Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life...

Kaliope flying over Nordrassil in Mount Hyjal.

...at last I've found you! (Madeline Kahn, Young Frankenstein for the confused).

I finally made it into the Beta today after two weeks of waiting :) It only took a week of waiting for a key code to be assigned to me, followed by a week of waiting for Battle.net to accept it. In a bizarre twist, my daughter got a random Beta key on her account the day before I applied for mine. And she was completely unwilling to share, would you believe that?? Luckily I'm a sweet and patient person and restrained myself from invoking parental privilege.

Part of the reason for my monumental patience was that I could see how little tradeskill content was actually implemented. Since it was obvious that there wasn't much to do, I decided to bide my time. Right now there are no Cataclysm profession trainers. In fact, the lower trainers that are around are pretty sketchy. I'm only able to level mining to about 75, the trainer won't let me to move up another level. I can only assume they're still working on this stuff. It looks like they're revamping the trainer interface, so I guess that's why things aren't too functional.

On the plus side, I've been exploring a bit. The zones are being reworked - as you know. So I've taken the opportunity to wander around and figure out where the nodes ended up. I went to the Plaguelands to find high-end herbs and saw kingsblood and khadgar's whiskers. Be prepared for that type of change when you get into Cataclysm. It should be obvious, but I didn't really consider that when I first started hunting for herbs.

I've also been scoping out the new zones to see what types of herbs and ore are there. So far I've managed to locate obsidian (ore), cinderbloom (herb), stormvine (herb) and azshara's veil (herb) in Mount Hyjal and Vashj'ir. Right now cinderbloom seems to be the most prevalent of the herbs. My daughter and I both agree that Mount Hyjal is the better zone for farming. Vashj'ir is basically under water, which makes it slower getting around. It's also loaded with mobs who jump you frequently, the mob density feels pretty high. Plus everything is in three dimensions, which means you have to be aware of everything above/below/sideways of you. Personally I felt that the ore spawns were not as numerous there, but the mob density and movement issues definitely affect accessibility too.

The skill levels don't seem to be set either, so far everything requires a skill of 425. I'm guessing this isn't a permanent situation. Until they start to solidify these things, I probably won't be reporting a whole lot on tradeskill content. But I'll be happy to answer questions you guys might have, if you want to submit them :)