The Queue: Three questions for the dev chat

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky (@adamholisky), senior editor at WoW Insider, will be your host today.

I was thinking about some questions I'd like the WoW designers to answer today at the dev chat. Here are my three. There's very little chance they'll get answered, but I figure it'll be good to start a discussion and hopefully see some great questions get asked today.

1. Some encounters favor burst damage, while others work fine with damage that takes some time to ramp up. Yet not all DPS specs can produce the best possible burst damage consistently. Do you guys see this as a problem? If so, what kinds of solutions are you working on?

2. Removing auto-attack from monks is a neat idea for melee. If this change ends up working well, is there any thought on removing auto-attack from other melee classes?

3. What are your top three goals for classes and encounters in Mists of Pandaria?

Puntable asked:

Is there a datamined video of Tyrael's Charger anywhere?

Nope. Blizzard hasn't included it yet in the patch 4.3 files and only announced it last week at BlizzCon. Expect it soon, though.

Tolsimir asked:

I just finally fished up Mr. Pinchy, which brings my pet total to 149. Should I cheat and just buy a Pandaren Monk and/or Cenarion Hatchling, or grind out that stupid, stupid Crawling Claw for my 150th?

It's not cheating. It's being smart. You can either spend however much time it costs to earn $10, or spend hours and hours and hours farming. For me, I'd spend that $10 instantly.

After you've spent that $10, spend the extra time to get that 151st pet and be extra cool.

Cutaia commented:

Hmm...the question about the hero class reminded me that there gonna have to do some reworking with the way the DK starter zone works. Didn't we get talent points throughout that whole zone? Now, they'll have 3 talent points owed to them before level 58. Makes me feel bad for the QA people who have to think about all of these little things that changes like that end up creating the need for.

Yup, the death knight starting zone is going to have to have some mechanical changes to the talent point rewards. My guess is that Blizzard will give people one tier of talent every batch of quests and toss in some spells as appropriate.

I'm sure Blizzard's not too concerned about perfect balance here, just making sure that at the end of the starting experience, death knights are where they need to be.

Gdawg asked:

If race changing to a pandaren, would I be able to change to a new faction as well, or stay in the same instead.

While there's been no official word from Blizzard, I'm sure that you'll need to faction change as well. I can't imagine the service would include a free $30 faction switch as part of a race change.

Jerry asked:

Did Blizzard mention anything about Outland during BlizzCon? I'm not sure if I missed it or not. Specifically, is Outland getting a quest revamp in MoP? Or do our pandas have to suffer through there just like all our other classes?

I didn't hear anything at BlizzCon about Outland quest revamps. Asking people at tonight's dev chat would be a good time to clear this up.

NorricTehChickn asked:

With talk of controller/console support for Diablo 3, and the devs wanting the WoW Monk to play like a beat-em-up, do you think they'd develop joypad support for WoW?

No, Blizzard has always said WoW doesn't work with non-keyboard plus mouse interfaces like that because the game is so social. You can't talk to your guildmates in gchat without a keyboard.

That being said, there are joystick interfaces out there. However, none of them in my experience work very well.

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!