The Queue: Thin Mint milkshakes
by Mathew McCurley 
Mar 14th 2012 at 11:00AM
Big Gay Ice Cream is making Thin Mint milkshakes today, so if you're in the tri-state area, you probably want to get there early. You can still fly cross-country and make it here before the end of the day.
I'm running The Queue today because Alex is in California for some reason.
yous95 asked:
Do you think it's possible that Thrall's unborn child has some kind of right to Horde leadership and that it might present a future (I'm talking way in the future) threat to Garrosh's leadership (assuming that Garrosh is still there by the time the child is of age)? I know it's a bit out there, but I'm so curious as to the purpose of Thrall's future child lore-wise.
That's one direction Thrall's child could go, but I don't think the new Horde leadership works that way at all. It's not about succession but about leadership, accountability, personality, and strength. Garrosh is warchief for a lot of reasons, not least of which is Thrall's putting him in charge. Garrosh also by all accounts UPDATE: didn't win the Mok'gora fight against Thrall before being interrupted by the Lich King's attack on Orgrimmar, so who knows?
Honestly, though, I think Thrall's child is not the beginning of a new story for a new character but the end of an arc for Thrall. Thrall's passion to be a father and meet someone and get away from the people and culture he created and was burdened by is manifested through his son, everything Thrall wants an orc to be, born outside the old Horde and within the new one.
Plus, that kid has years to go before he's grown up. Personally, I hope he's just some better-than-average kid. Maybe he's a mathlete.
Xues asked:
What do you think they are going to do with Mass Res? Are they going to keep it at guild level 25 or move it back?
Also, do you think they'll do cauldron's differently this time? As a alchemist I only make flasks to make cauldrons, so there's not much profit left in it.
Mass Resurrection will most likely stay the level 25 guild reward, since level 25 is still a challenge for many groups out there. Blizzard has said that it is adding new guild levels and rewards with the next expansion, which is expected, welcome, and fun. Guild rewards can be anything, really, so Blizzard has a lot to play with in terms of compelling rewards for guilds making it to the cap.
As for cauldrons, I feel like the BoA change to make passing cauldrons between alchemy alts and their raid counterparts solidified the cauldron system as the one Blizzard will move forward with. While it is still somewhat of a feat to put together the necessary number of cauldrons for heavy raiding, the difficulty is offset by the amount of buff you actually get, especially when you tack on the guild perks, time extensions, and bang for your buck in terms of numbers. Have there been many complaints about the Cataclysm cauldron system, or is it relatively accepted?
We might even see some new guild perks that expand on cauldrons some more, adding functionality or reducing their cost somehow. At this point, it's wait and see.
Saeadame asked:
So, the GM (well, now ex-GM) of my guild logs on yesterday, removes 400,000 gold from the guild bank, passes GM to someone else and then leaves.
/sigh. Don't think there's anything to be done, but it was such a dick move.
No joke -- submit a ticket. Blizzard takes these things seriously! Drakkenfyre in the comments makes some good points about making your case:
Submit a ticket.
While everything in the guild bank is considered property of the guild leader, if the items were clearly from other members, and the guild leader swipes stuff from the bank then leave, Blizzard HAS been known to action them for that, and restore the items.
If the gold was pooled from multiple people in the guild, mention that in your ticket. At worst they say no, at best, you get the gold back.
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 1 of 10)
Gorelord Mar 14th 2012 11:03AM
There are ‘create-all’ buttons for making leather, smelting ore, creating inks, etc…but not for milling and prospecting. Why can’t we have a ‘mill-all’ button…or a ‘prospect-all’ button? Man, that would be nice.
Revynn Mar 14th 2012 11:14AM
UI limitations. They've said in the past that they want to find a solution to this, but it's another case of "good solution > quick solution".
matt_janoski Mar 14th 2012 11:19AM
There's an add on called Panda - which I believe was recently featured in one of McCurley's columns recently - that lets you do just that. Milling, prospecting, and I believe disenchanting
TimR Mar 14th 2012 11:18AM
The difference between those two categories is that the first has a fixed result. 5 leather become 1 heavy leather, etc. Prospecting and Milling have multiple possible results, that come up in a loot window. Milling gives you a varying number of pigments, and sometimes rare pigments. Prospecting can give any gem.
I've read that this is a possible reason you must do those one at a time, but I'm sure if they wanted to they could develop a way around it.
Kelly Mar 14th 2012 11:24AM
Sir (or ma'am.... sorry), I vote for you to be president of all things Blizzard related!
Best thing I've seen is Panda's (http://www.curse.com/addons/wow/panda) Mass Mill function (which has to be clicked for each mill), which will mill everything in your bag. It starts with the lowest level herb and moves up to the Cata herbs. It's not great, but it's better than what we have now.
Unfortunately, there's no "Mass Prospect" function....
Puntable Mar 14th 2012 11:39AM
I think the main reason is that instead of one button "mill", they would have to fill the profession book with "mill peacebloom", "mill silversage", "mill mageroyal", etc. and there are a lot of herbs.
Homeschool Mar 14th 2012 12:04PM
@TimR and Puntable - Puntable's description doesn't sound like a negative - it sounds like a plus! After all, all the crafting professions have books LOADED with recipes. Is it really negative to think of a book with a few dozen "Mill / Prospect X" recipes?
Nathanyel Mar 14th 2012 1:38PM
The random amount or even different results is not a problem, see several Alchemy recipes, such as the Northrend Alchemy Research or Cata's Transmute: Living Elements, the latter still has the "placeholder result" Random Volatile Element, and the Research once had Discovery! http://www.wowhead.com/item=44508 in the tooltip.
I'd say, keeping the Milling ability but also introducing "Mill Herb X" would be a good idea.
Schadenfreude Mar 14th 2012 1:53PM
I'd like to see the ability to mill 5 of any herb in a category (let's say you have 1 whiptail, 2 cinderbloom and 2 stormvine -- you can mill them together instead of waiting until you have 5 of one) but I assume there are some major technical limitations against this.
Edymnion Mar 14th 2012 2:15PM
For prospecting, I actually use a macro to help speed it up for me.
#showtooltip Prospecting
/use Prospecting
/use Elementium Ore
Its one click to automatically prospect 5 ore, as opposed to the current two click "hit prospect, select the ore" method. Set that on the secondary toolbar so you can hotkey it, then just spam it until you're done.
Didax Mar 14th 2012 2:25PM
It's not quite auto-prospecting, but set your auto-loot on and keybind the following macro:
/use Prospecting
/use Obsidium Ore
/use Elementium Ore
You can add any other type of ore you want to the macro. Just make sure they're in multiples of 5, spam the button, and watch a movie.
vincentmagius Mar 14th 2012 2:26PM
@Homeschool
You have a point. It's not like the recipe list doesn't exist. Look at Smelting/Mining. It gives you the option to smelt every ore available, so that covers Prospecting at least. Similar for Milling.
Enchanting is out of luck. We can't have "Disenchant ". You also aren't really disenchanting that much at one time unless you're being run through a dungeon.
Lipstick Mar 14th 2012 4:25PM
Due to the force to click the button option I just create a macro
#showtooltip
/use Prospecting
/use
/cast Milling
/use Cinderbloom
/use Stormvine
/use Azshara's Veil
/use Heartblossom
/use Twilight Jasmine
And it just spam clicks the button, it's not perfect -- if you don't have a perfect five stack of stuff I tend to just remove the extras and put 'em in my bank to make it simpler... but it works. It's spamming one button with auto-loot on. Not quite the same as set it, forget it, and walk away ... but it works.
deymorin Mar 14th 2012 9:23PM
The many hours I've spent shuffling ores over the last two epacs has made me want something visually like the horadric cube. Open it up, put like 10-20 things in it, and it mass DE's, prospects, or mills. Note that I don't think this is something you'd carry with you. It would be a tool near the trainers in major cities. You'd use the current one-at-a-time tools for field work.
Groshnak Mar 14th 2012 10:14PM
actually if you install TradeskillMaster one of the optional modules allows you to mass mill or mass prospect. For it to be effective you have to have auto loot turned on, and click a button again and again. If you have two monitors you can do all your milling while watching something on Hulu or netflix.
Evelinda Mar 14th 2012 11:43PM
If I had to speculate, i'd say it's because milling and prospecting (and disenchanting, for that matter) aren't actually CRAFTING. You're actually destroying the item and looting something else. Things like combining leathers, or smelting ores, while functionally similar, are still crafting, and so they can fit in the crafting ui.
Prospecting though, it's more like opening a lockbox, in so far as you're destroying that item to get to the creamy goodness inside.
Kelly Mar 15th 2012 3:25PM
Last night I was restocking my glyphs and I had a thought..... I have a gaming keyboard, complete with a macro ability!
Fired the configuration up, created a macro.... Simply Left Click-Wait 3 seconds.
Bound it to a key combination, told my keyboard software to repeat that macro 40 times, went to the WoW client, used Panda.... AUTO-MILL!
Yes, a bit of a round-about way of doing it, but damn it, it was nice to be able to make a sandwich, roast a duck and repave the neighborhood street all while I was milling herbs (bad thing, I finished all that and still had to wait for the last few herbs to be completed!)
The Wanderer Mar 17th 2012 3:20PM
@Kelly:
Careful there. According to my understanding, automating things using outside-of-WoW macros like that counts as botting, and can get you banned.
The limitation is "one hardware event per action", and a click counts as an action. If you trigger the macro by one physical click or keypress, and it generates more clicks or keypresses automatically without your intervention, that's against the rules.
I'm not a definitive authority on this, of course, and it's always possible that there's been an official "yes, this is OK" clarification that I've missed. But last I knew, the stated rules were such that what you've described doing was a bannable offense.
thedoctor2031 Mar 14th 2012 11:03AM
In line with the breakfast topic, do you think we are going to get any information on the whole Theramore burning thing? It would be nice to find out if the Alliance is going to play catch-up the entire expansion as well.
Noyou Mar 14th 2012 11:42AM
I depends on how major a catalyst Blizzard is going to make of that story. If it is something that happens like the shattering, they will most likely keep that under wraps. If it is just collateral damage then perhaps they will.