Death & Taxes getting world firsts seems as inevitable as, well, death and taxes.  Last night, they got the first world kill of Sapphiron.  Congratulations!

Flasks and player buffs should now be behaving according to the priority system. This means flasks should no longer be the first buff erased when a player exceeds the current 32 buff limit. The general buff priority philosophy is: Flasks, Stances and Shapeshifts > All other Buffs.

We added Auto Self Cast as an option that if checked makes all friendly target spells automatically cast on self if you dont have another valid target selected when you cast it. (You can be fighting an enemy and stun them and use a bandage and it knows automatically that you meant to use it on yourself, even though you dont have yourself targeted).

The debuff limit will be increased to 40 with the release of the Burning Crusade, according to Eyonix:

I will say this, for expansion the debuff limit is being increased from 16 to 40, combined with the focus on smaller raid dungeons, Warlock players will have more freedom and opportunity to use their debuffing abilities with less limitation. Beyond this, all classes will have new spells, talents and abilities that they will bring to the table by the time level 70 is achieved.

That's great news for everybody but especially for warlocks.  What took them so long?

In a stunning announcement, Blizzard revealed today that with the release of the Burning Crusade, raid dungeons will no longer be designed with more than 25 players in mind.

It's true, the plan is for five-player capped grouped dungeons. Ten-player capped raid dungeons. As well as Twenty-five-player capped epic raid dungeons. We wanted to focus on smaller raid environments, primarily to allow for greater individual player contribution. Also, in these smaller environments, hybrid classes have more opportunity to shine.

Oh, and there's much much more to be found in the original 1up.com article, including news about PvP improvements coming in the Burning Crusade as well as new abilities for shaman and paladins.

Among the innovations that will be introduced in the Burning Crusade are difficulty settings that the party leader can choose when starting up an instance:

A new feature is the difficulty settings and the group leader can select between five modes, of "easily" to "super+heavily". Loot is also variable depending on the degree of difficulty you undertake. The harder the difficulty, the better the loot.

The article also reveals where the Blood Elf and Dreinei starting zones will be and discusses many other aspects of the Burning Crusade.  Read all about it and then discuss it with your fellow Lurkers!

A change to Windfury that was mentioned in the 1.12 beta patch notes sparked a furious backlash against the Shaman totem system and sparked a serious debate about the relative advantages between the two factions in raid environments.  Luckily, as Quark reports, the proposed change to Windfury has been reversed:

I've spoken with the developers and they let me know that they're not satisfied with the impact the windfury totem change is having on current end-game content balance, and plan to undo the change. Please remember that the testing phase of any patch is precisely to test such changes and evaluate their possible impact on the game, whether or not they eventually go into the final release build.

In short, no change to Windfury Totem is planned at this time.

Thank God.  In other news, rogues and fury warriors rejoice, because Thunderfurycan now be used as an off-hand weapon.

July 15, 1999.  That's when the Lurker Lounge was born, and here we still are a whopping seven years later.

How far we've come!  Happy Birthday, Lurker Lounge!  And hello to any of you who have been here since the beginning.  Hope you'll be here for the 8th birthday.