The Queue: Let’s return to this Karazhan instead

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!

Yeah, I feel this. And actually, I did a lot of those quests without mounting up because it seemed like I shouldn’t be able to, given the situation. Now that my warrior is sufficiently geared that she can take on a ton of mobs in Suramar at once, though, I recklessly charge through the city on a horse. I kind of imagine her screaming expletives at the demons as she rides past, daring them to pick a fight. “Bring it, &*^%@!”

It’s immersive in its own way.

It’s really not too late to swap artifacts on your Demon Hunter if you want to. Every additional trait becomes immensely more expensive than the one before it. At certain points, you can get a second artifact completely caught up to your first with the same (or less) artifact power than it would require to get another trait in the first. My Warrior’s Arms and Protection artifacts are both sitting at 17 points. I tank dungeons with Protection, I do all of my solo activities as Arms. I feel pretty good about that split. And as your Artifact Knowledge ramps up, it only gets easier to boost alternative artifacts.

The world always needs more tanks and healers, so having a healer is a pretty good choice, too. The only healer I have experience with this expansion is a Holy Priest, so I couldn’t tell ya what Resto Druids are like in Legion.

I haven’t had many (any?) wipes yet this expansion, but Serpentrix often comes close. If it isn’t the trash, it’s people letting all of the extra wormy heads do their fire thing, with everyone so spread out the healer can’t get everyone at once. The unexpectedly troublesome boss in my groups is Hyrja in Halls of Valor. If I’m not the one tanking, the tank never moves her in and out of the beams to drop her stacking buffs, meaning everyone is taking tons of damage. If I’m the one tanking, I move her to drop the buffs, and my group asks me why the hell I’m moving the boss so much. Hyrja has no trash, but it’s the same idea: People totally ignoring the boss and its surroundings.

I’ve always believed players just want content, regardless of whether it’s an expansion or a content patch. Players were clamoring for yearly expansions simply because that was how Blizzard’s release cycle worked for WoW: A year of content patches, then the game went dead for another full year. The idea, and the hope, was Blizzard could lop off that year of nothingness, and we’d happily pay another $40-$50 each to eliminate it. If we get two years of solid content patches instead, that’s great. If they abandon the live game for a year straight again at some point, yeah, people will riot. And Legion‘s momentum will be lost.

Whether or not Legion will go beyond two years, I have no idea. It might. It might not. It’s impossible to say.

Blizzard hasn’t discussed these very much, so all I have to go on is what little I saw of them in beta. Blizzard hasn’t even stated when these guys will show up in the game world. However, I assume they’ll show up when raids open up next week. If I remember beta correctly, the world bosses rotate one per week and you’ll get a World Quest asking you to go kill them, and that World Quest has a week-long duration. So … one per lockout starting next Tuesday is my guess.

Check your talents for any cleave/splash/AOE damage you might not know you have. Legion added splash effects to a great many talents, including spells where you might not expect it. Alternatively, there may be someone in your area with such spells/talents. Hunters in particular seem to love running all over the place, hitting Barrage as often as they can to tap anything and everything.

I don’t think Blizzard is hyping it so much as they had to announce it so it could go on the PTR. The PTR itself isn’t hype. They want to test the patch. They can either announce it and start testing, or they can wait another 2-3 months for the expansion to simmer, then announce it, then get it on the PTR, then test it for the 2-3 months they need for development. That means the patch releases 4-6 months after launch instead of 2-3 months after launch. 2-3 months between patches is reasonable. 4-6 months between content releases is miserable.

Sure, they’ve announced patch 7.1 and put it on the PTR, but we might not see it on live realms until after BlizzCon or even later than that. I don’t think that’s too fast at all, personally.