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.