Some lucky World of Warcraft Annual Pass subscribers are already cavorting around the Mists of Pandaria, as Blizzard started sending out beta invites shortly after detailing how it'd all work. If you're not in, don't frown, sad panda, as invites are going out in waves.

The beta's kicking off with the starting experience for the new Pandaran race, the WoW blog explains. There's no high-level content yet, but testers can copy their live characters over to play with the new talent system.

The beta's starting with select Annual Pass subscribers, but will expand in waves to include lowly regular opt-ins too. Beta invite e-mails are being sent out, but given how many WoW phishing e-mails are sent out, you'd best avoid clicking any such thing and simply sign into your Battle.net account to check it's actually real. That's also where you should go to opt-into WoW beta tests, if you haven't yet.

If you're not in the beta, hey, you can always console yourself with our Jeff's preview.