Filed under: 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 will be your host today.

Yesterday was the huge Patch 5.4 infodump. Today, I'm going to see Man of Steel. So I'm all sorts of freaking out right now. Let's talk about WoW before I spin out of control and just start talking about Kryptonian Thought Beasts and the Jeweled Mountains of Krypton and Kandor and oh my Rao tonight is Man of Steel I am freaking out here.

And yes, a Thought-Beast was a big dinosaur looking monster with a screen on its forehead that showed you what it was thinking. In this case, it was thinking I want to eat that guy.. I don't know what possible evolutionary benefit that is, but there you go. Since a lot of these questions are about patch 5.4, expect many spoilers.

Thieren asks:
Any info on the Stromgarde Keep scenario that people are now talking about?
Please say it's true!

Anne covered the little we know about the Scenario in this post yesterday. All we know is that it exists, basically. Is it going to be the Alliance reclaiming it, the Horde taking it over, something else? We have no idea yet.

• Patch 5.4 PTR patch notes
• Virtual Realms announced
• Datamined NPC, mount and pet models
• Moonfang, a new dire wolf boss for the Darkmoon Faire
• Ilvl restrictions lifted for item enhancements
• Siege of Orgrimmar's dungeon journal entries
• New pets and a new pet battle tournament
• Stromgarde Keep as a new scenario
• New Challenge Mode titles
• Proposed initial ilvl changes for new raid difficulties

Stay tuned for more patch 5.4 information, and keep your eyes peeled for the PTR.

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5.4 ilevels aren't finalized but we're thinking something like 528 LFR, 536 Flex, 553 Normal, 566 Heroic.

- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) June 12, 2013

Do note, first and foremost, that these numbers are not finalized. They should be taken with a very large pinch of salt, and are subject to considerable change. The PTR isn't even live at the time of writing this post, so let's not get ahead of ourselves and proclaim the end of days for raiding.

So let's look at the current item levels. Raid finder drops 502, normal mode 522, normal thunderforged 528, heroic mode, 535, heroic thunderforged 541. So, the gap between normal mode and LFR has been widened, from 20 to 25, with Flex sitting 17 levels lower than normal mode. The gaps above that are the same, but there's been no mention of something like Thunderforged gear.

For heroic geared raiders, Flex seems like a logical difficulty at these levels, but there will be some theorycrafting that needs to be done to ascertain whether the new tier's potentially lower-level drops will outdo their current gear thanks to set bonuses, trinkets and the like. What this ilvl distribution seems to be saying is that heroic-geared raiders shouldn't need to run LFR at all. But, this is all subject to change.

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I don't think this even needs to be said, but huge huge spoilers ahoy.

With patch 5.4 going on the PTR with the quickness, we're starting to see just who, exactly, we're going to be fighting in the Siege of Orgrimmar raid, and it's definitely not as straightforward as we might have thought. With the folks at Wowhead having the zone page and Dungeon Journal information up, we can take a look at what's to come. Be warned, there are spoilers for the upcoming raid in plenty past this link. If you don't want to know what the bosses will be in this raid, then do not read past this point.

Okay, now that they're gone, let's gorge on what we can discover.

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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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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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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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• Flex raiding, which we've already been introduced to.
• Proving Grounds will finally be making its debut in patch 5.4
• New Feature: Virtual Realms. Virtual realms are sets of realms that have been fused together and will behave exactly as if they were one cohesive realm. Say what? You heard me!

• In the Throne of Thunder, Lei Shen will now always drop a Titan Runestone or Secrets of the Empire for players on the legendary quest line.
• Hey hunters! Arcane Shot, Cobra Shot and Steady Shot will all deal 10% more damage after that realm restart.
• Durumu and his minions have got us all figured out. Elixirs of Detect Invisibility will no longer allow players to see fog beasts while they are invisible.

Read on for the full list of hotfixes.

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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Every week, WoW Insider brings you Blood Pact for affliction, demonology, and destruction warlocks. This week, Megan O'Neill .

Karazhan: the most beloved of retro raids. Players may put on the rose-colored glasses when they talk of how limited raiding was back in the Vanilla days, but Karazhan is often talked of with fondness. Going back is a pleasure, not a painful memory. It's with good reason -- the place is built like a castle tower, going up and up forever, and it's full of memorable mobs and scenery.

Karazhan also has some of the tier 4 Voidheart Raiment for warlocks, as well as a mount and now pets for everyone, so it's a weekly favorite of mine to visit.

WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make gold on the Auction House. Check out Basil's gold making podcast, Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

I hear this all the time: "Every time I post anything, someone undercuts me within minutes." Luckily, there's a relatively simple solution to dealing with undercutters: ignore them. You don't ignore them hoping they go away, you ignore them because they aren't actually going to prevent you from selling your auctions.

Think back to the last time you bought something from the Auction House; let's say an enchant. You search for the best enchant you can put onto the gear. If the lowest price is affordable, you buy it. If it feels too expensive (compared to what you've paid before or what you know the materials cost), you might buy the mats and ask friends or trade chat for someone to make it for you. You might instead look at the second best enchant for the gear if it's something you won't be wearing for long or you're not expected to always use best-in-slot enchants.