The Queue: Smithing, garrisons, and more

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.

Best weapon ever? Yes. Very yes.

BapoThe-Paladin asked:

Anyone else hope they bring back specializations for blacksmithing? I'm leveling another alliance toon, and the Jinyu town has a waterforge, and I really wish they brought back specializations :(

While I found those specializations cool back in the day, I'm not sure if they were interesting enough in their previous form to justify keeping them around. The weapon specializations in Burning Crusade gave some great weapons (with the Lionheart line being my favorite swords in the game ever), it was a constant struggle between where you should get the best weapons -- crafting or raiding.

If Sword Specialization gave the best PVE weapons, every melee player in the game went swordsmithing. If it stopped giving the best PVE weapons, players hated that raiding trumped the effort they put into their smithing skill and rendered their specialization irrelevent. Those who didn't want to go blacksmithing were punished for keeping their preferred crafting skill. The same thing happened with hammersmithing and PVP. It's a whole lot of trouble.

I'm not sure specialization is the answer. Giving crafting cool, interesting things to do at a base level is the better option, I think. Don't make someone spec into waterforging, but maybe make some cool items with a waterforge and items you wouldn't normally expect to craft with. Items you need to seek out and collect through methods other than mining a node.

AlexVanDrie asked:

It may be because I haven't played regularly in quite some time, but I logged on today and noticed all the Kor'kron guards are drenched in a purple Sha mist. When was this added? I don't remember it when I was running Siege but maybe it was there. Excuse my stupidity.

As mentioned in the comments yesterday, that isn't Sha mist. It's an overdose of cologne and perfume from the Love is in the Air event. That's even worse than Sha mist.

ScottLeyes asked:

Does anyone else feel, like i do, that Garrisons are lifted from Vendors in Diablo III? Today's artcraft post immediately made me think "Where have i seen this (upgrading buildings thing) before... OH YEAH! DIABLO!"

Garrisons (and the farms before them) appear to pull inspiration from a lot of places. Diablo had the building upgrades, yes, but it wasn't the first game to have them. Other MMOs had version of housing, some more complex than others, and single player games before them let you build up a base, a team, and so forth. Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon, games that aren't at all serious-business sword-and-sorcery slay-the-dragon gameplay, inspired a great deal of the mechanics utilized in these features.

ScottLeyes asked:

So, since the next expansion is ALL ABOUT time travel (/wink), what celebrity cameos should we expect?

You should expect all of them. Every possible cameo they can squeeze in. But I hope and pray there are none, because their pop culture jokes have been like hammers to the head in recent expansions.

kageokami asked:

FYI ... "Edit" works @ Massively. WI staff maybe check with them since you are both AOL sites?

Editing is enabled in our comments and has been for awhile -- you should have a short window of time in which you can edit your post. If it isn't working, I'll continue to look into it, but it is enabled.

Goranaws asked:

Wonder if we could se an untainted thrall in WoD.. Possibly as a warlord?

Thrall wasn't even born yet at the time Warlords of Draenor is set.

JordanPhillips asked:

are the Titans just as evil as the Old Gods, only in a different sense? Algalon being willing to wipe out an entire planet of life for the purpose of "order" is hardly more admirable than doing it all for "chaos".

If ants get into your cupboard, do you feel bad about exterminating them? In World of Warcraft, you're an ant, the Titans are the exterminators. Everything's cool until we start picking around in their stuff alongside the Old God cockroaches.

Luckily, we're a breed of ant that kills cockroaches? Or something? I lost this metaphor a long time ago. I have no idea what I'm talking about anymore.

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!