The Queue: The one with the fashion-forward warlock

Welcome to your daily dose of The Queue. With Mike Sacco quite literally powerless, his precious Queue was left unguarded and captured by Fox Van Allen. All members of the Van Allen faction shall enjoy a 5 percent buff to damage and experience for the 24-hour duration, and Spirit Shards may now be collected.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have returned to host The Queue once more. I know you've missed me. You're probably saying to yourself, "Oh man, I wish Fox could do The Queue every day of the week, four times a day!"

This, of course, would be folly. You can indeed have too much of a good thing.

Remember when Who Wants to be a Millionaire first aired on TV? It was on maybe once a week. And then it got so popular that they started adding extra shows. Turn on your TV on Wednesday and -- boom -- there was Regis. Turn it on Thursday -- Regis. Friday -- Regis. Sunday -- Regis. Sooner or later, you couldn't even take a trip to the mens' room without seeing Regis Philbin staring back at you from the urinal, asking you who the father of quantum physics was.

It's Niels Bohr, OK?! Niels freakin' Bohr. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm trying to go to the bathroom here. Man.

Sharvis asked:

How has trade chat been since the last patch? Now that you can't spam in it, it seems slower-paced to me at least.

I realize that I'm simply a data point in a sea of data points, but the problem with trade chat has never really been spam so much as it has been anonymous jerkwads on level 1 alts. Expert trolls get the job done in one message or less. No matter how much you try and limit spam, you'll still have plenty of people who are unable to resist the lure of explaining that, if you did a 360, you'd be facing exactly where you started from.

I suppose the limitation on message frequency does seem to have put the screws to gold sellers for now. It'll probably take a full 4 or 5 days for them to figure out a way to get around it.

Grovinofdarkhour asked:

Do you think many people will actually spend the gold for master riding, or will most folks realize the difference between 280 percent and 310 percent simply isn't worth 5,000g?

I think that virtually everyone who can take 310 flight, will. At least for their mains.

When I signed in to the Cataclysm beta for the first time, the first thing I did was head to a riding trainer to get 310 percent flight. I didn't even need to think about it. I just did it.

For most players, Master Flight is totally unnecessary -- it only amounts to being able to fly about 10 percent faster than usual. I will concede that 5,000 gold (only 4,000 gold with faction rep) is a lot of money, and it'll probably still be a lot of money in Cataclysm. But what makes 310 percent flight less valuable than, say, the Deathfrost Boots that people paid 15,000 gold to make? Or the 5,000 gold I wound up spending to make the Merlin's Robe that I wound up disenchanting three months later?

I play World of Warcraft to enjoy myself, and having to fly around from place to place ranks pretty low on my list of "fun." The shorter my flights, the more time I have to do the stuff I enjoy doing. That's worth the 4,000 gold to me. Besides, what the heck else am I going to spend that money on?

Xodin asked:

I just saw the tier 11 preview set today for mages, and I'll admit that like many previous versions, the shoulders and helm continue to look fresh, but once again, we're wearing robes. The chest gear tailors craft and the greens we find while leveling have a variety of models, so why are endgame chest pieces all robes? I was really hoping that, with their third expansion, they'd create a new chest armor model for us styled after an open trenchcoat, or stylish vest or anything to mix up the monotony of the chest armor models we've had for the last three endgames.

We sent your comment to the folks at Project Runway. They tasked their designers with a challenge: Come up with a new, fashion-forward tier design for a summer raid ... made entirely from office supplies. I present to you the winning design: the warlock tier 12 vest!

Unfortunately, Blizzard reviewed this new tier piece and was afraid it represented "a lot of look." I dunno ... I thought the hot pink skull and crossbones captured the class perfectly.

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!