IGN has an interview with Lead Producer J. Allen Brack about Wrath of the Lich King.
IGN: We heard about a lot of the content in Wrath of the Lich King in your presentation, but what we didn't see was anything about the new profession features. Could you fill us in on what's been going on there?
J. Allen Brack: Inscription is the new profession; it's actually one of my favorite parts of the new expansion. Right now what we're working on is creating the system for how you actually create and inscribe scrolls. The way it's going to work is you'll have a series of mats that you need to do and then you'll create a scroll that will actually do the buff of the spell in question. Each scroll will have a specific use, so you won't create a generic scroll, it'll be a special scroll that will upgrade this fireball to do this type of thing. Right now we're still trying to make sure we've got that kind of mechanic down. That's actually most of the work. Most of the work is figuring out how that all works, what the materials are, how that comes together, and once we have that, then figuring out what the individual spells are and what the individual spells are and what the effects are going to be is going to be relatively easy.
A second interview with Jeff Kaplan (Tigole) may be read here. Here we have very nice spoilers about Naxxaramas, the Nexus in Coldarra (Malygos' Lair), and the Deathknight.
IGN: Can you talk a bit about the Death Knight's abilities.
Jeffrey Kaplan: Yeah so he has three presences which are similar to Paladin auras in that it's an activated ability that is always up on him. The difference between a Death Knight presence and a Paladin aura is a presence only affects the Death Knight. Some of them are tailored more towards DPS, like the blood presence and the unholy presence, whereas the frost presence is really tailored around the Death Knight tanking. The Death Knight gets some super-cool abilities; I think army of the dead is my favorite, where it's an area of effect, moderate cooldown, rain down ghouls on everything around you. They really overwhelm the scene. I love the raise dead ability. And that one he can cast on a number of different targets, so if I'm out there fighting in Northrend and kill something, I can cast raise dead and bring a summoned ghoul out of the corpse to fight alongside with me. But if I'm out there adventuring with you I can cast raise dead on your corpse and then you don't get to come back as you but you do get to come back as this very fun ghoul who has a whole action bar of abilities.
IGN: What about the rune resource system the Death Knight uses?
Jeffrey Kaplan: So you have six runes total and you'll always have six runes. You'll get to pick, and there's actually a forging process where you put those in your blade, you'll get to pick how many of those you have within six. So if you wanted four blood runes, one unholy, and one frost and that's the six you're going to run with, you can totally do that. We want there to be some customization in how a Death Knight manages his resources and let him choose. The runes have their own separate, independent cooldown as you consume them. Right now it's feeling good at about 10 seconds per [rune]. And then there are also abilities and talents that can trigger an instant refresh or conversion that consumes your blood but puts it into frost. You get a lot of run resource gameplay that way.
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King new info and screenshots are showing up all around. Below are some of the hands-on previews:
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