Our podcast is now ready for your downloading pleasure, and I have to say — it was a good one. Nothing flashy, no once-in-a-lifetime guests (though both Turpster and Matticus were on with me, and those guys are definitely one-of-a-kind), but it was just a good solid podcast, with some great discussion about the latest PTR build and Lord Marrowgar, the Battle.net changeover, and our very first predictions about when we might see patch 3.3 on the live servers. Turpster’s even got some money riding on his guess already. That’s all for our audience with Prophet Velen! Next week, we’ll be speaking with Cairne Bloodhoof, High Chieftain of the tauren! If you have questions for Cairne, whether you need advice or have questions about totems or nursing homes or anything in between, send them via email to  with the subject line

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com’s (almost) daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. I’m going to kick off today’s edition of The Queue with a question for you, the reader. It’s a gravely important question, so read carefully! What should I order from the local Chinese joint for dinner tonight? Should I go with my usual, shameful choice of orange chicken? Or should I go a spicier route and go for the Kung Pao? Heck, maybe I should bring a little variety to the table with a Pu Pu Platter? Help me, WoW.com! Sindrow asked… “Remember how faction switching caused all AT progress to be wiped? Is it safe to say that race change will not have similar effects, since everything is occurring within the same faction? Can you guys think of *any*

Okay, how did we miss this? We’ve been wondering about the level of change in each old-world zone for Cataclysm for months now, and the answer has actually been under our noses since BlizzCon. During the Art Panel, the above planning map was shown, along with some information to either side of it. We can’t make out everything in it, but there’s a lot of information if you know what you’re looking at. The zone colors, from what we can infer, indicate the level of overhaul each zone is receiving. Red is a heavy overhaul, yellow is moderate, green is light, and blue means a brand-new zone. The yellow stars indicate a dungeon, and the red stars indicate a raid. The white tabs each have a letter on them, indicating what in the zone was being changed at that particular point — L for level, Q for quests, etc. Astute readers will see some

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm is coming. Sometime. We’re at that point now where BlizzCon has been over for a few months and Blizzard is being pretty stingy with new information in the meantime. It’s a definite dry spell, but the same thing happened with Wrath — and then the Friends and Family Alpha began, and all bets were off. And while the F&F Alpha for Cataclysm hasn’t started yet (believe me, we’d know), that doesn’t mean you can’t stay informed. There’ve been bits and pieces of new info released, in PC Gamer magazine, on Twitter, and elsewhere on the internet. And we like to keep track of that! What’s come out is mostly new information on what’s going to happen to Azeroth. And we just recently decoded this planning map of Cataclysm zones, which is where some information comes from. So what this

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com’s (almost) daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. I was going to kick off today’s edition of The Queue by embedding Black Eyed Peas’ I Gotta Feeling (slightly NSFW) since I mentioned it was a guilty pleasure of mine on yesterday’s Moviewatch. Unfortunately, the official Black Eyed Peas Youtube channel disabled embedding and I’m not going to be a jerk and hijack it from somebody else’s channel. So you get a Dragon Age screenshot instead. Hooray! Blood! No, we’re not getting paid to plug this game constantly. We’re just nerds. Nerd gamers. This is what we do. Ilmyrn asked… “Any word on whether we’ll ever see a non-Arena frost wyrm mount?” Well, there’s a frost

Full disclosure here: The main thing that makes me want to play a particular race is their choice in hairstyles. Especially the females. Sometimes when I go to Stormwind and enter the barber shop I say, out loud, “All right, designers, let’s send our models to the L’Oreal Paris hair salon! Make it work!” Okay, that last part isn’t entirely accurate. Or is it? Anyway, yeah. Hairstyles are important to me, which is why I’m simultaneously happy and a bit miffed about the new styles in Wrath, a lot of which were just copy-paste jobs from other races. Night elf females still have a grand total of two good haircuts and human males can, joy of joys, be Goku now. While I can understand the trepidation from prot warriors at this statement (no one is terribly excited about a buff to Devastate, not even me) it’s an unfortunate but