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The Queue: I was right edition

Welcome back to The Queue, our daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mathew McCurley will be your host today.

Welp. Pack your bags, ladies and gentlemen, I was right. Straight from the woman herself. Victory dance.

Cetha asked:

Has there been any mention on the size of the download if you get the digital copy of
Cata? I'm trying to figure out if it would just be easier to get the discs and install it than to try and download another 16GB of info again, which didn't go so well the last time.



After doing the little trick to grab the pre-download preorder data, I checked to see the amount of data actually coming in. It was somewhere around 700mb, so I'm assuming that much plus whatever they patch in after the game goes gold.

Bourne asked:

How do I go about finding a girlfriend who also plays
WoW?

Trade chat.

Moghar asked:

A lore question. I just finished reading Arthas: Rise of the Lich King, and despite the fact that 90% of the novel is retelling the story of Warcraft 3, in the epilogue, Arthas backstabbed Ner'Zhul and ... that's it ... Does this mean that Arthas is (was) the one calling the shots for the Scourge all these years of WoW?

Yes, Arthas took complete control and ended Ner'Zhul's influence. The Arthas side of the Lich King won out completely, and Ner'Zhul's story is over.

steelvoltage asked:

I heard a rumor that Blizzard is going to make it so epic (purple) items are much rarer. Is this true?

Second, there's been a lot of talk going around that instances are going to be so much harder and you will need to learn to crowd control. I played during vanilla and The Burning Crusade so I know how to do that. It wasn't hard, you just had to pay attention. However, I remember when Wrath launched, heroic dungeons were hard then too. Would it be safe to say that they are going to be "hard" because of epic quality gear not going to being readily available, or is it because Blizzard is making them more a challenge gameplay-wise? Will we be steamrolling over the dungeons in a year or so just as we are now?

Gear is a huge factor in difficulty, and as we progress through the expansion, heroics and dungeons will become easier just by virtue of better gear. That will always happen. However, as to your first question, while epics are becoming rarer and really only available in the first tier of raiding and up, the heroic blues you get will still be heroic-quality loot. Their color is just changing to give the purple color meaning again.

As for whether dungeons and heroics are harder because of gear or mechanics, it's a lot of both. The mechanics are more difficult and less forgiving, as well as the fact that crowd control and really paying attention are vital. Pickup groups will have a rougher time, I'd say. So yeah, things are getting harder, and people are going to have to relearn a lot of what was forgotten during the Wrath of the Lich King days. Heroic dungeons were difficult in Wrath when we first tackled them, but the AoE mentality combined with the lack of crowd control and more forgiving scenarios made it so plowing through the content went from hard to easy in too few steps.


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!