As one of the youngest writers on the WoW Insider staff, I was of an acceptable age for Pokémon playing when Pikachu first sailed the ocean blue and Pokémon Red landed in my Game Boy Pocket. It was Christmas Day, 1998. I hadn't quite learned that electronics required battery power to operate at that point, and losing my Charizard because I didn't save once in an eight hour pocket monster marathon would be my most crushing video game defeat until our first 20k HP wipe on Professor Putricide 12 years later.

As you might expect from someone whose first video game glory days involved beating the Elite Four with a Mewtwo and thinking he was the best Pokémon master in the world, I'm a little psyched for companion battling. And by a little excited, I almost forgot to be excited about the rest of the awesome stuff coming in the freshly announced Mists of Pandaria, including the Pandaren themselves.

While I'm now allowing myself to be excited for monks, PVE scenarios, and the entire talent tree overhaul, I can't help alt-tabbing out of our blogging platform to decide which of my companion pets I'm going to level up first. Will it be my shiny new Murkablo, my staple Fossilized Hatchling, or am I going to go Black Kingsnake, just because no one else will? Maybe I'll even name him Onyx.

Tyler asked:

Does the WoW Insider staff have a bet amongst themselves going on as to what the next expac will be? Would the winner(s) get a prize for accurately predicting will it'll be about?

We don't have any sort of prize or formal bet running within WoW Insider, but we've definitely all had our own crackpot theories we were hoping would be confirmed for the sake of ego-inflation. And trust me, there was quite a bit of rightly-earned bragging going on between the staff today, especially since both Mat McCurley and Rossi called for entire talent system overhauls and saw those confirmed.

Xanndra asked:

Two questions: Does Allison (and Adam this year) live blog via the streams, or are they on site? And did the epicness of the group blow out the stream last night, or the prospect of GC being there have the equipment give up?

Allison was liveblogging from home while watching the streams today, while Adam is on site at Blizzcon. As for last night's stream, it's a funny story. See, apparently everyone was having too much fun chatting with Felicia Day, Robin Thorsen, and Aron Eisenberg last night that people actually lose track of time and didn't realize the party was pretty much over, which is why the streaming ended so soon after the last interview segment.

Bobby Gauntt asked:

What does a Pandaren become when it uses an orb of deception?

That's an easy one. Obviously, the white and black fur patches switch places!

SyntheticAether asked:

What do you think mages will cast from lv1-10, since AB/Fball/Fbolt are now spec-locked? "Throw strudel"?

I have two guesses. First, since frost uses Frostfire Bolt with Brain Freeze procs and there was a time in the early days of Cataclysm when a glyphed FFB was somewhat useful for fire in PVE, I could see them making Frostfire Bolt the baseline mage spell for leveling to ten. This would be my preferred way for them to go, as FFB is my favorite mage spell.

That said, they could also just go with Fireball as the leveling ability. With Living Bomb and Pyroblast both being important parts of the fire rotation, I wouldn't be surprised to see Fireball as a baseline spell. I imagine we're still going to be seeing a bit of use from our friend Arcane Missiles, though.

Seraph1337 asked:

Can monks really come soon enough?

See, I'm conflicted here. On one side, there's the fact that I really want to play a Windwalker, the melee DPS spec. The idea of a melee DPS that doesn't auto-attack is awesome to me, though the fact that they can use one-handed swords and are agility based makes me tremble with fear and a little rage. I really would love to never see agility swords appear in the game again.

On the other hand, WoW Insider might fall apart on Mists of Pandaria release day, as all of us class columnists put our assassination plans into motion in an attempt to win the monk class column. I'm not saying anyone at the Annabella last night is in any real danger, I just hope you didn't share any drinks with Wow Insider staff members. If you did, I plead the fifth.

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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!

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Tags: blizzcon-2011, companion-battling, facebookfeed, featured, frostfire-bolt, guide, mage, mage-leveling, mists-of-pandaria, monk, pandaland, qa, question-and-answer, wow-answers, wow-daily-answers, wow-daily-questions, wow-guide, wow-player-questions, wow-q-and-a, wow-questions

Filed under: BlizzCon, The Queue, Mists of Pandaria