The Queue: Patches always drop when you're sleepy

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

So yeah, I was hoping to go to bed when patch 5.4 news dropped and I ended up being awake for hours working on posts about it. I may be ludicrously groggy right now. Anyway, best news of patch 5.4 is Titan's Grip for polearms wooo! There's other stuff ... proving grounds, flex raiding, virtual realms, something in Orgrimmar ... but all of that pales compared to the majesty of TG with polearms. Many warriors will now twirl our way to greatness.

Since none of you knew that 5.4 would drop on the PTR when you were commenting in yesterday's Queue, most of your questions won't be about it. That's okay, it happens. As a result, we're lucky that folks on Twitter never sleep.

@AlternativeChat asks on Twitter:
Chances of mail across Virtual Servers? So you can finally send Heirlooms?

It looks pretty good, considering you can join a guild across them, use a shared AH across them, and do dungeons and raids (and no word of limits on that) across them. I would be very surprised if you couldn't mail across them. We'll see, though. The patch notes don't say yet.

@EmberDione asks on Twitter:
What's going on with names on this virtual server thing? Do we have any idea?

From the patch notes: Players belonging to the same Virtual Realm will have a (#) symbol next to their name. I assume this means that if my warlock Pyrrhus and someone else's mage named Pyrrhus are on different servers in the same virtual realm, he'll be Pyrrhus# to me, and I'll be Pyrrhus# to him. Perhaps our realm names will be in there as well, like in a dungeon or raid finder group.

Puntable1 asks:
With raid fights becoming more and more complex, what do you think of allowing the raid leader to direct like a coach from the sidelines. Add an extra spot to the raid, and he could be there in "ghost form" and move around, use raid markers, chat, etc, but not use abilities or take damage.

Honestly I think it is unlikely, it breaks immersion and kind of reduces the 'field general' feeling of raid leadership. It seems to me that raids have responded to the increased complexity of raid fights by spreading the raid leadership about -- in my experience, there has been a raid leader and up to three or more helpers who mark, call out specific boss abilities, tell the raid when to use cooldowns, etc etc. I don't see them divorcing raid leadership from raiders.

@Bulidar asks on Twitter:
What are the Horde doing in that mining pit in the Vale of the Eternal Blossoms?

They are digging it up looking for anything that Garrosh and his Horde can use as a weapon, and if you run the Dark Heart of Pandaria you find out exactly what he found. It's not good for anybody who isn't him, let me assure you. It's probably not even good for him.

@RetroDragon asks on Twitter:
Clog Den, a refugee from Kun-Lai at Two Moons, has a bear companion. With no bears in Pandaria, where did the bear come from?

A wizard did it.

@nuggsftw asks on Twitter:
Where do you think the raid portal will be for t16 raid?

Based on the boss list for the raid, I suspect it may actually be in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, perhaps in the pit the Horde have dug, because there's clearly some consequences to that action.

@Mementh asks on Twitter:
Do you think virtual servers will fix the low pop realms and can people handle it?

Fix it? No, but it may ameliorate the situation. It'll be hard to really test it on the PTR, so it'll be tested most thoroughly by going live and it'll be during that first month or so of the patch that we'll see how well lower and higher pop realms are joined in the virtual realms. If done well, it could definitely ease the pain for players on extremely empty realms.

fbxxkl asks:
Whats the point of Isle of Giants? Are there dailies? Special mobs (besides oondasta)? Can anyone give me a link where Isle of Giants gets a roundup/review?

You can farm up dinosaur bones -- if you get 9999 of them you can turn them in for this sweet mount. Our own Anne Stickney answered your question in this post.

And that's the lot. Thanks for reading! I go sleep now, I hope.

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!