The Queue: Monks, mercenaries, and more

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 and we may choose it for tomorrow’s edition!

I imagine they’d just do the level 100 boost. The point of the boost is to leap directly to current content if you’re purchased it — and maintaining a level 90 boost doesn’t achieve that. I suppose they could keep the 90 boost at a lower price point than a level 100 boost, but… eh. $60 straight to the current expansion seems like the thing to do, regardless of what level the current expansion is.

Vashj’ir was my favorite zone in Cataclysm. Wanna fight about it?

You’re likely to get different answers from different people, because different people get along well with different classes. For me, leveling a mage was a miserable experience. They’re squishy, their damage really isn’t that great outside of taking the Ice Nova talent which is borderline overpowered, they have tons of downtime to justify their ability to conjure food, and were a generally unpleasant experience. On my other characters, I was used to being able to kill elites (or rare elites) by myself quite easily without relying on cooldowns unless I screwed something up. On the mage, I had to get used to using all of my cooldowns whenever and wherever possible.

Monks feel like the obvious choice. That’s the class with direct ties to Pandaria and the pandaren. Maybe the Temple of the White Tiger, or a similar setup elsewhere in the gameworld? Maybe the peak of Kun’lai Summit — that whole thing with the hardened monks thriving in frozen privation. I’m no monk, so I don’t know if either of those things fit what monks love, but it seems pretty rad to me.

I think Mercenary Mode shows that it’s possible, but I don’t know if the developers would see it as necessary. Mercenary Mode, I think, is a way to try addressing faction imbalance which probably has a more significant impact on PVP than PVE. It might be harder to form PVE groups on a less-populated faction, but when it comes to PVP, faction imbalance creates horrendous queue times — essentially creating a situation where players can’t play.

Personally, I think cross-faction raiding and grouping is long overdue, but the developers have so far been adamant about maintaining faction lines. Again, though, Mercenary Mode opens up the possibility.