The Queue: It's now cold outside. In Fargo. In the winter.

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky (@adamholisky) will be your host today.

So far, this winter has been beyond mild. It got up to the mid-50s the other day -- warm enough that the missus and I were able to go take a walk outside. Of course, now it's zero out with blowing snow and lots of wind, so winter's back.

But really, it was a nice little slice of heaven in Fargo for a bit.

Zack asked:

Do you think that the Pandaren faction choice is a dry run for making that the norm for the playable races in the game? Between that and the politics played by Vol'Jin to stop the Zandalari, the fluid nature of the Dwarves at the moment, the current doubt of the Tauren in Garrosh, and a host of other story developments it seems as though Blizz is aiming to make faction choice a different kind of conscientious game mechanic. It certainly would open up some fun RP opportunities!

It's always possible that Blizzard would take some kind of dramatic overhaul to a core pillar of the game, but I don't think we should read into it very much. With pandarens, it makes sense that they could belong to either the Horde or Alliance and that each faction would accept them.

Would orcs really be accepted and given important quests by all Alliance, the people of Azeroth? Doubtful. Doesn't make much sense given the status quo. I think it makes even less sense in the future, given that we know MoP will be about the ramping up Alliance / Horde hostilities. People are not going to be very trusting then, especially of turncoats.

I could see individual races opening up, however. As you mentioned, it wouldn't be a huge wild card to see the tauren or an evil faction of the dwarves cross over. But as a blanket policy? Nay.

Puntable asked:

Why does all the Valor gear for cloth DPS have Hit (except for one piece)? I'm already over the hit cap for dungeons. Even with reforging, I'm better off wearing 378 gear. Why would they put hit on everything?

I suspect the reason is that 384 gear from the Raid Finder doesn't have much hit on it for casters. At least, that's been the case that I've experienced on my warlock. I ended up upgrading a lot of my Firelands gear to Raid Finder gear early on, and I suddenly found myself having to reforge and gem for hit almost exclusively.

Now that I've got mostly 397 gear, hit's not very much of a problem -- but for a while there, it was. Valor gear helped make it less of a problem.

Keep in mind that while some secondary stats might not make the most sense for you, there is probably a good reason for their being there (and they're helping someone else out a ton).

Puntable also asked:

Do you think people will ever get tired of doing HoT randoms and start doing the "old" heroics for their Valor Points, or are we stuck doing the same 3 dungeons for the next 10 months?

People are doing the old heroics, but as was pointed out in the comments, the reason you're not getting the old heroics much is that the newer heroics are getting ran a bunch and have a higher rate of attrition (because they're new), and you're getting put into them. Of course, it's really not a problem if the gear you've got on is less than the minimum requirement for the new heroics; you'll never end up getting them then.

Blizzard also wants to be sure that everything has the possibility of getting run without having to wait in a queue for an hour. It also doesn't want to design things around short-term trends in a game, which is why we're not seeing an option to exclude the newer heroics. Eventually, in this patch, their appeal will decrease.

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!