Patch 5.4 patch notes
Virtual Realms feature revealed
The Proving Grounds are coming
The latest patch 5.4 newsThe Queue: Professor Oak
by Adam Holisky 
Mar 27th 2012 at 11:00AM
I want to know how long it is before this character is discovered in the beta. In fact, if this is not an NPC that has something to do with Pet Battles, a great injustice will have been committed.
Ideally, he'll ask if you're a boy or a girl, too.
These things write themselves.
Nina asked:
I've read that there's a dead zone in monk healing, where they're horrible at it until level 18 and then overpowered. Have you run into any similar dead zones in the tank or mdps monk experience?
That dead zone is how it exists in the beta right now (as I'm told), but it's not a big deal because it's still very early beta, and as Kab mentioned, the specs are missing a lot of things. There won't be these problems at release.
Shepherd asked:
The last question in the Q has me wondering, is the flow to SW or ORG from the wandering ilse make sense? I am afraid it will be like "oh Hey you choose alliance so here's a portal to SW."
I think it makes sense from a gameplay perspective. Players are going to always need a central location to spike out onto the rest of the quest hubs. Stormwind and Orgrimmar are those central locations. And really, after you accept your citizenship into a particular faction, aren't you going to want to go and say hello to their main city at first? I know I would.
Shinae asked:
A guildie told me that the bonuses from the gathering professions are removed in the beta. Do you think this will make it into live? (This was the last thing I wanted to hear after spending my Sunday leveling skinning on my 85 mage after dropping maxed mining.)
They're not active right now, but there's no indication either way.
Jfofla asked:
It is possible that Blizzard will not allow questing during the Beta. What we have now, might be all we get. Look at how limited the Diablo Beta was.
Negatory. Blizzard said in its post announcing the beta that zones other than the new pandaren experience will open up eventually. We will see more than what we've got right now. There's no real way an MMO of this size can let all these new dungeons go live without extensive testing.
Cunningham asked:
Just curious what people think the requirement will be to use our flying mounts at 90? Sorry if this has been discussed already, I am returning to the game after a break.
From what we know in interviews, it's going to be a quest chain. Of course, that can change at any moment, so I wouldn't put a ton of weight on it. Blizzard tried the quest route in Wrath initially and then removed it, so there'd need to be something that changes for it to go forward in Mists.
When you do finally get flying at level 90, you get the Wisdom of the Four Winds passive spell, which allows you to fly.
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 2 of 8)
Ilmyrn Mar 27th 2012 11:29AM
According to what I've read, the mists didn't just hide Pandaria, they were also magic enough to confuse compasses and spit a ship back out more or less where it entered.
Jestin Mar 27th 2012 12:05PM
Pandaria is basically the island from "Lost." In fact, I would love it if there were a quest where we had to drop down a well and turn a giant wheel in order to make it blink to somewhere else in the world.
Fuzzl Mar 27th 2012 12:15PM
Jestin, I think you just found Blizzard's work-around for going "back in time" to Outland and Northrend :P
Drahken Mar 27th 2012 12:21PM
It's like the island from LOST. You just can't come and go as you please, even if you know the direction. (except if you're on bearing 3-0-5, apparently.) I forget who said it, but I read in one of the recent interviews with the Blizzard folk, they said that ships that sailed into the mist would get all turned around and sail back out, ending up back right where they started.
Drahken Mar 27th 2012 12:34PM
Curses! In the time it took me type my response someone beat me to the Lost reference. (I had to go to Lostpedia to look up what the bearing was and ended up getting caught up reading some articles. Then I chased a butterfly.)
Cyraxus Mar 27th 2012 1:13PM
In 2nd ed AD&D, the Elven island Evermeet was protected by something similar that teleported ships to the exact opposite side of the isle and surrounding waters. In that way most never realized that they had skipped some 100 miles or so as they still made it to their destination.
Hob Mar 27th 2012 5:09PM
Clearly, it's the same invisible wall that keeps you from flying over Stratholme or the Black Temple.
Kaero Mar 27th 2012 9:02PM
This is just a huge guess, based purely on what I've read about how big a zone The Jade Forest is from devs and those who went to the press event. If my measuring is right (which, y'know, it totally isn't), the distance between Pandaria and Zandalar Isle seems to be equal to the distance of the Wetlands Zone, from south to north.
Also, I'm pretty sure Imnick has it right, there - I'm sure it's been mentioned that the mists stop ANYTHING from actually getting through.
Strawder Mar 28th 2012 1:30AM
That's a good question. Let's ask Chris Metzen. Chris?
Metzen: "A (Pandarian) Wizard Did It!"
Puntable Mar 27th 2012 11:15AM
Right now, DPS specs can tank or heal vanilla dungeons just fine. Mists will remove many of the healing and tanking spells from the DPS specs. Will this mean the death of off-spec tanking an healing at lower levels?
Armill3 Mar 27th 2012 11:36AM
I sure hope so. As a healer running instances in the mid 30s now, every time a warrior shows up as tank specced as arms, disaster ensues, and four people's time is wasted.
slim1256 Mar 27th 2012 12:07PM
What I don't get is - why wouldn't they just spec Prot and insta-queue?
Even into the 60s, I regularly lead the meters while tanking as a prot warrior (In all BoAs admittedly, and pretty good gear to boot), so it's not like "I want to do more damage" is a good reason for queueing as a DPS spec. And it's not like dual specing is expensive these days.
And - saying that you can't level via questing in a tanking spec is also just ridiculous. On that same prot warrior, I just pull half the map and then AoE them down. Honestly, it takes longer to loot the corpses than it does to kill them!
Seems just lazy to me. If you're gonna queue, be speced for the role you're filling. That's not just common sense, it's common courtesy.
(Note - I'm not into the healing thing, so I'm sure this doesn't necessarily apply to healers)
Aodhan Mar 27th 2012 12:46PM
I'd like it if you couldn't queue for a dungeon as a tank or healer whilst in your DPS spec, but I'm not sure how feasible it is to implement this and there are potential hiccups (see below).
If MoP is going to remove a lot of tanking and healing abilities from DPS hybrids, something like this needs to happen. I've already seen three very confused new players try to tank SFK as a shield-less DPS warrior and it can hardly be much fun for them to have the group shouting at them. It certainly wasn't fun to heal.
I can see potential problems with this idea. What if you're a druid, levelling as balance/resto? If you're out questing while you wait for a dungeon pop, you'd have the choice of killing things more slowly in you healing spec, or sitting in a long queue as balance.
A possible workaround - which might be far too complex to implement, I don't know - would be to allow players to queue for roles appropriate to both their specs. Before level 30, your ret paladin can only queue as DPS, but after 30 when he's dual-specced for prot, he can queue as a tank as well.
vocenoctum Mar 27th 2012 1:02PM
While my warrior was leveled long before Cata, I leveled my paladin as prot and yeah, the bigger issue was gathering a large enough group up to be worth killing. (lots of stuff is leashed real tight now)
But, I'd love it if once you had dual spec you could queue as either spec and when you clicked "accept" to enter the dungeon, it'd change your spec to what you need for the role.
icepyro Mar 27th 2012 2:37PM
The funny thing to me is that lately I've been leveling a priest as an A/A Disco priest (aka Atonement priest). If the tank is using a proper spec and the dps aren't stupid (purposely pulling off the tank by attacking the wrong thing for instance), then really I can keep my dps to about 2/3 of a dps spec (or more if the tank is well into the habits of using survivability abilities to the point he doesn't need me at all) and have even beat out some lower geared dps.
I have been called an idiot for this, (which was amusing to me because if I don't have to heal the tank, why is the tank complaining about me not healing him?), but I find it highly enjoyable and not your boring stand still and heal occasionally thing. Besides, if I do have to heal, then I'm already able to do it without running out of mana.
tl;dr - why is anyone trying to heal or tank without being speced for it? These specs are easy to level in as well and dual spec is now cheap and easy. If you don't have 10g by lvl 30, I'll give it to you, you know?
JattTheRogue Mar 27th 2012 4:15PM
"What I don't get is - why wouldn't they just spec Prot and insta-queue?"
I don't know why they wouldn't spec Prot (they just like Arms better?), but you can still queue as tank no matter your spec if the class has a tank spec, so that Arms warrior would still be getting instant queues.
L_fetcu Mar 28th 2012 3:18AM
@slim1256
I am leveling my fifth priest (don't ask!) atm and apart for my first one (which was in BC) i leveled all as disc. it is really easy to kill mobs on the map with holy fire + penance and finish off with a smite (to keep up evanghelism for the increase dmg buf whileyou run to next mob). And (past lvl 30) I que as dps and heal.. it happened a lot of times for the lfg system to assign me to dps (so I would change specs) and then I realize that the "healer" does not have a healing spec... then I try to convince the "healer" to let me heal... so yeah it happensm but up to lvl 50 or so.
eel5pe Mar 27th 2012 11:15AM
Q4tWarlocks: Reading the responses to both the "green fire" and "meta-tank" thread on WoWI, I'm getting a lot of persecution complex from many warlock players (seriously ya'll sound like vanilla shams, or pallies from, well, every patch). On top of that there's a lot of casually thrown about negativity like "warlocks have suffered throughout Cata".
So (finally) getting to my multi-pronged question: some people say that "warlocks are the least played class" (source? at what level?). Would you care to hypothesize why? Where did this sudden swell of warlock negativity toward their own class come from? What has (or hasn't) changed about your class that makes you so depressed, other than the fact that you aren't getting two admittedly long-desired abilities in Cata?
I ask because my experience with the warlocks I group with has been largely positive. I haven't gotten any negative rumbles from my raid team's warlock (other than when she lost the /roll for DW), and her DPS has always been quite competetive. And in regards to PvP, I know afflocks are basically required for high-level RBGs.
Sterrin Mar 27th 2012 11:18AM
I'll just leave this here...
http://cynwise.wordpress.com/2012/03/25/leveling-data-on-warlocks-is-worse-than-i-thought/
Jem Mar 27th 2012 11:41AM
I play a warlock and I honestly don't know where the whole 'we never get anything nice" and "just like always, we get something awesome and they take it from us" type responses are coming from. I mentioned tonight to a guildie that the lock population is starting to sound a whole lot like paladins.....
Statistically locks are one of the least played classes, something that is evident right through the leveling process (the original cynwise blog plus follow up on the lvling numbers is well worth reading). PvE and PvP are both solidly performing, but the class itself is fairly unpopulated.
There are design flaws in my opinion - things like pets being tied specifically to specs. Our destro lock can't provide the int buff from the fel hunter, if we don't have a mage in the raid, without seriously gimping his dps, because inbuilt in the destro talents is a dps boost from the imp. I don't believe hunters have that kind of penalty if they bring a different pet for a specific buff.
However, I doesn't feel like the class as a whole has been promised a wealth of things over the years and Blizzard hasn't delivered. So I'm not quite sure where that response is coming from.
Removing HGWT makes me want to beat my head against a wall, since I know from painful experience that summoning ppl individually is a pita, the failure rate on summons is about 1 in 3 because someone can't help but move, and people are lazy sods that will not make the simple effort to get to where they should be outside a raid on time. Im' still bitter about the guy in vanilla that asked for a summons to an ony raid, then went afk for nearly 5 mins without telling anyone. The RL gave the locks hell for not summoning the guy. Yes, I'm still bitter.