info about new patch and expansion..Follow

Try heading over to YouTube and searching for such information. After Blizzcon II I found several vids of panels held at the convention about the upcoming expansion. They showed some footage of what the zones will look like and they gave a lot of general information. I can offer a few bits of information, but as with anything its very subject to change before the expansion comes out.

While the zones will feature a lot of artic settings, there will also be a good amount of forest areas as well. We will not be able to use our flying mounts in the first few zones. Blizzard wants to be able to guide our direction a bit more closely at first, but after reaching a certain level we’ll be able to use them again. There will be no new races this time. There will be a new profession, called inscription if I remember correctly, which will allow us to customize our spells, such as allowing a fireball spell to do more damage or to have a longer range or a shorter casting time. And of course we are getting our first hero class, which any class will be capable of unlocking.

I read that flying/epic flying mounts would need "training" to withstand the artic climate.

It was announced by Blizz that there will be no new level of riding skill for WotlK. Thus, you won't need to spend another few thousand gold to use your flying mount there.

However players probably won't be able to use their flying mounts while leveling (or for some levels at least) because that would obviously make questing/leveling to easy and might make game and zone-design very hard for Blizz.

I expect there will be a quest chain or something like this on a very late level (78-80 maybe?) before one can use his flying mount in Northrend. By then we'll be in the last zone and it would not hurt so much to give flying mounts back and enable people to roam the zones as they want.