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.

The above video is brought to you by our very own Mat McCurley. You might know him better as "that guy that writes about addons I guess" if you don't pay much attention to author names. There's a backstory to the video, but I think leaving it out makes it far more hilarious.

Enjoy!

clundgren asked...

"Why is there a continued perception of ret paladins as overpowered? Raid data shows them to be a lower tier DPS class on ICC bosses, and they are not particularly feared in arena. What gives? Did patch 3.0.2 leave that much of a lasting impression?"

They're still incredibly powerful in 5-mans and they're monsters in battlegrounds. Those two things are the PvE and PvP content that the most players experience. Ret paladins are kings of the low brackets of content. Even though ret paladins aren't dominant in Icecrown, they can walk into heroic Utgarde Keep and be top DPS effortlessly. (Edit: Original wording of the previous sentence was far too strong for what I actually meant, my apologies.)They will struggle along in high arena brackets, but stick them in Warsong Gulch and people will die.

It's all very odd, but unfortunately true. Ret paladins will rule the school in the normal every day content, but as soon as it's time for us to be competitive where it counts... that's a whole different story. Ret paladins are overpowered in that lower content, but we don't really compare when it comes time to be competitive. If we can burst out a bunch of damage with all of our buttons ready to go and the appropriate seal, we're awesome. Put us in a sustained DPS situation and we're... not so awesome. We have to make up for it with unrivaled utility. We're still worth taking places.

Travieso asked...

"I really didn't care for the stat change articles. Was it really necessary to have about 15 articles that all said the same thing?"

Yes. You might be surprised just how many people request that we write these things, and oftentimes just rolling them together into "casters" or "melee" isn't sufficient for people. If we just do a melee article, we will still get endless questions from rogues or warriors or retribution paladins about class-specific topics, or even just asking us to go over them in more detail. And then if we do those in detail, we get a cascade of hate mail that we didn't do X and Y specs in detail, so clearly we must hate those classes/specs. Clearly. Plus, if we do them more specifically, they're easier for those classes/specs to find further down the road if they/we need to reference them. It's better that we just get them all done and out there and then nobody, reader or writer, needs to worry about it after.

It's very rare that we go all out on a topic like that, but we did see that series as necessary to get people the information that they want. We do understand that it got a bit spammy to the people that simply do not care, but... even via RSS, you don't need to read every post. You can just mark them read and be done.

It's a bit "damned if you do, damned if you don't" and when it comes to supplying content a large majority of our readership wants, we're going to fall on the 'do' camp rather than the 'don't.'

Johnny asked...

"Do female dwarf rogues exist?"

Sure they do! I have one in my guild. Along with a female dwarf hunter, a female dwarf death knight, a female dwarf paladin...

Castellan asked...

"I re-rolled recently on a US server so that I could play with my son. I had my main on an EU server and had taken a break to finish university (I was a mature student) and secure a job; so I've missed everything from Uldaur onwards. My boy and me just dinged 70, I think 70-80 shouldn't take us too long, but all the articles I'm reading on wow.com are talking like Wrath is soooo over, and everyone's just waiting for Cata. Will we get to enjoy some of the Wrath endgame do you think? Or should we just level some alts?"

You have plenty of time to enjoy Wrath's endgame. Cataclysm is still many months out, and Blizzard has made it very easy to jump into upper tiers of content with a little effort. If you pick up a full outfit of Triumph badge gear and fill in the off-pieces with epics from the new Icecrown 5-mans, you're basically ready to step into 10-man Icecrown already. You can take it slower and check out Ulduar and ToC if you want, but if you want to jump right into the top tiers, you're able to do it assuming you have the skill to match the gear.

Rob & J asked...

"I have a ton of Dalaran cooking awards. I've purchased all I can from the vendor. Any hopes of new content anytime (soon) to spend them on?"

We've heard nothing about new cooking awards, there definitely aren't any in patch 3.3.3. I think it's unlikely we'll see any in Wrath of the Lich King. I just turned all of my cooking awards into Northern Spices, you might want to as well.

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Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW.com 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!

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, The Queue