GameGuide

The upcoming major content patch, Call of the Crusade, will bring a host of new features for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King.

• The Argent Tournament Expands: With the help of Azeroth's heroes, the Argent Crusade will finish the Argent Coliseum just in time to call for all brave citizens to prepare for battle with the Lich King. New dailies, rewards, and more will be available at the Argent Tournament grounds to lure adventurers into the coliseum.
• Crusaders' Coliseum: In order to prepare for a siege on Icecrown Citadel, players will be called by the Argent Crusade to test their mettle in the Coliseum. 5-player, 10-player, and 25-player challenges await inside.
• New Battleground: Isle of Conquest, a new large-scale siege Battleground, will be open. The Horde and Alliance will battle head-to-head for control of strategic resources to lay siege to the keeps of their opponents.
• New Arena Season: Season 7 will officially start, paving the way for all-new items and challenges.

Coliseum Raid Instance
Yes, there will be a 5-player version, then a 10/25-player version. The bosses will be different for the two versions. Think Ring of Blood or Amphitheater of Anguish, but more epic. (Source)

Isle of Conquest Battleground
Wintergrasp combined with Alterac Valley with a few more twists. (Source)

Patch 3.2 and 3.3 Release date
Do you really think Ulduar achievements will last a year? Instances become stale after 6 months even with achievements. Yea 3.2 won't be till later this year and by then Ulduar will have been played to death and people will want something fun and new to do and not some small joke instance since we won't see Icecrown till April/May next year probably.
Would it help if I told you your presumed time lines are way too inflated? (Source)

05/22/09

• A bug with the Blood Draining weapon enchant has been fixed to allow the Blood Reserves to restore the proper amount of health.
• Wintergrasp Demolishers should now properly damage all Siege Workshops.
• The bonus damage from spell power on the Druid ability Thorns has been reduced by half.
• The bonus damage from spell power on the Paladin ability Retribution Aura has been reduced by half. The threat generated by that damage has been doubled per point of damage to keep the threat generation about equal to before.

Both Thorns and Ret Aura scale with spellpower, which is not in abundance on tanks. On the other hand, on level 80 classes with spell power they could hit an attacker for 1000 or more damage per hit of just passive damage that doesn't even requrie a button press. That's pretty generous.

New zeppelin between Orgrimmar and Thunder Bluff
Simply put, every single city aside from Thunder Bluff is connected by a boat or zeppelin. Thunder Bluff has been unique since the latest expansion in that it still requires a run. No, it is not as difficult a run as the old Menethil jog, but it still requires a lengthy trip through over-level, hostile territory for an individual newly made who wants to make use of the facilities in Thunder Bluff.

This addition isn't primarily directed at the people who have the flightpath. Yes, you can fly from Orgrimmar to Thunder Bluff still, just as you can fly from Ironforge to Stormwind, but that does not invalidate the tram's existence for those starting a new character or starting the game as a whole. And while you may not think of it in those terms, there are still fresh-faced players, new to World of Warcraft, joining us.

As the craft leaves from one of the zeppelin towers in Durotar and is slower than the wyvern flight, I don't believe the population of Thunder Bluff will skyrocket significantly. (Source)

Player vs. Player
1vs1 PvP Balance
I believe we have offered the justification before, but to reiterate it, we designed WoW to be a group-based game. You participate through much of the content, especially the end-game content, as a team. If we had developed a 1v1 game, we would have made some of the mechanics work very differently. In a 1v1 game for example, healing would have to be far weaker such that a single healer could not overcome a single damage-dealer. (Currently a 5-player dungeon or Arena team needs but one healer for the entire group.) Abilities, particularly the crowd-control, would have to be much less powerful because there would be nobody to help you out. It is likely that class abilities and stats would have to be a lot more homogenized because basically you are compressing all of the roles and strengths of the entire team into one player. That's not to say you don't come into 1v1 scenarios sometimes even when you're participating as a team. But we don't expect those to be as balanced as larger group interactions.

I'm not sure what the foundation stone of all pvp is to which you refer. Many competitive sports would not be nearly as interesting (nor likely as balanced) in a 1v1 setting. Consider (American) football. Would you put a defensive linesman against a receiver? Does that even make sense? It's designed to be a group sport. WoW is designed for the most part to be a group-based game.

Compared to a lot of MMOs you can experience a lot of WoW's content while solo, but it should be obvious that we don't offer 1 player Arena team or 1 player raids for a reason. (Source)

Professions
is it really that bad to have a "best" profession? (See Jewelcrafting Nerf)
Yes, we think so. A key to games being fun is feeling like you have a choice. If you aren't making decisions then you aren't really playing a game — you are watching something as a viewer not participating as a player. Game design has proven over many years that when you have choice A and choice B where choice A grants more power and choice B looks cooler or grants almost any other kind of benefit, a vast majority of players will choose A. In their minds there is no choice. It has to be A. Likewise if humans were the most powerful race and mages were the most powerful class then WoW would not be very diverse. We want tradeskills to be a choice. Having a best profession means that choice does not exist. (Source)

Jewelcrafting Nerf
All of the other professions were more or less in-line with each other but we felt Jewelcrafting with the disabling of meta-gem requirements and the easy ability to hit 3 socket bonuses on top of getting stats from the Dragon's Eye gems put it clearly above every other profession

While there is a time to buff things, if anytime there was a balance issue and we only buffed things, the numbers would rise at a rapid rate and get out of control. There is a time to buff things, but when we feel one thing is too far ahead, it's time for a nerf, which we know is never popular, but we feel it needs to be done. (Source)

Itemization
Itemization and stats role
When I say it's a class problem and not an item problem what I mean is that we are relatively locked into how many pieces we can drop. If we drop more pieces, the chance you will get something useful is even less. Therefore we have to make sure the pieces that do drop appeal to a wide variety of specs and classes. When you don't care about a stat that someone you are sharing with very much cares about, that creates a problem that we do not want to fix by just making two different pieces. (Nor do we want to turn even more gear into tokens and badges. That gets lame.)

A great example of this are regen stats. By regen stats I mean MP5 and Spirit. Yes, you can get regen through other stats, but bear with me for a minute. Our b…