The Queue: Definitely not answering your questions about Dragon Age

Adam and Alex may be out of the office today, but that’s no reason to totally change the editorial direction of the site. (At least that’s what we’re telling them.) So today’s Queue, like every other Queue, is entirely about Blizzard’s games and nothing else.

Nothing at all.

I’m rather torn on flying. On one hand, having flying would likely get me more active in the game, doing things like pet tamer battles and leveling alts. On the other, I don’t have the Draenor Pathfinder achievement yet because, despite having most of the achievements on that particular to-do list, I’m not a fan of Tanaan Jungle and haven’t gotten any of the reputations to revered. I love questing and exploring, so I had the exploration, treasure, and questing achievements done ages ago and even managed to nab Securing Draenor when Pit daily popped up for me about a month ago.

But Tanaan Diplomat? I’m weeks away from if I started working on it now, and I’m not sure I’m going to. Exploring was fun. Questing was fun. But Tanaan just isn’t my kind of fun and my (brief) efforts to dive into it have only made it feel like a slog. Is flying at the end of the expansion, when we aren’t expecting any more new content, worth me spending several weeks doing six or seven dailies that I don’t really enjoy each day? My answer to myself is no, it isn’t… but as Warlords stretches on, I may well get there eventually.

And, really, that’s okay. Not all content is going to appeal to all people. Tanaan just wasn’t something I loved — as I’m sure exploration and treasure-hunting aren’t things some people loved. For better or worse, Draenor Pathfinder requires a large cross-section of game content to be completed, and that means that part of the achievement is a slog for anyone interested in getting it.

Blizzard wants getting flying to be a challenge. I get that. But I feel that my time is worth more than spending it on something I don’t enjoy in a video game — so I won’t be flying anywhere on Tuesday, and maybe not at all.

I know for sure that my default mount, in this situation, would be a flying Elekk. And as bizarre as that image is, making all mounts flying does make a certain kind of sense. There’s a convenience to being able to only have to bind one mount to a hotkey rather than, as many in Draenor may have, a hotkey for both flying and ground mounts. Plus the glowing wings on the Hearthsteed and the like look great… so why not expand the idea?

However good it might sound, though, I suspect this will never see the light of day simply because of the design resources required — even if it’s just a matter of pasting wings on everything, there’s time required to make everything look right. After all, you can’t just stick wings on a Kodo (and would their animations even look right in mid-air). So however practical an idea it might be gameplay-wise it’s probably less practical development-wise, taking a good amount of time for a relatively minor benefit.

But they should add a flying Elekk regardless.

While this could be more visible, you can find Lore Watch podcasts either in our Podcast category (mixed in with the main podcast) or under the Lore Watch tag. I’ll add it to the sidebar calendar to make it clearer when you can expect these to pop up.

I admit that sometimes I make a fuss over Pepe just because it annoys Matticus and it’s so fun to annoy Matticus.

That said I would definitely play this for the comic value if nothing else. I think Pepe would be a real scrapper in the arena — so who do we have to bribe to make it happen, Blizz?

Honestly, I don’t feel like any Diablo 3 classes play much like WoW classes… in part because the Diablo classes have to be highly self-sufficient, while WoW‘s class trinity (tank, healer, and damage) means classes can specialize more. In WoW, you can have a class that tanks or heals but does little damage, or a class that does lots of damage but has no sustainability without the support of others. In Diablo, that paradigm just doesn’t work. Groups are smaller and soloing requires that each class be self-sufficient enough to kill mobs and bosses with only healing potions for support.

While, say, the Wizard in Diablo 3 is something of a glass canon with abilities that may be familiar to WoW Mages, the class also has a ton of defensive cooldowns to let it survive the swarms of mobs found in D3. That’s not to say that WoW‘s Mages don’t have their own forms of self-defense, but due to the nature of the game the Wizard needs more of these abilities and has to make use of them frequently to survive.

One thing I have felt plays similarly, however, is Diablo 3 characters in Heroes of the Storm. Despite the fact that these games are two extremely different genres, each Diablo character I’ve played in Heroes feels very much like its Diablo variant… even though their specific skills may well be different.

Okay, due to popular demand (and definitely not because I said people could ask me about it on Twitter), I will answer this one Dragon Age question.

First off, I should say that this is just my opinion. All of the characters in Dragon Age Inquisition are interesting ones, with unique romance stories. But that said, for me, the clear winner in Inquisition is Cullen. It’s not that Inquisition doesn’t have a great selection of characters, because it definitely does, with the most varied cast of the series to date. (Arguably, the characters are more interesting than the story itself… and whether or not you agree with that, it’s certainly interactions with them that has me going back to replay the game.) But Cullen’s a character you’ve known for a long time in the Dragon Age universe, with appearances in Dragon Age Origins and Dragon Age 2… and saying he’s had a bad time of it so far is kind of an understatement. He’s a character who’s grown, changed, and been shaped by the games as we’ve played through them and Inquisition gives him a heck of a story arc. (And if you romance him as a Mage — which is, yes, possible despite his attitude in Origins — you get a bit of extra story.) The romance can be on the saccharine sweet side, but somehow I like it anyway.

That’s it for today’s Queue! As always, leave your questions in the comments and come back tomorrow for another round of Q&A.