The Queue: Money money money

Well, yesterday was exciting wasn't it? Adam's "insane" guess on the cost of a level 90 boost appears at least to have been below the price we saw. Lots of conflicting opinions abounded in the comments, both on that post and yesterday's queue, with some saying "too much" and some saying "just right". I don't think we saw anyone saying "too little" though. However, the first question was one that I saw a lot:

Devin asked

Q4TQ: With the 90 boost ostensibly being priced at $60 do you think Blizzard would introduce an option to buy levels individually for a dollar or so, or even a scaling price for higher levels? Allowing players to level by conventional means but avoiding areas of the game they dislike.

The short answer is no, I don't think we'd see that. Reason being that it could net Blizzard far less revenue than the "give us $60" option. It would also have the issue of how people would use it, and the impact of that use. For example, I find leveling from 1-15 really tiresome. Start zones, for some races, are fine, but if I never have to do the Pandaren one again it'll be too soon. Same applies for the Worgen and the Goblin zones, the ones that trap you until you reach a certain point. Right now, I give Blizzard $25 for a race change, but instead I'd just give them $15 to get off that darn turtle.

There's no real problem for other players with my skipping the start zone, but I'd skip the Blackrock dungeon levels every time. I hate those dungeons, not because they're hard, but because I only vaguely know my way, even after taking over 30 characters through them. If I'm playing a tank, I'll quest rather than doing them. If I could pay $4 to go past those, I would. And the same would apply for the Utgarde Keep zone from 68-72. $4 not to have to run that for 4 levels? Sold. $5 not to have to deal with Pandaria for the 16th time? Sold.

This is just me, of course, and reflective of my personal likes and dislikes. And maybe it'd give Blizzard some feedback on what players like the least. But the risk of it creating "dead-zones" is there, for sure. Having said all that, with the presumed $60 price, I'd be giving them $60. With this method I'd shell out $38 at the most. If they were looking purely at revenue, it might still net them more overall thanks to impulse buys, but I think some players would complain it'd "cheapen" the leveling experience. I'd love it, but I don't think we'll see it.

trayselight asked:

How do you know if your doing well enough? I notice on a regular basis that my DPS is lower then most other classes, and yet I'm feral druid. I know boomkin is out of this world awesome, and cat is less effective, but how can you tell how bad it really is?

This is a great question. DPS meters are problematic when you compare yourself to others from different classes. What you need to do to accurately assess your performance is to compare like to like. Using your feral vs. boomkin example, there will be a lot of fights where boomkin will do better, simply because of ranged DPS having an easier time with mechanics as a rule. However, feral has the capacity to do a ton of DPS. Do LFR, if you can bear it (or should that be kitty it), and hope to happen upon another feral. Look at their gear level, and look at their DPS. Compare it to your own.

Go over to World of Logs or WarcraftLogs and check out feral parses, and record your own. Compare the two. How does DPS by ability differ? How does debuff uptime differ? Look at the armories of high-ranking ferals -- are they reforging differently? Are they wearing different items? Gemming differently? Arm yourself with information, and compare feral to feral, not feral to anything else.

Teslacoil asked

QftQ...I have 2 separate battlenet accounts. In the past i have been able to transfer characters from my 2nd account to my primary account. My primary account has many mounts and pets and my 2nd account has almost nothing. I know if I transfer a toon from my 2nd account to my primary, it gains the mounts/pets. But if I transfer a toon from my primary to my secondary (my 7 year old son plays my second account) will the toon bring the mounts and pets with him, or does the toon lose them and just has what is originally available on the second account. I dont feel like trying to get all the mounts and pets my son likes a second time.

Mounts, pets and the like are tied to battle.net accounts, as a couple of people clarified in the comments. As the "proud" owner of several battle.net accounts over different regions, as well as several WoW accounts, I have a decent knowledge of how all this works. Mounts and pets and anything account-wide is owned by the battle.net account. Let's call the battle.net account with the mounts bnet1 and the one without bnet2. If a character from bnet1 is transferred to bnet2, it will have the mounts owned by bnet2. It will not carry the bnet1 mounts over. If bnet2 had a mount that bnet1 didn't have, still no luck.

One potential solution would be to see if you can transfer bnet2's WoW account over to bnet1, meaning it would get the pets and mounts. To the best of my knowledge, you can still run both at once, as long as you select separate WoW accounts from the same battle.net account. It's worth checking with Customer Support, as I've only ever done this running both WoW accounts from the same computer.

TinaSvensson asked

Q4Q: Any news about the connection issues that is going on in Europe? When and how will they fix this periods of dcs?

We have no news other than what's being posted on Twitter. There are connection issues in Europe, and Blizzard work on them, then they are fixed. The best way to monitor this is to follow Blizzard CS EU.

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!