Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Matthew Rossi will be your host today.

So yeah, I was hoping to go to bed when patch 5.4 news dropped and I ended up being awake for hours working on posts about it. I may be ludicrously groggy right now. Anyway, best news of patch 5.4 is Titan's Grip for polearms wooo! There's other stuff ... proving grounds, flex raiding, virtual realms, something in Orgrimmar ... but all of that pales compared to the majesty of TG with polearms. Many warriors will now twirl our way to greatness.

Since none of you knew that 5.4 would drop on the PTR when you were commenting in yesterday's Queue, most of your questions won't be about it. That's okay, it happens. As a result, we're lucky that folks on Twitter never sleep.

@AlternativeChat asks on Twitter:
Chances of mail across Virtual Servers? So you can finally send Heirlooms?

It looks pretty good, considering you can join a guild across them, use a shared AH across them, and do dungeons and raids (and no word of limits on that) across them. I would be very surprised if you couldn't mail across them. We'll see, though. The patch notes don't say yet.

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Filed under: The Queue

We mentioned them last night while covering the surprises of patch 5.4, so now I roll around to you this morning. Did you see virtual realms coming? Do you like or hate them? Are they a cool way to avoid forcing players to worry about name changes and server moves or are they just a half step that needs to go further?

Personally I'm really interested because with this, the day comes ever closer that I could pug any raid with any friend I have of the same faction. It's a change I never expected to see, and one I'm very interested in watching. If this eventually leads to, say, one North American virtual realm for all players, I might be okay with that.

But enough about me. This is about you. What do you think? Let us know, we're keen to hear it. Patch 5.4 definitely isn't afraid to shake up the status quo so far.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, Breakfast Topics, Mists of Pandaria

Patch 5.4 already? When they said patches would be coming more frequently they were not kidding - we've only been in patch 5.3 for a month or so and patch 5.4 is already on the PTR. And it is packed with new features, some of which we've been waiting for all expansion, like the long discussed proving grounds.

Rygarius - Patch 5.4 Coming Soon!

New Feature: Proving Grounds

• Proving Grounds is a new feature for individual players to test and improve their combat skills.
• At the Proving Grounds, players may undertake trials, designed for Damage, Tank, or Healer roles.
• It provides a great opportunity to learn how to Tank or Heal, without the need of a group.
• Each trial is available in four separate difficulties: Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Endless. Harder difficulties include more difficult and varied enemies.
• Endless mode allows you to test your mettle against increasingly difficult enemies. Compare your best scores to friends and guildmates!
• [PTR]: Access to the Proving Grounds and more information is coming soon.

source

While we still don't know quite a lot (like what form these will take, whether they'll be in their own location like Brawler's Guild or queued for like scenarios) we do know they're currently planned for 5.4, they'll allow for DPS, tanks or healers to face solo challenges to improve in their chosen role and they'll have multiple difficulty levels. This has been a feature long anticipated and requested, so I for one can't wait to see how it is implemented.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, News items, Mists of Pandaria

What, you may ask, are virtual realms? Well, they're a very interesting new feature (and if you choose, you can pretend they're the new feature Ghostcrawler mentioned for 5.4) that will have quite an impact on how we play the game. To quote the patch notes:

Rygarius - Patch 5.4 Coming Soon!

Virtual Realms are sets of realms that are fused together, and will behave exactly as if they were one cohesive realm. Players on the same Virtual Realm will be able to join guilds, access a single Auction House, join arena teams and raids, as well run dungeons or group up to complete quests.

source

This is basically the first step in the creation of a unified, single realm across whole regions of World of Warcraft. Similar in concept to a PvP Battlegroup, this basically allows you to treat players from other realms in the shared virtual realm as if they were on your selfsame realm, including all the benefits of guilding, grouping and raiding.; This is an enormous game changer, and I admit, I don't think I ever expected to see it happen. For guilds on low pop servers, this drastically increases the potential player base that you can recruit, for just one potential benefit.

Do remember, however, that this is the PTR. As Ghostcrawler says:

Take data-mining and even PTR itself with a grain of salt. PTR is our Petri dish and not every experiment works.

- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) June 12, 2013

Stay tuned for more news -- this is definitely an exciting change.

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Filed under: Guilds, Blizzard, News items, Raiding, Mists of Pandaria

No one likes high latency, least of all someone playing an MMO that can demand reaction time the way World of Warcraft can, especially in raids. But even out in the world, latency can be a killer. So when people started reporting issues with connections to World of Warcraft soon after patch 5.3 launched, it got a lot of players noticing. In a six page forum thread there's been a lot of lively discussion of what's going on - whether it's on Blizzard's end, or somewhere between the computers of the affected players and the Blizzard servers. If you remember the Lagpocalypse post, you know how complicated these issues can get.

MVP forum poster Lissanna posted an interesting walkthrough of her own attempts to find the culprit today, and explained why despite some forum poster dissatisfaction that it is indeed helpful to run a traceroute and pathping and post the results to the tech support forums, since it gives Blizzard an idea of who to talk to about these issues. If they don't know who's being affected, where those people are, and more importantly where the issue is physically located there's not much they can do to help.

So if you're having the same problem, giving Blizzard as much information as possible is definitely helpful in terms of getting this sorted out. I've seen people in my raids disconnect on every single boss so far while I haven't had the issue at all myself, suggesting the problem isn't on Blizzard's end but is out there somewhere in the path the data takes between Blizzard and the players. Hopefully it can be solved soon.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Bugs, Blizzard, News items, Mists of Pandaria

With the introduction of flexible raiding a certain conversation is cropping up again. It's a conversation about raid lockouts. Back when LFR was first introduced during Dragon Soul, quite a few players began to argue that they felt forced to run LFR in addition to the raid itself. Then, as we moved into Mists of Pandaria raiding, this discussion intensified. I had my own opinion on the issue, which was basically that no, raid finder should not share a lockout with normal mode raiding. Luckily, Blizzard didn't do that, coming up with other ways to reduce LFR's desirability for people who run normal/heroic raids.

Now, with flexible raiding, the argument that it should share a lockout with normal/heroic raids is being resurrected because again players are afraid they will be forced to run it. I'm opposed to this idea for a variety of reasons.

1. Sharing the lockout between flexible raiding and normal/heroic raiding means that if you choose to step down to flex for a night because you were short people, you'll either be locked into flex or you'll need to be able to switch back and forth between them. Either players will be punished for going flex, or they'll be using it to bypass encounters that are 'too hard' on normal. This isn't meant to be a means to game raid difficulty.
2. Sharing the lockout between 10 and 25 man raiding nearly killed 25 man raiding. A shared lockout between flexible raiding and normal raids would probably be enough to finish the job, because as 25 man guilds lost members and made use of the flexible raid to keep running, there would be very little incentive to recruit and less incentive for new players to join.
3. Flex raiding is being rolled out to test the waters - we have no idea how the final implementation will shake out. Burdening it with a shared lockout adds a further complication which isn't needed at this time. For all we know, flexible raiding will be how all raids work in the next expansion. Even if it isn't, we need to give it time before we make it jump through more hoops.
4. People need to stop begging Blizzard to keep them from playing the game.

Number five is probably the most controversial point, and it's also the most important to my eyes. I don't know where certain players came up with this idea that Blizzard needs to save them from doing things but it needs to stop. If you're not in a guild that's pushing content in the first week or two of its existence, you will not need to run flexible raids for gear to push that content faster any more than you need to run LFR for that.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, News items, Raiding, Mists of Pandaria

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

In the past few weeks I've talked about warrior survivability concerns and our problems with itemization and that's got me thinking: what are the solutions? Now, I'm not a dev nor even playing one on TV, I'm basically just a fan of the game, but that doesn't stop me from thinking about these things. It's easy to complain about issues, after all, but harder to discuss meaningful solutions. So I've decided to do just that, since the comments alone are usually worth the price of admission in cases like that.

The main concerns I'll be discussing are as follows:

1. DPS warrior survivability in PvE
2. The rapid decline of Arms warriors in PvP (Cynwise's recent class distribution numbers went a lot more in depth than my own class rep post, and it's convinced me the warrior decline in PvP is more meaningful than I first thought)
3. Warrior tanking issues (haste, overall DPS, our lack of 'cheese')

So what could we see that would help with these issues? What changes would be effective without being too effective?

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Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors

I love it when smart people say something I wish I'd said. Last year, I wrote this post about how the WoW community (especially active members of the community, such as forum posters) tends to assume that everyone plays the game the way they do. Now comes a much smarter, more analytical and thus more factual post from Taufmonster about engagement bias.

Hopefully I'll be forgiven for breaking it down - basically, the problem is that we make assumptions about WoW and its players based on the people we know and play with, assumptions that are not valid. To quote Taufmonster:

The people you see when you log into WoW, no matter which server you play on, do not comprise a representative sample of the people who play WoW.

That sentence might seem a bit surprising but I can assure you that it's 100% true. The primary culprit here is engagement bias, which is something you have to consider when you're analyzing a game-as-a-service, like WoW.

The analysis that follows is pretty fascinating, and I'll leave it for you to go read it yourself: it's well worth it even from the perspective of someone who doesn't do a lot of number crunching like myself. I especially liked the point about how you collect your information. That by sampling the readers of a site that's dedicated to World of Warcraft like MMO-Champion in his case, he's already selecting for players who are more engaged with the game. Since this is the first part of a series of posts, it's definitely worth paying attention to Taufmonster's Log for more installments as they come out.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Mists of Pandaria

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Matthew Rossi is the dark force behind a triptych folded cardboard sheet with a lot of tables printed on it today.

It's no secret that I spent a lot of time playing pen and paper RPG's. This is a story from one of those.

Friend of mine was running a Werewolf: The Apocalypse game, one of White Wolf's original "Noun: Definite Article Gerund" games. I actually liked both Werewolf and Mage: The Awakening, just because you could do some crazy stuff in these games. I turned an ancient vampire into a chair once! Paid for that one in paradox, whoo boy. Anyway, so we're at the table, all of us playing werewolves (as you do) and we've discovered that the mayor of the city is in league with the Wyrm (the game's ultimate antagonist, think Sargeras meets a Captain Planet villain) and has a host of Nexus Crawler minions waiting for us. One of our more (up to that point, anyway) meek and mild players is incensed with this betrayal and she says "I'll tear out his heart for this!"

The GM smirks and says "First you have to get past his private army of fomori."

She takes off her glasses, stands up straight and says with an actual growl "Put them in front of me."

And that, my friends, is why I love gaming. Put them in front of me. Let's get on with the show!

Slothcloctimus asks:

Question: Why is there not a third phase in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms? I love the first phase -- when you first enter and all the pandaren are coming in for the first time. It feels like you're part of something big. Then when you hit 90 and start the Golden Lotus quests, you get a second phase where you're holding off the Sha attacks and the mogu and everything. The dailies kind of dragged on, but I love how the story ended with the epic quest at the end. Then I turned the quest in, saved everything....and flew over the same bad guys still there on my way out.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Lore, The Queue, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

This week, while I was doing the WoW Insider podcast, we got a question about Rexxar. Now, if you know me, you know I love Rexxar. The question was, essentially, where is Rexxar and while there's a simple answer to it (he's in Blade's Edge) it's a bigger question than that. With Vol'jin getting the band back together, so to speak, with Chen and even Thrall and Baine taking part in the Darkspear Rebellion, why didn't he call in Rexxar? This is, in fact, the perfect time for Rexxar to show up and save the day in that gigantic brooding Mok'Nathal way he has of doing that.

Heck, Rexxar would be the perfect choice for a field commander of the rebellion, because as I pointed out before, Rexxar is the one guy who always believed in Thrall and Thrall's vision for the Horde even when Thrall didn't.

The orcs changed because one person said so. That person stands before you now as Warchief. Do you doubt him?

So where is Rexxar? Why is he still in Blade's Edge? If he could return to Orgrimmar to protect it from the Elemental Invasion, why isn't he in Razor Hill now, saving the Horde from bad leadership and bad intentions? Am I the only one who wants to see Garrosh throw down with Rexxar? And the Champion of the Horde isn't the only lore figure who has been conspicuously absent as the Alliance/Horde conflict heats up.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Lore, Know your Lore