The Queue: Pink Zeal

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.

Magenta...the color of righteousness!

Drewbob asked:

Agree or disagree: group quests are okay for current expansion content, and should be returned to the game.

While I think that it's okay, mostly, that former group quests in wrath era content and prior have been made solo-able, I think the lack of these quests in the open world definitely take something of the spirit of it being an MMO with a community away from the experience. As I was leveling my eleventy-billionth toon in Zinth'alor the other day (and cursing the developers for not retuning respawn rates), I remembered back when it was elite, and you needed at least a couple other party members to make it to the top. While I don't think the rewards offered for that were ever quite commensurate with the effort, I think that that's easy to remedy, and having more opportunities in the world to take down moderately more difficult quest and zone content beyond world bosses would be awesome.

I think that the open tagging system is a good compromise between group questing and soloing. You don't necessarily need to assemble a group for it, but anybody can pop over and participate if they're on it too (and especially early in an expansion, other people will be on it).

I do kind of miss group quests -- there's something about putting a team together and tackling a tough mob -- but boy was it a pain. I don't know if it was the same for everyone, but there were quests I simply never got to do in vanilla because I could never find a group and they were literally impossible to solo.

DevilsBlades asked:

I'm sure there's an article about this somewhere that I've missed, but working on getting my first legendary cloak and I've gotten to the step where I need to get 3000 valor points. What's the quickest way to build up valor points for a week?

Heroic scenarios are usually the best route for time vs. VP gain. You get 120-150 VP per run and they're pretty short. Commenters suggested banging out the Epoch Stones quest on the Timeless Isle for 200 VP also. The daily there grants 50 VP too.

MelissaBoz asked:

Is that whole gotta pass challenge to silver to be in LRF still going in to WoD? It seems like such a bad decision. Totally discriminates against players with physical problems and doesn't help you learn how to be in groups at all. All bosses have diff abilities. Learn them you win. Battling enemies whose will be different than what you'll go up against later anyway is pointless.

It's only for heroic dungeons right now, and only for queueing with the dungeon finder. You don't need to pass the test if you're queueing with friends. If it makes you feel any better, the devs also said they're making Proving Grounds more helpful and educational in general.

smartazjb0y asked:

How do you guys feel about smaller, more frequent raid patches?

MoP launched with 16 bosses, then 6 months later released 12 bosses, then 6 months later released 14 bosses. I personally felt that the instances were a bit too big, and that 6 months in between them is a bit too short. They probably could have released them 7 or 8 months apart, so the wait inbetween SoO and WoD wouldn't be so huge.

But, instead of them releasing 14-boss raids every 7 months, how would you feel about, maybe 7 boss raids every 4 months? Instead of only 2 raid patches, we'd get 4, so it'd be the same amount of raid content in the expansion overall, just spread out differently.

This is one of those ideas that sounds good on paper, but in practice probably wouldn't work. The precedent for new raids is usually new scenery, new art, a few new models. Twice as many different raids means twice as many locations, which take a lot of time. I doubt people would be excited about "it's the raid you played four months ago, only...backwards!"

WoW players tend to lose their minds about "rehashed content", and if we had double the raid patches, rest assured folks would be frothing at the mouth because locations or boss models were reused.

Of course, I'd love for more variety and frequency in raid content. I'm just being realistic.

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!