The Queue: Mages, meta gems, and the forest through the trees

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.

One of my favorite zones in the game is Elwynn Forest. It's such a peaceful place, has a bunch of nice trees, and then BAM. Hogger.

The little jerk. Just sitting out there trolling around.

I thought I was pretty darn cool when I went back and beat him up at level 13 back in 2004. Nine years ago.

Drindarr asked:

Why does the mage ability Blink only seem to work correctly about 50% of the time?

The mage's blink ability is functional based on the geometry of the area around where the mage is blinking to and from. If there are even slight issues, including those that you can't see, then the spell doesn't work right. This is really noticeable when you're blinking across zones and ground types. For instance if you blink from a road to a grass land I've found that there's a chance you'll hit some hidden edge and stop dead in your tracks.

Now that said, this doesn't happen nearly as much as it used to. Blinking back in the day used to damn near glitch the game. Not any more (which is a good thing).

Nyold asked:

I have a question, inspired by a small debate I had with a guildie last night: Does Blizz ever explained why meta gem in Pandaria suddenly has no requirements? Usually you'd have to have 3 reds or 2 blues + 1 red or something like that. Is it part to streamline the game? Because without it, gemming is a much more straightforward business now.

The old meta game was kinda dumb, in my opinion. Before your class basically had one prominent stat, and you gemmed for that. Stam stacking tanks, for instance; they'd just pile on the stam gems. But when you had a meta gem with the color restrictions you had to suddenly kill your itemization just to get a socket bonus, sometimes rarely worth the effort.

So it went away, like it should. The other reason for this is that the stats became more powerful and well balanced, so it's not really necessary to force things as much as before. You're also not running into just one gem preference as much as you used to, so it makes meta gem restrictions all the more unnecessary.

And you're right too -- gemming is quite a bit more straight forward than it was. Look at your gear, plop in the top primary and secondary stat that you need, and more or less you're done. Unless you want to min/max to the extreme... then just pretend I didn't say any of this.

Fox-kfed asked:

So has anyone ever felt that the forests in WoW aren't very... well, foresty? I mean, they have more trees than the usual areas, but they're still pretty sparse when compared to actual forests. I'd guess that they don't want to put lots of tree density in because of the problems it would cause with Line of Sight?

There's some areas where the forest is very foresty -- think zones like Feralas. Then there's some that are not, like Elwynn Forest, etc... Part of the reason of this is that the gameplay feels best when you've got room to move around and cast big spells. With a closed in space you don't get that feeling.

If you want a game that has better land representation, check out Skyrim. There are forests and mountains you practically can't get through.

And no matter what, WoW is no where near as bad as the original EverQuest was. Not by a long shot.

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!