I decided to log in to my Battle.net account yesterday in hopes that magically I was entered into the World of Warcraft Cataclysm beta without getting an email notification.  Since Battle.net was redesigned, it's one of the most convoluted sites I've seen for something as simple as account and game management, it's rather frustrating.  Nevertheless when I arrived to my WoW account page, the ever elusive WoW1 Account was listed and my beta subscription was active!

Now I've played WoW off and on since vanilla, I started March 2006 prior to the release of The Burning Crusade, so I'm very familiar with the style, lore, and progression that WoW has made over the past 5 years.

The upcoming Cataclysm expansion introduces some major changes to Azeroth and the general function of the game, some more subtle that others.  I'm just going to make some bullet points about my first impressions wandering around the world for a few hours yesterday, and of course the issues I have may just be because it's in beta form.

Things I like that have changed/been added:

• No more stupid weapon skills. This was one of the most painful parts of leveling, getting your weapon skill up to a point where you don't miss mobs every single time.  You now have just a simple "Weapon Skill" icon in your spellbook which tells you what you can wield.
• Zone auto-quests.  Certain zones you enter automatically put quests in your quest log, and auto-complete when you finish the tasks.  Unexpected and neat, saw my first one in Vashj'ir.
• Level up notifications. Leveling up puts a cool graphic notification in your HUD and tells you which skills are now available at your newly earned level.  It makes that golden "woosh" around you when you level look like a party favor.
• Talent specializations/31 pt talents. It makes specing a LOT easier, seems to have cut out a bunch of the fluff talents. Plus there's a Druid talent called Nom Nom Nom (NNF ofc).
• Multiple tracking on the minimap. Easily selectable, very useful.
• Baron Geddon. Oh yea, he's back lol.

Things I dislike or am up in the air about:

• Major class changes. Too difficult to go into much detail, but I primarily play a mage and druid, and on the mage side they made Arcane Missiles a proc only spell which kinda works but is frustrating at times.  I wasn't able to train druid skills since the beta is currently bugged if you have 2 professions you can't train anything. I'll delete a profession tonight and try it out.
• Mob health increased x3. Level 80 Cataclysm mobs now have around 31k hp.  Understandable to scale but it was kinda scary seeing that at first.
• Gear stat changes. I'm still up in the air. Caster items basically have int/stam and crit or hit. I originally hated the idea of so many secondary stats, but now I kinda miss it. The gear seems "light" even though early quest items are around an ilevel of 272.  Not seeing spell power on items will take some getting used to.

I'm sure I'll have more to say as the beta progresses and I'm able to do some more things.  Hoping to get in a dungeon group for Blackwing Descent eventually.