Blizzard has some big plans in store for Warcraft lore lovers. The company has announced their intent to tie Wrath of the Lich King dungeons in with the World of Warcraft lore.

New dungeons will be connected to quests lines in an effort to further embellish the backstory behind Northrend, Arthas, the Titans, and others.

Below are some bulleted highlights from the Dungeons and Raids Panel, followed by detailed boss encounter information, and several clips from the panel itself.

Dungeon and Raid Panel Highlights:

• Huge scale environment and epic creatures with unique abilities.
• The developers emphasized that players do not fight the Titans right away but they do become more and more present as players progress through Northrend.
• Focusing on a shorter Dungeon model.
• Big scope but able to walk through without difficulty.
• Boss encounters with choices as to where and how a group fights them.
• CUSTOM CREATURE MODELS! Less recycling of creature models.
• 10 and 25 man dungeons for ALL of the raids instances.
• A push for players to experience raids no matter how large of social groups they are in.
• More rewards for 25 man instances.
• Certain boss fights they want to go all out with boss experiences.
• Destructible buildings during boss fights.
• Higher quality loot from heroics. A Tier better than normal dungeons.
• Players can earn badges: Emblem of Heroism(heroics) and Emblem of Valor(25 mans).
• Players can complete tier sets with badges.

Cool Boss Encounters:
The second boss in Ahn’kahet is a vampire. At different times during the encounter, the boss attacks a random member of the group, attempting to suck their blood. Players have to beat back the boss to prevent him from killing their party-mate. Surprisingly, the boss has an eerie resemblance to Tom Cruise.

The other highlighted boss encounter was the final boss in Chamber of Aspects. The developers spoke about two different ways to fight the boss. An easy way, and a more difficult way.

The boss is surrounded by three Twilight drakes. The easy route for taking the boss down is killing the Twilight drakes first, and then moving on to the boss resulting in a normal loot table. The more difficult method is to not kill the drakes beforehand, but to kill them during the boss fight. Doing this will drop a Twilight Drake mount that you can show off to your friends, better yet — your enemy’s.

Last but not least is news that will surely make Hunters happy. Due to the changes involving Hunter pets, specifically granting them access to a “tanking” talent tree, a Hunter’s pet will now be viable off-tanks in instances. Sorry to all the off-tanks out there … you’re going to be replaced by an overgrown turtle.

Featured Dungeons, Itemization, and Q&A Video:

The Halls of Lightening

Ahn’kahet:The Old Kingdom

Chamber of Aspects (raid)

Eyes of Eternity

Itemization

Q&A Session

BlizzCon 08 had no shortage of special guest appearances. In addition to the truck loads of draenei and night elves, the outskirts of the event are being patrolled by none other than Thrall.

Check out the mighty Horde Warchief in action after the jump.

In what is perhaps the most shining example of obsession and geekiness I have ever seen, a fella by the name of Bradster has 36 World of WarCraft accounts that he plays on 11 computers simultaneously. He mainly seems to be doing it because he doesn’t like to rely on so many other people to get a raid going, which includes attacking the Alliance capital cities, and on that front I can totally see where he’s coming from.

I hate those Alliance douchebags too, but I’m not about to drop $5711 per year like Bradster is. The best way to get to them is to just live well, right? Well, Bradster doesn’t appear to be letting the Alliance off the hook so easily, as he plans on picking up 36 copies of Wrath of the Lich King on day one, spending around $1500, just so he can have a raid group of level 80 Shamans terrorizing Stormwind as soon as possible.

Read on to see how this crazy man manages to control all of these characters.

From the Bradster himself:

A lot have asked me, why create so many? The main reason is to invade Stormwind and Ironforge when they reach top level. I’m sure the Alliance will put up a big fight when that happens. We’ll see how it goes. If they don’t make level 70 before Wrath of the Lich King, then it will be at level 80. That is my main goal. That will probably happen after I’ve got some PvP gear from the battlegrounds. I’m also planning to do some 25 and 10 man raid instances but that is secondary to my PvP goal. Of course I’ll be doing arenas too to build up PvP gear but I’m not expecting to do that great there because I’m way behind in gear right now. I need to get to level 70 first, then level 80 and by then I will probably have all green gear while most others have been doing the battlegrounds and arenas.

It costs me exactly $5711 in subscription costs per year with 36 accounts on the 6 month pay schedule. Not bad considering I’m looking at it like it’s a hobby and there are more expensive hobbies out there than World of Warcraft.

32 of my shaman are level 61. One shaman that I had before I started the 32 is at level 70 along with 8 other level 70 classes that I had. My mage, priest and druid are in the center of the circle of shaman in the pictures but they are kind of hard to see. I’ve also got some mages and priests that I’m currently working on that are level 23. Once they are at level 31.9, I will stop working on them, get 16 of them to level 60 with the recruit-a-friend bonus levels and work on the shaman again.

When Wrath of the Lich King is released, I plan to be at the store when it opens and will purchase 36 copies of it. With tax, it should be about $1500 for all of them. Then the shaman are on their way to level 80 along with the priest, druid and mage.

By the way, I have 9 level 80 shaman created on the Murmur PvP realm in the Wrath of the Lich King beta. I mainly tried it out to see how well my computers would work as they are. With the exception of one my desktop computers, I should be fine with the hardware that I have.

I use 3 addons in the game. CT_MapMod is used to give me locations for quests, etc. ClassIcons is another addon that I use to show the class of the target. It helps for PvP encounters. Then the last addon I use is SSPVP2 which is excellent for displaying timers and other things while in the battlegrounds.

For my keys to send to all instances of WoW on my 11 computers, I use Octopus 1.3.2. Maximizer in Octopus allows me to start up all WoW instances at the same time or any individual instance such as if a WoW instance has crashed. It also allows me to shutdown all of the computers at the same time.

Here is a picture of my computer set up:

Not shown to the right is another laptop which runs 3 copies that I just moved there. The keyboard on the right was moved to the top shelf there as I don’t really use that keyboard while playing. I have macros that set my main assist/cast/follow. Any of the eight screens to the front can be set to main assist/cast/follow as my mouse scrolls to them all using Octopus.

Source: Dual-Boxing.com

*UPDATE: As some commenters have pointed out, Bradster is not the owner of Prepared and all of the 36 WoW accounts, he was just the guy that uploaded the links to the forum. Bradster himself has only 5 WoW accounts. Bradster is the one who is married, so we don’t really know anything about Prepared’s girl-touching status. You may now continue to unabashedly flame.

Any World of WarCraft player worth his carbon knows that their game of choice is filled to the brim with pop culture references that stretch from Paris Hilton to Big Trouble in Little China. It would seem as though Blizzard is continuing that trend with this recent discovery from the Wrath of the Lich King beta.

Everyone’s favorite orphaned anthropomorphic deer, Bambi, makes an appearance in the game, along with his buddies Flower, Thumper, and his mom (who is still alive at this point). Of course, the names were changed to protect the innocent, that being Blizzard’s wallet, but it’s obvious what the inspiration was.

So what happens if you decide to be a tad bit evil and recreate that murder scene of Bambi’s mom? Apparently, Bambi does not like that very much and instead of just taking it lying down like he does in the movie, he decides to totally destroy you.

“Bambina” transforms into “Vengeful Bambina” and apparently is capable of delivering quite the ass-whooping. There is no information yet on what kind of stats Vengeful Bambina is going to have or what kind of loot he will possibly have, but there’s talk that he might actually be a world raid boss.

Most of the easter eggs already contained in WoW are simply items or NPC’s, so this seems to be like the next step in interactive pop culture reference easter egg technology. I, for one, am actually looking forward to WotLK a bit more now, just for the chance to murder some Disney wannabes. I will become Vengeful Dan and take out my repressed rage on those bitches for torturing me with their overly happy non-manliness.

Yes, I’m sick like that.

Source: WoW Insider

Morgan Webb of G4’s X-Play gives us a little preview and some interesting info on Blizzard’s upcoming World of WarCraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King. Spoiler alert: Arthas is really a good guy and Death Knights are Paladins in disguise.

Seriously, though, there are some spoilers in the video, so carefully consider whether or not you want to ruin the excitement of starting a Death Knight by knowing what happens ahead of time. You’ve been warned.

Oh boy… If World of WarCraft wasn’t already a massive drain on your free time, then Wrath of the Lich King will make things significantly worse.  Not only will the expansion add Death Knights and an entire new continent, but it’s also bringing with it Achievements, which you earn by doing a myriad of quest-related and pointless things alike.  With examples like Town Crier, which I assume involves /yelling a lot, and another one for giving out 10 hugs, I expect my fellow denizens of the World of WarCraft are about to get a whole lot more annoying.

Blizzard’s official site for Wrath of the Lich King has a list of some of the achievement categories.  Lucky for you, I won’t make you waste the energy involved with going to the site, as I’ve listed them here:

• Player-vs.-Player: This includes arena, battlegrounds, and world player-vs.-player objectives. A few examples:
  • Hot Streak: Win 10 ranked arena matches in a row.
  • Alterac Valley All-Star: Capture graveyards, towers, and kill the enemy leader all in one game.
  • City Defender: Kill 50 enemy players in your faction’s capital cities.
• Dungeons and Raids: Every end boss of every raid and dungeon in the game grants its own achievement. Future achievements in this category may include ones for completing a run without any player deaths, with fewer than the maximum number of players, or within a certain time limit.
• Professions: Advancing to each tier of mastery in a profession earns you an achievement, and there are specific achievements for secondary skills (with major professions to follow).
• Quests: Quest-based achievements include completing a certain number of quests and completing specific quest lines. This category contains zone-specific subcategories.
• Events: Seasonal events such as the Midsummer Festival, the Lunar Festival, and Hallows’ End have specific achievements of their own.
• World Exploration: You’ll earn achievements by exploring each zone in the game — and get meta-achievements when you fully explore a continent.
• Reputations: This set of achievements includes attaining exalted reputation with each faction in the game.
• General: These achievements tend toward the whimsical, including getting a shave and haircut (a new feature of Wrath of the Lich King), obtaining a certain number of tabards and vanity pets, falling from a great height, and more.

Did you read that last one? That’s right, there will now be a beauty salon/barbershop (presumably with no Ice Cube or Queen Latifah, at least I hope not) where you can alter the appearance of your character.

Your character panel will have a tab that lists all of these achievements, and they will show up on your page in the Armory as well.  Rewards for certain achievements include non-combat pets, tabards, and other non-game-altering, purely cosmetic prizes.  Perhaps you can unlock more hairstyles?

Unlocking the Achievements triggers an Achievement animation and “unmistakable” sound.  A message will pop up letting all those around you and everyone in your guild know what you just achieved.  As if trade chat spamming wasn’t bad enough, now we’ll have fifty other messages from people jumping off of Thunder Bluff to get the “Jump from really high” Achievement.  Glorious…

Oh, and these achievements will also have a points value and add to your running total, called your Gamerscore.  Wait… it’s not called Gamerscore?  Oh, my bad.  Seems they haven’t revealed what it’s named yet.  I have a suggestion, though: Gamerscore — let’s just call it what it is.

With things like this and Microsoft’s Avatars, it’s a wonder anything new and innovative is ever created.  What’s next?  Marcus Fenix isn’t original either?