The Queue: The grand melee
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. Mike Sacco will be your host today.
For no discernable reason, the WoW.com Twitter account is asking who would win in a three-way grand melee between the Queue writers -- Alex Ziebart, Adam Holisky, and me, the inimitable Mike Sacco. Whoever wins has to face Matthew Rossi in single combat, which, of course, means that they lose. So whoever wins, Rossi wins.
Before we all fall to the cruel burly forearms of Rossi, though, we can probably answer some reader questions. Or at least I can, given that it's my day to do it.
Edge asked...
When a cross realm group wipes and has to get back to the instance from outside, which version of the "outside" are we in? What I mean is, outside the instance, are we all together on one of the servers, or does each person go back out to their own servers "outside" area, and then come back into the same instance? Or is this a whole new area just for these 5 particular people?
When you zone out of a cross-realm instance, the "outside" is your particular realm.
Mr Shinra asked...
This probably is a bit presumptuous to ask at this point in time, but the 5-level question has me wondering: Since Deathwing's been built up to be all big bad and with a very high power level (+9k), what are the estimated chances that the (eventual) fight against him, will be a return to the old-style 40-person raids that the game hasn't seen since the days of Ahn'Qiraj?
Considering that the mere act of him ENTERING THE WORLD caused half the world to explode, I don't think 25 people will be enough; and that's assuming he would fight a bunch of tiny mortal insects (from his point of view) alone.
Blizzard recently stated that there would likely never be a return to the 40-man style of raiding, and I for one sincerely appreciate that. 40-man raids were just like 25-man raids except 15 people weren't pulling their weight.
At least in my opinion, and in Blizzard's, it doesn't matter how many people are participating in the encounter so long as the "epic" feel is still there.
Metatron asked...
Are there any plans of expanding the WoW enterprise to other consoles such as Playstation, X-Box. I've heard that Warcraft 2 was made avaiable for PS, but I don't think any other Warcraft game had it. If there aren't any plans like this is there any particular reason Blizzard doesn't want to move into this lucrative market?
Blizzard's console division, which was working on StarCraft: Ghost, closed down back when I first started working there -- 2006 -- and every interview since then has stated that their particular development model doesn't lend itself well to console games. Thus, they're unlikely to ever produce for consoles.
Can you imagine the headaches involved with trying to get an emergency maintenance patch for WoW over XBox Live? It took something like two months for a patch to get deployed that fixed a crippling bug with Castle Crashers.
Sead asked...
Does the "Raid Browser" Tool work in the same way the new Dungeon Finder Tool work? i.e. can you port into the raid directly?
Nope, the Raid Browser is just a browser. It's a retooled version of the old LFG pane. It doesn't assemble groups or allow porting.
Daniel asked...
Since Cataclysm was announced, one new feature has stood out to me, the Path of the Titan, basically a glyph system on top of the existing one from what I can tell. What I was wondering is, will it focus more on class skills like increased crit damage on a warrior's MS, or more passive bonus like increased overall damage by 2%?
It'll give broad, class-unspecific bonuses. Examples are -5% bleed damage taken, +10% bandage healing, +1% haste, etc. You won't see any damage increases for Fireball or anything like that.
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!
