Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com’s daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today.

For no discernable reason, the WoW.com Twitter account is asking who would win in a three-way grand melee between the Queue writers — Alex Ziebart, Adam Holisky, and me, the inimitable Mike Sacco. Whoever wins has to face Matthew Rossi in single combat, which, of course, means that they lose. So whoever wins, Rossi wins.

Before we all fall to the cruel burly forearms of Rossi, though, we can probably answer some reader questions. Or at least I can, given that it’s my day to do it.

Edge asked…

When a cross realm group wipes and has to get back to the instance from outside, which version of the “outside” are we in? What I mean is, outside the instance, are we all together on one of the servers, or does each person go back out to their own servers “outside” area, and then come back into the same instance? Or is this a whole new area just for these 5 particular people?

When you zone out of a cross-realm instance, the “outside” is your particular realm.

Read more »

Even the dungeons are getting into the spirit of the holiday season — as proven by this screenshot from Nexmors of <The Elites> on Nagrand (EU). So… what? How? Why? Well, I think I’ll just let Nexmors explain:

“When encountering Svala Sorrowgrave she bugged after the speech which meant no fighting could commence so we decided to take advantage of this by taking a festive screenshot.”

And, really, a nice cool, dark dungeon? It’s bound to be the perfect place to keep your snowmen safely frozen. Why we don’t see more snowmen dungeon crawling year ’round is quite the mystery.

Do you have any unusual, beautiful or interesting World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We’d love to see them on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@wow.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next!

Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. Please include the word “Azeroth” in your post so it does not get swept into the spam bin. We strongly prefer full screen shots without the UI showing — use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more battleground scoreboards, Val’kyr on mounts, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran. Older screenshots can be found here.

The dungeon finder tool that rolled out in Patch 3.3 has been a game-changer for most — if not all! — of us. Instead of waiting around to find the dungeon group you need, an ample supply of players eager to run the instance you need is only a few clicks away. With this new-found freedom to run any dungeon any time, a lot of the WoW.com team is out running dungeons all the time: gearing up, collecting gold, leveling alts, collecting tier 9, stocking up on emblems… Well, safe to say that no one’s quite sure how they lived without it. And looking forward to another weekend of chain-running dungeons, I don’t think anyone wants to find out, either.

For more of our exploits — and yours — in game this weekend, read on!

Read more »

We talked a few weeks ago about the ability bonuses exclusive to each profession. The idea behind this, of course, is that the majority of these bonuses are relatively equal to one another. If you’re a master of your profession, you can expect to receive about 80 Attack Power or 47 Spell Power. You could also pick up an additional 60 Stamina if you’re an Enchanter or a Miner.

These are the most common bonuses available to all the professions. However, there are a lot more stats in the game than just Spell Power, Attack Power, and Stamina. (Although, it’s a fairly reasonable argument that these are three “sexiest” stats in the game, since they tend to be the centerpiece of many e-peen arguments.)

Especially when you’re coming up in the ranks as a new character, there are other stats that are even more important. For example, Hit Rating is frequently regarded as a must have stat. If you’re not at the appropriate hit cap for your class, you can never achieve your maximum damage.

This is one of the ways Blacksmithing and Jewelcrafting really shine. These two stats have the ability to laser-focus manage exactly how your crafting bonus will buff your character. Let’s take a look behind the cut and start breaking down these two crafting abilities.

Read more »

It’s time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that loves nothing more than to gaze down upon the whole of Northrend from one of the floating chunks of stone around Dalaran and realize that at some point, a mage has probably killed every living thing down there. At least the targetable ones, anyway. And the ones you can’t target? I’m sure more than one mage has certainly tried.

So I’m officially nominating patch 3.3 for “best patch ever” status. Here’s a short list of the highlights of this patch:

• Three highly challenging, fun, lore-filled 5-man instances, full of sweet loot
• A massive new raid, with four gated sections, 12 bosses, and the promise of eventually being able to shove a Fireball up the Lich King’s tailpipe
• The incredible, game-changing Dungeon Finder Tool, which is responsible for peace in the Middle East, has brought an end to the recession, and has cured cancer
• A few choice mage buffs, including a PvE viable Frost spec
• Quest Tracking without the need for an addon
• Quel’delar and Shadowmourne
• A swiftly approaching new Arena Season
• Weekly raid quests
• The Kalu’ak Fishing Derby
• Perky the Pug
• A host of little changes for low level characters
• Rocket bare

Not shabby, right? And best of all, Blizzard has managed to deploy the majority of this new content without also deploying a host of bugs, glitches, and instability, or otherwise making the game unplayable for awhile as we’ve come to expect from patches this large. There were some log-in issues and bugginess on day one, but by day two, everything was running relatively smoothly by day two. I’m being relatively conservative when I say that Blizzard, in my personal opinion, has hit this one out of the park.

Read more »

Winterschill of Kirin Tor sent in this screenshot of the new leper gnome boss Krick in the Pit of Saron. Krick seems too terrified to be much of an effective fighter without his giant mount. This may be why there aren’t a whole lot of gnome bosses in this game. Or maybe Krick is upset because he looks like the end result of an unholy Saturday night liaison between a bottle of vodka and the random character generator.

Do you have any unusual, beautiful or interesting World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We’d love to see them on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@wow.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next!

Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. Please include the word “Azeroth” in your post so it does not get swept into the spam bin. We strongly prefer full screen shots without the UI showing — use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more battleground scoreboards, Val’kyr on mounts, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran. Older screenshots can be found here.

The story of the Culling of Stratholme is cool, the first time you do it. However after about the hundreth time it gets to be a bit much. And thanks to the random heroic dungeon finder, I practically have Arthas‘ speech memorized now; he and I yell in sync at the end of each run “To the ends of the earth!”

Be honest, I know you do, too.

What has to be the most requested feature of this dungeon — the ability to skip the long and repetitive story — isn’t coming anytime soon. When there was some discussion about this in the general forms earlier this week, Eyonix appeared and enlightened us as to Blizzard’s thoughts on the matter:

We agree, but unfortunately with the current tech/flagging that exists in regards to this — it’s just not possible for the game to recognize this sort of thing and allow for a bypass. It’s always a possibility for the future though.

So for the time being we’ll have to live with this, but at least Blizzard is on the same page with us all. And if the Trial of the Champion and Halls of Reflection instances tells us anything, it’s that Blizzard won’t be building dungeons without the ability to skip the story in the future — at least we hope so.

Zach is a Battlegrounds freak. Even if he doesn’t raid or quest or sell things at the auction house, he’ll make sure to get a small dose of Battlegrounds PvP to brighten up his day. You should, too. They’re like vitamins. Bloody, face-melting, honor-gaining, sword-clashing vitamins.

This little thing called patch 3.3 came out some time back, maybe you’d heard. I had planned it to be my return from an unintentionally self-imposed hiatus from hardcore play, considering that all the tools would now be in place to allow all players of all gear levels to catch up the the penultimate level of content. It was a good plan, except that a few things here and there kept me from jumping right into it when the Fall of the Lich King went live.

The new Dungeon Finder system is getting rave reviews from everyone who’s tried it. I think it’s an awesome tool — quite possibly one of the best things to happen to the game. The coolest thing about it for me is that the concept stemmed from the Battlegrounds! That’s right… the Battlegroup-wide grouping system is inspired by the way Battlegrounds get players from various realms from way back since Patch 1.12 in 2006. Who’d have thunk it, right? The rest of the PvE population getting something good — something really, really good — from the PvP aspect of the game.

Blizzard has been cleverly trying to sprinkle PvP elements into the PvE side of the game, such as the Princess Delrissa encounter in Magisters’ Terrace, and its more recent, scaled-up version, the Faction Champions in the Trial of the Crusader. If the message isn’t already clear, Blizzard is trying to make you like PvP. At any rate, this whole new PUG craze is a happy byproduct of the cross-realm Battleground system. The only difference is, in Battlegrounds, group composition isn’t as important.

Read more »