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The Queue: Waffles of Draenor

Dawn Moore
Updated ·7 min read
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Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Dawn Moore (@dawnwow) will be your host today.

Happy New Year!

I was fortunate enough to have a box of Eggo waffles in my freezer this morning when I went through yesterday's Queue looking for questions. If you didn't read yesterday's, commenter Kageokami asked ScottLeyes to spam a "Best of ScottLeyes in 2013" in the comments and he complied.

I also unlocked an achievement this morning by not getting any residual syrup on my fingers in the process of eating my delicious freezer waffles. I'm not sure what the achievement is called though, as it scrolled past too quickly and I have terrible peripheral vision. Either way, it's an excellent way to start the new year.

And given the title of today's Queue ...

ScottLeyes asked:

OK, so we need strong song suggestions for the WOW MUSICAL... I nominate:

"One Night in Halfhill" (sung to "One Night In Bangkok")
"Undercity Girls" (sung to Katy Perry's "California Gurls")


There is a song I've been singing since vanilla WoW, to the tune of Particle Man by They Might Be Giants. The last bit has to be sung really fast to keep it on pace.

"Barnacled Clam, Barnacled Clam,
Doing the things that a barnacled clam can."

That's apparently all I've come up with in eight years, but it's so catchy! If that doesn't make the musical I'm going to be pissed.

TrollingAzeroth asked:

When is the "catch" determined when you're fishing? Is it:

1. When the pool spawns?
2. When the cast is made?
3. When you click the bobber?

The first place I thought look for an answer was El's Extreme Anglin' (though I should also note that commenter Mbuhtz also recommended searching here). This post is a bit old but quite thorough in its response...

"The thing we know for sure is that if you fail to click a bobber that has splashed when fishing a pool, the total number of fish left in the pool doesn't change. You actually have to bring up a loot window to reduce the pool's supply of fish. (And no, I can't remember what happens if you bring up the loot window and then fail to take the loot from it.)

"Based on the behaviour of latent or laggy servers, the loot is generated by the server when you click the bobber, not when it splashes: The client has to go and ask the server something. Presumably it asks what the loot is - well, what else does it need to know? But then there's a delay when casting while the client checks something with the server. I assume the server was randomising the cast location, but it could be randomising the catch too. And pools (which basically use the same underlying code as ore and herb nodes - which I guess is why the left-over test pool above Northshire contains Peacebloom) might have their contents generated at pool creation time, a long time before anyone catches anything.

"On a slight tangent, the Fishy Experiment thread at Elitist Jerks has some interesting loot generation theories. The theory goes that the "contents" of a container are generated at the time loot is created in the world. However, storing the precise contents would be needlessly data-intensive, so the contents are stored as a single seed number. That means if the loot table of the bag changes (as happened with fished crates at patch 2.3), the seed number stored may yield different loot before and after a patch.

"Generally Blizzard's data structures seem very simple, but are so clouded by apparent randomness that almost all the players remain confused. For example, at release there were only 6 variations that determined the fishing skill and fish across every zone in the game - yet when I started researching El's guide nobody understood any of that.

"So in answer to your question... 42? The virtual fish that did not get caught may or may not have ever existed. But if the generation of a quest fish is truly random, it's best not to worry about whether what you didn't catch ever existed, and instead focus on reducing the chance of a fish getting away ;-) ."


So no concrete answer, but I think we can probably eliminate option one (that loot is created when a fish pool spawns). From a simple programming perspective I don't think it would make sense to have the loot creation point change based on whether you were fishing from a pool or a random body of water in the world. It seems most likely that the pools are just areas where the loot pool (that is, loot options available) is different. This seems logically supported by the fact that the fishing changes in patch 3.3 made it so you could no longer loot junk when fishing from pools, even if your fishing skill is 1.

Drewbob asked:

Who would be your top 5 team of awesome secondary characters you'd like to see carried forward into Draenor in WoD?

I think Cata did a great job of introducing new characters we could get to know better over the course of the revamped leveling zones, and in Mists (Alliance side at least) we spent some quality time with the Pandaria advance team as well as the Shado Pan. These hardly represent all the awesome secondary characters. If you had to choose five, who would you take?

Are we picking from secondary characters we've already quested with to continue with us into Draenor, or can we establish some new ones? I'll gladly take some of the characters we've been close to in the past, but I'd also like to establish a couple of new ones to fit with the next expansion.

  • Admiral Taylor -- This is purely selfish, as my night elf would like someone to keep her warm on all those cold nights in Frostfire Ridge.

  • Sully "The Pickle" McLeary -- I think Sully has the most personality out of the cast of secondary characters we traveled with in MoP. Since Gizmo and Socks are both in a better place, I'd like to see what adorable non-combat companions he brings to the Warlords of Draenor quest lines.

  • Akama -- Since we'll be exploring both the past and an alternate timeline, I'm sure we'll run into Akama once we arrive at the Temple of Karabor ... But I want to do more than just run into him. I would like to know more about who Akama was before The Burning Crusade, and possibly find out how much of the events at the temple shaped him into what we saw two expansions ago.

  • Aggra -- I have this hopefully romantic idea that while Aggra might initially be left behind with the kids, she'd eventually show up late to the party to work closely alongside our characters. I figure she's a great companion for issues dealing directly with Garadar.

  • Arko'narin -- Arko'narin isn't a secondary character, just a quest NPC ... But she had so much potential back in vanilla that I think she would make for a great secondary character in an upcoming expansion, especially if Blizzard ever wanted to extend the paladin class to night elves. At present, the the story of her fate is open ended and could go many ways. Last we saw her she ran off with the sword of her dear and departed friend, Trey Lightforge, but there's no knowing whether she's alive or dead.

Coincidentally, four of my five choices all have A-ish names. That might get a bit confusing.

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!