Family & Friends: BC

Since a short while ago the family & friends alpha from WoW:BC started, a lot of info - some true and some fake - leaked despite the NDA. After a few days of pondering about the first screenshots of the new talents/skills from the expansion, Blizzard uploaded their own alpha expansion talent calculator to end the speculations. Some classes are still missing and of course it's a way of changes from alpha to gold status, but it gives us a good insight about the upcoming possibilities. Although screenshots from eg. Druids are already circling around, so it won't take long for Blizzard to complete the expansion townhall with them.
While DPS warriors are complaining, i like the changes. It looks like finally (at lvl 70) it will make a real difference if a DPS or protection specced warrior is tanking and not only for a few encounters. For a defensive meatshield the new talents/skills will be valuable, looks very promising. Two large discussions about the skills and such can be found here (1, 2). And if you want to see how the character creation for the new races look, watch this video.

Seems like people are saving screenshots like crazy and even try to run the alpha on emulators to explore the content, beside datamining the spells and such. If you want to see a ton of screenshots of different location in the expansion, from the Noggaholic crew and some others, check out these two: 1, 2. There are also links to new flying mounts like the Phoenix and some shots from inside the new raid instances like Karazhan. Talking about Karazhan, there is already the first video of the Tower of Medivh.

On a raid related note concerning Naxxramas, the first two raid groups (Death & Taxes, nihilum) finally killed the four horsemen. Giving us the possibility to have a first glance at the Sapphiron fight with two videos: 1, 2. Also interesting news is, that Vis Maior could complete the frame of Atiesh (legendary caster staff) and got the base dropped from C'Thun on their next run. Read the quest text and more info on their website.