The Queue: Barbarian is best class

What can I tell you? I like Diablo III’s barbarian class.

This is the Queue, Blizzard Watch’s place for questions and discussion of all the various colors on the Blizzard rainbow of games. Let us do that.

Honestly, I barely knew what was going on when I watched the Heroes of the Dorm tournament after the fact, but people seemed excited and you can follow the actual play pretty easily. As someone who doesn’t actually watch a lot of streams or anything like that, I thought it was pretty entertaining.

Guys, I’m not trying to get the Queue to change, and I do read the comments every time I write a new Queue. We all do. The community you find at Blizzard Watch (that is to say, you) is the biggest reason this site even exists. We know it, we’re thrilled y’all care enough to come and play in our sandbox and support our efforts. All I was saying was that sometimes, after going through the comments, it’s nice to have a means to get some directed questions on days when that isn’t easy to find. Like, as an example, on days when there’s an enormous discussion of dapperness in the comments of the Queue.

The fact is, not all of us have similar interests. For instance, I’m really not the best person to ask about, say, why they’re nerfing WW monks even though they’re already kind of low DPS. But it’s certainly a good question, and I’m willing to look into it if it’s asked. (For the record, I don’t currently have an answer to that one, I’m honestly not sure why they would nerf WW instead of, say, buffing warriors.)

Also, I personally try not to use more than one question from the same commenter in a specific Queue – while sometimes I don’t feel like I have a choice, in general I want everyone to feel like they have a chance to get a question in there.

But please, don’t feel like we don’t want you to be yourselves here. That’s what helps make the site unique.

Someone might be. I’m not. I love my draenei warrior and his shoulder armor.

I just love those things to death. Love love love.

Also, I gotta say, considering the draenei were the victims of genocide, I’m really uncomfortable calling them ‘the master race’ even with my tongue firmly in cheek and knowing they’re fictional. That’s eredar talk. Or blood elves, but who could honestly be bothered to care what blood elves have to say about anything, ever?

I’m not defending the mana bombing of Theramore, but whether or not you believe it was a war crime, the reason Garrosh did it wasn’t simply to twirl his mustache and be evil. Throughout Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria we get a sense of Garrosh Hellscream as an unconventional tactician. We see him using rare beasts from Northrend in the novel Wolfheart, we see him enlisting previously hostile, outright anti-Horde forces like the Blackrock and Dragonmaw clans, and his use of weapons like the mana bomb and the Divine Bell (and later, the Heart of Y’Shaarj) show that Garrosh likes to go for the surprise knockout punch – get your enemies committed to an action and then spring the trap on them.

At Theramore, he intended to get the Alliance to commit their forces (including, but not limited to, their best military leaders as well as their troops) to the city’s defense and then wipe them out in one act, which if successful would have been devastating to the Alliance’s ability to wage further war on Kalimdor.

This tendency is one of Garrosh’s strengths, but it’s also a weakness, and it’s one of the reasons I like him as a character – he’s a smart, talented military leader with a big flaw that he refuses to see or correct, and it keeps getting him into trouble. The problem with always going for the surprise knockout comes when your opponent knows you do that, and you try it anyway.

As to whether or not it was a war crime or a justified attack on a military target, ask twenty people, get forty opinions. I totally admit to being more on the side of the Alliance than the Horde in terms of how the lore went in Cata and Mists – it made it hard for me to play my tauren, to be honest.

If you were watching the leveling stream this week, though, you got to see Anne’s response when we got to the end of Stonetalon and she realized that everything we did while leveling as Alliance in that zone was just a set-up for the Horde to come in and blow up the place anyway. If you leveled through Cataclysm content as Horde, you don’t really get how Theramore fits into that 1 to 60 Cata revamp, how it feels like yet another defeat in a series of defeats. A brutal, demoralizing loss of a well known city that many players leveled through and remembered fondly.

And since Anne’s up tomorrow, you should totally ask her about that.

I literally have no response to this aside from a four letter expletive followed by the word yes in all caps. Then I dance around for a while, and then I sit down and start daydreaming about founding the Draenor Paleontological Museum, filled with fossils and remains of various Draenish animals. Come trace the evolution of the Magnaron to Gronn to Ogron to Ogres! Where do orcs come from, are they the gnomes of Draenor? (Think about it, they’re way smaller than the ogron or ogres) I would be so into this idea, I’m imagining a huge display with Mannoroth’s skeleton in it and everything.

Yes. A thousand times yes. Museums. Make it happen, Blizzard.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. Anne’s up tomorrow, remember to ask her about Stonetalon.