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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsThe Queue: Clearly, the correct answer is Tommy, the green Ranger
by Adam Holisky 
Jan 3rd 2012 at 11:00AM
Andy provided the correct answer for yesterday's Queue. And let me tell you, he's right.
Except the Pink Ranger. I had such a crush on her ...
Shrinknet asked:
What level does my fishing need to be in order to catch Cata-level fish, and can I reach it with bonus items?
You need to have a fishing skill of 1 to catch from pools (Blizzard made this change a while back) and 450 to begin to catch normally from open water in Cataclysm zones.
Fishing also levels up pretty fast right now, so it's a good time to grind it out. Only took me about a dozen episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix to level fishing through.
Ailuvan asked:
I switched from physical to mobile authenticator. No problem there.
Then there was an update to the auth app. At which point, it stopped working. So I sent in a request to detach it from my account, but that took 3 days, and finally happened when I was asleep. An hour later, the account was hacked. 2 hours later, I woke up, reset the pw, and reached the authenticator, and all was well.
Does the mobile app lose its mind every time it's upgraded?
I've never experienced a problem with the authenticator app, but that sucks that it happened. I know other people have had similar issues. I think if there's something not working with it for you, the best bet might be not update it (why fix it if it's not broken?) or use a physical authenticator.
Joakim asked:
Just what exactly is up with that village in Tol Barad? It's got dwarves, humans, gnomes, orcs and taurens - all in a very suspicious mood and easily angered.
They're all outlaws and have a bad attitude in general. Nothing much can be done to make them happy, so we kill 'em, or at least try to take their fish.
Buffalo asked:
My name is Buffalo and tomorrow is my birthday. Can we have a buffalo themed queue tomorrow?
No. Bah, humbug.
Happy birthday.
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!
Filed under: The Queue
Reader Comments (Page 5 of 10)
Amaxe Jan 3rd 2012 11:19AM
"Fishing also levels up pretty fast right now, so it's a good time to grind it out. Only took me about a dozen episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Netflix to level fishing through."
So (assuming about 45 minutes without commercials each), you only have to fish for nine hours straight to level fishing?
deymorin Jan 3rd 2012 11:35AM
If you never leveled fishing before that might sound horrible. But trust us, it's a bargain.
jtrack3d Jan 3rd 2012 11:44AM
There really is no longer any fish you have to have that doesn't come from a pool. If there was, you could buy them on the AH, anyhow.
So, fish what you need.. max fishing will come on it's own.
(cutaia) Jan 3rd 2012 12:20PM
"There really is no longer any fish you have to have that doesn't come from a pool."
Tell that to any tank who wants Mastery, or wants to make a Seafood Feast for their raid...
Noyou Jan 3rd 2012 12:32PM
Can you show me where the Lavascale Catfish pools are?
http://www.elsanglin.com/fish/lavascale_catfish.html
So yeah, there are a few fish that you have to catch in open water.
Kakume Jan 3rd 2012 12:54PM
There are still valuable fish out there that aren't in pools, but I do reckon that skilling up fishing feels a lot less urgent than it used to.
At the end of TBC I made a point of maxing out fishing on my then main in preparation for Wrath; this was when casts still missed instead of returning greys, and only successful catches provided a skillup, so I REALLY did not want to enter a zone without the appropriate fishing skill.
These days with pools you're home and dry (er, sorry) and even in open water you're still getting skillups. It still takes a while to start catching high level fish in reasonable quantities, but instead of spending that time in Orgrimmar lake, you can spend it fishing up mostly-greys and the odd useful fish as the mood takes you.
Malsi Jan 3rd 2012 11:21AM
Clearly, the correct answer is Rita Repulsa!
Anicore Jan 3rd 2012 11:26AM
In terms of difficulty, how did vanilla and BC raids compare to Wrath and our current Cataclysm raids? We're they more on par with current regular mode difficulty or heroic? I had only just hit 60 a few months before BC released and my guild was only about 5 bosses into BWL. Then in the 40 to 25 raid size change the guild fell apart and I was guildless and re-rolled a tank, and only managed to complete Kara and ZA before Wrath launched. Obviously I missed a fair bit of content and I'm just wondering where we stand now from a difficulty / experience perspective.
(cutaia) Jan 3rd 2012 11:59AM
The accessibility of raids has gone up dramatically since Wrath, but it doesn't necessarily all have to do with difficulty.
There is a lot less barrier to entry due to the addition of heroic dungeons each patch and badge gear that can catch you up. There are less pointless barriers, such as rep requirements for summoning bosses in Molten Core or entering heroic dungeons in BC, or even attunement quests that required people to run old raids, or do a bunch of stuff, every time they wanted to get a new player into a new raid.
It can definitely be proven that today's heroic raid bosses have many, many, many more abilities than vanilla bosses. I mean, just compare the ability list of Molten Core bosses to even normal mode bosses in Cataclysm. Now, one train of thought states that the advent of mods have made this additional complexity necessary. But it definitely feels like the individual jobs of each player in old 40 man raids were often pretty tame, compared to all the things we must pay attention to now.
Although, I do hear the BC raids were pretty tough. :P
Amanda A. Jan 3rd 2012 12:25PM
I didn't play in Vanilla and BC, so this is what I've heard.
Vanilla wasn't hard because of raid design, it was hard because of game design. Tactically, it was generally simplistic compared to current raids-- of course, the player base was also less experienced as a whole. It was mostly hard because mechanics were generally sort of bad and itemization was wonky. For example, the capstone talent for holy paladins was consecrate. It was also 'hard' because it took a lot of grinding to even get into raiding. There was no fast way to gear; you ground dungeons until you got a set to randomly drop, then you ground a harder dungeon, some endgame dungeons took keys, mat costs were absurd for crafted items... If you've ever done Naxx 80, that (tuned for 40 level 60s) was the last raid. It was considered absurdly complex, tactically.
BC had better itemization and mechanics, but the raid tactics got more demanding. I think less than 1% of players saw the ending of the Sunwell raid. Heroic dungeons were very hard, impossible if you didn't have at least two CCs, and that was only the first step. (Remember that modern damage is higher in the same gear and level than damage was back then, thanks to systems refinements.) You never outgeared unless you raided heavily, because the entry level raids weren't that much better than Heroic gear. And raiding at all required you to do a long attunement quest, and once again there were no gearing shortcuts. Want to start raiding a year into the expansion? Good luck getting a group for the tier 4 raids every week until you're geared for tier 5, then you have to do tier 5 to get tier 6...
The Dewd Jan 3rd 2012 12:30PM
Vanilla is hard to compare because it took (in theory) 40 people do the big ones. Trying to get 40 people online, especially prior to the scheduled start, required either begging or threatening. (I know a lot of guilds either used to give bonus DKP for showing up early or penalized you DKP for being late.) Plus you'd have afk-chains where someone would need to afk and then it was 5 people and just before the last of the 5 got back, 2 more would go afk - and so on. I'm sure the more serious, hardcore, progression-minded guilds were more disciplined than that and planned breaks into the schedule - at least I'd hope so.
BC had a lot more gating - like the Kara key quest. Don't forget that, originally, everyone in your 10-man Kara raid had to have a key to get in. Having 10/25 people meant that there were less logistics to worry about, too.
My biggest concern, honestly, is that Blizzard seems to assume that everyone who raids has been raiding with the same people since at least BC, if not Vanilla. Fights are getting more and more complicated. While an entire tier full of tank-n-spank bosses are boring, boss fights now require a level of raid awareness that we haven't really seen before in regular mode fights. I believe they said that they are aware of this and want to be a little less punishing to new raiders - we'll have to see if they meant the Raid Finder or if MoP is going to be a nice balance between Wrath and Cata.
eel5pe Jan 3rd 2012 12:40PM
Old raids were more difficult, but it's kind of a matter of perspective.
If you look at the mechanics objectively the old bosses are a lot simpler: a lot of your standard fare of "don't stand in this", "move out of the raid so you don't kill everyone" "kill the adds really fast" "dispell x" that you'd see on a 5-man boss now or even solo content. There were exceptions (Gorefiend comes to mind first), but you could summarize most boss mechanics in a sentence or two.
However the encounters were more difficult for two main reasons. First, classes and general character mechanics weren't as well designed back then. Spellbooks were a lot smaller (anyone else remember spell downranking?) and buffs weren't very well distributed. As a result raid stacking was often a must, and to keep encounters challenging Blizzard tuned fights assuming you were optimizing to the nth degree. If you go back even further, you had a different breed of raid stacking in terms of consumables and temporary buffs. It used to be that there was no limit to how many potion buffs you had, so people would chug like ten potions a fight. Flasks were nigh-impossible to farm and difficult to make, as you had to visit scholomance just to craft them, a non-trivial task back then. And then you had more esoteric consumables like the items from Blasted Lands, Winterfell E'ko, and what always took the cake for me: buffs from mind-controlled mobs. One popular early strategy for downing Rag involved taking your raid, 10 players at a time, into UBRS and mind controlling a mob (scarshield ragebinder or something like that) to buff each of your members with a fire resist buff. Ugh.
Second, players are a lot savvier now. Information wasn't as readily available back then in the form of videos and websites, and we didn't have neat addons like Deadly Boss Mods telling us what to do. Getting information on an encounter used to mean going to your guild's forums.
Narayana Jan 3rd 2012 11:36AM
So, I don't want to go down the path of anecdotal evidence, but this Q marks the 4th reference I've heard in the last week to someone's account being hacked within a very short period of time detaching an authenticator.
This leads me to think that there's one of two things happening- either:
1) These accounts are under a constant barrage of hack attempts and the 1 day window is long enough for them to cycle again or
2) The hackers somehow know when an authenticator is de-linked and they prioritize hacking these accounts for which they've already stolen a PW. (How they're getting the PW is another thing all together.)
The latter seems more likely to me. Is the act of losing the Core Hound Pup achievement updated in real time and visable via the Armory API? Is there some easy way to see when someone has taken off the authenticator that isn't immediately obvious to normal users?
loop_not_defined Jan 3rd 2012 11:56AM
Most hack attempts are automated. #1 seems far, far more likely to me.
Ailuvan Jan 3rd 2012 12:19PM
Yep, number 1 is the answer. Boys ruining through lists of id's over and over.
Noyou Jan 3rd 2012 12:32PM
Another possibility- people who have authenticators think they can click links with reckless abandon. Just because you use protection doesn't mean you will be safe from every evil. Tread lightly my friends. (And stay thirsty)
Kakume Jan 3rd 2012 12:37PM
Have you ever seen the sheer quantity of try-your-luck exploits against a wide variety of OS vulnerabilities that are spamming around the internet at any given moment, just targeting random addresses? If someone can automate malicious behaviour on the internet, it's a safe assumption that it is being automated. That assumption is consistent with #1 above.
Some time ago, we had a spate of guildies getting their accounts compromised (they were using the same password on a website that had its passwd database leaked.) The thing is, this went on for MONTHS. One friend of mine had an inactive account at the time of the leak, and only resubscribed months later; within a day of activation, his account was owned.
It might actually convince a few more people to use authenticators if they could picture a mass of robots trying their luck, all day, every day, at hacking accounts. :-)
Joe Jan 3rd 2012 11:38AM
There's definitely a security lesson to be had from this tale of account hack when switching authenticators.
Before you make any change to your authenticator situation, change your battle.net account password from a computer that you're reasonably certain is not compromised.
Too often people with authenticators don't change their password for months or years because they have the extra security of an authenticator (I know I'm guilty of that).
Noyou Jan 3rd 2012 12:46PM
Good reminder. I usually change them when I added time cards. Since joining annual pass I have been using the auto pay feature. It's time to change that password!
Arrohon Jan 3rd 2012 11:49AM
General Video Game question: What game (or series) do you believe has the best music?