The Queue: What do the barrels say

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 love the new models. I love them to pieces — it’s great seeing the variety of emotions and expressions you can get now, and it’s such a gigantic improvement from the original vanilla models. More importantly, I love how human males at work now look like they’re simultaneously clasping their hands and listening intently, like they’re trying to come up with the perfect manufactured flatulence sound instead of doing whatever it is they should be doing.

Hotfixes are usually an immediate thing, unless otherwise noted that they’ll need a realm restart. Basically, if hotfixes have been posted, chances are good that they’re already live, with the exception of the ones that have been specifically labeled as needing a realm restart.

As for what constitutes a realm restart, that’s when the servers shut down and come back up again. Most of the time, this means during the weekly maintenance that happens every Tuesday. However, sometimes Blizzard will restart the servers on off days, during late night hours. If there’s some kind of restart in the works, you’ll usually see a notification about it in the launcher or on the log in screen.

Okay that is an incredibly cool thing that I wish were in World of Warcraft — the whole introduction of using Griftah as a fence this expansion was pretty neat, but being able to sell to anyone? That’s pretty amazing. I play a Rogue too, so really we’re just going to have two rogue ideas here, but I kind of want to see Rogues utilize throwing weapons again. I know, it’s not a brand new ability, but there was a point in time in Throne of Thunder in which I actually stood with the ranged and just threw a knife at the boss for DPS (because we had too many melee) — and my DPS was just as high as the ranged casters. Which was hysterically funny, and possibly just a little demoralizing for the ranged groups … oops?

For Hunters, because I play one on the live stream — I’d like to see Hunters able to tame mounts. Not in a permanent ‘Add this to my mount collection tab’ kind of way, but an ability that lets Hunters tame one to use temporarily, something that despawns in combat. Fun flavor, not too powerful.

I don’t think we’ll ever see Garrosh again — I think his story is pretty much done, now. Although I guess I’ll take that back in the hopes of one day seeing a situation where Thrall has to come to terms with what he did to Garrosh and the Horde by having a long chat with Garrosh Hellscream’s spirit. I mean, come on. Thrall could have left Garrosh in Nagrand and just let him run the Mag’har and be happy, in his own barbaric kind of way, but instead he dragged him from Garadar, took him to Azeroth and basically set in motion everything that eventually led to Garrosh’s downfall. If he’d just left Garrosh alone, happy in the knowledge that his dad wasn’t a complete jerk, Azeroth might be in a better spot right now — and Garrosh wouldn’t be dead. Or at the very least, he wouldn’t be dead by Thrall’s hands.

And when you think about it, that’s got to weigh heavily on Thrall. Not only did he not take care of his best friend’s son, he basically railroaded his best friend’s son into a no-win situation and ended up having to kill him. Wherever the Grom Hellscream of our timeline is right now, I don’t think he’s particularly happy with Thrall.

… and I really need to write a short story about this or something, I swear.

They were, at one point, in the same pool as humans and dwarves — they were even members of the Church of Light. However when the Scourge attacked, a lot of the former High Elves/now Blood Elves grew disillusioned and felt that the Light had abandoned them when they needed it the most. Liadrin was one of these Blood Elves, and when the opportunity to channel and harness the Light from a naaru presented itself with the arrival of M’uru, she took it willingly — after all, if you’re channeling the Light from a creature and simply using it as a tool, it can’t exactly abandon you. For more on this, you should check out the novella Blood of the Highborne, which is included in World of Warcraft: Paragons anthology. It was written by Micky Neilson, who is also responsible for the excellent short story Unbroken, about Nobundo and the origins of Draenei Shaman — one of my favorites.

It’s less a matter of whether or not they can work together, and more a matter of they have two different tasks and two different styles of working. Kil’jaeden’s job is basically assimilation — he works to recruit and assimilate every race he sees fit into the ranks and armies of the Burning Legion. When Sargeras popped out of the picture after Medivh was killed, Kil’jaeden kind of took over the role of commander of the Legion, most likely because this was the sort of thing Sargeras did anyway. Archimonde, on the other hand, is the military commander of the Legion. He leads the armies that attack and raze entire worlds. He’s not about bringing in new members to the ranks — he’s all about conquering and annihilation. Basically, Kil’jaeden brings races into the fold, and Archimonde uses those new numbers to attack and destroy things.

In Warlords, Kil’jaeden was trying to bring the Orcs into the Burning Legion for a second time — and that failed when Grommash wised up and didn’t drink the blood of Mannoroth. Archimonde saw this, and said all right then, if Kil’jaeden failed and they aren’t going to join us, I’m just going to take our forces and wreck the planet. You kind of get an idea of this if you use the Burning Legion Missive toy to do some convenient eavesdropping.

I’d clean up Karazhan and hang out there. I mean it has an in-house theater and everything.

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!