The Queue: I am not going to write about dinosaurs (I totally am)

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

I know you all just want World of Warcraft questions and answers, and so, I won't talk about dinosaurs again. I'll just get right to your questions.

Iskande(@IskandeGamer) asks:

Q for the Q: when will you be writing an entire book on paleontology, rather than chapters of books?

You're killing me here, Iskande. To be honest, my interest in paleontology is strictly amateur. I've considered writing a kind of paleontological guide to World of Warcraft covering the real life versions of critters we see in game like the diemetradon from Un'Goro, but I seriously suspect there wouldn't be all that much interest. I love paleontology, believe me, but there's not much call for it around here.

Above me you see the new Direhorn model that will be introduced in patch 5.2, for instance. It's based on Triceratops, one of the most famous of the ceratopsians. However, while its horn arrangement is very suggestive of Triceratops, the large spikes on its frill is suggestive of Styracosaurus, a related ceratopsian that lacked Triceratops' impressive triple horns.

You can see here even more clearly how they combine the Styracosaur frill with the Triceratops horn structure.

Jim Miller(@Boddi_) asks:

So now that we have a director, any ideas for the WoW movie as far as the plot goes? Or any wishes for the movie?

Honestly, I have no idea. What I don't think they should do is try too hard to recreate WoW itself. There's a lot of history to the Warcraft setting, and I'd pick a big, pivotal moment, like the First and Second War, and run with that. Too many films stumble with trying to be too faithful in terms of adapting the source, but this isn't a case where slavish attempts to cram in everything from the setting would work. WoW as a game has steampunk, alien dimensions, demons and undead, dinosaurs, and a constantly shifting battle between opposing factions to deal with, you're not going to fit all of it into one movie, especially when WoW itself borrows liberally from comic books, pulp horror classics, sword and sorcery yarns, etc etc.

However if at some point someone riding on a Quetzalcoatlus shows up in the movie, I won't be disappointed. Yor's World, he's the maaaaan.

hill242 asks:

Quick question for the WoW-educated folks: True or False: I can, within a week's lockout, repeatedly kill Grand Empress Shek'zeer in LFR and use my bonus roll for a shot at my sha-touched weapon. I'm getting desperate, folks, and I will run it every day this week if the answer is True.

To answer you, yes, this is true. Specifically, you can use an Elder Charm of Good Fortune on a subsequent LFR run, even if you have already killed the boss in question, and get another bonus roll on loot that may or may not pan out. You can do this until you are out of Elder Charms. You will only get the bonus roll, you are still locked out of that boss otherwise and won't get your normal loot roll, and this only works in LFR because in normal/heroic raids you can only kill them once. I do not know if you can use the bonus roll more than one on Galleon or Sha of Anger.

Carcharodontosaurus. I said last time I'd talk about them in the next Queue I wrote, I didn't want to be a liar. Forget Spinosaurus, it may have been bigger but it had a head designed for fishing, this thing was a land predator and it was not kidding about it. (I do love Spinosaurus, but let's not pretend it was designed to hunt on land, it was a semi-aquatic predator.)

Literally dozens upon dozens of you talked about:

PvP servers, CRZ, transfers, etc etc

All I can really say is, I was on a PvP server when Mists of Pandaria launched, I didn't like it, I left. I ended up leaving several mid-20's characters behind, and yeah, it was kind of hard to level them in certain zones when people from four or five PvP servers all ended up there. Sometimes people would bring their 90's to Thousand Needles just to be jerks and gank leveling players and even wipe out flight points if they could, and eventually I had enough. With Real ID and Battletags, you only need to be on the same server with friends if you're raiding with them. If you're leveling a low level character and you want to get away from PvP on a PvP server for whatever reason, have a higher level friend on a PvE realm invite you to a cross-realm party. You'll be in that person's realm instead of your own. This requires that you and your friend have shared Real ID or Battletag information, of course.

In addition to being a really cool predator with a lot of history (and potentially the first dinosaur described in scientific literature, as its first recorded appearance was in 1676) Megalosaurus was also the first dinosaur described in popular lit, as it appeared in Charles Dickens' Bleak House. Sadly, the dinosaur is not actually in the book, but rather is just imagined in a narrative passage. Man, I would personally have loved to see a Megalosaurus eat Sir Leicester Dedlock.

Mike Stabble(@Stabble_Babble) asks:

Why has Thrall sat back and let Garrosh get away with the murdering of innocents in Theramore?

That's pretty much exactly what Jaina asks him in Tides of War, albeit with less 'asking' and more 'accusing', and he doesn't really have a good answer for her. Why did Thrall let Garrosh send Kor'kron to occupy the Echo Isles? Why did Thrall let Garrosh blow up Stonetalon? Why does Thrall continue to do nothing while Garrosh tries to use Sha power and mogu secrets to mutate his people? In short, why isn't Thrall doing anything about Garrosh in Mists? If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say that in game, Thrall isn't really sure what to do about it all yet. He's probably hurt and shocked by Jaina's total freak out, saddened by Garrosh's actions, a little sickened that the Horde's going along with them, and in fact, seems pretty okay with them (from an outsider's perspective, which we have to remember is the perspective Thrall has in terms of what's going on inside the Warchief's conclaves nowadays). Plus, dude has a wife and a baby and he did just save the world, so maybe he's tired.

From an out of game perspective, people did nothing but complain that Cataclysm was too Thrall centric. We're taking a break from Thrall. Just accept it. He'll be back eventually, but right now, he's got his own stuff to deal with and we're going to have to handle this without him.

No, I don't have a dinosaur to talk about here. Instead, I'll just mention Deinosuchus, a crocodilian from the Cretaceous period big enough to eat dinosaurs. It was about 15 meters long (50 feet) and it wasn't even the biggest crocodilian, rivaled or exceeded in size by Sarcosuchus and Purussaurus. Yes, the only thing exaggerated about Rotgrip was his number of limbs, as there really were crocodilians that big.

What's really interesting about Purussaurus is that it dates to the Miocene, a mere 8 million years ago, 57 million years after the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct.

That's enough of me mixing Warcraft and dinosaurs, I suspect.

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!