The Queue: Take our stuff

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. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

I'm going to use The Queue's intro today to remind all of you that our loot card giveaway for this week is still up and active until tomorrow morning. If you haven't entered yet, go do it. Do not try to enter here on this post, because all that you will win is my eternal loathing. Go to the contest post and leave a comment there to enter.

Dbodinem asked:

"Since not everyone who comes to Cataclysm will necessarily be decked out in tier 10 (they may not even have rare pieces but be sporting quest greens), about how long will people still be wearing tier 9 and tier 10? My guess is that quest greens will replace our LK epics by about level 83. Or is itemization going to change so radically that we'll want to replace our T9 and T10 right away?"

My guess is that the itemization changes are going to alter what's desirable so drastically that we'll be leaping at early leveling greens more than we did in any previous expansion. While our T9 and T10 is going to get some stat changes to match the new Cataclysm systems, Blizzard most likely isn't going to put extremely careful consideration into making them the most optimal pieces for every single spec. In fact, such a thing is probably an impossible task. Can they ensure, for example, that mage tier gear is best in slot for frost, fire and arcane? Probably not. That's not the case now, and it won't be the case after they convert everybody's gear. When these changes go through, it's going to be far too late to regear yourself completely in high-end epics. You'll just hit the new zones, come across some greens that are a little more optimal for you, and you'll go with those. Especially with the mastery stat coming through, assuming they don't add that to Icecrown gear retroactively.

This probably won't be the case for every class or spec. Some people might end up with excellent gear after the stat conversions and decide to wear their Icecrown epics straight to 85. I do expect that in most cases, people will upgrade pretty fast. Your level 83 guess is a good one.

Natsumi asked:

"How many people are starting Gnomes only guilds just to Fraps 25 gnomes swarming Deathwing in Cataclysm?"



Darasen asked:

"Why are there so few actual healing talents in the early parts of a druid's Restoration tree and so many shape shifting ones? That seems to be a bit backwards to me. It seems the first actual bonus to healing is in the 4th tier while the Balance tree has talents that directly improve healing in tier 1."

The top few tiers of a class's talent tree seem to be designed to give you interesting options for your secondary tree. Once you hit the bottom of your primary talent tree, there should be options for branching out that make sense. Feral druids will probably dip into resto for Furor, Natural Shapeshifter or whatever else they want. I'm certainly not saying every single feral will do exactly that, but it's an available option.

A resto druid would take Improved Mark of the Wild and Nature's Focus in that first tier and he can completely avoid Furor if he wants. Then once he's hit the bottom of the restoration tree, he can hop over to balance and pick up Genesis. They want to encourage you to dip into multiple trees instead of going 71/0/0. Those sorts of specs aren't all that interesting. If you can close your eyes and click randomly and come out with an optimal spec, that's a bad thing. Needing to make decisions is a good thing.

clundgren asked:

"If I transfer a character with heirloom items to another server, what happens to the heirloom items?"

Until Blizzard implements cross-server mail (which might not ever actually happen), your heirlooms are permanently stashed away on the new server. If you want them back on the server they were from originally, you need to do another server transfer. I made that mistake a few weeks back, actually; all of my cloth heirlooms ended up going to a server where I was just stashing an alt to free up character slots.

I'm just letting them rot over there now. It's too easy to get badges nowadays to worry about a few heirlooms.

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!