Icecrown Gating, Last Wing in 2 Weeks.

No surprise to everyone, it's official on the live servers, the Lich King will wait to eat your souls in 2 weeks (unless you defeat him of course :P). The official date is February 2nd (US) and February 3rd (EU). You can read the details, as usual, on your best source of live information about WoW, MMO-Champion.
The second wing opens today (yesterday on the US servers) with 2 new bosses: the Blood Princes and Blood Queen Lana'thel. A bunch of vampires, that seem easier than Putricide as the queen has already been downed, though this can be due to the guilds having 2 more weeks of itemization in icecrown. Explanations and information about the gating system and the combined pool of limited bosses attemps can be found on MMO-champion, here.

About my games lately I finally got Saurfang down in 10-Man, on both my paladin and ma discipline priest. I tried a bit Festergut with Syrïel, we managed to keep the tanks alive (with me and two other healers) on 2 attempts (we tried it 4 times), but our raid dps wasn't high enough to pass the enrage timer. It's tricky as the tank/heal team is kind of better in the 10-Man my priest is sometimes, but the dps are way higher in my horde guild :P
On a side note a discipline priest is incredibly effective on Saurfang to limit his blood power. We killed him with 0 mark in 10-Man once I figured that if I have the mana I should just shield everyone at all time to prevent as much blood-producing damage as I could. For the first time my priest went into icecrown she started with Saurfang and had a huge amount of fun, even with her limited gear (not even 230 medium ilevel).
The fight with Saurfang is really much more about control and reactivity than pure dps and/or stuff, which I happen to like. Festergut on the other hand is nearly the whole contrary.

Icecrown Gating, Third Wing in 2 Weeks.

Icecrown Gating

You can read it on MMO-Champion here, the third wing of Icecrown Citadel has been officially announced to open 2 weeks after the second one (aka the 19th of January). By the way the next arena season 8 date, which will be the last for Lich King, has also been announced to be probably on the 26th of January.
The third wing of Icecrown will be the last before Sindragosa and Arthas, so we can expect to see the Lich King live the 2nd of February if they keep with the 2 weeks gating time period. Not that I expect my guild to go that fast (we're just finishing with the entrance wing) but I'm sure all hardcore, or even semi-hardcore guilds will keep up with the pace for normal mode.

Now remember that the last bosses of each wings also have a limited number of attempts you can have on them for each week. This number has been increased from 5 attempts to 10 though, so this week everyone will have 10 attempts on Professor Putricide.

Cataclysm release date thoughts.

Now I'm sort of wondering if ICC will be enough content for players until the release of Cataclysm, even with the artificial increased time need to finish the raid that this gating system creates (pool about that topic on the right side). More than 3 months between a raid is cleaned and another appears is usually too much, but if we have the same "new talents live test period" as we had at the end of The Burning Crusade we can probably add about 2 months to this 3 months period farming ICC.
Still 5 months lifespan only bring us to early July, and I don't think now that Cataclysm will be out before the summer (though I was thinking June before). Blizzard won't release during the summer, which brings us to a fall release.
Now you can understand the announcement by Blizzard about a new raid being given to us before Cataclysm launch. I would expect just before or just after they give us the new talents trees. A new raid adds about 3 more months to the time that can go before the launch without players quitting "en masse" the game. Which brings us to the fall/late fall release that seems to be expected by most people now (preorders even give an early November release date).

What do you think about it? I'm really eager for Cataclysm myself, and would like to see it before summer, even if it probably won't happen I'd like to at least see the "new talents live test period" at this time. The global revamp of the talent trees is what I want to see the most right now, I think the "old model" has done its time.

Icecrown Gating, Second wing on the 5th.

Thanks (as always) to Boubouille from MMO-Champion for this news, and to the player who sent it there. You can read the details here, but the basis is: the second wing of Icecrown Citadel with Rotface, Festergut, and Professor Putricide will open the 5th January. So we have 4 weeks (probably a bit less spent raiding with Christmas and New Year during that period) before the next wing is opened and more bosses are given to us.
Boubouille speculated that the next gating will probably be shorter, or we would not have Arthas before April (and hard mode can't be unlocked before you beat Arthas on normal). He's probably right, 2 to 3 weeks is probably the time we'll have to wait during the next gating periods.

Until the 5th, we can have fun with Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Gunship Battle, Deathbringer Saurfang in the entrance of the Citadel raid. But don't forget the new instances, I think the bosses there will be a fun challenge even for moderately geared players.
More news about the patch when I'll have been able to play it, the servers just came up again in Europe and I won't play before tonight :)

If you're experiencing problems, look at the list of known patch issues also present here. And don't forget to update your add-ons beforehand (like when you're patching ;p).