informed the residents of Wrath of the Lich King beta that their realms would be going down for some routine maintenance. The realms are back online, and now carry some pretty interesting changes that weren't around in the previous build.

Hunters in particular received two more stable slots, boosting their total capacity to five. The two additional slots won't come cheap though, costing 50 and 100 gold respectively. Here are the rest of the change notes to World of Warcraft's WotLK beta build 8719:

• Interface
• You can now compare your achievements with other players. Screenshot
• It seems that the action icon now appears when you mouseover the target frame of a NPC. It doesn't look like it's implemented yet but we can assume that in the future, we will be able to left click the frame of the NPC instead of his model to prevent all the issues caused by players blocking NPCs.
• The Death Knight starting area now have its own loading screen.
• The first features of the threat meter have been added to the game.
• Your of threat (based on the member of the party with the highest threat on the monster) is now displayed in the scrolling combat text.
• Your of threat is now displayed in the tooltips of monsters.
• According to the first reports, the threat is just sent to the client without any encoding now, it will be very easy to build mods to display the exact threat of each member of the raid in the future.
• Hunter
• Two new stable slots are available for your pets ! The respective price for the 4th and 5th slots is 50 and 150 gold.
• Warlock
• Howl of Terror (Demon Form) cooldown has been increased from 40 seconds to 3 minutes.
• Professions
• Alchemy Alchemical Blood has been renamed to Mixology.
• World
• The lighting bug affecting most of the indoor zones is now fixed.
• A new "battleground room" is available in Dalaran !

Visibly missing from the notes are the planned changes to the Death Knight's disease mechanics, implying that they might be taking effect at a later date. Check back with us again in case we receive any more news regarding this matter.

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Related articles:

• Wrath of the Lich King beta: BlizzCon Bear mount and new frost talent effects spotted
• WotLK beta forums: changes planned for Death Knight's disease mechanics
• Morhaime: Wrath of the Lich King coming Q4 2008

Source: wow.qj.net