So, the NDA was lifted. It’s time to rejoice. I’m just a bit… puzzled.

I was in the Alpha. I should have all this info stashed up to share with the world and bask in the pageviews. I should have tons of posts written about the changes. I don’t.

[Luckily for you, Lissanna was also in the Alpha and she's promised some yummy posts.]

I maybe played the Alpha for 10 hours in total, which were spent:
- leveling a worgen hunter to 11
- making a goblin mage, logging into her, looking around and logging out
- flying around on my druid in Elwynn forest to see the big hole in Stormwind
- doing one run of Blackrock whateveritscalled
- doing the first few quests of Vashj’ir.

So I don’t have anything much to say yet. I probably won’t spend much time now in the beta either, because, honestly, I have enough to do on live, and I don’t want to spoil my Cataclysm leveling. I’m curious about the changes, but I don’t want to get bored of the quests before the expansion even hits.

So, no major insights, just a few observations. Spoilers be here, so don’t carry on if you want to skip them.

Healing touch is (at least was, in a previous build) AMAZING. A much shorter cast time and a lot of healing. I really, really, really hope it stays like this. Judging by this page, it has the same base cast time as Nourish (3 seconds), so I doubt it’s going to stay the same, but with my haste it was a really big and fairly fast heal. You mean I could actually tank heal now without spamming Nourish like crazy and hoping s/he won’t get plastered?

Tree form on a cooldown is depressing. I know I said it’s not so bad, but healing without being a tree felt… wrong.

Blackrock whatever is just as ugly as the other Blackrock dungeons. I hate all that lava. I don’t know if it will remain the same difficulty in live, but it didn’t pose any problems to us (our gear was T10 but not BiS). The blue drops were better than what we were wearing. Yep, our epics will be replaced very very fast.

Vashj’ir is fun and leveling underwater rocks. The quests are also better than the usual ‘bring me 20 of these’.

The worgen starter zone is phased and it’s annoying. I was leveling with friends, but they started a bit after me so we couldn’t even see each other. On the bright side, they finally put a mailbox there – yay heirlooms without running half the map!

Flying in the old world ROCKS. I only explored a tiny bit (I wanted to see wtf the big hole in Stormwind was), but whooooosh birdie!

That’s it for now. I might make a separate post where people can ask questions, if anyone’s interested. I don’t know much (anything) about lore, I won’t do many quests, but if you want me to take a screenshot of this place or look for that NPC… no problem.