The Queue: I demand a recount

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Michael Sacco will be your host today.

I'll be taking over The Queue periodically for Alex and Adam, and thus I've been given this soapbox. Well, guess what! I'm usin' it.

I demand a recount on the alleged outcome of the Rossi vs. Sacco arm-wrestling match. I don't know where the results came from, but I bet if we looked in Adam's basement, we'd find a Diebold machine that "fell off the back of a truck." Rossi may have the burly chest and body hair that give him the makings of a champion, but I've got really good hair and I can guarantee that one look at me and Rossi would give up the ghost right there. Unless we're playing by standard rules, in which case he would literally murder me.

And now, reader questions.

Sean asked...

"A question about the new Random Dungeon feature. Let's say you sign up for the first random dungeon of the morning, and you get a place that you just can't stand. (Think OK or Occ) If you bail on the dungeon, then wait out the Deserter debuff, have you messed up your shot at the Frost Emblems for the day?"

We've had a lot of questions about the new Dungeon System lately, which is good, because it shows that people are (at least) interested in it and (at most) excited about it. To answer your question, you don't miss your opportunity to get your Emblems of Frost if your first random dungeon of the day goes down the toilet. You get your Emblems upon successful completion of your first random dungeon of the day.

Tyler asked...

"O read that the wyrmrest accord will have some involvement in the new zone, twilight highlands....i would think the wyrmrest accord would be all over the place in the next expansion. they are somewhat prominent in WoTlk and malygos isn't the main villian. the main villain of cataclysm will be D-Wing himself. i would think they'd be everywhere. your thoughts?"

I haven't heard anything from Blizzard intimating that the Wyrmrest Accord faction itself will be making a return, and following patterns from previous expansions, there's almost no chance that an obselete faction will be reintroduced. What you can probably expect is a new dragon faction similar in name or function to the Wyrmrest Accord, a la Cenarion Expedition or Argent Crusade.

Lidstrom asked...

"Any chance Blizz will get rid of the rest bar? it seems to be an outdated idea, and since many of their recent changes have been to speed the leveling process, it'd be nice to be leveling an alt and not have the rest bar go from blue to purple and slow down the process."

The rest bar is simply your reward for taking a break for a while. It's not meant to be something that's there all the time, unlike the baked-in 30% cut for experience necessary in Outland, for instance. While there certainly have been lots of ways that Blizzard has handed out to help you level alts or help you decrease the time you spend in old content, those are all separate entities built to function differently than the rest bar. I don't see it going away, and for one big reason -- if a player logs in and sees that their alt has a full rest bar, there's a pretty good chance that they'll say to themselves "Oh, neat, maybe I'll level for a while. I'll get double experience, after all."

It's a pretty neat psychological mechanism, and it works.

Mort asked...

"When Cataclysm hits, will Blackwing lair and Molten Core stay raidable as level 60 instances? I've been planning to roll a Tauren Paladin , and I'm really hoping I can get a hold of a Judgement set for him for the sake of RP and pure awesome. Have we heard anything about the fate of the Vanilla raids once Cataclysm hits? Are they going to remain standing, or are they only going to be a nostalgic memory once 4.0 hits?"

Blackwing Lair was actually shown in some shots at BlizzCon, but only the bit that you could feasibly fly up to if you were able to fly in Azeroth proper. It's the entrance to one of the raid instances, actually. But since they said specifically that the non-instanced portion would be the place with the raid portal, I'm led to believe that the 60 raid isn't going away.

That said, Nefarian is honest-to-God back and alive somehow for Cataclysm, unlike his sister, so it's possible they'll change Blackwing Lair in some way. But we won't know until Blizzard tells us.

As for Molten Core, I mean, I understand you want some old gear, but man. Why would you willingly go into that place, almost five years later? It's awful.

Shade asked...

"Is there a map out there, somewhere, of what Azeroth looked like BEFORE the Sundering? I searched high and low for an official one, but I came up completely empty on that front and I ended up just cobbling one together for use in my blog."

Nope, unfortunately, the oldest map of Azeroth that exists is the world map for the venerable original Warcraft game. If we ever get some crazy Caverns of Time expansion that takes us to pre-Sundering Kalimdor, though, I'm sure they'll give us a fleshed-out map for it.

Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW.com 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!