The Queue: I’d like to be a pirate

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!

You know I really like the way the Shipyard looks, but I kind of wish you could actually go into the ships and mess around. As it is, you can climb on top of them, but there’s no way to get into the interior that I can see. Unless I’m missing a door that isn’t sealed off. I sort of wish they’d opened them up, added some crew below quests, maybe a few little quests that gave you a reason to be down there. As it stands, it’s kind of like that not-quite-hideous vase that your great aunt gives you, the one you have to stick in the living room because it was a gift and it’d be rude not to, but it doesn’t serve any kind of real purpose beyond being something to stare at.

It sounds like a good idea to me, but I’m wondering how exactly they’d pull something like that off with a class like say, a rogue (look, I play one, I’ll fully admit I’m biased here), where there’s little opportunity to make the class visually distinct, much less the specializations. The only thing right now that really delineates a rogue as being a rogue is if they’re in stealth and you can’t see them. In raid encounters, it’s rare that you see any stealth happening at all, other than that first “I’m going to inch up right behind this boss and get to stabbing before anyone else hits this thing” shuffle. Trying to differentiate between Combat (stab it and poison it), Assassination (Uh…stab it and poison it more?), and Subtlety (stab it, but don’t be super obvious about the stabbing?) in some kind of visually distinct way seems like it’d be a hassle, to say the very least.

The Troll wars. I’d like to go back to the moment where the high elves allied with the humans and made that original deal to teach the human race magic. It’d be a logical thing for the Infinite Dragonflight to want to halt — stop or somehow sabotage that alliance, and poof, no human magic-users at all, ever. But it’d give us a look at the original human nation of Arathor, and the high elves, and what exactly went down during that pivotal moment of Azeroth’s history. Yes, I realize I’m suggesting another troll dungeon, but hey, this is an important one! And we haven’t had one in Warlords at all.

Look, they’re never going to kill Thrall. And if they do, for some weird reason, decide to kill Thrall, he’s not going to be a corrupted end boss of some expansion or another. If and when he goes out, it’ll be in a blaze of glory saving us all. Because Thrall is a “good guy,” he always has been, always will be.

I find this incredibly unlikely, because it would require Blizzard having to re-work every single piece of armor they have ever made in game in order to fit it correctly on a Naga model. And I think that’s a slightly larger undertaking than that whole “Let’s re-vamp every vanilla zone ever” feat that they pulled off in Cataclysm. If they introduced Naga models and just didn’t bother updating old tier sets and old gear, nothing would look right.

Logically, it probably wouldn’t have been delivered while we were out in the wild establishing our garrisons — that’s just one of those things you overlook as a roleplayer. Once the garrisons were established and we had Ashran with portals to each major city, I could see couriers being sent back and forth to deliver correspondence, with all mail being delivered via the Ashran hub. But honestly, it’s just not something roleplayers tend to think about — mail is mail, it’s more often sent and delivered as OOC than IC.

They usually wait until we’re much closer to BlizzCon to reveal any of that kind of information. Last year, I think we got our first glimpse of the pet in September, and that BlizzCon was also scheduled in November, so I’d say September would be a safe bet to make.

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!