The Queue: Death knight riot
by Alex Ziebart 
Sep 24th 2014 at 11:00AM
Jeez, Adam forgets to mention death knights and you guys riot and burn the comments down. This is why nobody likes death knights.
I'm kidding. Please don't kill me (and then raise my corpse as a ghoul).
DespicableBrad asked:
With the recent release of the WoD Cinematics and revelation of the end boss for the expansion along with the announcement of only 2 raid tiers for WoD, I can't help but shake the feeling that Blizz is sort of planning to rush us through WoD and get us into the next expansion more quickly than we found ourselves on WoD's doorstep post-MoP. With the upcoming Blizzcon, and a possible expansion announcement on the horizon... do you think this is possible? Is Warlords perhaps a "short" expansion to get us more quickly into the next one and into more frequent content patches/releases?
I actually wrote a post about this recently! I do think an expansion announcement at BlizzCon is likely, but it won't be their focus for the event. What I expect is they'll give an announcement or a teaser but stay grounded in Warlords of Draenor for panel content. BlizzCon is the place they announce games. That's just how it is. If they truly think a one-year-turnaround on expansions is likely this time, they need to announce it at BlizzCon '14 or they'll be announcing it at the same time they announce a release date at BlizzCon '15. Announcing early makes more sense than announcing late.
They could announce the next expansion at some other gaming convention ... but that devalues BlizzCon. What is the better marketing choice? Devalue a game (by announcing the next expansion before this one is live) or devalue the company's biggest hype machine for all of their games?
I could be wrong. This isn't something I'd bet my life on. But I think Blizzard announcing something is the logical move for them to make.
GabeTorres asked:
How much gold will we get from Valor and Justice points, and will I be better off spending my Justice points now or holding them for conversion? If I should spend them, what do I spend them on?
I believe the conversion rate is 35 silver per point. If you're maxed on points, that's a pretty decent chunk of change, but mindblowing. If you want to get gear with those points, you might as well. You can always spend them on heirlooms. You never know when you'll want a new alt.
Loco asked:
Pet battle in WOD question: There was talk about the players being able to breed battle pets. Any news on that front?
It got canned. Not happening.
Alibarem asked:
If you could turn any major Alliance character into a new major Forsaken character, who would it be and how would they adapt to undeath?
I'm going to take an Alliance cop-out answer and say how about you give us some of your guys before you take more of our guys?
zengarzombolt11 asked:
How do you think Azeroth will look like if we (the adventurers) lost every major fight since vanilla? like we failed to stop Ragnaros, Hakkar,illidan all the way to MoP last raid
I'm pretty sure the train would end at Ragnaros if we had a losing streak. Ragnaros defeats us, turns Azeroth into molten slag, Algalon hits the reset button up in Ulduar, credits roll.
RustinMeek asked:
Can you explain why the buff for high lvl toons was put in place for old content? If anything I feel that the content should scale UP. I mainly do old content and I find it substantially more fun if it is difficult. Taking 2 or 3 guildies and making an old cont run is my favorite thing to do.
Old content isn't really supposed to be challenging. That's just not Blizzard's philosophy. When it's done, it's done, and the general intention is that you should be able to faceroll it. And the older it is, the easier it should be. It's cool that you find some of it difficult, but unfortunately, that's not how Blizzard handles that kind of thing.
Simply, it was easier to implement something where you deal significantly more damage to things lower level than you are than it was to go back and retune every single mob and encounter in the game. They would effectively have needed to redesign every encounter ever. They'd need to calculate new health and damage for everything, from vanilla WoW up through Mists of Pandaria. It's easy to write it off as Blizzard being lazy, but asking them to do that probably wouldn't be reasonable. It's just plain easier to maybe scale it down to a certain percentage, if they scale at all, and let you blow it all up.
PeterAnargirou asked:
I hear a lot about how great the new models are, but I still have my doubts. Is it just when you're zoomed in close with the camera facing the front of the models? Can you see an increase when you're zoomed out all the way and facing away from the camera? Just curious!
The models are completely different. Even if your camera is pulled as far back as possible and you're wearing hideous, low-res armor from vanilla WoW, you'll notice a difference. The animations have all been redone and are much smoother. The run animations are different. The hair is different. It isn't just a matter of a prettier face.
Fizzl asked:
Is there any video game soundtrack/song out there that really gets you in the feels for one reason or another?
Bastion!
Chrth asked:
Did anybody watch Gotham last night? What did you think?
I didn't watch Gotham, but I'm using your question as an excuse to say Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season 2, heck yeah!
ralos asked:
Wait so we get the new models in 6.02?
Yes.
Jimmy asked:
Are there any bottle-neck type quest (MoP starting area Alliance) at the beginning of WoD? This will be the first time we start out an expansion with the new connected servers and I can see the problem of bottle-necks being and even bigger problem with the new bigger servers.
Unless they've implemented some variety of phasing (and I don't think they have), the entire intro sequence is likely to be a painful bottleneck. The opening stretch in Tanaan Jungle has on-rails hallway syndrome where you're packed into a very limited space. Afterwards, when you go to start your garrison, you'll have to compete with everyone else on your faction for a very limited number of mobs. They may have tinkered with spawnrates since I last did those quests, but ... yeah. It was bad.
Devin asked:
9 minutes and not a single comment? What's going on here?
It happens, man. It creeps me out.
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