Now that I have a digital device capable of acting as a digital reader, it has come to my attention that reading is fairly easy on devices such as these. I picked up my friends' awesome short story collection as my first piece of digital reading material, and now I long for more. Weird stories are cool.

So help me, dear Queue readers. At the end of your questions about the beta for whichever poor soul has to write The Queue tomorrow (Adam), put in a story recommendation, book recommendation, or any kind of reading material for me to consume. I need to read more, and now's the time to do it. Words.

Stonegrasp asked:

Does anyone know the range on AoE looting? 40yards, 50 yards?

It feels like 15 to 20 yards around the central corpse clump. That's not an exact number, obviously, and I've only tested AoE looting a few times. Suffice to say, if you've played any other MMO out there that has AoE looting, it feels the same.

@MBragiel on Twitter asked:

Which bug in beta do you hope never makes it live?

The only bugs that I've experienced that have been annoying are animation bugs. Pandaren obviously don't have all of their animations in and sometimes default back to standing still with their arms pointed diagonally downwards. These are superficial things that will be fixed by the end of beta. Since we haven't seen the actual continent of Pandaria yet, we haven't had access to the wealth of areas where bugs dwell.

And we haven't even fought the mantid yet! Aaaaaaaaaah!

moobinator asked:

So right now The Wandering Isle is designed around Panderen learning to become Monks, I know its extremely early Beta, but here is my question:

If a Pandaren is to become lets say a Hunter, where does he/she start, do you think they will increase the quest line to include all possible Panderen classes? and What if you make a Troll Monk, where do you learn your Monkish ways? Do you think they will put a monk trainer in each of the starting Zones Seems like it would take away from the Zen like learning of the monks if now they just go Kill Boars for 10 levels.

The pandaren starting experience has a lot of monk flavor (since the race and the class come hand-in-hand, obviously), but each class is on the same mission -- to reawaken the elemental spirits and figure out what is wrong with the giant turtle that you're riding around on. Remember, World of Warcraft is a story-driven MMO, not a class-driven MMO. Monk trainers and quests will most likely be implemented later in the beta into the new starting areas, as they were not currently there when I made my orc monk.

Basically, the quests you do have nothing to do with the class that you are. Your race is more of a unique experience than class at this point, from a starting character's perspective. If you are a troll monk, you will learn your monk ways from the troll starting experience, etc. Think of monks like making a new warrior or priest -- just a new 1-to-90 class.

puntable asked:

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?

The common wisdom these days is that the instances from 1 to 60 don't exactly require a spec to do anything difficult. Sure, having a dedicated tank or healer helps, but it isn't the crucial tool for success. Whether or not that actually plays out in practice every time, however, is up for debate. After level 50 to 60, things begin to change as specializations offer more advantages. I don't think the removal of these abilities will take away from the positive experience that lower-leveled dungeons currently exhibit; however, nothing should be too hard in the 1-to-60 content, in my opinion.

@ANevers on Twitter asked:

I am curious as to how long it actually takes to create new player models.

Making new models for WoW is a difficult process because of the legacy issue. We're all familiar with legacy problems with code, programs, etc., but imagine if you had to build a brand new orc or human model from the ground up, and it had to be compatible with everything in WoW currently and into the future.

There are thousands of pieces of armor and weapons that have different model anchor points, texture tweaks, and unique issues to deal with when animated. Now, multiply the work you have to do by eight. Then multiply the work you have to do for optimization of new models and the potential for allowing the old models to be used as well. Will every NPC model change as well? What about special NPCs that could break with a new model? And that's only the tip of the iceberg.

It's a lot of work, especially with so much legacy stuff to deal with.

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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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