The Queue: The roof, the roof

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.
Jack Spicer asked...
"With each expansion Blizzard seems to be bringing underused talent specs around and making them highly desirable. In TBC, it seemed to be Feral Druids, Prot Pallies, Shadow Priests and BM Hunters. In Wrath, they really brought up Survival Hunters and Retribution Pallies.
But I'm curious. From a PvE perspective, which talent trees are still universally lacking and laughable?"
Oh boy, this one is going to be debated pretty viciously today, isn't it? From a purely min/maxing point of view, it's largely the very strong PvP specs that are lacking in PvE, and that's probably by design. A Shadowstep spec from Rogues isn't going to perform in PvE. A Frost spec for Mages, and I mean deep Frost and not some hybrid Frostfire thing, is pretty lacking in PvE. Both of those are strong PvP specs... usually. I think that's intended though and I'm not convinced that will change anytime soon.
I can't think of any PvE-oriented specs that are actually failing in PvE. Some specs aren't as good as they could be, but the gaps are much, much smaller than they were a couple of years ago.
Fuseitana asked...
"The Bosstiary that WoW.com featured a few days ago was really informative, I wish Blizzard would put out the same for their other raid instances. MY question is whether there is in-game lore that gives the information in the Bosstiary. IE, without it would we know that Auriaya was the archivist?"
I don't think there's any other information that says Auriaya is the archivist of Ulduar, no. Auriaya, Kologarn and the Assembly of Iron were all largely mysteries until the Bosstiary. Luckily, they're mostly in the minority. There is definitely a lot of information on the Keepers and Yogg-Saron floating around. You can figure out the roles of Ignis and Razorscale with some informed guesswork. Ignus is Generic Titanic Blacksmith #1058462. Razorscale is the only notable Proto-Drake in the place, and Thorim is missing Veranus, so you can put two and two together there. And General Vezax? Well, it's pretty obvious what he is.
Tharesar asked...
"If I create a Death Knight, play until I get all my blue gear then sell everything, send all the money to an alt and repeat again and again, will I get a reasonable amount of cash? Or is this a huge waste of time?"
A colossal waste of time. There could be worse ways to spend your time, but if your goal is to make gold you're much better off doing daily quests. Faster, significantly more profitable.
Twothing asked...
"After reading the post "Interview with a Scammer" and discovering that buying the TCG loot cards for ingame gold isn't a breech of TOS. I wanted to know can I buy time cards for ingame gold?"
No, because game time has a cash value. It costs real money to play. The item from the TCG card does not have a price attached to it. It's a free, costless bonus from buying the trading cards. You can absolutely trade in-game gold for things with no cash value. If you pay attention to the contests we run here on our site, you might notice that we don't have big, crazy legal rules attached to TCG loot giveaways. That's why. The TCG loot has no cash value, thus we don't need to worry about legal issues at all.
However, game cards do have a cash value. We pay $15/month to play WoW. If we here at WoW.com wanted to give away some game cards, we would need to get some old fashioned legal such-and-such written up because money would be involved. Gold for gametime would basically be a roundabout gold selling and buying service. The money would just come in the form of 30 days of WoW printed on plastic.
Now I wrap this up with a shout out to Oghorille of Grizzly Hills US. Hi!
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, The Queue
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Reader Comments (Page 2 of 5)
Robert M Jun 9th 2009 5:41PM
@Angus
WOW, thanks for the response. One thing I never understood about Lava Burst is the cooldown/cast time combo. I know there may be some spells that I can’t think of off the top of my head, but there seems to be a general pre-lich formula for cast times to be instant when it comes to burst abilities having cooldowns. The old formula seemed to apply best to mages.
There seems to be a break from that philosophy in WotLK now with Chaos Bolt, Penance, and Lava Burst.
With mages and locks, there is enough insta-cast going on that they can maintain dots or do damage, but elementals seems to be screwed here according to your response.
Wouldn’t the easiest response be to make Lava Burst insta cast and maintain a long cooldown? Wouldn’t that be a step in the right direction for bumping shaman dps if in fact movement is the thorn on the side of shaman. Doing so would increase dps in fights that require movement and not really alter stationary DPS since elemental shaman are really only charged 1.5 seconds (a GCD) for lava burst if they are talenting lightning mastery?
tsel Jun 9th 2009 1:09PM
A question:
When are we actually going to be able to get the battlebot pets? I really don't need a chance to win a hoodie or a tricked-out mouse, I just want my tiny glowing friend, and I'm tired of checking every day to see if it's finally time. Any word?
LloydPancakes Jun 9th 2009 1:11PM
I'd say if you're a regular reader we'll know right away when the pets come out via all of the sites and probably a message on the official World of Warcraft website.
kit Jun 9th 2009 3:34PM
They're in-game already. If you go to the Game Fuel site, you will see a button to claim yours, but you will need a Battle.net account.
Avrador Jun 9th 2009 1:14PM
A lot of the Death Knight starter gear sells for only a few silver, probably to avoid exactly that situation. However, if I recall correctly, if you spend nothing (no repairs, no talents) you can have 40-50 gold by the end of the starter chain.
While yes this is silly if you have an 80 on the server, if you're rolling on a new sever (for example to play as the other faction,) it can be a very good way to give your new toon a heads-up. And you don't need to worry at all about affording your lvl 30 mount.
ceristapwns Jun 9th 2009 1:37PM
Exactly!! Before WLK, it was a huge pain to level up characters on a friend's realm or something even if they were running me through dungeons and such b/c I just didn't have the gold to buy anything at all. But with DKs and their starting chain, one could do this several times in a row, sell all your stuff, send the gold to your low level character and have a pretty good chunk of it to support yourself as your leveling and need gear upgrades and riding training and such.
I'm more willing to dabble on my friends' servers now that I have a source of easy, quick gold. It's not a lot, but it's a lot to a lowbie character with a few silver in their pocket. :D
Thander Jun 9th 2009 1:14PM
DKs are actually pretty good for gold if you are starting on a new realm, opposite faction. There isn't an easy to get gold from one faction to the other. Instead, I made a DK and leveled it to 62ish. That gave me around 250g for my fresh level 1 alt on that realm. I was able to get a set of okay bags and have leftover money for the mount. It's a nice start for a new alt. I felt pretty good gold-wise until level 60 where I was around 400g short of epic ground mount.
Malkavos Jun 9th 2009 9:20PM
I agree, although I've taken it further and my DK is now level 77 with maxed mining and herbalism, and an epic flyer. Now that dailies are available, I'm a farming machine to supply whatever my "real" main on the new server/faction will be.
eric_barbaric Jun 9th 2009 1:23PM
An alternate song for today's "Que" could be The Bloodhound Gang's "Fire Water Burn". I actually thought that's what it was going to be with the headline, but was disappointed to see it was Billy Joel's song.
Remen Jun 9th 2009 1:52PM
Now were dissappointed to see Billy Joels song or were you dissappointed that you didn't see "Fire, Water, Burn"? Personally I was expecting "Fire, Water, Burn" but was even more excited to see "We Didn't Start the Fire". Imho this was an improvement.
DoctorOnline Jun 9th 2009 1:27PM
"I can't think of any PvE-oriented specs that are actually failing in PvP"
Somebody hasn't tried to PvP on an enhancement shaman, now have they? God, I swear that is the most useless, pitiful PvP spec I have ever seen. It's so depressing that I've just given up and gone resto; at least I'll bother the other faction with my survivability.
It's also entirely possible that I just suck, though I hope that's not the case. x.x
Irshalthra Jun 9th 2009 2:11PM
Nope, you don't just suck. Enhancement isn't even worth looking at for PVP. But the author didn't mean to say that and did correct his typo above.
Angus Jun 9th 2009 3:09PM
I had 13K kills on my enhancement shaman prior to level 80.
I have gotten about 100 since I dinged. Most were HKs from being nearby in a stunlock or not quite dead yet.
It isn't that you suck. It is that shaman in PVP are basically trying to run a hurdle race while missing a leg and with a sucking chest wound.
Ceradene Jun 9th 2009 1:33PM
As for the useless PvE speccs, frost mages are indeed a very good example.
Even if you pick up all the necessary PvE glyphs (removing snare from Frostbolt for one) and dump all the uselful PvP talents in favor of PvE talents (mostly in the arcane tree), you will still be way under Frostfire, Fire and Arcane mages in damage output. What you end up with is a specc that is neither good in PvP (lack of snares and survivability) nor in PvE (lack of damage).
liu Jun 9th 2009 2:15PM
I don't believe that Frost is completely useless - it's handy as a secondary raiding spec for when you're on adds or in an AOE-heavy or really long fight. I raid with Arcane as my main spec, for when I'm just responsible for DPSing, and Frost as off-spec for XT, Razorscale, or Mimiron.
It would be nice if they gave us a useful 51 pt talent, though.
peagle Jun 9th 2009 3:18PM
@liu
Any FFB spec would be superior as a PvE offspec to Frost as you cite. You still get imp. blizzard for AoE and more mana than you can shake a suspiciously wand shaped stick at.
Tauran Jun 9th 2009 1:34PM
Shaman have been in the fail boat since the vanilla nerf. Enhancement and Elemental more recently resto have been beat ugly with the nerf bat. Considering the troll, orc, tauran, dranei leaders and the lich king himself(Ner'zhul was at one time a shaman) are shaman, the state of shaman is laughable.
Endario Jun 9th 2009 1:49PM
I'd hardly call Velen a shaman, but I see what you're getting at.
AyaJulia Jun 9th 2009 4:56PM
Cairne is a Warrior -- http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=3057#abilities
Vol'jin is a non-playable class called a "Shadow Hunter" which combines abilities of three playable classes with others we don't have -- http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=10540#abilities
Velen is a Priest with some extra battle abilities thrown in -- http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=17468#abilities
Also, Cairne is the leader of the Tauren, not the Tauran.
Jon Do Jun 9th 2009 1:34PM
"If I create a Death Knight, play until I get all my blue gear then sell everything, send all the money to an alt and repeat again and again, will I get a reasonable amount of cash? Or is this a huge waste of time?"
It depends. Straight-up, you get about 30g if you sell everything and train nothing.
But pre-3.1 I did that two times (Ally DK) and netted about 1000g a pop because of cross-faction cooking quest-only recipes people needed back then to hit 160. And that was only selling 2 of the 3 Ally recipes because I needed the rarest one. I haven't tried it since 3.1 though.