Is this email claiming to be from Blizzard legit?

I just got an email:

Dear Players,

Take a trip back to Azeroth with 7 days of FREE game time! Simply click below to claim your time and experience all of the latest improvements and additions to World of Warcraft®... but act fast, as this offer will expire on Mar 22, 2011.

It looks incredibly professional, and looks very real. The only suspicious thing is the link to claim 7 free days of game time, which seems to be a squat of battle.net (you can see the actual link in the revision history for this post if you're so inclined).

How can I tell if this an actual Blizzard thing, or if I'm being phished?

The whois record for that domain was just registered on the 11th of March. And not by Blizzard but by someone at a nondescript chinese address.

I would stay away, sounds like phishing.

This is a scam that is a variation of a real email that Blizzard sent out on November 10th, 2010. The difference is that the link in that email went to www.worldofwarcraft.com, which is a real Blizzard site.

To be exact, the link was: https://www.worldofwarcraft.com/account/claim-promotion.html?promoId=SEVEN_DAYS_PROMOTION

However, this offer ended December 1st 2010, the week before Cataclysm was released.

Other clues from Blizzard that the real version was legitimate was the use of the user's first name at the top of the email.

Sounds like hackers. Best thing to do is log in to your account (to Blizzard's official site, not any links from the email) and check if there are any offers there.

While you're right that this is hackers ( I'm glad that URL sends out warning bells), there is a single precedent for this. Blizzard has done this once, for WoW's 6th anniversary (...or maybe fifth?) to all inactive accounts. (I'm betting your WoW account isn't inactive, though.)

It looks like the text of that previous announcement email was stolen for the phisher's own use, and so it is very likely the whole scenario is a sham.