Perhaps feeling the competition from third-party talent calculators like Wowhead, Blizzard released a new improved version of their talent calculators.  Among the "innovations" are the ability to see all three talent trees at once and also the ability to see the statistics for all ranks of trainable abilities.

Quark found a funny article written by Rokujo on the official Blizzard forums entitled "Night Elves:  Poor Decision Makers."  As Rokujo points out:

Anyone ever notice how the Night Elves, when faced with important, world-changing decisions, INEVITABLY make the wrong ones? If it weren't for Night Elves and their screwups, I'd be inclined to think Azeroth in general would be a much nicer place.

The long searched for Ashbringer quests have been found!  Wowwalkthroughs has discovered and loosely translated a Korean website that shows the series of quests related to the Ashbringer that will be added in the 1.11 patch.  The quests tell the story of Mograine, his son, the Scarlet Crusade, and the founding of the Argent Dawn.  Just when you think the story comes to a nice tidy ending, you are told to look for Mograine's son.  "Wait a minute.  I've killed Mograine's son dozens of times," you think.

You are wrong. You only killed one of them. The other still lives!

(Cue suspenseful music).

Seismics verifies that the change to the Spirit of Zanza that makes it no longer persist through death was intended:

Spirit of Zanza no longer persists through death. However, the cost has been reduced from 3 tokens to 1.

Unfortunately, I can verify that the Spirit of Zanzas are still considered unique, so you can only carry one on you, making the Spirit of Zanzas practically worthless when used for raiding or PvP.

This article showing the game in various stages of its creation is really neat, even with some of its simplistic negativity. (Note to author: having a map doesn't mean all the content in in the zone is created). Note that not all of the images may come up the first time you load the page, but the images are not broken links. Just right click on any image that doesn't come up the first time and open it in a new window to view it. It seems like the image server doesn't want a given user to download too many images all at once.

So, what happened to the Emerald Dream?

The Scourge invasion that will start in patch 1.11 will only be temporary, according to Drysc:
 

The invasion will last for a maximum of a few weeks, but that can be cut down to a bit less if everyone is taking their time to fend off the invasion. The event will likely be annual but I don't believe anything final has been decided as to how often it will occur.

Also, Eyonix revealed today that the paid character transfer service will be coming soon.

The character transfer service is currently slated to go live sometime this summer. Unfortunately, we don't have a specific date locked down just yet. We'll provide updates on the service as we move closer to its launch.

Eyonix likes to create a list of all the latest official announcements from Blizzard in a column titled Warcraft Weekly.  While it doesn't come weekly like it should, it's a good way to make sure that there aren't any announcements that you have missed.  Some interesting announcements in this batch include:

Release timers will be eliminated in dungeons, battlegrounds and raid instances, but mechanisms are being added to eliminate graveyard rushing on some bosses.

Outdoor PvP objectives will be introduced as soon as patch 1.12.

The Blood Elf and Draenei racial abilities have been officially announced.

Some of you may have noticed slower or laggy connections to the World of Warcraft over the last couple of days.  This is because the Blizzard Background Downloader is already downloading files for the 1.11 patch.  The idea is to have some of the patch content that is already complete, like sound and graphic files, already downloaded onto most players' machines.  That way, the release day patch can be kept small, making patch day easier on everyone.

In an official Blizzard forum post, Tseric revealed how intellect translates into one's base spell crit:

Not an accurate statement. I will clarify.

At level 60, each class has an "expected amount" of INT. This varies from class to class.

At level 60, a Mage's expected amount of INT is 286 points.

That expected amount yields a 5% crit chance.

This works out to 59.5 points of INT for each Crit% point.

At levels before 60, the numbers are different, but keep the basic ratio of expected amount of INT to the crit% of 5.

Later in the thread, he provided this table:

For Mages at level 60:
48 Int: 1% crit
107 Int: 2% crit
167 Int: 3% crit
226 Int: 4% crit
286 Int: 5% crit
346 Int: 6% crit
405 Int: 7% crit
465 Int: 8% crit
524 Int: 9% crit
584 Int: 10% crit

MongoJerry has posted a new Adventures of Neriad tale that describes Neriad's adventures as she and some of her fellow Tichondrius Hordemates battle the Naxxramas spider boss Anub'Rekhan on the 1.11 beta test server.  Enjoy!

Raiders aren't going to get their epics for free anymore.  Zarathustra gives a rundown of all the materials that will be needed to make the Tier 3 epics from Naxxramas.  (The information is originally from Curse-Gaming).

In addition, Threnody gives the rundown on the materials that will be needed to make various pieces of frost resistance gear, which will be helpful in Naxxramas.