It's been that way ever since 3.0.2 was released, I would assume it's a relic of the beta servers, though it would be funny if it went live that way for a little while. It's most likely something they can hotfix though.

Their backgrounds are rather different. They're similar in that they were both slaves to the gladiator pit. The difference is that Thrall has his time spent with Tabetha and Jaina, which helped forge him into a more compassionate person than just another "rawr smash" orc, like Garrosh. Without those two he would've hated the humans as much as the humans hate the orcs; they showed him that not all humans are violent racists against orcs. Varian, and the majority of the humans, seem ready and able to prove him as wrong as possible.

A few questions regarding the BoE item that drops from each raid boss in WotLK.

Does the item have it's own slot on the loot table, allowing it to drop in addition to the regular loot? (ie. Rare Bonus Loot such as Warglaives) Or does the item share a spot on the rest of the (BoP) loot table?

Also; do these items vary from Non-Heroic/Heroic Raids?

Do they match the iLvl of the rest of the boss' loot table? So would the BoE item from Non-Heroic 4HM be iLvl 200, and the BoE item from Heroic Kel'Thuzad be iLvL 226?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can answer these questions.

From my perusal of the list of BoEs, it appears they are the same ilvl of the other items the boss drops. I can't answer the bonus loot issue.

Not every boss has one; if every boss did have them, there would be more available: there are only 13 ilvl 200 BoEs, many of which are world drops. There are 24 ilvl 213 BoEs, and by exhaustive search of the previously posted list I believe each Naxx-25 boss other than Gluth and KT has a BoE on their loot table - the rest are from Malygos-10, Sartharion-25 and 25-man badges. Thus it loks like your assertion that every boss has them is almost correct if one ignores Naxx-10 and KT.

Yes, there are BoE items available with 25-man badges; these are likely supposed to be money-making items for those who have nothing else to get. The heirloom tems are likely designed as the equivalent sink for 10-man badges.

Well to be fair, there has never been a non-bloodthirsty animal Orc leader for the humans to interact with before Thrall. Frankly after the events of Warcraft 1 and 2 the fact that they kept the remaining Orcs in Azeroth alive in internment camps instead of xenociding the entire race is the height of mercy and compassion. We also see in Warcraft 3 that the moment Thrall leaves the other Orcs alone they manage to revert to complete savages. Thrall leaves for 5 minutes and puts Grom Hellscream in charge and in that time they gorge themselves on demon blood, clearcut a Night Elf forest and kill their revered demi-god Cenarius.

I just hope Hellscream Jr. gets killed off at some point, unless they actually want to just revert back to the "Orcs are evil invaders who want to kill everyone" model anyway.

I'm not even going to comment on this one as I think the paralels between this and history are fairly clear as is.

Cutting down the forest for lumber was in fact something the Warsong clan was ordered to do by Thrall. Cutting down the forest angered Cenarius whom attacked the Warsong Clan along with the Night Elves, and in desperation a Darkspear Witch Doctor that was serving with the Warsong Clan pointed out he felt there was a site of huge power nearby and said to Grom it was probably their only chance.

Upon actually arriving there, (presumably) the same Witch Doctor pointed out it was probably cursed, but at this point Grom had the choice of being killed by a vengeful demi-god or drinking from this fountain. It should be noted he did not know at this time it was corrupted with the blood of Mannoroth. He then proceeded to kill Cenarius and the Night Elves in the area, and after that gets enslaved by Mannoroth again and at that point founds out it was demon blood he just made himself and his entire clan drink.

Now if you'd mentioned Grom was bloodthirsty because he immediately attacked the Alliance upon landing on Kalimdor you'd be correct, ironically cutting lumber on the order of Thrall was his "punishment" for his aggresiveness. Thrall thought to give him a peaceful task to make him atone, that it ended up the way it did was something he couldn't have known because the Night Elves certainly didn't make their presence known until after Grom started cutting lumber.

Judging by the way other similar transports work I doubt you would have to relog to use it.

That does lead to something I've been wondering about though; how are they keeping people without Wrath out of Northrend? With TBC there were instance portals that could easily block access, but with a boat/zeppelin it's a little less obvious. Can you not get on or even see the transports without upgrading? Or will it let you on the boat but drop you in the middle of the ocean once you hit the loading screen? The latter seems rather unlikely, but it would amuse me a fair bit :p

On the PTR, I jumped on the boat to see what would happen.

It took us out to sea, the loading screen came up and then dropped back and we were in fatigue waters, just out from SW harbour, short swim back to safe waters and then land.

I'd imagine this would also happen for the non-wotlk accounts in Live.

edit: see the sea not sea the see :S

For TBC you actually test this with the boat to Azuremyst isle, what happened there was that you could take the boat, but you'd teleported to the graveyard in Darkshore instead of getting a loading screen if you weren't on an upgraded account.

I assume the same (is supposed to) happen(s) for the boats and zeppelins to Northrend.

I could be remembering wrong here, but at TBC launch, weren't there server restarts right before 12:00 AM?

No, but there were quite a few server crashes due to the spam at the Dark portal

It took much less time to get through the web page than it did to install BC, so I can't say it was a problem.

Excellent to hear, thanks for answering my question.

(Please delete, found my answer)

The Alliance war effort appears to be mostly from the remainder of the "original" Alliance - Humans, Dwarves, and Gnomes, as the High Elves don't really exist in their old form. The state of the Night Elves is a bit up in the air to me - it's been quite a while since anything told us much about what Tyrande's current concerns are, though the Emerald Dream has to be among them. I doubt she thinks the Lich King is a minor threat - the Legion's forces that devastated their lands was mostly undead - but her priorities at the moment are unclear to say the least, but she certainly should have the forces to be able to participate in the war. Nothing I've seen has directly addressed the Draenei's current level of strength, which since the group at the Exodar can probably be assumed to still be trying to establish themselves, is probably concentrated in the Draenei forces in Outlands.

With the Blood Elves having aligned themselves with the Naaru with the events of Sunwell, they're in a state of flux as well, and also have a significant portion of their strength in Outlands. The Aldor, the Scryers, and A'dal and the rest of the Naaru are probably more focused on the Burning Legion, though they certainly don't like the Scourge - and the Blood Elves do have far more reason than the Draenei to get involved if they can. The horde is far more unified than the Alliance though, that much is certainly true - the Horde haven't had a Black Dragon helping run one of their factions for the past couple years, and for whatever reason, the dwarves, the group most in a position to have taken up leadership of the Alliance, have shown no interest in doing so.

The friction between Horde and Alliance that develops in Northrend may be part of the reason many of those groups are not more involved though - the Draenei and Naaru certainly have little to no reason to have interest in a Horde/Alliance war, and connections with the Naaru may affect blood elf involvement as well. The night elves may take the infighting as a sign that this is a brash action for the most part, and not a well thought out assault that they wish to take part in, and they probably have closer ties to Theramore and Jaina than any other Alliance group, and Jaina almost certainly will continue to try to avoid Horde/Alliance conflict as well.

this is absolute rampant speculation, but it would be quite cool to see the factions "splinter" into 4 sub factions, or allegiances- Human/Dwarf/Gnome, Orc/Troll/Undead, Blood elf/Draenei (united under Aldor/Scryer/Naaru), and Night elf/Tauren. As has been mentioned countless times, a re-factioning of players would be practically impossible assuming current game mechanics... but its interesting to see how the storylines seem to be fragmenting along these lines naturally.

Daily quests should give around 9800 XP each when your account is upgraded.

if you get the quest and complete it *before* upgrading your account, and then turn in the quests after upgrading your account, do you get XP?

It should. That's how completed dailies worked when transferring a character to the beta.

someone told me that this was changed in 3.0.3, but i saw nothing in the patch notes to say that. I dont know if i should bank 25 dailys or not

Seems the opening is bugged somehow.
We have on our server several alliance in tundra already and alliance dks active, but horde cannot do anything of that.

Checked wow forums and other servers seem to have similar "problems".
Makes those first 80 achievements bit absurd.

They removed the first to 80 achievements a long while ago.