If you haven’t already registered for Blizzcon and you’re looking for a last ditch way to make it to the conference, this might be one of your last opportunities. SteelSeries, along with partners like Jinx!, BradyGames, and Cryptozoic, are looking to send a lucky pair of pals to Blizzcon next month, and you can sign up right now at the Blizzcon Sweepstakes site!

The winning prize pack will include airfare, hotel, admission to the con, and even $300 bucks in your pocket to spend while you’re there!

Even if you don’t win the grand prize, you may pick up one of the 20 prize packs from the sweepstakes, with goodies inside including the SteelSeries World of Warcraft gaming mouse, gift certificates to Jinx!, Cataclysm strategy guides, mousepads, and even a talking Murloc plush toy!

Hurry – entries have to be in by October 2nd!

The folks over at WoW Insider took this fantastic video which shows some of the new Worgen emotes, gestures, and animations from the latest iteratio nof the Cataclysm beta. Things look to be shaping up really well, and the emotes for the Worgen – males anyway – seem to be either near complete or extremely close.

Sadly, Worgen females aren’t fully implemented yet, so no similar video for them, but with people bantering about a potential release date, it’s likely they’ll be coming soon. In the interim though, this is a fabulous look at what you can expect as far as the way the new race plays when you finish your install of the expansion and roll your first Worgen. Because I know you will.

After all, there’s not a lot going on in the World of Warcraft right now, so who could blame you if you’ve been taking time off of the game while waiting for Cataclysm to ship. Have you been playing? How have you been passing the time?

A lot of other WoW bloggers I read have suggested that now’s the time to run as many randoms as possible, as many heroics as possible, and load up on badges and gear and heirlooms because they’ll all be more valuable as the expansion approaches, and they’ll all help you level from 80-85 or start new characters after Cataclysm.

I on the other hand, saddled with a mostly inactive guild that was never raiding class (we were social more than anything) and only a few friends who still play the game, have largely been taking the time off and away from the game (at least until I’m blessed by the Blizzard angels with a beta key.) until the expansion comes out.

So what about you? Has your guild been trying to max out as many characters as possible in preparation for the upcoming expansion and changes? Or have you been leveling alts as much as possible? Maybe you’ve all but abandoned the game for the time being and plan to come back when Cataclysm launches? Let us know how you’ve been passing the time!

Among the goodies that Blizzard snuck into the most recent Cataclysm beta were brand new talent trees for just about every class – the new trees reflect changes that Blizzard has been talking about making for a while now, but the new trees finally reflect what we’ve been told would happen and they’re available to play with.

If you’re in the beta (lucky you) you have the new talents to fiddle with, along with the new customizations and specializations you have to pick early on in the game, but for those of us on the outside, we’ll have to wait patiently until we get an opportunity to try for ourselves.

If you want to play with the trees though, you can head over to WoWHead’s Cataclysm site now to try out the new trees.

After a long wait and lots of doubt, Blizzard finally rolled in the new Worgen female models into the latest iteration of the Cataclysm beta, and they certainly look fiercer and more complete than the previous ones did.

Over at WoW Insider they have a gallery of several of the new models, and there are scowly, growly faces abound – which kind of matches up well with the male models, I think.

But enough about what I think – what do you think? Has Blizzard finally ditched the “super-sexy” approach to just about every female model in the game? If you’re inclined to play female characters in-game, will you roll a female worgen? Sound off in the comments!

If you haven’t seen or heard the news yet, an entertaining new minigame has made an appearance in the Cataclysm beta called “Peacebloom vs. Ghouls,” which looks and plays an awful lot like the fabulous tower-defense-style game, Plants vs. Zombies. The video above, from the venerable TotalBiscuit, shows the minigame in all of its glory, and the best thing about the minigame is that when it’s all over, you get a special in-game companion, the Singing Sunflower!

What’s even better about the minigame is that when you do complete it and get your companion, you’ll find that your Singing Sunflower is voiced by none other than Laura Shigihara, the original composer of the Plants vs. Zombies game, and the delightful voice you hear in the promo trailer singing “There’s a zombie on your lawn!”

Shigihara confirmed the news on her blog yesterday, where she said:

Besides being fun and kind of novel if you’re into PvZ, you get a pretty cool reward for finishing the quest: a “singing sunflower” pet! I actually had no idea this information was public until Hashimoto linked me to TotalHalibut’s video earlier tonight… incidentally, I was right in the middle of recording the sunflower’s voice when I watched it. ^_^ I am so excited about voicing a WoW-pet because what can I say … I’m a big nerd.

Yeah, color me excited for this when Cataclysm comes out. I’m not even normally a big tower-defense person, but this game has a special place in my heart.

Straight from the mouth of the cynical Brit himself, TotalBiscuit, comes this fabulous new preview of the upcoming secondary skill coming in Cataclysm, Archaeology. Since it’ll be a secondary skill, it means that anyone will be able to learn it, much like fishing or first aid.

TB walks through the skill as it stands in the beta now, and some of the things you’ll be able to do with it when Cataclysm is released. Head over to YouTube to see the video in higher-quality, widescreen glory!

Lately I’ve been doing a lot more tweeting. Especially about WoW. I’ve been working on gearing up to be most prepared for the Cataclysm release. My druid has already made the server transfer over to Eldre’Thalas, my original WoW home realm. So, reading all of the various blogs from those who are actually on the beta, I’ve come to realize a few things.

1. We’re all (and by all I mean each and every single person playing WoW right now) going to be relearning the game… all over again. All of us on equal footing.
2. Some quest reward gear from Cataclysm will be better than most T10 items from WotLK, much like WotLK quest rewards were better than BC end game items, and Vanilla before that.
3. The game will be wholly different than what we’ve all become accustomed to.

Lately Ive been reconnecting with old friends from EldreThalas on twitter (find me at a @hestiahdruid if youd like). Lots going on there. My friend Kurn is rebuilding her old guild. Were getting ready to hit the ground running at the very onset of Cataclysm, and Im getting excited over the possibilities! Getting to see the game before its been old news for months. Wowhead let me know, via twitter, that a Blizzard announced the currency conversions.

Previously it had been announced that Blizzard was taking WoW to a point system that was universal across the board. Something I believe should have been implemented a long time ago, but I digress. All of your old badges of Conquest, Valor, Heroism and Justice will be converted to a designated gold amount while Emblems of Frost and Triumph will convert directly over to the new Justice Point system. Equally a similar conversion will happen with the Honor system and all previously earned honor points, Arena points, Wintergrasp Marks, etc.  will convert over to the new Honor Point system.

There is a hard cap of 4000 points for either point system. At the beginning of Cataclysm there will be a soft cap allowing those players who have banked large quantities of Emblems or Marks to go over the hard cap. The difference being, players will not be able to earn more Justice Points or Honor Points until the previous points are spent to below the 4000 cap. All Justice points and Honor points earned over the cap will be converted to their designated monetary value and mailed to the character.

The biggest thing to pay attention to is the fact that both Frost and Triumph emblems have the same conversion value into the new system. Anyone without a raiding guild knows that obtaining Frost Emblems is much harder than getting Triumph Emblems. At level 80 you can earn 2 Frost Emblems for a random dungeon, and 5 Frost emblems once a week for the weekly. Anything above that requires the player to participate in ICC or VoA to get Frost Emblems.

A player needs roughly 1500 emblems of both types to even come close to hitting the hard cap once Cataclysm arrives. Those of us who want to have the ability to spend freely once the expansion hits know this means its time to run back-to-back random dungeons.

EDIT:  The new conversion rate of emblems has been changed to reflect an equivalent mathematical value to the current emblem system. This blue post explains that Frost and Triumph emblems now convert at a 11.58 Justice Point per emblem. Meaning that in order to max out at the start of 4.0.1, you’ll need roughly 345 Frost/Triumph emblems.

I won’t be there, sadly, but I’m curious how many of you fair readers will be headed to the conference?

Blizzcon is only a few tender weeks away, and if you haven’t made your travel plans, or worse don’t even have a ticket, your time is all but running out. The show is October 22nd and 23rd in Anaheim, California at the Anaheim Convention Center, and there’s certain to be big news at the show, including lots of detail about what we can expect in Cataclysm, more stories on how StarCraft II has been doing, and maybe even some Diablo III news for those of us looking forwards to that title.

So what about you? Are you headed to Blizzon? Maybe you’ve purchased a virtual ticket? Or will you – like me – wait for the explosion of news that comes out of the show on various blogs just like this one and absorb it all as it happens? Leave us a message in the comments!

I have to thank the folks at Wow.com for this one, it’s probably the most succinct way of telling whether your guild is worth your time or not.

Although maybe it should really be titled how to tell if that person in your guild is bad, as opposed to the whole guild. Even some guilds I’ve been in and loved had a few people who were like that. The real tell if they’re bad is if they start arguing with you when you say “get out of the fire.” Yeah, I have a couple of guildies right now who’ll do that. And then complain when they don’t get loot.

Head over to YouTube to watch in higher quality!