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The Queue: Comeback Kid
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. The new Sleigh Bells album is almost out! Aaahhh! I've heard the whole thing and, minus this song and one or two others, it's a lot less raucous than I thought it would be, based on Treats. I still like it, though. Simpsons Rule asked: I have a question: Has the Daily Quest column been canceled? There hasn't been a post since January 27. Nope! Not in spirit, anyway. Some of you guys may have noticed slight changes in the format here, and this is one of them. Basically, we're trying to make sure that really cool stuff like interesting community blogs and fan creations doesn't get lost in our daily content cycle. To that end, we're spotlighting things more individually and not under a single banner like The Daily Quest. You'll note we've done this with other columns as well, like our roleplaying column, among others.
Ol' Grumpy and the crushing disappointment of roles
There are no pure DPS classes in World of Warcraft that use two-handed melee weapons to deal damage and only one pure DPS class that can even equip them. There are literally hundreds of two-handed melee weapons in this game. This has always annoyed me, because I love big weapons. I know you know this about me. One of the reasons I hate the argument that pure DPS classes should have dibs on top DPS weapons is that in order for me to play a character that uses a two-hander, I have no choice but to play a hybrid. In fact, in order to play as melee DPSer at all, I either have to play a rogue (all three rogue trees dual wield small, fast weapons) or a hybrid. Those are my options. If I wanted to play ranged DPS, I could pick from one of three possible pure classes, but if I want to melee, I'm forced to either give up the weapons I enjoy and take up a playstyle I don't like or accept that I will be forced to DPS at a penalty and be expected and/or pressured to tank. This to me is asking me to pay twice, and it's unacceptable. Last week, Ghostcrawler posted an excellent discussion on class and role that I highly recommend everyone check out, and it seriously has me pondering what design I'd prefer for World of Warcraft and indeed how I feel about classes and roles entirely.
Wouldn't this be cool? The Lost Islands of Draenor
One of the things we like to do at the virtual WoW Insider office is talk about what we'd like to see in the game. Sometimes it's something as simple as a winged Zhevra mount. Sometimes it gets more elaborate, like when Mat McCurley and I were talking about the lost ocean that once surrounded Hellfire Peninsula before Draenor got ripped inside out and dumped unceremoniously into the Twisting Nether, becoming what is now Outland. "Hey," I said, "Have you ever noticed that Deathwing's Lair isn't part of the part of Draenor that became Outland?" "Yeah, and the Warsong Clan's island is gone too." He pointed out. This got us to thinking about future content. We know we're going to Pandaria soon, but neither of us have given up on what Mike Sacco calls an outer space vacation expansion. We want it to happen, to seek out new life, to go where no tauren has gone before. And this got me to think that maybe, we can start the exploration off in 5-man content.
The Queue: You will die, we promise
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. It's pretty nice of Blizzard to make sure you know that its game will kill you. Coffee asked: With the arrival of account-wide achievements, do you think Blizzard will add something where our achievement points have some in game effect? For example, special vendors that will only sell to you if you have greater than 3000 achievement points, another vendor that will sell different items if you have over 5000, etc... Like I said on the podcast recently, I've learned never to say never about anything Blizzard could possibly do in relation to WoW, but the devs have stated several times that they never intended for achievement points to be a real currency. So, I doubt it, but with account-wide achievements and other systems changes coming with MoP, we'll just have to wait and see.
The Queue: Re-Vita-lized
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. I wasn't planning on picking up a PlayStation Vita, but then they told me there'd be a full-featured Uncharted game at launch, and welp. Philster asked: Very happy that they are going to allow achievements account-wide. It will definitely help me towards playing different characters more often. What achievement are you MOST proud of? Mine is still Loremaster, as it was pre-Cata, and took a very long time to do. Though once I get What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been in May for finishing Children's Week, that will be up there also. Personally, my favorite achievement is Glory of the Ulduar Raider (10-man). It was the first time I had really been involved with progression raiding when it was relevant; we had a dedicated group, and we all worked hard to clear that place every week until we did it, and we were still up there in terms of timing. It was my first and really only experience raiding at that level. I've raided before, but not really with a purpose. I saw that rusted proto-drake and knew it had to be mine, so I did it.
The Queue: Garbage Day!
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. Hope you guys are as pumped for Skullgirls as I am. Any game that has someone yell "GARBAGE DAY!" when they shoot a pistol is a day-one purchase for me. Soulestream asked: Do you think they are allowing account wide achievements because they have decided to do the item level / stats squish? No, I think the devs' stated reasoning was honest: They know that, after seven years, you're probably going to have a bunch of achievements on a guy you don't feel like playing as much anymore, but you keep playing because that's the guy with all the achievements. Making achievements account-wide means that you don't need to play the guy you hate just to maintain momentum (and a title you like that you can't get anymore).
Patch 4.3 hotfixes for Feb. 7, 2012
A fresh round of hotfixes landed tonight, including a pair that will relieve the pain of many achievement hunters and event celebrants this week. The following fixes are included in this round: Players are now able to receive Lovely Charms while on the quest Test Your Strength, when the player's inventory has both the Darkmoon Adventurer's Guide and Lovely Charm Collector's Kit. Players now have the chance to receive both the Lovely Charm and Grisly Trophy from a single kill. Hit the break for the full list of tonight's hotfixes, including an Ultraxion trash nerf.
How players are using cross-realm raiding to foster communities
With the introduction of cross-realm raiding in patch 4.3.2 and the Raid Finder, players have gone above and beyond in creating new and exciting server-less communities that bring in raiders from all over the world via Real ID grouping. While the Dragon Soul raid is not available currently for players using cross-realm raiding, all other raids and difficulties are, and there is no better time to go back to old content and finish off stuff during the wait until the next expansion. Sites like LFRaid.com and Twitterland Raiding are two communities that have sprung up quickly in this new cross-realm raiding world. Twitterland Raiding is a website created for the Twitter WoW community to form up groups for raiding across server lines. With a centralized place to express interest in raiding as well as no server structure or logistics to worry about besides Real ID names (which gets immensely easier with the introduction of BattleTags), raiding can happen in greater volume and more quickly.
The Queue: Superb Owl
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. Why can't I find out anything about this Superb Owl? dinojake15 asked: Any word yet on MoP's system requirements? I got a little 10.5.8 MacBook that can just barely run Cataclysm. Just wondering if I should start saving money for a new computer now. Blizzard has been incrementally increasing WoW's system requirements with each expansion, so it's safe to assume that MoP will require even more muscle than Cataclysm did. I don't think it's been announced just how much more muscle, but if you had trouble running Cataclysm, you're going to have trouble with MoP.
The Queue: A giddy thing
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. This Queue is excellent. *throws The Queue on the ground; it shatters into a million pieces* Another! Ellyon asked: My main is a resto druid. Lifebloom triggers Replenishment and I keep a stack of Lifebloom on a tank for, ideally, the whole fight. Last night I was in Raid Finder and noticed that Replenishment kept falling off. I would refresh Lifebloom just to make sure, but Replenishment didn't return until some other moment: a moment when I was not casting or refreshing Lifebloom. I'm wondering, is there a priority system that another character is the trigger for Replenishment? With my style of healing, Replenishment should be up the whole fight, but I regularly saw it fall off and was not refreshed at the moment I would have expected. Commenter metafarm answered this one really well, so here it is for posterity: It gives 10 party or raid members (with the lowest mana left) 1% of their maximum mana every 10 second for 15 seconds, or 1.5% over the full duration. Each time it is triggered, the 10 most needy members are recalculated, and those people either receive the buff, or have it refreshed on them.
The Queue: A sudden increase in prudishness
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. "Finally," you're saying right now, "Sacco is back with more YouTube videos of songs he likes." Yer darn right! Puntable asked: I'm not sure I really want to ask this question, but here goes. Blizzard has been changing a lot of the armor models on females, such as black mageweave leggings, to cover more skin. Why the sudden increase in prudishness after 6 years? Well, Black Mageweave Leggings haven't changed since launch. What other instances of an "increase in prudishness" can you provide? If you need evidence that Blizzard hasn't stopped putting in revealing armor for women, check out rogue season 11 gear.
Ol' Grumpy and the specter of pointless elitism
Ol' Grumpy (that's me) has a bit of a problem. He's started tanking for pickup groups lately. I guess technically that means I have two problems, but doctors probably can prescribe some medication or something for white-hot eruptions of seething rage. I'm starting to think Neltharion was the tank for the dragon aspects' regular 5-man group. However, my molten cauldron of hate masquerading as a soul isn't what I came to talk to you about today. No, I'm actually here to explain what pointless elitism is and why it's actually bad. I'll use an example from a recent 5-man. I had signed up to tank because I wanted the goody bag of potent bribery. I admit it, I'm weak. I zoned into End Time, said hello to the mostly uncommunicative group, and started charging things, as I am wont to do. Things died, we progressed, no one pulled aggro by DoTing a mob while I was mounted and on the other side of the map -- it was pretty much ideal for a pickup. Then we got to Sylvanas, killed her, and as someone looted, two of the DPSers begin savaging the third for doing less than they. I look at Skada and saw that all three of them were floating between 11k and 14k DPS overall, with this one player sinking to 7k on Sylv. They were all geared about the same -- a couple of HoT pieces -- so clearly, they were all there because they needed the gear.
The Light and How to Swing It: The Fall of Deathwing, ret edition, part 2
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions! This is it, guys and girls. This is the moment we have all been training for while hitting that poor target dummy in Orgrimmar, because only repeatedly bashing a plank of wood will truly prepare you to square off against a dragon as epic as the big DW. So pick up your weapon, your bag of tricks, and your handful of cooldowns -- it's time to kill Deathwing the Destroyer. Spine of Deathwing I remember when there was wild speculation on what the Deathwing fight in Dragon Soul would actually look like. The devs announced that we would jump on him for part of the fight, and my strange brain secretly hoped that we would start at his tail and work our way up, maybe chopping off his legs and wings into a giant container of dry rub so the Titans could come on down and throw it on a massive barbecue. Honestly, we should have done that with Onyxia so she couldn't be resurrected 14 times!
Have reforging demands become too complex?
Have you ever cringed at the idea of picking up a new upgrade because you knew it meant you were going to have to reforge almost every single piece of gear you wear? Do you actually consider picking up more than one of the same item so that you can have it reforged differently for different specs? Do you ever want to punch that smarmy, overly reverbbed ethereal in the face after you dump several hundred gold reforging all your gear because there was no negotiation? (You just charged me a flat fee, you jerk!) That last one may just be me. Reforging gear has become a huge part of optimization. It is at least as important as gemming and enchanting. Sites like WoW Reforge and Ask Mr. Robot (to name just two) are heavily consulted by players looking to squeeze every last erg of performance out of their gear. Is it too much? Has the minigame of stat tetris gotten out of hand?
4 steps for dealing with Raid Finder harassment
I'm a reformed bully. A few years back, I was the kid in the PUG raid calling everyone else bad and acting like I was the Light's gift to raiding. I've since worked to distance myself from that attitude. While I still get annoyed from time to time when I see poor play in Raid Finder and generally have a sour taste in my mouth while pugging raids, I've become a lot more aware of how painful and harmful my words can be, and I keep them to myself. With my past experience being a bully, it made sense that when our editors wanted someone to write up a survival guide to using the Raid Finder, the most dreadful hive of scum and villianry since Mos Eisley, I would take the challenge on. The three main types of WoW bullies In my real life, I work with kids. I've spent the past third of my 24-year life working with kids. As a result, I've been exposed to a lot of bullies, both online and on the playground. There are a few staple things to remember about people who are also bullies, particularly when it comes to the Raid Finder. Here's who you'll find there. 1. The Covering for His Own Inadequacies Bully This is your archetypical bully cliché, but it's grounded in reality. These bullies are horrifically self-conscious, and they're just lashing out at whoever's handy because they're afraid that if they don't, they're going to be the one picked out and picked on. We've all been here; it's called high school (also Congress, but I repeat myself). These bullies are fairly common in your average Raid Finder run. Just yesterday, I ran a RF with Shelam, my blood death knight. Now, Shelam has an average ilevel of 378 and has tanked all of RF before, but he was called out and almost vote-kicked by three players: another blood DK who was trying to tank while dual-wielding Souldrinkers (a big no-no), his friend and guildmate the last-on-meters fire mage, and an unholy death knight who was fully gemmed for stamina despite being a DPS class. They all called me out for being undergeared, most likely because I was the easiest target in the raid due to my lone remaining blue item, an ilevel 346 helm. Had they not gone after me, it would have been easy for them to have been the recipients of some harsh (if accurate) words, so they chose to go on the attack instead. That let them redirect the blame and their insecurity onto me while feeling empowered because they were making accusations instead of fielding them.
The Queue: Catnap
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. It's almost the end of a very long weekend. Who wants to take a nap? It's me. I do. Tfish asked: What's the deal with that new Lor'themar story? I mean I guess it's kind of cool that we get some new lore on him considering he has just been sitting around doing nothing for the longest time, but I really don't care about what he was doing in the time span between BC, and the launch of WOTLK now that we're almost 3 expansions away from that time period. A valid question. I'd agree that it does feel a little odd for blood elves to be the only race that didn't get a "new" story, but In the Shadow of the Sun is important for a different reason -- Blizzard just made a writing contest entry canon. It's very rare for something like that to happen in the industry. Sarah deserves a lot of credit for writing a story so good and so in-universe that Blizzard decided it should be part of WoW canon. As for Lor'themar, well, who knows? Velen got just the smallest amount of presence in Cataclysm; maybe MoP will hold some new developments for Lor'themar.
Official patch notes for patch 4.3.2
Patch 4.3.2 is at hand, and you can find the full list of patch notes after the cut. If you haven't been keeping track, this is not a content patch; it just updates some features, fixes some bugs, and adds the new 64-bit client (finally). Also of note: Players can no longer receive two of the same item at the same time when winning loot from a Raid Finder boss, Vengeance no longer acts off player damage, and Aspect of the Hawk got a big ol' buff. Update: The patch will not be releasing today after all, barring some sort of miracle. Remember, if Blizzard hasn't said it, it isn't guaranteed. Sorry! But heck, why don't you brush up on your patch notes anyway?
The aesthetic consequences of new character models
This is neither a post excoriating nor exulting but rather simply contemplating the process of updating character models in World of Warcraft. I got to thinking about this when I realized that I'm always happiest when I get Well of Eternity because I like the night elf model. Tall, spare, muscular, it looks excellent in plate. There are certainly flaws to the model, but they're concealed entirely by my gear. Night elf males have large hands, but those hands look just fine curled around a weapon, and the faces are entirely concealed behind my helmet. As you can see above, the night elf male does an excellent job of showing off the textures and details of my armor set, especially the plated legs. Redesigning these models will have a variety of effects. As a long-time player, I have my own stylistic loves and hates. Human females look astonishingly vapid and nigh-idiotic, and their animations in melee look ludicrous to the point that I expect them to fall over every weapon swing, while gnomes and blood elves have excellent combat flow. Female undead melee are awesome to watch, but I can't stand the bones poking through my gear. That's part of the complication here. The models you love, someone else hates, and the models you hate, someone else loves. That's often viewed as a cop-out -- but man, if you screw up my tauren, I will burn your world. (Note: Will not actually burn your world ... too lazy.)
The Queue: Do it live
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. Warpaint is a band you just have to see live. This is a fantastic live version of Burgundy followed by Undertow. Zaet asked: Do u think there will ever be another Warcraft RTS? Put plainly, I'd be incredibly surprised if we saw another entry into the main Warcraft series while WoW was running. Placing Warcraft 4 right after WoW gives Blizzard very little wiggle room when it comes to the MMO's story, but placing it long after WoW sort of invalidates the MMO's story progress altogether. Essentially: "Here's what's going to happen regardless of how WoW's story plays out." Of course, I'd love to play as an older Arator the Redeemer or even a King Anduin Wrynn, mind you.
Totem Talk: The ups and downs of playing enhancement in Dragon Soul
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Josh Myers once only tackled the hard questions about enhancement but has recently expanded his sphere of responsibility to all shaman DPS specs. (And no, two-handed enhancement is still never coming back.) I've said in the past that enhancement is in a good place in 4.3, and that's the truth. Despite some really awful itemization and some as-yet-unresolved issues with the spec, enhancement is remaining a strong middle-of-the-pack contender. In non-cutting-edge raid groups that don't have multiple Dragonwrath-wielding casters, we're even better. Dragon Soul is a great instance for enhancement in 4.3 because it offers a variety of fights. Some play to enhancement's strengths, some highlight its weaknesses, and some fights are Ultraxion and your DPS spec doesn't matter, provided you can push buttons and click a shiny purple dot on his screen every 45 seconds. For the purpose of brevity, I'm going to assume you're familiar with the normal-mode mechanics of these fights (and if you're not, some are conveniently covered by my frenemy Tyler Caraway in the Ready Check column) and just speak to how enhancement specifically fares on these fights. Chopping Morchok There's nothing particularly special about Morchok for enhancement, except if you're doing the fight on heroic. Shamanistic Rage and Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem make Morchok's Stomp damage negligible, but Stomps don't really hit hard enough on normal to worry about. However, if you have a healer in line of sight during a black phase (and you've done nothing in recent memory that would cause them to hate you), Glyph of Stoneclaw Totem and Shamanistic Rage will let you stay on the boss for most if not all of the phase. If you don't have a friendly healer, enhancement still fares better than most melee on this fight, as cast Lava Bursts and Lightning Bolts still hit hard.
