The Queue: Secondary professions 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.

Happy Monday, all! Enjoy your few days at work until New Year's Eve. Assuming you have a job that gives you a day off for the New Year. I've never had such a thing. I'm pretty sure it's a myth.

DavidBaldock asked:

With cooking recipes again requiring a variety of ingredients, and with being able to potentially learn the recipe by tasting certain foods, has cooking become more or less interesting as a secondary profession since MoP or Wrath?

I doubt any expansion will match Mists of Pandaria for the sheer volume of cooking-related activities simply because it was thematically appropriate to that expansion. Cooking was a big deal there in a way it never has been -- it was an element of setting rather than simply a side activity. That said, complexity does not necessarily make something interesting, but I felt it did in that case. Personally, I haven't even seen a reason to delve into cooking in Warlords of Draenor. If I'm soloing something, I use the free food from my garrison's level 3 Herb Garden. If I'm doing grouping activities, I use the feasts that are so abundant in this expansion. I haven't discovered many recipes from eating food because I've found no reason to eat it. Simply gathering the recipes isn't enough of an impetus if I'm not going to use the end product.

Frankly, I don't even remember what cooking was like in Wrath of the Lich King, so that must not have been particularly interesting, either.

I think it would be cool if Blizzard used those secondary professions to drive additional content, though. For example, max level activities wherein you put First Aid to use with the possibility of getting meaningful rewards out of it. Every army needs its medics.

Drihge asked:

This may have been answered before, but I can not remember. If you have a level 3 Garrison and you faction change do you have to redo all of the quests to get back to the garrison level or does it just transfer with you?

If you change factions, your garrison progress resets completely.

Edit: The answer to the above question is based on experience from the opening weeks of Warlords of Draenor. At that time, players who changed factions lost all of their progress. That may have changed since then, but our most recent experience with the system was a total questing and garrison wipe.

ArthurN asked:

Question for the queue and/or other Queue readers: what are your impressions of archaeology in WoD? It is one aspect of the game that I feel is hurt by no flying, but not as much as I might have expected. But I do spend much more time than I would like having to kill mobs inside of dig locations, and I still have one site in Frostfire Ridge that I was unable to clear because it's full of elite wolves and some of them are sleeping on top of dig locations.

Personally, I don't feel archaeology is all that different in Warlords than any previous expansion. It's the same ol' routine. The flying mounts or lack thereof don't feel impactful where archaeology is concerned; you have to dig everything up on the ground, anyway. The only issue I run into is one that has always been present with the profession. Every now and then you get a digsite that is way too large (or filled with difficult mobs) or plopped on top of terrain where you don't know if what you're looking for is up, down, under, over ... and those ones I tend to leave right where they are. I just won't do them and I deal with the fact that I don't have as many digsites available to me for awhile.

Archaeology is consistent with its pros and cons.

@cieper asked:

How long was between Garrosh arriving on Draenor, and the 6.0.2 invasion? Iron Horde built a LOT of things, must've been a while.

I don't believe we have an exact timeframe -- Blizzard rarely gives precise numbers -- but we know it was at least a few years.

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!