It's almost time for Mists of Pandaria! The Pre-Expansion patch 5.0.1 will soon hit live servers, which means that a lot of new features from MoP will be added to the live game (such as the new talent system, new spells, pet battle, etc.). However, you will not be able to enter any new areas from Mists of Pandaria.

The confirmation of Patch 5.0.1 came via this blue post today:

We will soon begin public testing of patch 5.0.1 of World of Warcraft, a patch that will precede the Mists of Pandaria release, and includes many features and functions that are new to the game.
We encourage all players who wish to test patch 5.0.1 with us to take careful note of the following:

• It will not be possible to access the 5.0.1 PTR realms with a game account that accesses the Mists of Pandaria Beta.

• If a game account has been flagged with a Mists of Pandaria Beta license, it can only be used to enter Beta realms.

• This limitation is on each World of Warcraft license, and is not Battle.net account-based.

• While testing 5.0.1, players will not be able to access zones or content that is a part of the Mists of Pandaria expansion.

Thank you for your continued support of our testing and tuning process. We look forward to seeing you in-game.