It's official!  The highly anticipated expansion to the World of Warcraft, The Burning Crusade, will have its release date postponed to January 2007.

Blizzard Entertainment® today announced that the release date for World of Warcraft®: The Burning Crusade™, the highly anticipated expansion for World of Warcraft, will be in January 2007. By adding a few extra weeks to the development cycle beyond its original target date, Blizzard will be able to extend the closed beta test and further refine the new content that will ship with the game.

There's a lot of excitement over the release of the Burning Crusade.  Some highlights on the Lounge:

• Nobbie just got his beta key.
• There will be new level 70 Alterac Valley items, but you'll have to use the new token system to get them, according to Monkey.
• The hunter talents have been released, as spotted by WimpySmurf.
• The druid talents have been revamped, as spotted by oldmandennis.
• A lot of professions are changing, according to Wildfire and Nobbie.
• Healing talents will be multiplicative and take into account +healing gear.

Blizzard has been very hush hush over what the new Blood Elf priest racial spells will be in the expansion (very likely because they're not sure themselves).  However, it was revealed that the priest racial spells for all priests will be changing in the expansion:

I will say this though, just so you walk away with one new piece of knowledge -- each will get one brand new ability, and one that already exists in-game now among the existing available races for the priest class.

So, one priest racial ability currently in the game will be given to all priests.  Starshards for everyone, amirite?

The 1.12.1 mini-patch has been released.  Check out Sword of Doom's Lurker Lounge thread on the subject for more details!

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!