As some predicted, at yesterday’s Q&A, Blizzard announced that pre-orders for Battle for Azeroth are open and that four Allied Races (Void Elf, Lightforged Dreanei, Nightborne and Highmountain Tauren) are available in game NOW for anyone who buys the pre-order.
Decisions Decisions
Battlenet Balance can be used to buy pre-orders – thus the price of the Wowtoken (Wow’s gold to “real” money exchange mechanism) has shot up to 403,000 gold in the EU! I’m very glad I stocked up on tokens before the announcement – it was nice to buy the expansion without spending any cash!
So if you have a max level character and have completed the associated unlocks for each Allied Race (usually being exalted with the faction and having completed their zone’s questlines), you can immediately play through the unlock quests with your high level character and then create your new alts. These unlock quests will also give you new racial mounts that may be ridden by any characters of the same faction.
Some important notes: The four extra character slots per server are not avaialble yet – but should be hotfixed in the next couple of days and will be available even to people who haven’t bought BfA. Also, if you want the Heritage Armor transmog sets for each Allied Race, then you have to level them from 20 to 110 without using an insta-ding token.
Time to level that Void Elf Warlock!
GamingSF 
Interestingly the token prices here in NA don’t seem much affected. They did spike for a while yesterday, but right now they’re at 186K each, which isn’t all that higher than they were before pre-orders went live. I’m probably just projecting my own personal feelings, but I can’t help but wonder if people just aren’t that excited by BfA. I found it strange how token prices climbed for weeks leading up to BlizzCon, then started going down as soon as BfA was announced.
Right now Nightborne are the only race I meet the requirements for, but I’m not so far off from the others, so I might as well push on for them, I figure. Still think the rep grind is kind of ridiculous, but Blizzard owns my soul, so.
Don’t have any interest in Highmountain or Lightforged — they’re not different enough from the base races to really justify their inclusion, IMO — but I figure the intro scenarios might have some cool lore at least.
Still haven’t decided if I want a Void Elf or a Nightborne. The way Void Elves came so out of the blue is off-putting, but they do look really cool, but the tentacle hair is a bit weird, but they do have better animations, but the Nightborne have nicer voices, but the Nightborne faces don’t look right to me, and a Void Elf would put me at an even six characters on both factions…
My brain hurts.