Well, Jaina got her upgrade already, and we’ve heard that other NPCs may be looking a little better very soon. But what about us players? Don’t we get a cool, slick new look too? Vaneras has the answer: erm, maybe. As you may have noticed, our armor has been getting updated as we’ve gone along — the Tier 10 armor is much clearer and more stylish (well, depending on who you talk to) than the original tier gear that dropped way back when. But as for the actual player models, Vaneras says it’s something that Blizzard would like to do, but it’s all a matter of time and priority. They’ll get around to it, sure, but only when it makes sense for them to spend the time on it. Which is what we’ve heard before, really — J. Allen Brack told us way back that things would be updated bit by bit rather than having a major patch be focused on updating everything you can see on screen. Still, Cataclysm, the expansion that redoes the old world and all of its old without a side view. So, after some datamining and image editing of our own, we’ve put You guys have probably noticed The Queue has slowed down a lot as well, and it’s somewhat for the same reasons. We love writing it,

Good times on the WoW Insider Show last Saturday — even though Turpster was AFK for the week, we had a packed show, with Matthew Rossi, Chase Christian, and Eddie “Brigwyn” Carrington all jumping on to share some opinions. We talked about the new instances already testing over on the PTR, as well as what we’ll find in Icecrown (we kept the story spoilers out of it, though we did talk about some bosses and their abilities). And we hit up the character selection and creation screens and chatted about what might be better on those. Make sense? Just because you don’t see, say, Attack Power on gear doesn’t mean you won’t have an Attack Power number governing how much damage you do. It just means that the AP you have will come from stats like Agility and Strength (depending on your class and a sinizuh asked… “With the simplification of stats in Cataclysm, are websites/communities like Elitist Jerks going to have nothing to do?” Elitist Jerks predates the dark voodoo that is the math behind Armor Penetration. Coding arcane magicks into World of Warcraft isn’t what fuels theorycrafting and places like EJ. It’s the drive to get the absolute most out of your game.

  Starting at 6:00 p.m. EDT, 5:00 p.m. CDT, 3:00 p.m. PDT we’ll be liveblogging the Twitter developer chat that’s going on with WoW’s Director of Production and Game Director. We’re seeing how this goes. We know a lot of you don’t use Twitter, and that many places of business block Twitter. If this twitter-induced liveblog goes well for us, we’ll do it again during future Twitter chats. If not, we won’t! Enjoy it now either way. Update: Chat over! The transcript of the liveblog after the break. We’ll do a review of this tomorrow, talking about our thoughts concerning the event overall. After you read the transcript you’ll likely come to the same conclusion we did: Save for a couple items nothing new was really presented. There was a lot of fluff and very little substance. 4:50pm CDT: They’re now taking questions, tweet to @warcraft with the hash tag #blizzchat. 500pm CDT: Lots of questions are being asked, no answers yet. Most of the questions are not too good, to be honest. 5:05pm CDT: Nothing yet over their twitter feed. Although we’re told this is today… 5:09pm CDT: Q: Will Path of the Titans be as time consuming as obtaining Sons of Hodir

Ghostcrawler posted a bit this evening on the philosophical direction Blizzard is taking in Cataclysm in three important areas: Talent trees New spells and abilities Recycled raid content The discussion originated from a mild QQ post about what the poster felt were the flaws in Cataclysm, and Ghostcrawler took that opportunity to clarify a few things that the community has been talking about since the initial announcement at BlizzCon 2009. Chief amongst those is that they are specifically designing talent trees now with an intention for there to be 5 to 10 talent points that can be spent where the player wants — and that talent guides like you find in WoW.com’s class columns will only go so far in the selection of the idea talent tree; the rest of the talent selection will be left up to the individual user. Of course, this information isn’t exactly new per se, but it’s interesting to hear some of the refinements of it all as Cataclysm’s development progresses. Ghostcrawler’s full statement after the break. The talent tree comment Ghostcrawler is referring to: No new talent points. But wait didn’t GC say they were going to go back and redo the trees? That is a misconception. All that

While it may or may not hint to the release date of the next expansion, a listing on Amazon has pegged the release of a hardcover novel by award-winning author Christie Golden entitled World of Warcraft: The Shattering: Prelude to Cataclysm. While that might seem like one colon too many (insert snickering here), the self-explanatory title actually sounds pretty cool. What sounds uncool, however, is that it’s a prelude. Meaning before. If you’re reading into this as much as I am (generally not a good idea), that could mean that the Cataclysm expansion will ship after August 31. After all, you’d think that Blizzard’s marketing team would want a book that reveals what happens before the Cataclysm to actually launch before the expansion hits, right? Eastern Kingdoms – Light overhaul: Tirisfal Glades Western Plaguelands Silverpine Forest Arathi Highlands Alterac Mountains The Hinterlands Hillsbrad Foothills Duskwood Elwynn Forest Dun Morogh Loch Modan questing today, it stands apart. It’s a very long journey for a young character, and when you finally arrive at the Sepulcher and find the husband’s grave, you realize you’ve come all this way to deliver a worthless trinket to someone

IgroMir is Russia’s largest gaming convention — sort of an Eastern European Electronic Entertainment Expo (E5?) — and Blizzard made an appearance there this week, showing off World of Warcraft: Cataclysm and Starcraft II. Besides the demo booths, visitors could look forward to panels with J. Allen Brack (the current WoW head honcho) and Chris Sigaty (SC2 grand poobah), trivia contests with the Russian Blizzard CMs, and goblin/worgen leveling contests. But, of course, here at WoW.com we’re mostly interested in Cataclysm news, so let’s get right to it, shall we? In his Cataclysm panel, Brack touched on two subjects — Tol Barad, the new outdoor PVP zone/quest hub, and the new guild leveling system. The Tol Barad talk was apparently nothing new, but the guild leveling talk had some good information in it. Not everything discussed here is new, but some of it is, so I’ll just reiterate what he said. After the jump, of course. Your guild will get experience for players earning rep, killing bosses, doing dailies, getting achievements, Arena and BG wins, crafting, leveling up, and more. The top 20 earners in the guild each week will have their contributions turned into XP. Previous