The Queue: Let’s talk about the Scourge

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 can’t seem to escape Sylvanas, the Forsaken, Bolvar or the Scourge lately — they all keep popping up in various conversations with various people. And for some reason we ended up with a couple of Scourge-related questions yesterday on top of it all! But hey, it’s fascinating lore, so I’m not going to object to all the chatter, weird coincidence or no. Let’s answer some questions, shall we?

Nope! But it wouldn’t be the first time people have made comparisons between the two franchises. To be clear, StarCraft and Warcraft are their own separate universes, there is no crossover. People have asked and it’s been answered many, many times.

Those aren’t garrison missions — they’re missions from your class hall. Dave Kosak mentioned in our BlizzCon interview that we’d see the introduction of a mission map in our class halls, and it works kind of the same way as a garrison mission table, except that this time around, they’d like the followers to have a little more substance to them.

She knows there is another Lich King on the throne…and she’s not exactly happy about it, either. It was never actually clarified as to whether or not she knows it’s Bolvar, though — I don’t know if she would have recognized him even if he weren’t charred beyond recognition, as she didn’t exactly have a lot of close contact with the Alliance. But Sylvanas is well aware that while Arthas died, the Lich King lives on — it was a big part of her leader short story, Edge of Night.

Not exactly. When Bolvar took the throne and became the next Lich King, it was because as Uther stated, “there must always be a Lich King.” The reason there has to be a Lich King is that without a mind to control them, the Scourge would simply go nuts and slowly conquer the world — they need that leader in place to keep them docile. But there’s inherent dangers in being the Lich King, too, and while Bolvar showed tremendous strength in being able to resist the Lich King’s attempts to corrupt him in Wrath, there’s no guarantee that his resolve will last forever.

However, the Lich King was originally created by the Burning Legion to be used as a weapon on Azeroth from the remnants of Ner’zhul. Ner’zhul was still in his own way rebellious, and between him and Arthas, they struck back at the Legion, which forced the confrontation between Legion (with Illidan representing them) and the Lich King (with Arthas representing him) at the end of Warcraft 3. It’s entirely possible that animosity still lies dormant somewhere within the Lich King’s helm, and could be utilized if necessary.

The problem is that while yes, that means in a way that the Scourge would be working with us, it definitely doesn’t mean the Scourge is on our side. And we know very, very little about what exactly the Lich King was before Kil’jaeden decided to forcibly merge Ner’zhul with the being. There are so many unknowns about the Scourge, and the only real solid information we do have about it is that it is very, very dangerous — so yes, were it to be utilized against the Burning Legion, I suspect it’d be a last-ditch effort when all other hope was lost.

And yeah, the idea of Bolvar just showing up in our most dire hour of need with the angry armies of the Scourge at his back is one of those things I’ve thought about before, in that “Man that would be about the most bad ass thing ever” kind of way.

I don’t know — and that’s one of those things that’s bothered me about the loot system for quests, dungeons and raids ever since they made the change in Mists. While it’s nice to complete a quest and see a selection of rewards that are immediately relevant to your character, there are times where I’d actually like to be able to choose between different reward options, whether for the “choose whichever reward sells for the most at a vendor” option, or the occasional “choose the cloth or non-agi leather option because frankly that outfit would look really pretty on my rogue.”

Right now, when you do LFR raids, the only loot you get is the loot that is tailored to your current class and spec — but bosses have a heck of a lot more loot options on them, and being able to get my hands on those other options and add them to my wardrobe would be awfully nice. We haven’t heard anything indicating that this is a thing that is going to happen, so it’s entirely possible the answer is no — or that the question hadn’t even occurred to anyone at Blizzard just yet. I hope we’ll see it happen, because I do love collecting different sets!

Soon — and that’s really the only answer we can safely say. We haven’t been given a date beyond the “weeks following BlizzCon,” but if information is being dumped like this, there’s a good chance we’ll see it happen sooner rather than later. We have no real way to predict this kind of information, nor do we have any kind of magic signal that things are going to happen — the beta will drop when it drops, and we just kind of have to be patient until then.

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!