The Queue: Questions, comments, complaints...
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Allison Robert is your hostess today.
I have absolutely no idea what the hell the above video is about, but have been required to place it there on threat of firing by Alex Ziebart. Questions, comments, complaints? Send them to him!
Pyril asks...
(On the faction champions fight in Trial of the Crusader): Why would Blizzard force PvE players to basically learn PvP skill sets now, when they've been so good about keeping them seperate to this point? Any chance the encounter will be reworked? GC has said he doesn't want to force raids to bring certain classes, but if you don't to this encounter it's a 3 hour wipe fest.
Is the encounter likely to be changed? No, at least not its basic mechanics. Blizzard fielded similar complaints concerning the Priestess Delrissa fight in Magisters' Terrace, which could be an incredibly ugly experience on heroic if you didn't have CC or weren't well-geared. But are aspects of the encounter likely to be nerfed, or at least tweaked? Maybe, maybe not. It'll depend on how much trouble Blizzard sees people having with the fight.
What's certain is that the Faction Champs encounter is a very common target for complaints right now. Some of this is the result of players still gearing up, but others are voiced by people who intensely dislike the arenaesque feel of it all, or who run a raid setup that's less-than-ideal for whatever champion comp they get that week. I think you're entirely correct in saying that the fight becomes significantly more difficult (or at least more gear-dependent) if you're running a raid with limited options for purging/dispelling the mobs' buffs or keeping their healers locked down, and it's probably that aspect of it that Blizzard's keeping an eye on.
Personally, I despise PvP and wasn't expecting to enjoy this fight, but it turned out to be a bit more fun than I'd anticipated. The champions have a truckload of health and they will focus-fire people, but apart from that, they really don't play all that intelligently, and most of them do a lot less damage than their shiny gear would seem to suggest they're capable of (so I guess we're safe from the threat of computers taking over the world as long as the AI needs to L2P). The two most consistent pieces of advice I've seen given across the many, many Warcraft communities where complaints concerning the fight have been aired is that:
If you have this option, have your raid switch to PvP or more defensively-oriented specs (e.g. your Rogues switching to their arena/BG spec and Holy Priests going Disc). Any additional survivability or escape skills you can squeeze out of talents should be in the raid. It's all very well and good to say, "OK, ranged DPS, you're in charge of keeping mobs off the healers" -- but the array of CC abilities available to the enemies guarantees that a designated "peeler" is not always going to be able to do something. Players need to take a greater measure of responsibility for their own lives.
If you're wiping over and over again with no end in sight, you may be trying to kill the wrong enemy first. Experiment with different kill orders and see what seems to work best -- and yes, this means that you don't necessarily have to kill one of the healers first (although that's generally the most helpful strat) or even prioritize them at all.
I hope this helps somewhat, and yes, this encounter can be absolutely maddening if you get unlucky with the comp. Whether this results in for a nerf or not is anyone's guess.
Mognet T asks...
Why is it that I can't seem to change my account password, log out, or update my picture for WoW.com?
We've gotten a lot of complaints about this recently and have forwarded them on to our tech support people. Unfortunately, I have no idea what's causing it. As an aside, we loathe our commenting system just as much as our readers do, and it's a high priority for an overhaul.
Two somewhat related questions today --
Arlendor asks...
With the earthquakes and explosions and general disarray coming in Cataclysm, has Blizzard announced any plans to reopen (the old part) of Ironforge?
and
Lidstrom asks...
(Will) Ironforge Airport will become a functional flight path?
Plus various questions from other people regarding zone design in Cataclysm, what's likely to change, what won't change, etc.
I have to echo Alex here by saying that a lot of this is stuff that we can only speculate on, so take this with a grain of salt. We haven't had any word on any of these questions as they relate to specific zones, but Blizzard has expressed a desire to revamp any and all older zones where questing is currently -- for lack of a better phrase -- a monumental pain in the ass. I've been working on Loremaster for my main lately and just finished Loremaster of Kalimdor, and I really have to say; Blizzard is so much better, light years better, at zone and quest design now that the difference between classic Azeroth and Outland/Northrend is like night and day.
Realistically, I expect this is going to result in zones with more tightly-organized quest hubs, significantly better flight path placement, and quite possibly just more flight paths, period. They're also open to designing previously off-limits areas (see: Uldum and Hyjal), and both Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms are being redesigned to accommodate flying mounts anyway. So if Ironforge Airport survives the upheaval, it should be accessible somehow, even if it doesn't turn out to be a flight path. Old Ironforge I have no clue about, but it would be really cool if they did open it up.
Al in SoCal asks...
Is there anything to buy w/ Isle of Conquest Marks of Honor - not that I have any though?
So far it looks like the only use for an Isle of Conquest Mark of Honor is for honor returns (i.e. For Great Honor for the Horde and Concerted Efforts for the Alliance). Whether this is a mistake, a bug, or if the gear requiring them just isn't in the game yet, we're not sure.
Norm asks...
3.2.2 PTR Patch Notes: Relics: All buffs provided by relics (idols, librams, totems and sigils) now share an exclusive category such that gaining a buff from one of these items will remove all other buffs gained from items in this category.
The wording isn't very specific. I'm wondering, for example, if I were to use the Sigil of Virulence, would it not let my 2-piece Death Knight DPS set proc? If my thinking is wrong, could you please try to clear this up for me?
What this means is that you can't twist or swap relics in order to gain multiple simultaneous buffs from the slot. For example, my main is a Druid dual-specced into tanking and healing. Without this change, it's theoretically possible for me to twist Idol of Mutilation and Idol of the Corruptor to gain both 200 dodge rating and 153 agility at the same time; I can put in Mutilation, wait for the dodge bonus to trigger, then immediately swap to Corruptor and wait for the agility proc to trigger, then continue doing that throughout the fight squeezing as much uptime from both buffs as possible (disclaimer: I don't actually do this but it's still possible). Now, while most players won't bother with this because swapping an idol in combat triggers the global cooldown (and that's usually more trouble than it's worth, particularly if you're a DPS -- the GCD trigger is often enough to override whatever damage gain you might have gotten, especially if you're a caster), some players will macro relic-twisting into their rotations to get as much benefit from the slot as possible. Blizzard's ending this by immediately canceling any buff tied to a particular relic as soon as another one triggers. So you're perfectly fine to swap relics all you want, but you're never going to have more than one of their buffs up at a time.
You haven't said which tier set you've got, so I'm unsure which proc you're talking about, but because these bonuses are unrelated to sigil procs the rest of your gameplay should be unaffected.
Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW.com 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!
