The Queue: Look I happen to think he’s adorable

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!

I got a new pet while we were in between leveling streams last week, and nobody seems to appreciate him in quite the same way as I do. Look, Joe might not be fluffy or cute, and he might not have flappy wings, but who can resist his beaming grin, especially when it’s flanked by little mandibles that look kind of like baby T-rex arms? I definitely couldn’t, so he’s my buddy whether anyone else likes it or not. Poor Joe. Don’t worry buddy, I totally love you.

No, because one thing isn’t necessarily going to negate the appearance of the other. The raid team (encounter design) isn’t the same team that does quests, or crafting content, or PVP content. So telling the raid team “Say, don’t work as hard on raids” isn’t going to leave them suddenly capable of doing more PVP content — because they don’t design PVP content to begin with. That’s not in their wheelhouse of things to do.

Honestly, I would be really surprised if they removed the legendary ring chain altogether, specifically for that reason. Oh, they could always just throw the cinematics in there, but it wouldn’t quite make sense, would it? I mean I don’t think anyone leveling through that content to get to Legion is necessarily going to spend all that time grinding out a ring, but at the same time, some sense of story cohesion in regards to what’s really going on on Draenor and how it ties into Legion is almost a necessity, especially when you’re tying two expansions as closely together as Legion and Warlords are. So I’m not really sure how they’re going to handle that one.

Azeroth absolutely does have plate tectonics — when the Shattering happened, Kalimdor split into several distinct continents, presumably along natural fault lines. And Azeroth does have volcanoes and earthquakes. Yes, these things are directly affected by the elements, but the shell of the world seems to be divided into chunks that shift and move. And in an Ask a Cdev, when someone asked about Kul Tiras the response was “Kul Tiras, the island nation, will not be visible at the start of Cataclysm – something about tectonic plates shifting it out to sea….”

So yes, Azeroth does have plate tectonics, although they probably work a little differently, considering there’s magic and elements and everything else that doesn’t exist in the real world involved with it all. Will we ever see the continents reconnect? Well … that would take a different kind of global disaster to do, wouldn’t it? But on a world where the elements are sentient and magic is a normal part of life, anything is possible!

I want to see them introduced as a story vehicle, something akin to what we saw in Dagger in the Dark, Dark Heart of Pandaria, and The Secrets of Ragefire. All of those introduced story elements that were part of understanding the major, overlying story behind the expansion, and they moved the story forward — the attempt on Vol’jin’s life, the reveal of just what was below the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, and the reveal of the fortress below Ragefire were all pretty big plot points. I wish the rest of the scenarios had done as much. Blood in the Snow was interesting, because you had Moira and the dwarves involved, but there wasn’t as much of an impact there, and I was sort of sad about that.

Story aside, my favorite scenario, hands down, was always Unga Ingoo. I loved running around the island collecting things, I loved the whole mechanic of zip lining from one area to another. It made the scenery itself interactive and engaging in a way that I hadn’t quite seen before. You weren’t just following someone on an escort, the map itself was this neat game of discovery, a hide and seek of kegs and a puzzle of how to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible. I loved that. I’d love to see more of it.

From the sounds of it, that’s almost the conclusion Blizzard was coming up with when they were thinking about Demon Hunters and specs as well. Would it have served the game better? There’s no real way to know. I mean in another reality we could have been playing a game where we only had two specs to choose from all the way back on day one, which would negate the necessity for a dual-spec system, and maybe by this time, the devs would be thinking “Man, two specs just feels really static, let’s mix it up and throw in a third for everybody!”

I like the idea behind it. I like the idea of kind of boiling down a class into two specs that are both ridiculously cool, instead of coming up with two that are ridiculously cool, and stalling on ideas for the third. Will it pan out? Well, we’ll kind of have to wait for beta and see how Demon Hunters play before we can make any real conclusions on that. But for my part, I really want to play a Demon Hunter and see how it works!

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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!