Obviously spoilers in this thread, don't read any further if you want it to be a total suprise.

New patch today (4/25) pushed out a Jimmy McWeaksauce to PTRs that lets anyone with honored+ rep with VE get attuned/ported to Mount Hyjal. On live to zone into Hyjal you must kill Vashj and Prince Kaelthas (so no one on live is keyed yet). Patch was 38 megs by the way, fairly large (the original 2.1.0 patch was something like 200 megs). Lots and lots of little bug fixes, like hunter, alliance epic mount wingsflaps, etc.

Hyjal is in Tanaris obviously, one of the CoT wings. When you zone in, you are in a small cavern with a raid entrance (another zonein), and two gates "Night Elf" and "Horde". There is also a vendor that sells 3 pages of gem designs, and the T6 vendor (!).

You can see the gem vendor loot at http://www.mmo-champion.com.

When you zone into the raid instance you start out, as Alliance, at a small alliance base with lady Jaine Proudmoore and lots of 70 elites, including horsemen, dwarf riflemen, NE priests, bloodelf Sorceress' (?).

The starting area is standard alliance structures, few towers and buildings, think Theramore. You start the encounter and rush out to fight Undead - a few 70 elite abominations (naxx) are the first encounter.

Don't see a map yet, not sure if its because of a mod or there is no map for Hyjal ingame.

No obvious zone-out point in Hyjal. Graveyard is standard CoT GY, so a 3-4 minute run. Fighting the first groups now, more later.

I was wondering that too... and im still looking O_o

Probably high elves, since at the time of Mount Hyjal there weren't technically any blood elves.

Do they look anything like this?
http://www.battle.net/war3/images/hu.../sorceress.gif
http://www.battle.net/war3/images/hu.../sorceress.gif

Multiples pics of a player exploring Hyjal: http://boards.worldofraids.com/topic-3599-1.html

The T6 vendor wants the T6 tokens, so...

Hyjal definitely does not seem harder than BT. Our instance got bugged and stuff started despawning, and the monsters weren't running to us anymore. But it looks like you have to defend the base against multiple waves (like Black Morass). The first wave is 8 ghouls, they die very easy and I believe are CC'able. They spawn in turn necromancers and mages as they die, but Jaina really owns hard (she had at least 9 mobs on her at one point and never dropped below 96%).

Its still buggy, basically any wipe means your done it would seem (lol), as the waves get bugged up after wipes and randomly stop. But so far the monsters die pretty easily, you get NPC help, seems to start out easy and ramp up. We pulled a bunch of abominations and they all died very easy and were hitting the tanks for 1-2k.

By the way its trivial for wall jumpers to jump into the alliance/horde base camps at the moment, just jump around one of the corners at the locked gates and you can get inside easy. I'm exploring the entire zone at the moment, Thrall is the horde commander (and not KoS if your alliance!).

There are three camps - Alliance, Horde, and the Night Elf camp where the World Tree is. You start the zone with undead attacking the alliance/horde base camps, so far the farthest I've gotten is 3 waves (boss is 3d wave). I assume you slowly fallback to the Night Elf camp at some point (they are all connected), and witness Archimonde and the World Tree events from WC3. The zone is not very big at all, you can ride from one end to the other in under 5 minutes. I was told pre-TBC that Hyjal was planned to be a raid that took under an hour once you mastered it, and I can definitely see that.

Wow, that truly looks like the WC3 event. Is there much more to it than that? Do the bosses attack the raid which is fortified or something (ala AQ20)?

I mean I guess that's what spronk is saying... still, really unique idea. Could be a lot of fun.

It's all fun and games until you hear Archimonde's ridiculous voice.

Seems to be Black Morass 25 man style...with NPC help.

Mobs come in waves, bosses come every few waves,

Looks to be a short instance for sure.

Not saying easy but...short

Ahh how I miss WC3's brilliance aura.