“We generally pull from many places so that we have a good variety of people in the beta. Some of it is random and some are winners from contests, or specific groups that we want to pull from. We don’t have a specific schedule for you on who we will pull in or when to share with you, but we’ll do what we can to keep people as informed as possible…

There is no minimum level of experience needed since we look at a broad spectrum of testers. We want people of all experience levels to be able to share their experiences with us so that we know where we might need to work on something more. We don’t necessarily want to make one aspect too hard or too easy on either end of things…

I just thought I’d update this thread with a little extra information to let people know that there will be a sign up process when it comes time for the beta as well.

Please note that that time is not now. Please be aware that there are some scams currently running that are asking people to sign up for Wrath of the Lich King beta. We will let everyone know when it is time to sign up.”

Bornakk
The first dungeon many players will explore in Northrend is Utgarde Keep. Can you tell us what players can expect to encounter throughout the various wings of this dungeon and how it will compare to Hellfire Citadel, which is the first dungeon people explored in The Burning Crusade?

Jeff Kaplan
Sure thing, Utgarde is a really cool dungeon that is in a zone called Howling Fjord. It is filled with these guys called the Vrykul, who are these huge sort of half giant barbarian-like creatures who have turned very nasty and evil. They’re actually trying to get into the good graces of the Lich King by doing evil deeds and when they die they are risen up and sort of taken into the Scourge. So they are really evil guys, unlike the Horde and Alliance who want nothing to do with the Lich King, only want to defeat them, these Vrykul guys think the Lich King is so cool that they want to do even worse deeds to get in his good graces.

The dungeon is filled with them, the first room in Utgarde Keep is this massive forge room where they are forging weapons to go against the Horde and Alliance. They are also these famed dragon riders, if you look at their architecture they have stretched dragonskins over their village huts and that sort of thing. So the second room you come to is this really cool Proto-Dragon stable and the Proto-Dragons were sort of the early version before dragons really evolved into the sentient, beautiful majestic creatures that they are in Warcraft right now; they were these sort of primitive things that the Vrykul really lorded over.

So you get to fight a variety of bosses, you also get your first interaction with the Scourge in this dungeon. You’ll find out that there is a Scourge ambassador and that the Vrykul are trying to get in with the Scourge then you’ll fight one of the Warlords and get a bit of lore about who is leading the Vrykul. And when you’re a max level player you can go up to Utgarde Pinnacle which is the max level dungeon that’s at the top of Utgarde Keep. So again, it’s kind of like a two wing dungeon with an entry-level level 70 wing on par with let’s say The Ramparts and then a max level wing that would be like the equivalent of Shattered Halls.

So I think it’s a pretty cool place, we try to vary up the architecture from room to room so it feels a little bit different, it looks different, we use different creatures in the different rooms, we try to give various crowd control types, so the dragons can be hibernated, there is humanoids, undead for the different crowd control types all have options in the dungeon and then do some really cool scripted boss fights too.

If you’d rather read the interviews instead of listening to the podcast, here’s the transcript.

Most balance druids were disappointed by the last patch. Even though it added many new craft recipes and items vary few were useful to the balance druid (or “Boomkin’). From these recent leaks, it looks like we’ll see a little Boomkin love in Wrath of the Lich King.

• Typhoon: Summon a violent typhoon that does 530 nature damage when in contact with hostile targets knocking them back 5 yards.
• Starfall: Summon a flurry of stars from the sky on all targets within 30 yards of the caster each doing 500 arcane damage and an additional 170 arcane to all nearby targets within 10 yards. Maximum 20 stars. Lasts 10 seconds.
• Improved Moonkin Form: Your Moonkin aura also causes affected targets to have a 33-/66-/100-percent chance to gain 20-percent spell haste when they critically hit with spells for 10 seconds.
  
• Gale Winds: Increases damage done by your hurricane and typhoon spells by 25/50 percent, and increases the range of your cyclone spell by 10/20 percent.
• Owlkin Frenzy: Attacks done to you while in moonkin form have a 5-/10-/15-percent chance to cause you to go into a frenzy, increasing your damage by 10-percent and causes you to be immune to pushback while casting balance spells. Lasts 10 seconds.
• Eclipse: When you critically hit with starfire, you have a 20-/40-/60-percent chance of increasing damage done by wrath by 10 percent. When you critically hit with wrath, you have a 20-/40-/60-percent chance of increasing your critical strike chance with starfire by 10 percent. Effect lasts 30 seconds; two-minute cooldown.

Other general spell enhancements that will have an impact for balance druids:

• Nature’s grasp and entangling roots are no longer outdoors only spells.
• Hurricane no longer has acooldown.
• Nature’s reach will reduce the threat caused by balance spells.
• Brambles will give thorns a chance to daze a target.

“Though some priests have found a use for the discipline tree, right now, it doesn’t quite have a solid purpose/goal, but rather seems to act as a supporting tree. This is something we plan on addressing with Wrath of the Lich King. Originally, the goal of the tree was primarily intended to provide staying power, vs. the holy tree which provides throughput.”

“We’ve just started implementing the voice chat on the test servers. It’s an important evolution for WoW. Lots of players are used to running that kind of system using software like Team Speak or Ventrilo. Now we want to implement this in WoW for many reasons.

Firstly, we want vocal chat to be available to every player, including those who don’t have the technical knowledge to install and set up that kind of software. We also wish to ease the lives of players who constantly have to alt-tab to switch between their software and WoW or play in a windowed mode.

(more…)

“I fully agree with you, we did learn many lessons from The Burning Crusade. We’ve already fixed the access issue with recent updates. I can’t tell you a lot about the progression system in Wrath of the Lich King, but we’re exploring new paths to make this add-on accessible to everyone.

For example, we could imagine some open content for a server rather than for a specific guild, like we did with Ahn’Qiraj. We could even push this basic concept a little further. You could also imagine a system which would allow you to grant access to all your characters once you’ve unlocked it with one of them. It’s a very important matter for us; we don’t want to remake what I personally consider a mistake in the Burning Crusade.

We want to re-examine all the trade skills one by one. For example, the leather craft in the Burning Crusade was interesting only in the first level of the add-on. It became rather obsolete later compared to the objects you could take from the monsters, get as rewards for quests or find inside dungeons. In the Wrath of the Lich King, we want everyone to be satisfied with the trade they choose and we want it to be rewarding. Therefore we’re going to analyze everything we did with The Burning Crusade and previously to work out what was good and what was missed out.”

It claims to come from ‘WotLK Development Team <wotlkBETA@blizzard.com>’ and reads:

Greetings,

You have been selected by Blizzard Entertainment to take part in our special World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King BETA testing. To participate simply log into your account at the special World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King site at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wotlkbeta . After logging in and confirming your identity, you will be taken to a download page for the Worlf of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King BETA Client. We thank you for your help and participation in this process, as customer feedback is one of our most powerful tools in creating an outstanding game for all of our customers. If you do not wish to participate, simply take no action, and your account will remain as it is now.

Blizzard Entertainment Inc
Account Administration Team
P.O. Box 18979, Irvine, CA 92623

Regards,
Wrath of the Lich King Development Team
Blizzard Entertainment Inc.

But, the actual link takes you to http://wowtlk-beta.awardspace.co.uk/index.html where you’re asked for your username and password for your World of Warcraft account which (obviously) you should never provide outside the actual World of Warcraft website.

Just an FYI to let everyone know this scam is going around.

In Wrath of the Lich King, you will be able to pick up a runeblade, don some plate armor, and wreak serious havoc using both melee abilities and offensive magic. To give you an early glimpse at the design philosophy behind the new class, we sat down with the World of Warcraft design team to talk about the role the death knight will play in the expansion’s story as well as in its gameplay, and to get their thoughts about goals and ideas for the new class.

The biggest news at this year’s BlizzCon was the announcement of World of Warcraft’s next expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, which will introduce the game’s first hero class, the death knight.

What made you choose this particular class?

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“We’re still discussing how (flying mounts) are going to work - we’re not sure if you’ll actually be able to use your flying mount right away. You might have to earn your ‘Northrend flying badge’ at a later level…learn how to defrost the wings, ya know? And whaddya know, you can only do that at, oh, level 78.”

While denying a privilege (even for a little while) that took some folks — especially those who dropped a small fortune on epic flyers — months to earn will undoubtedly outrage some players, for the designers, it’s a necessary evil.

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“The current idea we’re playing with is you have a fixed time, say 10 seconds, for a rune to fade back in and become usable again, and there are potentially things you can do to speed that up or immediately light up runes. We have this one idea for an ability called Blood Boil — it’s a damage-over-time ability, and after the end of the duration, it lights up two of your Blood runes.”

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