The Queue: Twinky

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 edition of The Queue has a cream filling and no nutritional value.

Daveterrell asked:

I was rumbling around Stormwind Castle and came upon an NPC that allows you to pay 10 gold to stop earning experience. What's up with that?

That NPC's function is usually utilized by PvPers who want to stay in a certain battleground level bracket. By turning experience gain off, they can prevent accidentally leveling up from honorable kills or turning in quests.

Dannyboy asked:

With the New Heroic instances of Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman on the horizon is there any chance we will be seeing a normal version of these two?

Unfortunately, no. Blizzard recently stated that they would've liked to have low-level versions of the instances in question, but there was no good place to add them in the 1-60 bracket.

Shinanji asked:

I don't raid or do dungeon runs very often coz of the jerks I've had to deal with using the LFG/LFD utilities. Don't know if this has actually been asked before, but my question is this:

Is there anyway non-raiders, such as myself, can get comparable gear to normal/heroic gear without grouping?

I've mentioned this before, I don't get opportunities very often to get into good groups, due to kicking coz of my, formerly Gearscore, now it average iLevel, which is at 307 currently. Most of the gear I've found in the AH is PvP gear, which I have gotten to PvP, but I'm looking at getting better PVE gear.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you don't want to run group content, what do you need better gear for? If you're not doing instances, heroics, or raids, then you only need gear that lets you kill quest mobs, which is provided in spades through quests, reputations, or the auction house. Try Tol Barad dailies for your faction's rewards, which are ilvl 346, and make sure to do the daily quests for the various Cataclysm reputations, some of which reward items up to ilvl 359.

Elzogo asked:

Why haven't more raid groups downed Conclave of Wind? My raid group has only downed Magmaw twice and the Defense System once, so we're not the most talented or hardcore group out there but we found Conclave to be one of the easiest fights so far.

I can't speak for every raider, but Conclave of Wind is a fight that requires a level of coordination that lots of raid groups just don't have. A good raid leader can get a group through it no problem, but not every raid leader is a good one. Another aspect of Conclave that makes it less appealing for fledgling raiders is the highly random loot. I don't think I'm the only person who dislikes having an epic with "of the ______" in its name.

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!