The Queue: Dreadnoughtus fears nothing

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.

Haven't done a dinosaur queue in a while. And well, they named it Dreadnoughtus schrani. I mean, come on. It's a dinosaur that weighed 65 tons, it's one of the most complete Titanosaur skeletons ever found, and it has a name that immediately made me think of one of the cooler of all warrior sets. So yeah, the video above explains how amazing this find was, how it's changing what we know about these truly massive dinosaurs, and most importantly it weighed more than a 737. Just think about that for a second. A full grown Dreadnoughtus could squash an elephant under one foot and barely notice it. The heaviest estimate for Giganotosaurus is 13.8 tons, which means it would be like a moose getting attacked by a house cat.

Anyway, let's get on with the questions.

SintraEdrien asks:
Why do people think that they deserve (or you owe them) your Battle-tag just because you've been polite and friendly in guild or chat or where-ever? I try to be that all the time, but I'm not comfortable giving out my Blizzard identity (what Battle-tags essentially are) to others whom I don't really know.

With the rise of addons like oQueue, people have gotten used to just handing their Battletags out. It's an essential part of cross-server random group forming in order to PuG content like Siege of Orgrimmar or the August Celestials/Ordos. As a result, for many people, the Battletag has become essentially just the same as being friended in game, and they don't really consider how it extends to other Blizzard games - such as Starcraft 2 or Diablo III or Hearthstone. There are all sorts of privacy concerns that not every player is comfortable with when dealing with the Battletag system.

I only accept Battletag exchange requests from people I know I like playing with enough to be grouped with them multiple times, so I relate to your discomfort. Not all players understand how personal this can feel to us, however. For people who've grown comfortable with random cross-realm grouping, it may not even seem like an issue.

Elprede said:

I DON'T KNOW WHAT WE'RE YELLING ABOUT

LOUD NOISES

Kinry asks:

Question about the new legendary quest line: There were a few things I didn't like about the Mists one but the two big ones were being forced into PvP (can't stand BGs) and feeling unable to roll a new alt in say 5.4 because, hey welcome to months of sigil/valor/secret/rune stone farming while my character feels weaker than my main. Most people I've spoken to felt similarly. Do you think Blizz will account for that this time around?

Okay, please remember this is just my opinion - I am simply answering the question about what I think, I'm not promising you anything and I'm only giving you my opinion, not Adam or Alex's. That all being said -- No, I don't think they will.If Blizzard decides to leave out a PvP element to the new legendary, I'd be pleased, but I don't expect it to happen. Like it or hate it, it got people to PvP. That was its goal, and it succeeded. So no, not counting on Blizzard backpedaling on that one. In fact, I expect Ashran to play a role in the new legendary come Warlords.

HemttTanker asks:

Am I the only person that leaves the 'show helm' box checked?

No, I always do. I often forget what my character's face looks like.

yaminokaze asks:

QFTQ: What do you think of "the great tank nerf of 2014"? As someone who played a bear for years but may not be going back to raiding in WoD, the actual change doesn't bother me much. It was arguably due, and I think it'll probably feel all right when all's said and done (and if doesn't, it won't affect me much anyway).

No, what makes me a bit concerned is that this suddenly comes out of left field this late in the beta process. Maybe it's just me, but it feels like this is something that should have been at least discussed much earlier, rather than something that springs up a couple months from release (not to mention a little more than a month from 6.0).

Is this oddly late for such a change, or am I just seeing odd direction and late communication because there's been a fair bit of that in this beta so far?

For starters, it's a tuning change and it seems (to me at least) aimed at how tanks play outside of dungeons and raids more than how they play in them. The fact that raid bosses and mobs are being tuned to do less damage indicates that tanking balance inside raids is roughly where Blizzard wants it to be - it's tanks outside of dungeons and raids that are the issue. And I frankly believe this - playing on the beta, the strongest warrior spec for soloing and leveling is prot, and the most fun and frenetic (and practically unkillable) DPS spec is a prot warrior with Gladiator's Resolve. I've taken to always using Gladiator's Resolve. It's just crazy fun and almost nothing can kill me while I'm using it, due to all the inherent tankiness I maintain.

As was pointed out by Celestalon in the initial Tank Squish forum post, tanks have gotten very defensively strong in comparison to non tanks.

A tank shouldn't be 100 times harder to kill than a non-tank. That's insane. It makes the idea of emergency offtanking when a tank goes down almost impossible - only classes that get a lot of tankability from outside sources like forms can do it (like a druid, ultimately). So yes, I agree with the change - it's going to make tanks less absolutely unkillable outside of dungeons, which is fair considering their damage is coming up. It might even allow tank specs back into PvP again.

As for the timing, well, this is the tuning phase. This is when they've decided they have the abilities working and now it's time to adjust their power. It's pretty much exactly when I would expect it to happen.

I would have liked to answer more questions, but there were almost 700 when I checked and 90% of them were Blizzard needs to give us free character recustomization which isn't actually a question. As such, I cannot answer it. Hopefully you'll at least ask a few questions for Anne to answer.

Have a safe and happy weekend.

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!