The Queue: One Legion, deserters, 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!

I seem to recall the “One Legion” thing with them transcending all realities was taken back shortly after it was shared, but I can’t find a source at the moment, either. Maybe it was wishful thinking. Regardless, I really don’t think it’s true. And even if Blizzard says it is, I’ll wait until they say it no longer is true, because your question is precisely what’s wrong with it. You’re going to tell me the Burning Legion transcends all realities, all timelines, all universes, but they repeat the same plan over and over again? That’s a great way to turn your villains into dummies.

Want the Legion to span the universe? Fine. That’s pretty cool, actually. But you just can’t have one Archimonde which transcends all realities. He would know better than to repeat the same failure of a plan. He would come up with a new plan. And if the Legion transcends time, he could change what he did before and alter the future, and the Caverns of Time wouldn’t have to deal with the Infinite Dragonflight, but the Burning Legion being aware they can change what they did before. And if the Legion does transcend realities and timelines, what happens to the duplicates? What happens to the guy who signed up with Sargeras and became the Archimonde we know in all of those other timelines? Every timeline has that guy.

I really do think the “One Legion” thing came out of someone at Blizzard misunderstanding something/getting too excited about something and making a tweet. I don’t think the “One Legion” situation was ever true. Not now, not then. Nothing about the Burning Legion suggests this could be true. There’s no foundation for it. It comes out of left field and breaks more of the narrative than it fixes/adds.

Now, if it isn’t true, Warlords of Draenor makes perfect sense. Kairozdormu was looking for an ideal timeline for his nebulous plan. The Draenor of Warlords fit the bill. It wasn’t convenience that the Burning Legion was ramping up its invasion on this Draenor. Kairoz was looking for that. The differences between our timeline and their timeline is, by and large, the ideal Kairoz set out to find. We don’t know his endgame, and we might never know why these differences were what he wanted given he’s dead now, but we were told this was his ideal scenario.

I’m going to be a big poopy-pants crybaby and say I’m really tired of WoW’s pop culture references. Maybe it’s nostalgia, but I feel like the pop culture references used to be subtle back in the day — or if not subtle, they slapped you in the face then scurried off immediately after, existing only long enough for a laugh. In the latter half of WoW’s existence, the pop culture references latch on like leeches and refuse to let go. Harrison Jones, for example. WoW already has archaeologists! Why is the awful pop culture reference now the one and only archaeologist character in the game? Let it go! I’m sure there are still subtle references in there, but I’ve been trained to be beaten over the head by them, so if it isn’t obnoxious, I miss it completely. Which is a good thing. They shouldn’t be disruptive. People who get it will smile and people who don’t will see it as just another character in the game.

Rather than wanting to see more pop culture references, I want the game to get back to a point where pop culture references aren’t an actual part of the narrative, but more like Easter Eggs instead.

Ask me again when Harrison Jones is long gone and I’ll probably have a more cheerful answer! I just really don’t like that guy. Sorry.

Penalties for that sort of thing are tough. You can’t make them too punishing, either. Not unless you’re ready to hand out bans. If someone is getting upset in a dungeon, it might be best for that person to leave rather than stay and act like a jerk. If leaving means they’re locked out of playing for the rest of the night, they’re likely to stay in a group they aren’t enjoying and make everyone else’s lives miserable. I think it would be justified to do something like the timeout growing in length if a player is consistently abandoning groups, but 30 minutes is a good starting point. A player with a history of poor behavior should be treated appropriately. A player who has simply reached a point of frustration and wants to walk away, that person’s penalty should be much shorter. Everyone has a bad day sometimes. Making the decision to walk away from a particular group shouldn’t automatically end your ability to play for the night.

I wouldn’t make a new one. Instead, I feel if Blizzard could do this all over again, their better option would be to offer fewer classes, but with more ways to play them. For example, combine warriors, death knights, and paladins. Throughout your character progression, your choices would differentiate your playstyle. You could transform your base characters into a warrior that uses 2-handers, and either progress down the path that makes you a full-blown Arms Warrior or take a holy crusader path that turns you into a Retribution Paladin. Or walk a darker path, embrace undeath, and be an Unholy Death Knight. Mages and Warlocks could start as the same thing, but your choices in specializations are what would make you a Frost Mage or a Demonology Warlock or whatever.

I think this would avoid some of those homogenization issues we run into — how do you make Protection Paladins effective tanks without giving them a kit that is, essentially, the same as a Protection Warrior? That wouldn’t be an issue. They’d be the same class, only one is steeped in the Light for its aesthetics and the other is an elite foot soldier.

New classes could be done by expanding existing classes rather than bloating the roster overall. Obviously, it’s far too late to do something like this, but I’d be curious to see how it’d work in action. Certainly, I’m not opposed to new classes, this is just an idea I’ve been thinking about lately! After all, Monks (and Demon Hunters, though we can’t play them yet) sometimes feel like a new take on the Rogue rather than a distinct idea. Some of the base classes are such general concepts that any new class inevitably comes across as an improved, cooler version of what we had before.