The Queue: Let’s make some happy trees

Welcome back to The Queue, the Q&A column for all things Blizzard related. If you have a question for the Queue, leave a comment and you may see it answered!

Does anyone else kind of wish clicking the easel opened some kind of MS Paint interface in which we could paint our own garrison artwork? No? Maybe? …you’re right, we’d probably end up with a lot of really tasteless “art” screenshots flying around.

You can’t actually kill Arthas before his long-winded speech, to my knowledge — he’ll hit 1% and refuse to die until he’s done his little song and dance. What’s really funny is that due to scaling changes, his instant-death doesn’t actually kill you. Or at least it didn’t kill me on my rogue. This left me free to sit there and stab him while he and Tirion shared their moment of chitchat, although it didn’t actually do anything to him until the scene finished playing out.

Due to scheduling conflicts, the Diablo stream was cancelled. We’re still looking at the possibility of adding more streaming and video content in the future, however!

Because both owners of Blizzard Watch live in the Central Time Zone, so they have decreed it as such. Meanwhile, I will continue to sit here and write from Mountain Time, a.k.a. The Time Zone America Largely Forgets About.

Currently the only real Alliance/Horde interaction we’re getting is in Ashran, in which both sides are incredibly paranoid about some kind of super powerful artifact that apparently has no real impact on what’s really going on on Draenor, since we haven’t really done anything with it or about it other than fight each other. Which makes very little sense, given the lessons we were supposed to have learned coming out of Pandaria.

So yeah, it would be kind of nice to see more interaction between the Alliance and Horde — real interaction, because the threat that the Iron Horde poses is supposed to be a threat to all Azeroth. In expansions past, this meant working together in some capacity or another, and we haven’t really seen any evidence of that at all this time around. Given that we’ve all crashed through the Dark Portal on this supposed suicide mission, you’d think we’d … stick together or something. Or at least meet up at some point and consult about what to do next. This should be one of those threats that sits above and beyond petty factional conflict, and yet it doesn’t seem to warrant that as far as anyone involved is concerned.

Blade’s Edge is actually a combination of Gorgrond and Frostfire Ridge. If you ride through Frostfire, you’ll note that a lot of the canyons have those spiky rock formations that Blade’s Edge is famous for. It can be presumed that a large, large chunk of Gorgrond was blown away or collapsed into the Twisting Nether, along with a large portion of Frostfire. Keep in mind that the land didn’t just break away — it moved, shifted, broke apart, pulled together, changed elevations … Ner’zhul really did a number to the planet.

I’m not exactly unhappy about it, but I kind of have mixed feelings about it. Sure, we can use our flying mounts as ground mounts now, but most flying mounts are so big that running along on the ground with them takes up a good chunk of your screen. Riding up to a NPC almost guarantees that you’ll be standing on top of them before you can speak to them.

I think what I’d like to see is a reversal of how flying zones have worked in the past. Typically, in prior expansions, we can fly all over the main map, and then there are a few smaller zones (Isle of Quel’Danas, Timeless Isle, Isle of Thunder) that are designed with no flying in mind, and flying mounts are disabled. I find myself wondering what would happen if the majority of the world were ground-mount only, and instead we had a few specific zones or hubs that were designed around the concept of being able to fly. What would that look like, and how would you make that a viable zone to play in, that sort of thing. Vashj’ir kind of works off of this principle — when you hit the space bar in Vashj’ir, you’re technically flying. That’s part of the reason I enjoyed Vash’jir, I think, and Deepholm as well to a degree, because bases and quest locations are on different elevations. You have to be able to fly to experience those zones.

It might be a happy medium, I don’t know. I just kind of hate the idea that all these flying mounts I worked so hard to obtain over the years might not actually be able to function the way they were intended to be used, in newer content.

That’s it for today’s Queue — if you have any questions you’d like to see answered, be sure to leave them in the comments below!