The Queue: Puppy party

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.

We got a puppy from the local shelter. We think she's a chihuahua/dachshund mix. My day job lets you bring in your dog whenever you want, provided they're house-trained and sociable enough not to bite people or other dogs. This is what happened when she met Lily, another puppy.

GordonSullivan asked:

I just set foot on the timeless isle for the first time and the first thing i noticed was that most mobs are elites. Is this hub designed for raiders?

Nope, but the elites are definitely tougher than normal mobs. Many of them are soloable, though, and the rares you really want are always attacked by groups, reducing the danger to you (most of the time).

Eliza asked:

Does having four difficulties of raiding actually take up enough dev time that non-raid content has to suffer for it, or is that a myth?

Of course the four versions of SoO are identical visually; I've just never been sure how much work has to go into tuning and calculating the numbers for each difficulty. Is that a huge deal, or is it just a matter of getting things in the right ballpark with some basic math, and then tweaking here and there as-needed?

I think people like to think Blizzard is full of people who can and do do every job, but the fact of the matter is that there's a team that handles art, a team that handles quest design, a team that handles encounter design, and the list goes on and on. Other content doesn't suffer because the encounter team has to balance a new difficulty mode.

sergel192 asked:

Do you see Flex raiding replacing LFR next xpac? Or what changes to LFR do you hope for/ expect next expansion?

Oh, definitely not. There's no way. I think Flex will someday replace normal mode, with the proper difficulty adjustments, strictly because it's a way better system than being locked into 10 or 25 people and suffering when you're down one or two. But I don't know when that'd happen.

As for the next expansion: I think it'd be cool to have an additional advancement system like Diablo 3's Paragon levels. Account-wide benefits for progress on your characters. Got alts? Cool, here's some bonus stuff for them since you have three 90s or whatever.

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!