The Queue: Talents in the next expansion

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

The talent system has been revamped in every single expansion post-Burning Crusade. Will the next WoW expansion be any different?

Gordon asked:

How do you think talents are going to work from this point on? Will we have 1 talent every three expansions? Or will we get 1 per expansion, which means 1 every 5 levels?

I suspect they'll need to do something like giving us a talent every other expansion, and shift at which levels you get a talent to smooth out the curve. Expansions where we don't get a talent point, we'll probably get something else. Maybe they'll switch off between new spells or new talents.

xChackOx asked:

Why is having green fire so important to Warlocks? So important that it requires a special quest, ptr testing, wow insider articles and months to implement. Seeing that it is purely cosmetic, I can't see why the big deal of this.

You can kind of blame Blizzard for this one. Warlocks have wanted green fire because warlocks use fel fire, not mage fire. Fel fire, when seen used by NPCs or as world decoration, has always been green, dating back to the Warcraft RTS games. Warlocks should have been using green fire from day one.

Naturally, warlocks way back in the day were like, "Hey, can our fire be green?" The developers and community managers said repeatedly that yes, they were working on that. Then it never happened. And it never happened. And it never happened. And every time the topic came up Blizzard said it's totally coming, then it totally wasn't. Do note that this isn't the only cosmetic thing warlocks have been teased about -- before the announcement of Mists of Pandaria, it was teased that warlocks would be given more demon options that crossed gender lines. Say, summoning an incubus instead of a succubus. Hasn't happened yet.

At some point, the developers decided that if the warlocks want green fire so bad, they need to work for it and it's being implemented into its own side story completely. Warlocks asked a simple question: "Can we have green fire?" Blizzard hyped it into a fever pitch all on their own when the green fire should have been the correct color for warlock spells all along.

Warlocks using red fire instead of green fire would be something like hunters shooting arrows out of a gun, or bullets from a bow. If you want to shoot the right ammo, you have to wait 8 years and then embark on an epic quest. Whaaaat?

@Revynn asked:

Mildly unrelated Q: So, between a song I found about Kerrigan and the new SC2 trailer, I'm getting pretty curious. I'm pretty terrible at RTS's and never touched Starcraft, should I start at the beginning or just pick up HoTS?

Start with StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. The original StarCraft and its expansion had an excellent story, but it feels rather dated these days. It released in 1998, after all. Wings of Liberty will bring you up to date a little and it sets the stage for the events of Heart of the Swarm. If you're willing to play a game that feels ancient by today's standard, then absolutely check out the original StarCraft. You'll understand Kerrigan much better as a character if you do.

I'm bad at RTS games myself so I never play StarCraft competitively, but absolutely anybody can play through the single player campaign.

@FreddieGibbons asked:

are there still cookie cutter builds I should be using or is that all rubbish now?

There will always be specific talents considered correct for any given situation. There are certain talents that are very powerful in PVE but not very powerful in PVP, for example. But overall, you're given a great deal more freedom in your talents. In the cases where one talent is very good in PVE, at least you can pick that one talent without needing to invest in an entire talent tree or talent spec to get it.

@KoleBigEars asked:

What is one thing I MUST do before I lose the ability to play WoW (possibly/most likely) forever on the 28th?

I don't have any suggestions for you, but I'm sure our readers do. Readers, get to commenting!

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!