Allakhazam poster Tabstopper has posted in our hunter forum regarding some official upcoming hunter changes. Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street outlined them on the O-Boards, noting that "Hunters of all specs, and particularly Beastmaster, are doing too much damage in PvE."

We want to be careful not to hurt hunter dps too much in PvP, so we’re taking most of the damage out of Steady Shot and Volley. Beastmaster hunters are in addition losing some of their pet dps. We still want BMs to have the best pets, but pet dps numbers are a little high at the moment. We are also still concerned about hunter survivability in PvP and taking the opportunity to jazz up Deterrence into something that looks and plays a little more interesting.

Ghostcrawler lists 13 changes that will hopefully be hitting the PTR soon so players can test them before they go live. You can read the list below and you can discuss them in Tabstopper's thread.

We hope you've all gotten the chance to check out the new World of Warcraft Miniatures game, which was released last month. But if you haven't, you'll have the perfect reason tomorrow, Dec. 9, when Upper Deck launches the Deluxe Edition of the game. We've received a press release with all the details:

The World of Warcraft Miniatures Game Deluxe Edition starter comes with everything two people need to play, including six randomized figures, three each from two of the three factions (Horde, Alliance and Monster), including Upper Deck’s pioneering detachable miniatures bases (dubbed the UBase™), deluxe Beginner’s Guide, one of three high-quality Deluxe Edition game boards, and custom dice.

You'll also get a World of Warcraft Trading Card Game sample pack, including a loot card from the Drums of War expansion that gives you a cosmetic in-game upgrade. Keep reading below for the full press release, or check out the announcement on the WoW Minis page.

Today I am happy to announce that Allakhazam.com has officially partnered with Blizzard with our acceptance into their Fansite program. As you know, we've always supported World of Warcraft and Blizzard has returned the favor. On the official World of Warcraft website Blizzard stated: "We would like to welcome Allakhazam to the program. Allakhazam has offered gamers a variety of game information over the years and has continued to grow and support the World of Warcraft community." We're honored that our commitment to the community is being recognized in this way.

"So what does this mean?" you ask. It means we're in the position to work much more closely with Blizzard than ever before. We'll be able to provide our users better content, new features and promotions that wouldn’t be possible before now. Plus, there are always the bragging rights that come with having Blizzard recognize your favorite website!

To all of you who've supported us over the years, this is your victory. It's our loyal users who make great accomplishments like this one possible. For that, I speak for everyone at Allakhazam when I say: Thank you!

Feel free to chime in on the celebratory thread in our forums.

Welcome to the first in our new series of weekly recaps to keep you posted on some of our most noteworthy news stories, interviews and other exclusive items. At Allakhazam, we strive to bring you current news for a wide variety of MMORPGs, whether they have a ton of subscribers or they're just entering the alpha test phase.

While this new recap series will showcase a variety of articles, we invite you to visit www.allakhazam.com to browse through all of our daily updates. You can also click the news archives link near the top of the left menu on that page to look through all our posts since 2001.

Keep reading after the jump for this week's noteworthy news. For example, if you haven't already, check out part one and part two of our interview with Warhammer Onlines's Destin Bales, or our interview with Project Lore's Zand Broumand. There's even more links below, so keep reading.

Allakhazam Features

• Warhammer Online: Moving Forward, Part One : Destin Bales, Live Producer on Warhammer Online, talks with us about the current state of the game, hardware recommendations, realm balance, and many other issues.

• Warhammer Online: Moving Forward, Part Two : Bales discusses the game's economy, customer service, competing with World of Warcraft, and other topics.

• Allakhazam Watches Project Lore - Zand Broumand : Broumand talks with Tamat about his new soloing segment in Project Lore, as well as gaming in general.

• Jumpgate Evolution Media #1 : Codemasters has supplied us with four exclusive Jumpgate Evolution screenshots. We'll be getting more each week in December.

That's right! Thanks to Upper Deck, Wowhead is hosting an exclusive WoW TCG giveaway! Over the next couple of weeks you can expect to see our friends over at Wowhead run a number of contests giving away in-game loot. I won't spoil what all their giving away, but let's just say, this isn't a contest you want to miss.

How to Win

Just post your contest entry as a comment in the daily contest blog post. This time, the question is:

“What was the most epic loot drop you've ever gotten?”

It doesn't have to be an epic item – it could be an epic battle, it could be an item that comes after hours and hours of farming – as long as for you, it was epic.

At the end of each day, we will randomly select two entrants from the blog comments, and award them a loot card!

For more information about the contest, head on over to Wowhead !

Blizzard currently has a couple contests running for some great loot. One is open to players in the U.S. and Canada, while the other is from the European World of Warcraft site.

In the U.S. and Canada, Blizzard and ATI have teamed up in honor of the Feast of Winter Veil, the upcoming in-game holiday event, to give away 80 ATI Radeon HD 4550 graphics cards. All you have to do is visit this site and register. You'll receive one entry for registering and then another for every day you log in to the site. You can also get up to 10 more entries for referring friends, and five entries each for signing up for the Blizzard or ATI e-mail lists. The full rules can be found here. The contest ends Jan. 9.

On the European site, Blizzard has teamed up with Steelseries to offer some WoW computer accessories to players who create the best WoW-themed Christmas decoration. Prizes include that crazy WoW mouse, a ZBoard keyboard and a professional gaming headset. You have until Jan. 2 to send in a photo of your creation. Rules and more information can be found here.

Ever since Wrath of the Lich King was released, there's been numerous discussions among players regarding whether it's too easy or not. Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, and so are the game's developers. Allakhazam poster Nikkelmand has shared in our general forum a post from Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street that covers this issue. It was buried in a thread regarding DPS balance in raids.

Ghoscrawler made five points in his post and leads off with the comment, "We know heroics and raids are a little easy right now, and we're okay with that ." His final point, which I feel sums up his post, is below. You can read the rest after the jump, and discuss them in Nikkelmand's thread here.

5) We knew we were messing with class balance quite a bit, so it's nice that things are a little easier right now. It gives the players time to learn the new spells and abilities and gives us a chance to see how things really work out in the actual game with thousands of people beating on the mechanics. We'll continue to make adjustments as necessary. It's an MMO. Things change over time.

There used to be a cap of 40 on the amount of debuffs you could have on a creature at one time. Well, according to Daelo on the O-Boards, that cap has been increased with Wrath of the Lich King.

We changed how the game handles debuffs (ie negative state effects on targets) on creatures with Wrath of the Lich King. The old hard cap of 40 debuffs on a target no longer effectively exists. You can now apply way more debuffs to a target without them dropping off before their duration expires. The default WoW UI will not normally display all these debuffs, but they really are still there!

Of course, Daelo does not confirm whether there is a new hard cap for debuffs. From the use of the words "way more," we can probably assume there is some sort of cap.

Project Lore launched a new segment of the show this afternoon called Soloing -- which will be starring Zand "Dorkins" Broumand, at least initially. In this new segment of the show, Zand will be doing an introduction to soloing in Northrend. This week he starts off in Howling Fjords but not before we had a chance to sit down and talk with him about Project Lore, Soloing and a little place called Gamerville.

Tamat : Hey Zand! It’s great to talk with you again. Thank you for pulling yourself away from your Hunter long enough to answer a few questions. Did you have fun at BlizzCon?

Zand :  Not only did I have fun, but going to Blizzcon confirmed a long time suspicion I had. Hot chicks DO play World of Warcraft, I repeat, there are hotties in the World of Warcraft.

Tamat : Indeed! So let’s start with the most obvious question. How are you enjoying your new and improved Hunter?

Zand :  Loving it.  More stable space, new pet talent trees, improved hunter talents, exotic pets, and automatic leveling of really low level beasts ... it’s like God himself came down from heaven, got a job with Blizzard and was put solely in charge of all hunter improvements.  It's truly mana from heaven!

Tamat : *laughs* Do you have any alts that you play beside your hunter?

Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street has posted a preview of some Death Knight changes the dev team is currently discussing. Most of these changes apply to tanking Death Knights.

This is a new class, and while we’re thrilled overall with how it's been received, we always expected to have to make more changes to death knights than the classes that have had their talents under the microscope for many years. We’re not prepared to announce specific changes to DKs yet, but here are some general areas we are tinkering with.

Possible changes include a boost in Frost Presence's mitigation; scaling the mitigation of Icebound Fortitude based on defense skill; buffs to tanking talents in the Blood tree; a reduction on Rune Strike's weapon damage, but a boost in threat; a reduction in runic power costs of Unholy Blight and Horn of Winter; some fixes to Shadow of Death; some changes to ghouls; and a new spell to raise fallen allies.

Ghostcrawler's full post can be found here or below. Discuss the topic in our Death Knight forum here.

UPDATE: Ghostcrawler has further expanded on this topic in a second post. It's also after the jump.