The Queue: Worgen druids don’t seem to sniffle

Getting into the questions fast for this edition of The Queue. Why? Because druids.

To answer this question, I logged onto my worgen druid, and I immediately parked him somewhere and waited. Past the twenty minute mark in kitty form, he didn’t sniffle. He did sniffle in worgen form, though. So based on my small sample size experiment, they don’t seem to sniffle.

It’s theoretically possible and I’ve learned never to say never when Blizzard is concerned, because transmog, dual spec, blood elf warriors and no flying in Draenor so far all exist to prove me wrong, but I don’t expect to see that in WoW. The MMO loot dynamic is so ingrained as a progression method in World of Warcraft that I really can’t imagine them doing something like this, even if it was decoupled from raiding – players would feel like they got weaker inside a raid instance, and that’s just not something I imagine the designers would think felt like good design. And adding AA or paragon to WoW is basically just adding more levels, and it would lead to some ridiculously powerful level 1 alts compared to level 1 mains if the Diablo system was used. I see a lot of problems with the idea, but again, I’ve learned never to rule anything out.

I think they have changed it, repeatedly, over the course of the game’s existence. There’s a fundamental similarity between how the game fought in 2004 and how it fights now, that’s an undeniable fact. But if you took someone who was playing WoW in 2004 and snatched them forward in time eleven years to play the game now I’m fairly certain they’d be pointing out all the stuff that’s changed over the years.

I don’t think we’re ever going to see WoW adding, as an example, a duck and roll combat mechanic, or forcing us to push a button instead of autoattacking, or making all ranged abilities require you to aim using the mouse, or what have you. WoW‘s familiarity is what allows players who unsubbed in the past to come back and pick up where they left off and it’s been cited as a design principle for the game – they always want WoW to feel like WoW. But yes, there will be incremental changes that do change how combat works.

I’m assuming you mean what would I, Matthew Rossi, do if I had three hours in Azeroth. Azeroth, a world where I know for a fact that a thousand mawed tentacle monster lives beneath the ground, where a gigantic dragon once destroyed half the world just because he could, where at any moment a zombie plague could erupt from grain scattered around (Half of the largest human kingdom in existence was turned into walking corpses, in fact), where…

Dude, you want to know what I’d do with three hours in Azeroth?

I’d hide.

I like Tormmok because he says things like “Give me troops and I will conquer the Gorian Empire for you” and man, I wish I could give him those troops. I like Blook just because he’s a big ol’ palooka (Hi, beater boss), I like Defender Illona (I like all my draenei followers, just cause we’re draenei bros together) and I like giving Admiral Taylor grief about how I had to keep saving him over and over again. Then I feel bad.

Sure. It’s not like they cared, they were dead.

Honestly, I like the theory that Lana’thel had just finished pulling them through a portal and into the room you fight them in when you show up. It explains why they had those three portals to the various places you killed those jerks in the first place.

As to why neither Arthas nor Lana’thel seemed particularly in a hurry about it, well, Arthas probably considered them failures, just more evidence of your raid group’s superiority as minions. And Lana’thel couldn’t well work against the Lich King openly, so bringing the three back to ‘unlife’ may have had to wait until she had no choice.

Or maybe she didn’t give a toss about them either.

Here are some answers I’m basing purely on my own personal experience.

First off, it was the most accessible raid of The Burning Crusade – you could run it with ten people, and they didn’t have to be particularly well geared, unlike Zul’Aman, which demanded you be at least as geared as you needed to run TK/SSC. If you wanted to do bear runs, you needed to be geared from TK/SSC at a minimum, and most people I knew going for bears were in Black Temple/Hyjal gear. Meanwhile, not only was Kara far more forgiving in terms of gear you needed to run it, once they put Badges of Justice on the bosses running Kara was a great way to farm up badges for your alts to get geared, so everybody ran the place. Sometimes multiple times.

Unlike other raids, familiarity doesn’t seem to have bred contempt for Kara. I think part of this is because of its unique layout – we still haven’t seen another raid that gives you the feeling of climbing up a tower, much less the weird distorted geography of the zone. Some of the most iconic loot of the expansion dropped in Kara (Gorehowl, for one) and the interior design, music, even little touches like getting to talk to Mayor Ebonlocke’s father all helped give you the feeling that Karazhan was a place that existed, that it had a history before you got there and it would after you left.

The boss fights varied in complexity but they were good introductory fights, the kind of fights the first raid you get to do in an expansion should have.

I definitely think Karazhan benefited from being the first real raid a lot of players got to do. I was a veteran of vanilla raiding, so for me Kara felt a little easy – I’d come out of Naxx 40, tuned ludicrously tightly, and for me a 10 man raid was how you cleared UBRS. But for a lot of players, Kara was raiding, it was the first raid they every managed to get enough people together to clear, and its thanks to Kara that we have flex raiding now.

It definitely wasn’t the attunement, though. Attunements are garbage.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. This prehistoric crocodylomorph is pretty awesome, thank you for pointing it out, DespicableBrad. Leave lots of questions for Anne please.