The Queue: Jaina is still my favorite

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!

Was she ever filling that role, though? She was endlessly pushing for peace and clearly that wasn’t ever going to happen. It can’t happen due to game mechanics, it won’t happen due to the nature of the Horde — and the Alliance’s need to react to that or die. Was she really the hero Azeroth needed? I don’t think so. However, she might be now. Jaina is an extraordinarily powerful mage who has finally reached the point where she sees the only way to get anything done on Azeroth is to act. As far as I can tell, Anduin is simply where Jaina was a few years ago — an idealist who has not yet accepted the Horde isn’t going to let peace happen. Anduin is not going to get what he wants, just like Jaina didn’t get what she wanted. Azeroth doesn’t work that way.

Let’s not pretend Vol’jin as Warchief is going to revolutionize Horde/Alliance relations, either. The dude was pretty happy lobbing threats at the Alliance even when the Alliance was backing his rebellion.

The easiest franchise to cross over with WoW is Diablo. They’re both fantasy settings — Diablo is just darker. And smashier. Zoltan Kulle and Kel’Thuzad would be dark wizard buddies. Tyrael and the other angels would fit right in with the various Titanic creations. Diablo’s Burning Hells and WoW’s Burning Legion could unify for even more demony badness. In that vein, I don’t know if there’s a specific character that would work best — those two franchises could be smashed together entirely and still function.

If I had to pick one, I’d take the Diablo 3 Crusader on the Alliance’s team any day. We need cool paladin/crusaders again. All of the ones we had are either dead or lame ducks like Tirion. Or left behind on Draenor, like Yrel.

I’m not one of those people that goes “if this game goes free to play, I quit!” or anything like that. No one specific thing will make me quit unless it’s implemented in a spectacularly disastrous way. For me, these things happen in a sort of death by a thousand cuts. The developers doubling down on raiding being the single most important aspect of the game has brought me closer than ever, I admit. If that continues — dis-incentivizing gameplay that isn’t raiding, returning to the days of locking everything behind heroic/mythic — I may eventually reach a point where I don’t feel like the game is for me anymore.

Please forgive me for the short Queue today! I know three questions isn’t much, but questions have been light and time as has been tight. BlizzCon is coming, which both means we don’t have much Legion information to work with until then, and I’m pretty darn busy preparing for our coverage of the event. Leave lots of questions for Liz! She’ll appreciate it.