World of Warcraft at Allakhazam.com

According to a post on the WoW Europe forums by Vaneck, the warlock summoning spell will be having an overhaul. Instead of requiring an individual shard for each summon you'll summon something similar to the meeting stones which will last 5 minutes. This will be coming before the next major content patch that will have the raid instance Ulduar (3.1). The original post can be found here.

We all knew Wrath of the Lich King did well, but Blizzard has confirmed it by officially announcing today that the expansion sold over 2.8 million copies in its first 24 hours of availability to become the fastest-selling PC game of all time. Of course, it's only competition was The Burning Crusade's 2.4 million copies in January 2007, so Blizzard was going to hold onto the title no matter what.

"We're grateful for the incredible support that players around the world have continued to show for World of Warcraft," said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “Wrath of the Lich King contains some of the best content we’ve created for the game so far, and we look forward to seeing even more players log in to experience it in the days ahead."

The full press release can be found after the jump.

Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has posted an update regarding feral druid changes that are coming in the next patch. To sum it up, bonus armor on items will not receive the bear armor multiplier and weapons in the game will no longer improve feral attack power. An improvement in the Survival of the Fittest talent should basically compensate for your current armor bonus, and here's his take on feral weapons:

We are no longer going to have weapons in the game which improve feral attack power. Instead, your attack power will scale based on the dps of the item. Practically speaking this means almost no change for any gear you currently use -- you should not see your dps change. What it does mean is that we can create the occasional dps staff that could be used by druids or hunters (or very undergeared warriors), and that Ferals may occasionaly use two-handed dps maces.

GC's full post can be found here or below.

Episode 6 of BlizzCast, the official Blizzard podcast, is now online, and it contains an hour of interviews regarding World of Warcraft, Starcraft II and Diablo III.

In the sixth epic episode of BlizzCast, we spend a day with a developer and find out what life is like for World of Warcraft Lead Tools Programmer Monte Krol. Next, we take a look at StarCraft II unit design from concept to creation with Senior Art Director Samwise Didier and Lead Game Designer Dustin Browder. In our third segment, Bashiok spends some time with Anthony Rivero, senior artist for Diablo III, and discusses "bridging the gap" in the series’ character design. Bornakk wraps the episode up by answering some questions from the community.

You can download an mp3 of the show here or read the transcript here.

You killed your raid content mobs, you topped out your player versus player (PvP) rewards, you leveled to the cap only a month after the last expansion and, in only a few weeks (or days), the newest content addition to the game is coming out; the dreaded expansion.

Most MMOs that offer expansions which increase the level cap cause depreciation of old content. Let me explain. While features or content are not removed, and backwards compatibility is maintained, the content previous to the expansion often becomes obsolete or out of date. There is little reason for players to go through old content when there's obviously a new and better way of doing things.

Blizzard has prepared for Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK) by making previously challenging raid encounters significantly easier, forcing some folks to cry foul as their hard work becomes "cheapened". The drops now pull from the same loot tables as they did before the change, but with significantly less risk and challenge.

So my question to you is, do you care?

Some of the folks on our World of Warcraft board discussed this very thing last week, and the replies, barbed though they were, elicited strong responses on either side.