How is WoW now a days?

Well last year round this time I gave up playing my lvl 80 tanking paladin because I thought WotLK was going downhill. Getting into a guild was a 40 hr a week job just finding one and then you had denote that much time to stay in. PvP was kinda bad etc. So I see cata coming and I thought about starting fresh, new character, new server etc. So to the WoW players on here, how is it now? How are the professions? Hard to make money? And whats this I hear about you can only spec ONE talent tree? Any help or advice about coming back would be appreciated, thanks guys!

Better than ever, old Azeroth is way more alive.

You can join a casual/social guild and just join random raids when you're in the mood.

Professions are the same, only cooking was implemented so i don't know much about main professions.

You can make money easy porblem is not spending them and investing to make way more :P.

You can have hybrid trees but not as before, depending on your class and tree, you can spare 5-6 points at most for other trees. You said you had/have a paladin, well a ret paladin at 80 at the moment can have something like 2/2/32 and something like protection 0/32/4. At 85 you will have a few more points to put but in cataclysm your main tree is what's important, the rest are either for a little more health %, a little more range and crit, or some resistance.

I don't know much about it, but I keep hearing about Blizz offering 7 days of play time for accounts that are not active on Cataclysm's release, so wait till then.

All I can say about it is it's a lot more streamlined, the quests seem more interesting and well structured, no idea on anything else as I haven't played in ages but I'm enjoying leveling my Tauren Warrior (38-39?) a lot more than the past. I can't help but feel you level a little too fast now, quests turned green halfway through Stone Talon which was annoying.

ok thanks, I was just seeing how things were. I was worried about the money part, because I remember as a miner I was going broke on my server, A stack of saronite went for 11-13g if you were lucky. You could vendor it for more. How is herbalism now?

when you install cataclysm will you still be able to play in the old places if you are just starting out? is there separate servers for each expansion?

Well there's your problem :P saronite is no good, that you can only sell to a vendor, but nobody really needs saronite, you rarely find somebody that asks, if so you can just rush to sholazar or something and gather a few. Titansteel was good for money, if you're too lazy to farm for materials then you can get something like 30 g profit per bar, if you do farm you can get up to 60g profit (on my server at least), but there's really no point to professions at the moment since everything will be useless in less than 2 days.

If you'll continue to be a miner, just smelt the last recipe since those are used for high end items, for cataclysm it's elementium/hardened elementium.

No idea about herbalism, never picked it up, my herbalism alt barely has around 180 skill :P, but herbalism is not really in demand, from what I saw, it's practically useless for making money on its own, just for getting materials for inscription or alchemy. If those are your two professions then they're not really a good mix, herbalism and mining. I assume alchemy will have the same uses in Cataclysm so if you want to dominate the high end metal market you can pick up alchemy and mining, to transmute certain materials that you need for the high end smelting recipes, but it's too soon to fully predict professions yet.

ok, ok. Well blacksmithing and minging were my professions. But like I said that was over a year ago. lol back when titanium was the hot stuff.

WoW is still a very good game, and is only going uphill through Cataclysm. The raids are shorter, but much more difficult; there are rated Battlegrounds, for a more intense and hardcore PvP environment; many parts of the UI, such as raid frames, have been revamped for ease of play; you have a clearer sense of your role now that talent trees have more of a focus; the revamped dungeons are actually really, really hard and require lots of CC to complete, thus making it a more enjoyable experience; leveling overall is more fun (leveling a gnome warrior right now for some pvp, it's awesome); the list goes on and on. Cataclysm is coming, and with it two years of possibly a second WoW golden age.

WOW, ok thanks man. appreciate the news!