The Queue: To Zanarkand

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

No, you're getting emotional over the intro to a video game!

JediExcel asked:

Question on the changes removing certain stats from armor and weapons in WOD. Does this mean I could basically switch between enh/ele shaman or feral/boomkin druid? Or have I grossly misunderstood the concept?

This is precisely what you can do, but with a few caveats:

• It only applies to items made for WoD

• It doesn't apply to certain item types, like weapons and trinkets

So you could feasibly switch to your offspec wearing the same gear and be okay, though you'll still probably have a set of trinkets and weapons/offhands for your offspec as well.

Revets asked:

Conspiracy time!

Anyone else find it weird how drastic the change of pace was for mists? Content was motoring along at a very reasonable pace, just like Blizz and us wanted to. Then BAM we get hit with 12+ months of SoO.

Now I don't want this to be a "grumble grumble" starting comment so I'll get to the point:
What happened? Something must have gone down to rust up the gears over at HQ in my opinion. Somehow I feel like its related to GC leaving. Do you think him leaving slowed down progress? Did he leave because he saw progress slowing down? Or is it something entirely different? I just wanna see behind the curtain a little bit just to reason out what cause this dramatic change. What do you guys think?

I can't answer this question definitively (and I'm definitely not going to speculate as to GC's reasons for leaving the company), but let's see. I feel like there was definitely a calculated effort to release a lot of content early in the expansion's life, because they were almost guaranteed the attention of people who recently bought it. But after that? It's hard to say. Perhaps there was slightly too much manpower shifted to WoD -- remember when it came to light that the Battlefield Barrens patch was so, well, barren because the quest team had been working exclusively on WoD?

Whatever happened or continues to happen, it's pretty clear that regardless of Blizzard's much-touted plans, this "annual expansions"/"smaller, faster expansions" thing just doesn't seem to have worked. I'm probably done waiting-and-seeing for it.

Twowolves asked:

Was it stated that receiving WoD quest rewards would have a random chance to additional high level gear? i feel like it was a blurb on a slide but I haven't seen it mentioned again.

Yep! It's right on the WoD website. "Any quest can randomly award bonus rare or epic items." I'm pretty excited for that feature.

Whiteout asked:

Is there any possibility that people who are not interested in PvP will have any incentive to travel to Ashran?

It's possible it'll have some draw for non-PVPers, like a raid boss or daily quests. We don't have much information on it yet, though.

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!