The Queue: From the photo album

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 pulled out the oldest screenshot I could find in my Screenshots folder. Unfortunately, I switched computers right before BC launched, so all of my vanilla screenshots are gone. You guys should post the oldest screenshot you can find in the comments. Though I'm not going to force you! Or am I?

Revynn asked:

Am I wrong to be annoyed that guilds are already 11/12 while most of us are still trying to get to 85? It's somewhat expected for guilds like Paragon to steamroll content, but they've barely had time to run heroics. Doesn't that say something about the difficulty level of Cataclysm raids?

Yeah, you're wrong. Sorry, but the fact is that not only were these raids open for a month or more on the beta, we're also dealing with guilds we know are the best of the best of the best. Some of them are even sponsored. Being at the bleeding edge is just what they do.

Most guilds will take months before they even clear the first tier of raiding. Who cares if someone does it faster? The speed that you experience the game is what matters here.

Reis asked:

Serious question now....what is up with the Alchemy transmutation cooldowns? First they were changed to match daily quest reset, then they were just every 12 hours. Now, today, it's 24 hours again. Is one of these a bug? If so, which one?

Transmutes reset at midnight every night. If you do a transmute at noon, you'll have a 12-hour cooldown, but if you transmute at 11:00 PM, then it'll only be an hour. Transmuting at the stroke of midnight, on the other hand, will give you a 24-hour cooldown.


Phort asked:

1. If the worgen were originally nelf druids following Goldrinn and they got addicted to their worgen form and all that yadda-yadda-yadda, why/how can they turn into humans? I have come across nothing to answer this to date.

2. With my above question about being human, where did Arugal or Ur get the idea they were from another dimension?

1. The worgen you play as in-game, and almost all of the worgen you encounter in Eastern Kingdoms, for that matter, are human. They became afflicted with the worgen curse by way of worgen ripped from the Emerald Dream by Arugal. The curse can be spread by bites or scratches, so you're a human turning into a worgen, not a night elf turning into a worgen turning into a human. That would just be silly.

2. Bear in mind that very, very few humans have seen the Emerald Dream. Heck, not even many night elves have seen the Dream. To Arugal and probably any other human unfamiliar with night elf culture and history, the Emerald Dream would just look like another dimension. Because it is.


Aikou asked:

When do you think we will ever see a writer for the Blood Pact column?

Adam Panshin, our new warlock columnist, had RL crit him for a few weeks. During his absence, one of our former Blood Pact columnists, Zach Yonzon, stepped in to keep the coverage current during Cataclysm launch. Mr. Panshin is back now and will be taking over Blood Pact once again this week.


FartyMcGee asked:

Are we somehow scaling in crazy ways when we level 80-85? I just hit 83 and suddenly have 53k hp on my rogue, as opposed to 47k at level 82 (which was crazy enough). I'm just looking for the underlying mechanic at work here, since it isn't gear-based, like you see in lower levels.

There's no magic to it, and it's not gear-based -- you're just getting a boatload more HP when you ding. Cataclysm dungeons and raids are based around big health pools to help encourage reactive healing and more varied encounter design. See, to counteract stat inflation in other expansions, bosses just had to keep hitting harder and harder and harder and do more ridiculous raid damage every raid tier. Inflating our HP to sky-high numbers should, at least in theory, help stave off that kind of encounter design for a little while yet. At least until Deathwellcrown Radiance comes in Patch 4.3.

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!