The Queue: Begone, tornado

Welcome back to The Queue, our daily Q&A feature for all of Blizzard’s games! Have a question for the Blizzard Watch staff? Leave it in the comments!

Hunters can equip staves, so yes!

Set bonuses on older tiers of gear have all been disabled, yes. It makes me sad, because busting those out in Timewalking was a lot of fun … but the devs don’t seem to want you doing that. Min/maxing for Timewalking is against the spirit of the thing, I guess. You can still use the sets and old legendaries and all of that, it’s just set bonuses going away.

More importantly, though, many of the set bonuses broke naturally as classes experienced changes and redesigns, particularly those coming in Legion. What happens to a set bonus where the spell it modified has been removed from the game? Or changed to have a different function altogether? Is it reasonable to expect Blizzard to revisit and rebalance the set bonuses on every tier of gear from tier 1 onward every time they make class changes? Not really. Outright disabling set bonuses is probably the safer method of ensuring nothing goes horribly wrong.

Doesn’t seem that way, no. However, I don’t expect revisiting those places will be worthwhile unless you’re specifically trying to craft something from Warlords of Draenor. The raw materials aren’t worth much, and in the time invested in the picking-and-mining, you could probably take your level 110 out to the Broken Isles and complete a World Quest which will provide better gold. The truly effortless gold is all going away, though: gold garrison missions, the jewelcrafting daily, and so on.

And heck, I say if you can actually make profit on Warlords crafting materials in future expansions, I say congratulations. I earn more on Copper Ore from the base game than I do on ore from Burning Crusade onward. I think Copper Ore is worth more than True Iron Ore right now.

My new wake-up time is 5 a.m. and that’s one hell of a change for a guy who used to go to bed at 5 a.m. Being a responsible adult is hard. Especially when you’re nocturnal.

I wouldn’t be opposed to the devs doing this, but if I had a choice in the matter, I’d rather they didn’t. I’m still waiting for an opportunity to fix the mess Cataclysm left behind. I don’t mean “mess” in terms of gameplay, but rather the game world. Why is there still a magic tornado in Westfall and Darkshore? Can we shut up that volcano in Ashenvale yet? Can the things which are on fire stop being on fire?

Azeroth was a very pretty place, but many zones are an eyesore now after Cataclysm had its way with them. I wouldn’t want to add random splotches of fel green to it. Give players a broom and a mop so we can clean up before the mess gets any worse.

Demon Hunters won’t get early access to the Broken Isles, no. You’ll be able to create them in the pre-patch, play through the Demon Hunter intro experience, but other than that, they’re stuck waiting with everyone else. Giving them early access to the Broken Isles would be silly; everyone would roll a Demon Hunter to play the expansion early.