Blizzard and the World of Warcraft dev team have announced a second round of Ask Creative Development. The Creative Development team is charged with maintaining and creating all of the lore behind World of Warcraft both in the game an in the fictional novels based on Azeroth.

The members of our creative development department, headed up by Chris Metzen, are the creators, keepers, and librarians of our game lore and story.

Head over to the Ask CDev forum post to throw your question on the pile.

Please be aware that we'll be using the forum voting system to help decide on which questions to answer. Before asking your own question, look through the thread and add a vote to any others that you like. Feel free to just vote, but if you do have a question, please limit yourself to one per post.

Read more here.

Blizzard has announced that the LP version of the soundtrack from World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has been released to iTunes. The new version features bonus content including behind-the-scenes artwork, seventeen tracks and a bonus track only available on the LP download.

Want to bring the music from the latest World of Warcraft expansion with you anywhere you go? The World of Warcraft: Cataclysm soundtrack is now available as an iTunes LP from the iTunes Store, featuring 17 eminently epic tracks as well as special bonus content including artwork, liner notes, and behind-the-scenes interviews. If you previously purchased a copy of the Cataclysm soundtrack album from iTunes prior to the release of this special LP version, don't worry -- you'll be able to receive the bonus content at no additional charge.

The Cataclysm LP Soundtrack is $9.99 on iTunes. Check out the full list of tracks on here.

Since the World of Warcraft Cataclysm expansion was released just over a month ago, there has been a lot of discussion among players about the difficulty of Heroic dungeons. Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has penned a new article discussing why the dev team made the decision to make those dungeons as hard as they are: In short, 'heroic' is supposed to mean something and that players need the challenge.

First, let me state that we do hear you. We understand some of you aren’t having fun and preferred the Lich King paradigm, or at least something closer to the Lich King paradigm. We greatly appreciate the feedback and it always makes us sad when players aren’t having fun. We're not ignoring you. We get it. We may not always agree on every point, but we understand where you’re coming from, and we want to try to help you understand where we're coming from.

The bottom line is that we want Heroics and raids to be challenging, and that is particularly true now while the content is new and characters are still collecting gear. They’re only going to get easier from here on out. We want players to approach an encounter, especially a Heroic encounter, as a puzzle to be solved. We want groups to communicate and strategize. And by extension, we want you to celebrate when you win instead of it being a foregone conclusion.

The balance of the article gives frustrated players a few tips to improve their experiences within the Heroic dungeons.

Read more here.

Blizzard's Community Manager Jonathan Brown (alias Zarhym) has a new post on the official World of Warcraft forums about planned changes coming to the Shaman class. The list is not a huge one but seems to have the Shaman community fired up with sixteen pages of comments already posted.

Those changes were only announced in the context of warlock changes. I recognize though that the first draft of patch notes did not yet have shaman changes listed. In light of that -- and to hopefully dissuade you all from invading the warlock forum about the changes I listed there -- below you'll find the tentative shaman notes. The patch notes will likely be updated to include these changes tomorrow evening.

Shaman

• Chain Heal’s effectiveness has been increased by approximately 10%.
• Hex now has a PvP duration of 8 seconds.
• Purge now dispels a single effect instead of two.

Read more here.

Blizzard has announced that over 4.7 million copies of the World of Warcraft Cataclysm expansion were sold in the month following its release on December 7, 2010. According to Blizzard's internal sales partnership statistics and its own sales data, this is a record single-month sales record for a PC title.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm was simultaneously released in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Europe, Russia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand on 7th of December , and became available in Korea and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau on 9th of December. With day-one sales topping 3.3 million copies,* World of Warcraft: Cataclysm became the fastest-selling PC game of all time, shattering the previous record, which was held by the second World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.

Read more here.

The World of Warcraft Mobile Armory application has been given a free update with support for the Cataclysm expansion. UI improvements have been implemented, Cataclysm items, classes, races, etc. have been added and the app has been reskinned to match the new WoW community site.

The World of Warcraft Mobile Armory App is available from the App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at www.itunes.com/appstore. For more information on the World of Warcraft Mobile Armory, visit our Mobile Armory page.

Read more here.

As part of the streamlined World of Warcraft community site, the team has posted a new handy-dandy guide to travel in Azeroth. The guide includes information about mounts available, what levels they can be obtained, flight masters, zeppelin travel and more.

Azeroth is a large world and it's recently become much larger. There are hills to climb, deserts to explore, fjords to ford, and a vast sea separating the continents. And let’s not forget that beyond Azeroth proper there lies a whole other shattered world -- Outland. Traveling has never been more interesting, and for some, confusing. To help you with getting around, we’ve compiled a list of some of the more common ways you can see the world, meet new creatures, and (likely) be killed by them.

Read more here.

All hail innovation! A group of intrepid University of Southern California students have created and released FAAST, or the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit compatible with the XBox Kinect. Using FAAST, folks can map body movements and gestures. To put the program through its paces, the group used FAAST to play World of Warcraft via Kinect. The results are AWESOME as the video shows a group member casting spells, moving the camera and more.

In this video, we show how FAAST can be used to control off-the-shelf video games such as World of Warcraft. Since these games would not normally support motion sensing devices, FAAST emulates keyboard input triggered by body posture and specific gestures. These controls can be dynamically configured for different applications and games.

At this time, the mapping program is only compatible with Windows-based systems but the team has plans to release both a Linux and Mac version in the future. Now how awesome is that?

Check out the video below:

The World of Warcraft development team has started an interesting series of blog posts about the 'movers and shakers' in Azeroth and their collective metamorphosis since The Shattering that came with the Cataclysm update. The series starts with a look at Orc powerhouse, Thrall, and gives a retrospective look at the way Thrall used to look and the way he looks now.

One of the most notable metamorphoses in Cataclysm is that of Thrall. Thrall He's worn many titles in his lifetime: slave, gladiator, shaman, chieftain of the Frostwolf Clan, and, most recently, warchief of the Horde. Now, as the son of Durotan puts down the mantle of warchief and takes up the simple garb of a shaman once again, we take a look back at his journey and the events that shaped him into the orc he is today.

Read more here.