The Queue: American Old Gods

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.

The time to strike at the head of the beast will soon be upon us! Focus your anger and hatred on his minions! Wait, no, don't, because they're making American Gods into a TV show on HBO. Is there no end in sight for awesome genre TV? I sure hope not.

Yous95 asked:

I was reading Wow Archivist about Patch 0.10, where it mentioned, among all the other changes, that dwarf mages were removed from the game. It got me wondering: If people had leveled a dwarf mage during the time, and then patch 0.10 hit, what happened to their characters? Were they just deleted and had the people lost all the time and effort they put in? Did it automatically switch class/race? Also, do you think Blizzard would be able to suddenly remove a race-class combo without serious repercussions at this stage in the game?

Well, there's a very simple answer for this one. Patch 0.10 was a pre-release patch, patched in during WoW's beta testing phase. Like most beta tests, characters leveled were wiped forever when the retail game went live.

For strictly the beta, though, you could continue to play your dwarf mage even after the race/class option was removed. You just couldn't make a new one. According to comments on the Archivist post, dwarf mages were eventually race-changed to gnomes near the end of the beta.

Scooter asked:

Some time ago before cataclysm hit WoW Insider released a number of details on racial models and soundbites from the game. Among them were several from what I believe to be Archbishop Benedictus of Stormwind. From the sound of them there was to be a major event at the chapel with some big reveal as part of the opening to Cataclysm, but it never happened. What's the scoop on this...is it scrapped, will it happen, or have I just spent a little too much time near all the talking Northrend ore?

Much like the original Alliance intro the Twilight Highlands, this content was flat-out removed. Benedictus was changed to an unnamed bishop, and Wrynn's dialogue about Benedictus' betrayal was removed. It's safe to say that that ship has sailed and we won't be seeing that content again.

Honestly, it's probably for the best. Leave the in-faction political intrigue for the Horde in this expansion. The Alliance already has precious few uncorrupted good guys.

Alrendar asked:

Is there ever going to be a way to send Justice Points/Valor Points etc etc from one character to another?

While Blizzard has made leveling and gearing alts significantly easier in recent years, it's still pretty unlikely that we'll be able to send what amounts to endgame currency from one character to another. Essentially, by making it so only one of your characters has to be the endgame content workhorse, they would be encouraging you not to raid or do heroics on your other characters, or at least do both of those much less. What we need right now is not for fewer people to be in dungeon queues, that's for damn sure.

I don't see it happening in the near future.

Holycow asked:

Yesterday, my girlfriend was driving home in our car, which sports a large Horde symbol on the back window. Some guy cuts her off, then pulls into the lane next to her and flips her the bird, and yells "F***ing Horde!" then cuts her off again.

Now, I, if I were to encounter a car with a blue lion on it, would be glad to run into another wow player. Screw faction choice, it's mainly cosmetic.

Anyone else had any weird faction-biased encounters with other wow players out in the real world?

I was in a friend's car one time and we got pulled over right near my house. The cop was ready to tow my friend's car away due to outdated documentation, but he ended up just following us back to my house in the cruiser and not towing the car or issuing a ticket. Why? Because he saw the big Horde sticker on the back of her car. He asked us if we played. When I told him I used to work for Blizzard, we got into a long conversation about the game, he told me about all the Horde characters he had (his main was an undead warlock -- "no blood elves, man!!"), and I guess he felt some kind of faction camaraderie and gave us a break.

Little did he know that I main Alliance. You'll never catch me alive, copper!

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!