The Queue: Nothing

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

You people. I link you one of the year's best screenplays, and you spend four pages of comments talking about how Facebook is evil. All I did was link you a cool thing! So today I'm not even doing that. Today you get ... Nothing.

Aerowannabe asked:

Does anyone remember the devs talking about updating the professions at low level in order to make them more viable? I'm not expecting crafting gear to be better than dungeon stuff or anything, but it would be nice if there at least some things they could craft that help leveling.

I'm not really sure what you mean -- craftable stuff at low level is still pretty good, from the blacksmithing armor with +hit on it to jewelcrafting pieces that have no real competition for several early level brackets.

Butts asked:

If VP items from 4.0 will cost JP instead in 4.1, then how is this in line with keeping epics epic? Will the VP gear, currently purple, turn blue once it becomes available through JP? If not, won't this just be a repeat of the issues we faced in Wrath with inflated epic gear for everyone? Perhaps epics are only meant to feel epic at the beginning of the expansion?

Your Rusted Protodrake didn't turn into a Red Drake when 3.3 hit, did it? It would be pretty silly and unnecessarily cruel to turn someone's epics blue just because a new tier was introduced. My Felstriker never turned into a blue when AQ came out.

Your gear will become outdated. It will become easier for everyone else to get over time. You will get pretty new gear to replace it. This is the nature of the beast.

Speaking of epics ...

Cutaia asked:

Can we confirm once and for all whether or not color affects the item budgets on items?

I've seen very convincing evidence where the stat budget of green items has been shown to be the same as blue items of the same iLevel. Even Fox Van Allen has been evangelizing the "new" method of stat budgeting for Cataclysm.

Epics used to have a higher item budget than blues, which in turn had a higher item budget than greens. This is no longer the case as of Cataclysm. A blue item at ilvl 318 will have the same amount of stamina and intellect (for example) as a green item at ilvl 318. There is no additional stat budget the higher you go up on the "rarity" chain.

Honestly, at this point there's little point to the rarity color system at all. We only really need two colors: white for items with no stats on them, and green for items with stats on them.

Alpha5099 asked:

I've been using Hex a lot in heroics nowadays, but it sometimes seems to act strangely. Hex sometimes seems to just break on its own. Sometimes it's obvious that the tank or a DPS accidentally attacked it, but there are times when I'm certain that no one has done a single thing to my frog and it still breaks prematurely.

My thinking is that maybe there's some sort of hit check going on during the duration of a CC. I'm in resto spec, so the only hit I have is from Heroic Presence; I've seen Hex miss a few times, but is there some sort of failure rate during its duration I don't know about?

Hex (and some other CCs) appear to have what's called a "heartbeat resist check." The CC can break early if the resist check fails -- that is, if the mob resists that tick of the spell. Blizzard has never really spoken publicly about the resist check, but we're pretty sure it exists. If anyone has more information on it, please let me know in the comments.

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!