CoT dungeon (which isn’t new news but it’s recent at least).
- There will be more “micro dungeons” (i.e. non-instanced dungeon-like areas.. I guess Deatholme is probably a good example). One is called Gjalerbron where the Vrykul are working side-by-side with Liches.

Professions

Inscription
- Inscribers will be able to sell scrolls.
- Only a handful of core spells can be inscribed. Example they used was you cannot extend the range of the Priest’s Mind Vision, but you CAN extend the duration of the Hunter’s Freezing Traps.