The Queue: Cities, spirit beasts, and Lt. Morales

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 started playing in beta, so my misconceptions didn’t last very long. Replies to your question reminded me of my big one, though — I expected major cities to be significantly larger than they are. In the few MMOs I’d played prior to WoW, capital cities were massive. I mean, some of them were on the scale of a full questing zone and took a long time to traverse if you were exploring the entire thing. Those games also had loading screens, so sometimes you’d have loading screens between city districts and shopping centers and all of that sort of thing.

When I visited my first city in WoW, which I believe was Undercity, I was quite underwhelmed. It looked cool and everything, but it felt miniature. Cities in the other MMOs I’d played felt like places where a significant population could actually live. Cities in WoW were clearly places where some necessary NPCs hung out and that was the long and short of it.

At this point, the only answers you’ll get about this are guesswork. We don’t know what will happen. I’d like to think that level 90 boost won’t go away when they add a level 100 boost, but I can’t say that in confidence. Personally, I’d just use the 90 boost. For me, the least likely outcome is that level 90 boost becoming a level 100 boost in Legion, so nothing would be lost by using it now.

As far as I know, the developers have never talked about this. Well, they haven’t talked about it in public. Maybe they had conversations among themselves. Regardless, no guilds/clans, but if you make friends while playing, you can always add them to your B.Net friends list.

The advantage to spirit beasts is they come with one additional ability. That ability might be a buff, it might be an offensive spell, a defensive spell, whatever. A specific ability might push it slightly ahead of other pets, but generally speaking, all pets specced Ferocity will do the same damage. You don’t have to use a spirit beast if you’re running Beastmaster to get the most out of your DPS, but the buffs/abilities those special pets have are still pretty cool.

Disclaimer: I’m editing this in to state I don’t actually play a hunter and I believe I have some of these details wrong. If not wrong outright, then using the wrong terminology. Please refer to the awesome hunters in the comments for clarification!

Not long at all. I suspect the PTR cycles for Heroes of the Storm are primarily meant to weed out any final gamebreaking bugs or issues, not so much for testing balance of new heroes. We get a new hero every 3-4 weeks and and Lt. Morales is expected to release next week, on October 6. Given that 3-4 weeks between hero releases, that means we’ll likely get Artanis on either October 27 or November 3.

Matt’s our Hearthstone guy and we knew the box had Hearthstone stuff in it, so Matt was the obvious person to receive the box. As for the pikachu hat pictures that came out of it? He has only himself to blame. He put the hat on. He sent us the still image. If he didn’t want us using it, he would’ve said so!