The Queue: Broke Bad
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.
Readers, do your fellows a favor and keep Breaking Bad spoilers out of the comments. But that sure was awesome, wasn't it?
valantor asked:
So is Anne Stickney that works here on the sire the same co-author for the new ultimate visual guide listed on the front page ?
Yep!
HaydenHiggs asked:
I'm up to collecting the Titan runestones for the legendary quest line. What's the best course to take for collecting the quest items now that SoO out? Is there an increased drop rate in ToT for all the items there?
You should be running the last two wings of Throne of Thunder along with Siege of Orgrimmar. All of those bosses can drop the Runestones and one is guaranteed from Lei Shen. If you want to get your quests done anytime soon, that's the way to go.
Exogenesis3 asked:
Are Blizz gonna nerf LFR Nazgrim? It seems WAY overtuned for a bunch of strangers to cope with; every time I get into the second wing, all the fights seem to be a struggle, Nazgrim especially. It seems even worse than Lei Shen originally was, and I didn't think anything could be as bad as that. Complete chaos, and 5 stacks of Determination seems to be the norm even with groups that aren't completely incompetent. Nerf incoming maybe?
Nazgrim is one of those fights that can be totally ruined by one person that doesn't understand the mechanics ... or a single troll. Those are definitely the worst LFR encounters. Mechanics where one, single DPS can screw everybody up by doing something he shouldn't be doing should be left out of LFR, I think. If someone does a Bad Thing, it should kill them, not everybody else. In Flex/Normal/Heroic, go ahead, leave that kind of thing in. But not LFR.
Fizzl asked:
what's everyone think of the new Steam Machines and Steam OS and all that?
It's bizarre. I don't think it's for people who are already PC gamers, it's the start of a campaign to bring the PC to console gamers. Since I'm already a PC gamer, there's no value for me in what it's doing. I'm curious to see if console players are finding it at all interesting.
That controller sure is weird, though.
Rozza asked:
I've been hearing the warrior deck is currently underpowered in Hearthstone. Why is that?
I'm not sure I've played it enough to properly articulate why, but I'll try. In my experience, warrior is generally weak. It doesn't excel at doing anything particularly amazing. It seems to be aimed towards stacking your deck with minions that can hit hard and fast, but minions of that variety all have very low health and it's impossible to keep them on the board. For example, you use Inner Rage, which deals 1 damage to one of your own minions in exchange for 2 attack power that turn. You use it to trigger the Enrage effect on an Amani Berserker, giving that minion an additional 3 attack.
Your Amani Bersker is up to 7 attack that turn, which is crazy, because it only cost you 2 mana to play that combo! But that leaves the minion with only 2 health and you used 2 cards to accomplish that. The entire situation is stopped dead by your opponent playing a minion with taunt (or any minion really) because the Berserker can't live through doing anything but dealing direct damage. And that's the case for that entire strategy. Your heavy-hitters also have very low health, so you have no board control. You spend so many low-cost cards to beef up those minions that you run your hand empty very early in the game. You could skip all of that and load up beefier mobs with taunt, but you can do that with any deck and have more options. Why do that as a warrior when you can do it as a druid, which does it better?
Warriors have a lot of weapon options, but using those weapons means inflicting damage on themselves. Gorehowl is awesome, but every time you kill a minion with it, you chip away at your own health. Warriors can mitigate that with their class ability, but most other classes have abilities with offensive options to nullify your +2 armor. Warrior class spells also seem to need 2 (or more) cards to do the work of 1 card from other classes. Execute can kill anything ... if you deal damage to it first, meaning you usually need to throw away one of your minions to use it. But rogues have Assassinate which requires no such sacrifice, Mages have Polymorph, various classes have spells that do 6+ damage which can kill almost anything, and so on. My warrior deck has more spell cards than it really should have, simply because I need extra spell cards to make them as effective as what comes in other decks.
There are supposedly some warrior buffs coming. I'm eager to see what they are. Maybe when that happens, we'll see some stronger warrior decks show up.
And uh. Yeah. I'm sure some are going to be angry that I wrote 3+ paragraphs about Hearthstone strategy and not nearly so much for the Warcraft questions, but talking strategy needs way more words than telling people where to get Runestones. Sorry about that.
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!
