The Queue: Death Knights in the arena and other things

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.

Hey, welcome back! How was your Thanksgiving, my American pals? Did you sit around and laugh at Europeans like I did? You did? Great! High five! No, I'm just kidding, I love all of you equally. My Thanksgiving was pretty good! Well, as good as Thanksgiving can be when nobody feels like cooking so you buy a pound of sliced turkey and drop it in a pot of warm canned gravy, toss some of it on bread, and have a can of jellied cranberry sauce on the side. It's not good unless you can still see the can ripples in it. Mmm. Can ripples. Delicious.

Right, right, the Q&A! Let's start with Rasman's question...

I was just thinking about Death Knights and PvP and realized, Casters are really going to be hurting in the areas now if they match up agianst a DK. Death Knights don't care about your casting bar because they can just yank you in or go Vader on you because you forgot his cookies, and choke you for the Silence. Matter of fact, if they get you close, they really have 3 or 4 ways to interupt those casts, if you include the stun from an Unholy DK's Ghoul, that is. Am I just stammering on and not knowing what I'm talking about, or are Death Knights going to make this upcoming Arena season VERY Melee heavy?

It's hard to tell how Death Knights will fare in the arena. While there's a lot of people that expect Death Knights will dominate, there's also a very vocal (and smart) group of players that think Death Knights will start strong when they're an unknown, but people will learn fast and utterly dominate them. Death Knights have a lot of tools, but a lot of pretty big weaknesses as well. As the devs themselves have said, it's really, really hard to predict arena play. It's not just numbers or spells, it's strategy and tactics, too. A seemingly weak spec (or even spell) could become the backbone of a team.

If a couple of popular compositions completely shut down Death Knights, we might barely see any of them with a high rating. At least not until someone else figures out a comp that dominated the one that originally shut Death Knights out. That's the nature of the arena. It's hard to guess, and it's always changing. That being said, my personal prediction is that Death Knights will be more effective in a 2v2 or 3v3 setting than in the 5v5 setting. A double or triple melee team with a Death Knight will absolutely ruin Healers, I think. In the 5v5 setting, the healer(s) will have a lot more support, and a lone Death Knight won't complete dominate the entire other side.

It's a topic that people can debate for hours, days, or weeks, and there will never be a conclusion until we're deep in Season 5. And when Season 6 comes around? The scene could change completely.

Brian asked...

Is there any reason other than looks for a hunter to pick a Tenacity pet other than a gorilla? From what I've been hearing, gorillas are far and away the best tanking pets.

Besides aesthetics? If RP reasons counts as looks/aesthetics, it mostly comes down to utility options. The Gorilla is probably the best tanking pet overall, yeah, but you might like the unique abilities of the other pets. For Beastmasters, the Acid Spit from worms is really good if you don't have Sunder Armor in your raid/party. Scorpid Poison is a huge pain in PvP. If you wanted a pure tanking pet, though? Gorilla is the way to go, no doubt, no question.

Creo asked...

I can't find any reference to this, but is there anything that will replace the riding crop?

This is something we don't know yet. Last we knew they were trying to find a different way to handle those speed boosts that wasn't so clunky and annoying, but I don't know if they're still working on it. I have to admit though, now that Riding Crops are gone I don't really miss them. I liked it when I had it, but it was pretty annoying. Now that it doesn't exist, I just don't care and fly on my awesome red drake contentedly. They might reintroduce it somehow, but we don't know yet. If they do, I hope they do it in a 'set it and forget it' kind of way. Not worrying about it is nice.

nyctef asked...

Sorry if this has been asked before, but does anyone know why Dalaran is a no-fly zone?

They wanted Dalaran to be more like an actual city, forcing the players down into the streets. Instead of just flying over everything and skipping it all, we're down on the roads and sidewalks passing eachother by and interacting. We see the entire city and the neat things that go on instead of just seeing rooftops and specks that may or may not be players on the ground.

In my opinion, the only downside to these few no-fly zones is setting yourself on auto-pilot and walking away from your keyboard for a minute is dangerous nowadays. With Wintergrasp being right in the middle of everything, the number of times I see "Oh dammit!" in my guild chat increases every day as more and more people get flight back and immediately plummet to their deaths.

Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW Insider crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column! Leave your questions in the comments and we'll do our best to answer 'em!