Yes, but Kael’thas stabbing everyone in the back happened much later than the Scryers defecting (he didn’t steal the glowy glyphy thing (I swear I can never remember what those things are called) from the Silvermoon paladins until well after BC came out, because I actually remember seeing it down in the basement at one time), so there’s no connection.
Screenshot time!
Ensyld, going for another kind of swim, a la Scrooge McDuck
And I swear, no matter how long I’ve been playing this game, I keep finding new things I never noticed before. My night elf hunter, Nouveus, was making his way through Stonetalon, into the Charred Vale, on his way to Desolace, when he noticed what appeared to be a path up into what I’d previously assumed was an inaccessible area. I was already aware of the path from Sun Rock Retreat into the Charred Vale (another fairly recent discovery that made me do a /facepalm when I found it, because my Horde toons had previously been taking the long route from Sun Rock to Charred Vale), but this “path” is to the north. I’ve marked both paths on this “satellite view” - Horde path from Sun Rock Retreat marked in red, and this new “secret” path marked in yellow:
http://www.mister-rik.com/hosted/stonetalon_paths.jpg
And here’s Nouveus’ position on the in-game map:
http://www.mister-rik.com/hosted/stonetalon_map.jpg
Anyway, I got some fairly spectacular screenshots while exploring this path, and Nouveus did a bit of “spying” on Sun Rock Retreat:
http://www.mister-rik.com/hosted/stonetalon_01.jpg
http://www.mister-rik.com/hosted/stonetalon_02.jpg
http://www.mister-rik.com/hosted/stonetalon_03.jpg
http://www.mister-rik.com/hosted/stonetalon_04.jpg
So I was wondering to myself, “Does the Horde even know this path is here? Seems like the Alliance could just set up shop up here and drop all kinds of bombs on Sun Rock Retreat if they were so inclined.” But I guess the Horde does know, because Nouveus found this up there:
http://www.mister-rik.com/hosted/stonetalon_05.jpg
It’s a small campsite, and the crate has a Horde symbol on it.
“Naaru”. Or “talking chandelier” (YouTube link - yes, I’m still pimping “Exodar Disco” cuz it’s so totally awesome 
)
Oh, wow…I never found that one! I knew about the other path that it branches off of, of course, but I’ve never seen either outlet for the sidepath.
Thanks…it’s been so long since I’ve been in Shatt that I totally forgot.
I spotted the west end of the path when I was almost to Charred Vale. If nothing else, it’s will be a nice shortcut to Charred Vale when coming through Stonetalon from the south.
There’s nothing to stop you from killing extra mobs, if that’s what you want to do. It just means you don’t *have *to kill them unless you *want *to.
Skinning Critters was the easiest way to get your skinning up to 75. I’d just drag an alt over to Moonglade and go nuts.
The game world can only be so rich. It’s hard enough to design a raid like Black Temple or the Sunwell Plateau–could you imagine if they had to design those encounters from two different sides?
No Alliance can get rep with any Horde factions. No Horde can get rep with any Alliance factions. Unless something fundamentally changes about the game, the two factions races will always remain distinct. Basically, it’s for PvP reasons: they want each faction to have very recognizable silhouettes. They want you to look at a character, and instantly see from its race whether it’s a friend or an enemy. They don’t want you thinking, “Well, gee, is that a friendly Orc or a hostile Orc?”
Run regular Wrath dungeons until your comfortable enough to run Heroics. If you’re DPSing, I’d say your minimum should be 1.5k DPS before you start in on Heroics, unless you’ve got a group of friends who are willing to carry you through. Mostly, though, I wouldn’t worry about it–a lot of the people in the group are going to be just running for their daily Frost badges, or gearing up new alts. If you make it clear that you’re a fresh 80 who could use some help, a lot of people should be happy to explain fights.
With badges being so easy to obtain, there’s really no point to trying to wear PvP gear for PvE. The two sets of equipment are itemized very differently–the main difference being that PvP dumps a lot of points into Stamina and Resilience that will be useless for you in PvE.
I theoretically have a maxiLvl set that I wear for vehicle fights, but my tanking gear is so good right now anyway, I usually don’t bother with it… Also because I have a tendency to forget to switch back. :o
Congratulations!
Eh, if you scatter on time, it’s not too bad. (Especially if everyone is running a bossmod that has a /say for Defile–i.e., they’ll /**say Defile on me! **or something like that, so you can easily see who to run away from.) The bigger problem tends to be the Valks–with three of them, if people aren’t watching their positioning, it’s possible to split your targets, so that one is going in the opposite direction, which almost always means that someone gets dropped.
My husband and I always take that road to the Charred Vale, so some of us do. 
Well you and I know that. A new player might not realize, though, that they can/should keep killing mobs and hoping for a suitable drop. Of course, I personally get really bored grinding mobs when I don’t have a quest to do so.
But … but … that route would be longer for Horde!
TBQH, I disagree with that assessment, anyway. There’s nothing that seriously wrong with a lowbie running around in a few pieces of gray or white armor–it’ll get replaced eventually.
Hmm, looking at the screenshots, I might be mentally transposing the pond with another spot in Sun Rock. We take the other-other path, if that’s the pond near the top of the shots. (Crummy monitor at work; I can’t tell.)
You’ve also found the path to Malaka’jin (tiny troll village), I assume?
The red one is the path that leads directly from Sun Rock Retreat into the Charred Vale proper. The path I found is the one marked in yellow - you find it by traveling further north up the Webwinder path, and the other end empties out onto the path leading into Charred Vale. So Alliance can easily use that path, where they can’t easily use the “red” path from Sun Rock Retreat.
Oh yes, I have several Horde toons as well 
Pet question for more experienced hunters:
I read something a while back (don’t remember where, dangit) that said I should tame as many different kinds of pets as possible so that I can learn all the different abilities. This confused me quite a bit, because the way the article was written was kind of unclear. It made it sound as if my pets teach me new skills/abilities. That didn’t make any sense to me, because I’ve never noticed my hunters gaining any new abilities from their pets.
Could somebody clarify this? I’m suspecting what it meant was that if I tame one specific, say, Tenacity pet, that has a unique special ability, then future Tenacity pets I might tame will also gain that ability. But that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either - My troll hunter had a turtle pet for a while, and I haven’t noticed his new gorilla pet gaining the turtle’s “forcefield” effect when his HPs get low.
I’m clearly not getting something here.
I’m pretty sure this is old advice and the pet skills/abilities system has been changed since then.
Yep. Very outdated – you don’t need to worry about that now. Pet families have been normalized so that all tenacity/ferocity/cunning pets have pretty much the same abilities + a special.
Your turtle’s forcefield would be a tenacity special, frex.
Tom is right, that’s a pretty old hunter mechanic where you would have to learn a skill from an acquired pet to teach it to a new pet. Nowaday you don’t have to worry about it.
It’s an old class mechanic. Things haven’t worked that way for quite some time now.
ETA: Man, I got, like, triple-sniped.
Way back when, you would learn pet skills from your pets and then teach them to other pets, so you would have the pet you liked, then go tame a different pet to learn its skills, then dump it and teach the skills to your pet, all while not getting auto-level to 5 levels below your level, and having pet happiness and loyalty actually having some meaning.
One of the 3.X pre-wrath patches got rid of all that and gave us the pet structure we have today, where there’s 3 “classes” of pet, and each pet breed has a special attack or two they know automatically.
Boy it’s a shame how no one answers questions around here, huh, Mister Rik? 
Well, I’m thoroughly enjoying my hunter, Makig (go BDL!). Things have really picked up a lot in Outland - imagine, quest rewards that are actually useful.
Also - why did nobody tell me how awesome dual-spec is? 
I can run around burning down normal monsters non-stop with my survival build, then switch over to my max-survivability beast master build for elite quests. I love this unstoppable feeling.
In a few more levels I’ll be off to Northrend, can’t wait to check it out.
Well I was feeling cocky on my holy pally yesterday after having cut through scores of soldiers in Heathglen without problem, so I decided I could take on Abbendo or whatever his name is. Turns out, not so much: dude has a lot of hit points and hits hard. I got him down to about 70% but when I run out of mana, it’s game over.