The Queue: Under Draenor's Moon

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.

Seriously, check her out. I mean, everyone looks kind of badass with the moon behind them like that, but still, check her out. I really like how she moves, too. Combat animations aren't wildly different, but they have a bit more heft to them. I'm thinking of rolling a forsaken soon to see how that feels.

No spoilers for the Alpha from me - been running around on various toons to try out all three warrior specs. Prot feels the strongest. For those of you who don't play warriors, I rolled a DK and a paladin and both killed things admirably considering I was just hitting buttons at random. Gonna try an enhancement shaman tomorrow, I think.

ScottLeyes asked:

If you were going to assign WoW classes to "real world" historical occupations, where would Warriors fit?

They're not Knights (that's Paladins), so would they be mercenaries? Rhonin? Barbarians?

Look, he asked.

Anyway, actually, they would be knights. The vast majority of knights were at best professional warriors - guys like William Marshal were stone badasses, but they didn't do a lot of praying or healing people. It also really depends on what period in history we're talking about - Sir Elton John doesn't go around smashing people with a sword or casting Holy Wrath. You'd be hard pressed to find real human beings who could live up to a WoW paladin, but almost anyone can be a warrior - kill things, don't die. That's pretty much all you'd need. I'm deliberately not going into the nuts and bolt of the medieval knight as a warrior class - all that land they owned provided them the wealth they needed to afford that armor, horse and weapons and the years of training in how to use them. Mainly because this is a website about World of Warcraft and not Morris Bishop's The Middle Ages.

Similarly, Aleister Crowley didn't actually cast a lot of spells, so it really depends on how 'real world' you want to get with this. You could have a lot of fun imagining that a portal to Azeroth opened in 1900 and various real world historical figures learned abilities from WoW, if you're that kind of person. I may be that kind of person, but there's only so much room in the Queue for me to talk about how World War I would have been very different if we had individual soldiers who could summon armies of the dead, raise the dead, throw fireballs, or carry two swords each the size of a whole person.

jpec07 asked:

Q4tQ: how effective do you think Blizzard will be at making Proving Grounds viable, and non-class-dependent? And do you think they'll take things like DPS checks out of the mix for tanks or one-party-member-death-wipes for healers?

Right now, a warrior tank can get through bronze okay, silver decently, but gold is a huge problem, nevermind endless. DKs are far and away the best class for the job, and you can say the same of Druids for the healing Proving Grounds.

This is one of my biggest concerns. Part of the problem with current Proving Grounds is that some classes get a lot stronger as they get to certain stat breakpoints or plateaus - a warrior tank with a boatload of avoidance just does so much better thanks to Riposte, and losing those stats actually changes how you play the class, how much rage you have, etc. Hopefully the efforts being made to create stat parity between various stats (and the removal of avoidance) will equalize this to some extent.

They're probably going to leave some things like DPS checks for tanks, survival tests for DPS players, etc etc in the design. The goal of proving grounds is to teach you how to play in a group role to some extent - with that in mind, it's necessary for players in groups to do things like that.

Razwick82 asked:

QftQ: This may be silly, and I think I know what the answer is, but does WI have any sort of headquarters? Or is it more that you just send everything in to the editor at set times and it gets posted?

I only ask because I know several of the writers live in various corners of NA or Europe, but I'm not sure how many are in relatively the same area.

We have a virtual headquarters - there's a chat room we can all make use of to ensure that we're getting assignments, making posts, tormenting Alex or Adam about random minutia, making fun of my beard, etc etc. But in terms of a physical location for WoW Insider, nope. I work entirely out of my deskless office. I've never even met any of my coworkers despite working here for over six (possibly seven at this point) years.

That being said, I'd enjoy it if Blizzard put a bunch of NPCs in the garrison that were basically us. That would be cool. The WoW Insider garrison.

Brytenow asked:

Time to get ahead of ourselves:

The Heroes of Azeroth beat the big bad, get the loot, and everyone is pining over the next expansion. Assuming we leave Draenor in one piece, our slice of the Twisting Nether is now in contact with another, accessible with a convenient portal, and (hopefully) for the most part the folks on the other side does not want to wear our skins. How good of an idea is it to leave the connection open and allow trade and migration between the two worlds? Which rock will get a better deal out of it?

I once read a science fiction story that talked about an interesting consequence of off-world trade.

Currently everything on Earth with the exception of space probes and ships remains on Earth, in one way or another. The vast majority of our food is eaten on Earth, and broken down into various by-products on Earth. Our water consumption is balanced by our water expulsion - even with pollution taken into account, the water on Earth is a closed system. We're not sending it anywhere. Now, in an imagined setting where you can suddenly send food to another planet, everything that is in that food (including any water content) is gone. It doesn't decay here, it isn't broken up into components here, and the beings that eat it don't excrete or release anything here. You're taking something out of the system and not introducing anything back.

Now, in the case of Azeroth and Draenor, or Azeroth and Outland for that matter, you're doing this instantaneously, and you're doing it with multiple planets or worlds or however you want to think about it. The various Horde and Alliance who go to Draenor will be eating while they're there. Food may be shipped back and forth between the various portals and teleports. Resources, raw materials. If you actually want to stop and think about it, this is an amazing thing. It's even theoretically possible for someone from Outland to travel to Azeroth and through Azeroth travel to Draenor, a world split off from his or her own past, and see him or herself there as a child. The entire population of Outland could theoretically migrate to Draenor. I know I would rather live on a thriving, living world that wasn't polluted by warlock magic and then torn inside out by Ner'zhul, but that's just me, I guess.

Now, none of this is going to happen in the game. We're not going to have there be a massive water imbalance between Draenor and Azeroth and we're not going to see everyone from Outland pack up and move to Draenor (or even try and do so) because that's not at all the story they're trying to tell. It's probably really unlikely that the majority of people on Outland would even know about the existence of Draenor, especially considering how none of you know about the alternate Earth I come from even though the portal's been open for sixty years now.

Oh? My Earth? It's basically the same as this one up until we all drank demon blood and went nuts for a while. And then the place got torn inside out and now North America floats in the Twisting Nether. You'd like our Alaska, there's a lot of floating rocks there.

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!