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The Queue: Time warp
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. In my personal canon, every time a mage uses Time Warp, it creates a new timeline. We aren't even on our Azeroth anymore. Who knows where we are? Mages ruin everything. CRtheMighty asked: Who all from our Azeroth is going to this alt-Draenor? I know Garrosh, because it's his fault, and somewhere Thrall pops over. Anyone else?
The Queue: Snakes in Zangarmarsh
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. It's finally starting to get uncomfortably warm here in southeast Wisconsin ... and my air conditioning breaks. Awesome! Let's do this thing anyway. AndyM.Axe asked: Will the Adventuring Supplies vendors that sold the lower ilvl green gear return in WoD?
The Queue: Wood doesn't burn, right?
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Yeah, I'm sure that bridge is safe. Kidneph asked: First time asker here, but here goes. Do you reckon we will see a pre-xpac event like BC to Wrath and so on? If so, what do you think it may be?
Auction houses will be cross-faction in Warlords of Draenor
Developer Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas dropped something of a bomb on the forums late last night: the Horde and Alliance auction houses will be merged in patch 6.0. Watcher confirms that a major reason behind this change is faction imbalance. The faction with the smaller population on any given server often struggles to maintain a lively economy. With the auction houses merged, we have to wonder what will happen to the neutral auction houses scattered across Azeroth. Will they continue on as an alternate black market or be eliminated entirely? Facilitating trade between the Horde and the Alliance was the entire purpose of the neutral auctioneers -- a purpose rarely utilized by players for anything other than transferring their own items between characters across faction lines. Update 11:00 a.m. EDT: We now know that neutral auction houses will become integrated into the cross-faction auction houses. In other words, there will no longer be neutral auction houses -- just one massive interconnected auction house system per-server.
The Queue: Spikes
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. We have a number of quickie questions today. Some longer ones, but a lot of quickies, too. BoltzmannHatchling asked: Talking about Gorgrond, where all the spikes in Blade's Edge Mountains? I thought it was a remarkable and unique orogeny of that place, but Draenor lacks the "spikes" and can't seem to pin point them on the alphabeta maps. But if they are gone like my pools and volcanoes of green lava, then I understand...
Warlords of Draenor adds community member NPCs
This week's Warlords of Draenor alpha build includes a new NPCs named for WoW community members. A large number of them are members of the PvP community, but the list also includes individuals who are active on Twitter and other spheres of the community. Our own Sarah Pine, also known as Ilaniel, made the list with the NPC Ilaniel Pine. Congratulations, Sarah! Wowhead datamined the community nods and you can find the full list on their site.
Breakfast Topic: Broken things and Daleera Moonfang
Broken things are one of my guilty pleasures. Not completely broken, mind you -- something that doesn't work at all isn't much fun. But things that are just broken enough that they function incorrectly are wonderful. A household animatronic with low batteries, for example. Or when game physics go bad. This guilty pleasure means I love alpha and beta test phases of games. Sometimes the stories that result from a glitch in a game tickle me more than the actual stories. Daleera Moonfang, pictured above, is the subject of one such story. While playing the latest Warlords of Draenor alpha build, I'd just recruited Daleera as a follower in my garrison. She'd been with my crew for no more than five minutes before I noticed her over by a keg of ale, drinking away. I wandered over there just for the sake of saying hello and noticed her actions were looping a whole lot faster than they should. Only a few seconds passed between each refill of her mug and she never stopped. She'd fill, drink it down in one go, then immediately refill. While refilling, she'd comment on how much she enjoyed the drink before it. "That'll get you there, son," she said. "Just like Mom used to make. It's like a little piece of Ironforge." It doesn't matter that the NPC that loiters by the keg is randomized. It could have been any of my followers. But Daleera was the first, and now, in my heart, it will always be her. Daleera Moonfang is my hard-drinking priestess of Elune. She could drink dwarves and pandaren under the table. She's honed her boozy craft for an entire elven lifetime. It isn't canon, but it's my canon. Tell me: do you love broken things? I want your stories!
The Queue: Legendaries, Gilneas, eyeballs, and more
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. The gronn (and their various subspecies) sure are colorful in Warlords. Zapwidget asked: Is Blizzard going to repeat the Legendary method from Mists in WoD? I ask because that will ultimately be what makes or breaks my decision to actively participate in the expansion. In my opinion the legendary chain as implemented was less an optional thing and more something you had to do our you were holding your team back.
Warlords of Draenor: Major balance druid changes on the way
I have two druids, one Alliance, one Horde -- in fact, the Alliance druid was the first character I ever made. That said, while I initially tried my hand at healing with my first druid, these days, I usually just use the characters for farming purposes. Let's face it, there's nothing better than flight form for nabbing pesky herbs or mining nodes. I will, however, occasionally run a dungeon or a scenario -- and when I do, I'm in cat form. It's the default choice as far as I'm concerned, and I do enough damage to get by, although nobody in their right mind could claim I have more than a bare, passing knowledge of the spec. But I never could get into playing a balance druid. At first it was the fact that I began playing a druid before balance druids were even something remotely feasible to play. Then I was drawn to other classes, and by the time I got back to the druid, balance looked like a complicated impossibility to learn. Apparently I was not alone in this assessment, as balance druids are headed for some massive changes according to the latest iteration of patch notes from the Warlords of Draenor alpha.
Breakfast Topic: Let's react to the Warlords of Draenor patch notes
Given the release of the Warlords of Draenor alpha patch notes yesterday, today's Breakfast Topic writes itself. If you haven't read them, you should. They're huge. If you have read them, what do you think? The Draenor Perks are intriguing, and as someone who plays a rogue, they made me take a long look at what they meant for the class as a whole. Between Draenor Perks, spell changes, and the spells being removed, it appears combat rogues are moving further into dealing immediate, direct damage, with a lower focus on DoT abilities. Combat rogues no longer have Rupture and Draenor Perks turn a combat rogue's Deadly Poison into Instant Poison. There's an active effort to differentiate class specs that have lost their unique flavor over the years. I'm interested to see how changes like this play out. This is, of course, only the beginning of an alpha -- everything we've seen so far still has plenty of time to change.
Warlords of Draenor Alpha testing begins
Warlords of Draenor Alpha has officially begun! While at this stage testing is limited, players may feel free to opt-in to future beta testing by going to the Beta Profile Settings on your Battle.net account. Interestingly enough, along with this announcement comes the announcement of a new file format to compress and store game files. The new file format, CASC, replaces the MPQ file formatting Blizzard has been using for the past 20 years. Keep in mind that this is an alpha announcement -- beta has not officially begun. No beta keys have been emailed out. If you receive an email offering a beta key, ignore it for now -- as more information about the new expansion releases, phishing attempts are like to rise as well. Check out Blizzard's full announcement regarding the Alpha, and keep your eyes peeled -- with a client available, datamining will likely begin soon. Update: Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas had the following to say about the Alpha: Don't read too much into the word "Alpha." We have a LOT of content that's ready for testing. http://t.co/c93xZhSOt1- Watcher (@WatcherDev) April 3, 2014
