The Queue: The Underdome

I think the voice actor of Borderlands' Mad Moxxi is the only person alive who can say "om nom nom nom" out loud and sound adorable rather than horrifically obnoxious. Well done, Brina Palencia.
Didax asked:
With transmogrification and void storage being fairly expensive services to use, is this enough of a gold sink to handle late-Cataclysm inflation?
Or do we really need yet another version of Traveller's Tundra Mammoth?
My personal take on the topic is that at this stage in the game, there is very little Blizzard can do to get gold inflation under control, short of resetting the economy. That would be a very special flavor of shitstorm, so I don't expect Blizzard to do it. The gap in gold between what a casual WoW player might have and what a hardcore WoW businessman might have is absolutely massive. There are people in my guild who only have 1,000 gold to their name. There are also players who have multiple millions of gold spread across multiple characters.
How do you create a money sink that will take an Auction House fanatic's multi-millions out of the economy? You don't, really. If you did create some incredibly amazing thing that removed those millions from the economy, it would be completely unattainable for everybody else -- and that's not much fun, is it?
The people who have ludicrous amounts of gold tend to be the most frugal players, too. The guy with 3,000,000 gold probably isn't going to buy a mount that costs 1,000,000 gold, but the guy with only 5,000 gold is going to see that price tag and get angry that it's not accessible to him. What would be the point of that? You could go down to a more reasonable number: 30,000 gold. That's still a lot of gold. Some players have never had that much gold at one time, ever. Yet a number like that is insignificant to the millionaire.
Gold sinks hurt the people at the bottom of the game's economy, not the people at the top. Gold sinks can't fix WoW's economy. In fact, I would say they're more damaging to the game as a whole -- you know what that guy with 5,000 gold is going to do to attain that 1,000,000 gold mount? He's going to go buy it for real money. Where does that gold he's buying come from? Stolen accounts. Oh boy, I'm sure glad Blizzard added that gold sink!
Andre asked:
I've got a level 50 rogue that I've been leveling recently. I just got back to WoW and my Druid main isn't really raiding, although he's geared enough that I can do Firelands on him. I don't really have as much fun on him as I do my Rogue, and with the news of the legendaries come out, it makes me really want to push my Rogue to level cap. My friend has a bunch of grantable levels left from RaF, so I can easily get this Rogue to 80 in the next few days. My question is: How hard would it be to gear up on him? It was easy for my Druid because he's a tank and I got fast dungeon queues to farm JP and VP. Will it be harder to gear my Rogue?
I leveled my rogue recently as a temporary escape from my retribution paladin after I quit raiding. It was extremely easy to gear her. Queue times for DPS can be long, especially if you're used to the instant queues that tanks have, but they're not as bad as they used to be. I wait about 15-20 minutes for a dungeon as a DPSer at the level cap now, rather than the previous 30-45 minutes.
Between what you can find on the Auction House, instance drops, and the items you can buy with justice and valor points, you'll put together a decent set of gear in no time at all. My only real problem was weapons. Getting two good daggers together was a real pain in the butt.
It will be harder to gear the rogue than it was to gear the tank, but I still would not define it as hard. Just harder, relatively.
Esgarzer asked:
I dont know if it has ever been mentioned before... But has there ever been talks about making bear and cat forms for druids more ZulAman-boss-like? Like only the heads and limbs going feral and not the whole body?
I've never heard anything about this, no.
Because those Trolls look dumb and so would you.
undeadgoat asked:
Q for the Q: Hellllllp! I started playing WoW over the summer, and now that my classes have started up I somehow have time to keep up on WoW Insider but I haven't logged on in almost three weeks! Also now I'm writing a paper about WoW which mentions WoW Insider (as an example of a "metanetwork") so WoW Insider is a tab in my "homework" window and I'm distracted from my actual paper!
... That doesn't seem to be a question at all.
Filed under: The Queue






Reader Comments (Page 1 of 11)
kytemidnight Sep 21st 2011 11:03AM
How'd you get Deathwing in thar?
lownwolf Sep 21st 2011 11:06AM
private server!
Moeru Sep 21st 2011 11:09AM
Deathwing has been many places during his absence for the past year.
Shinae Sep 21st 2011 11:12AM
Deathwing can traverse the boundaries between gameworlds.
Didax Sep 21st 2011 11:13AM
Deathwing's looking for a new consort...
fallemwarrior Sep 21st 2011 11:19AM
:O! A PICTURE ON THE INTRAWEBZ! IT HAS TO BE REALL!!!
RUN DEATHWING IS COMMING TO GET US!
btw borderlands is one of my all time favorite games (Despite the first 6 months of ATI problems)
I Dont Always Guy Sep 21st 2011 11:31AM
Deathwing+Mad Moxxi... sooo we get an arena raid after all?
Blazing Rain Sep 21st 2011 11:32AM
Thats what she said.
tibbelkrunk Sep 21st 2011 11:32AM
You didn't hear? Deathwing was one of the 900k that left.
He said he's coming back for 4.3 solely because of transmogrification.
Grovinofdarkhour Sep 21st 2011 11:48AM
Are you kidding me? Now there are NPCs from DIFFERENT GAMES getting the [Stood in the Fire] achievement before my rogue??
fallemwarrior Sep 21st 2011 12:17PM
Grovin, ive gone afk to comeback and find my self dead from deathwing 6 times on my mage
ill trade you...
Eirik Sep 21st 2011 1:05PM
So, fallemwarrior, where have you been going afk, again?
Arcanum Sep 21st 2011 1:34PM
He likes to travel!
http://s1181.photobucket.com/albums/x433/Arcanum1871/?action=view¤t=1316215954102.jpg
Aislinana Sep 21st 2011 3:44PM
Alex consorts with a powerful wizard who knows all kinds of Photoshopomancy.
goldeneye Sep 22nd 2011 5:39AM
@ Arcanum
I must comment on the extreme funniness (is that a word?) of your pic of DW peeping through the Dark Portal. "Heeeeeeeere's Deathwing!"
thedoctor2031 Sep 21st 2011 11:03AM
In Burning Crusade the main enemy seemed to be Illidan but then the last raid was SWP. In Wrath the Lich King was the main enemy and we had one raid, less of a full raid than SWP by many factors but still a raid in the ruby sanctum. Do you think we will have another raid after this Deathwing raid and if so will it be small like ruby sanctum or develop the plot line with the old gods even further and defeat one of them?
Also, why do you think blizzard is changing its nerfing strategies? For tier 11 they didn't do accross the board nerfs until tier 12 came out. For tier 10 it was a stacking buff to the players without exactly nerfing the bosses and people had the option of turning off the buff. Now we have accross the board nerfs (and I might just have not noticed the way to turn off the nerf) that can't be turned off and make achievements seem a little more empty. I enjoy them because it lets me access content I didn't have the time to progress on as much but some of my friends in other guilds were progressing on ragnaros normal and some heroics and they feel like it is very diminished now.
lownwolf Sep 21st 2011 11:10AM
i've thought a lot about the nerfs, and I think I may see why they're doing it.
In 4.3 we will see the release of the Looking for Raid tool. If you're not aware, raids entered through the Looking for Raid will actually be easier than the normal raid and provide a lower ilevel reward.
That being said, I believe the nerf to current tier (Firelands) content is to reduce the barrier of entry for raiding. It would be rather foolish to require a player to gear up in normal modes in firelands (still challenging for some that have done very little raiding) in order to progress to the 'new content' using the Looking for Raid tool and have less of a challenge within that raid (Dragon Soul-EZ Mode)
They have historically nerfed old content when it becomes old, but now they're doing it early to give everyone a chance to go through Firelands, get some gear and be ready for the new Looking for Raid tool.
MattKrotzer Sep 21st 2011 11:10AM
For the first question, it really boils down to how soon they can have the expansion ready. If they plan to launch it next Spring/Summer, then probably nothing additional. If they can't, they might wedge in something smaller, like Ruby Sanctum.
ZodiacDragons Sep 21st 2011 11:12AM
As far as I know (and honestly I could be wrong), Blizzard has stated that this is the last patch of this exapansion, meaning this is it. It's gonna be 4.3 then Expansion.
Moeru Sep 21st 2011 11:13AM
It changes, but most of the time there's a nerf before the end of an expansion. BC had a huge nerf to all bosses on top of spec buffs and ICC had a mounting buff for players.
And now blizz has decided that every time a new tier comes out, it gets nerfed before the new-er tier gets released so we can experience the content. Though with the raid finder, I don't think it'll be too much of a problem anymore.
So in the end, they're just trying different things, though I think this is the best for people who aren't interested in progression, since there are pugs who will still want to go to T11, and now T12, even if the newer tier is out, instead of waiting till 5.0 when everyone is complaining that WoW is boring.