The Queue: Welcome to our new Canadian overlords

This header image, as with all of our very best header images, comes from the magnificent Mike Eng (Rades) and is in answer to a question asked by Heffenreffer:

QftQ – are you making the Canadians do all the articles tomorrow? you know cause…. American Thanksgiving

We in fact had a discussion about this earlier in the week, in which Rades and Matticus (two of our Canadian contingent) discussed taking over the site while the Americans were away and covering it with Canadian flags. Matt stipulated that the flag had to contain a no Pepe sign instead of a maple leaf and… let’s just say things went downhill from there, resulting in the image above.

However, to answer the question, both Americans and Canadians contributed to the site today, though I’ll probably be cooking by the time you read this. That out of the way, let’s move on to our daily Q&A.

I feel like Blizzard’s put themselves in a difficult situation here — the leveling experience hasn’t been touched since Cataclysm, but Draenor‘s skill pruning and stat squish negatively impacted it in a big way (and not a good one). Leveling players have terrible skillsets at low levels,  filled with spells or talents that modify abilities the player doesn’t yet have access to. Since Warlords arrived, some of my low level alts — notably healers — feel entirely unplayable because they simply no longer had the skills to be effective. At best, I’d call the current leveling curve sloppy.

And as to the stat squish, it’s made leveling from one expansion’s content to another very strange, as items with a higher ilvl in one expansion are often downgrades or sidegrades to items obtained from late quests or dungeons (no, not raids) in the previous expansion. In our leveling stream (where we’re just leveling through Wrath), I’ve found gear has to be 50 ilvls or more higher than what I picked up in the last expansion’s content to be worth equipping. It’s a weird system that means you spend half of your time leveling just vendoring every piece of gear you pick up.

Heirlooms seem like a band-aid fix to the problem of leveling being broken. With heirlooms, you level through content quickly enough that you don’t have time to fixate on the oddities of the leveling experience. However, the difficulty with heirlooms being the answer to leveling is that not every player has access to them — and it’s especially a problem for new players, who, when they come in, get an awful first look at the game world.

I’m not sure that making heirlooms baseline is the answer… but Blizzard needs to do something about leveling, because it’s a mess. Simply granting a flat XP boost to everyone would solve the problem, but it would also disregard the effort long-time players have made collecting and upgrading heirlooms, so I think Blizzard is unlikely to do it.

Still, I’m hoping they do something.

We haven’t heard for sure one way or the other, but my guess is that it will be similar to the faction-specific areas in Dalaran right now. Sure, you can run in, but you’re not welcome — and you’ll get kicked out pretty quickly.

Personally, to me, “alpha” and “beta” are semantics. Though one is an earlier testing phase and one is a later testing phase, they both indicate that we’re in testing — and so I’m not really that bothered as to whether this is an alpha or a beta. This is, admittedly, smaller scale than we’ve seen in previous World of Warcraft testing, but as some commenters have noted the experience we’re seeing, though small, is very polished.

Since this is the test we’ve gotten, I do suspect it’s what Blizzard was referring to when they said we’d see a beta in “weeks” — but in the intermediary time, the definition has shifted from beta to alpha.

I’ll admit, there’s not a lot of gameplay to check out yet and the testing feels pretty limited — there’s only a few hours of content, at most. Is it an alpha? Is it a beta? Semantics. We’re testing the newest version of the game and, I imagine, we’ll see more soon.

We seem to be talking about the most popular expansions as compared to the least popular expansions — Wrath is a player favorite while Cataclysm is decidedly not. Legion has already started out with some Wrath-style leanings. The Legion trailer mimics the Wrath trailer in a serious way (the father-son monologue makes an interesting echo if you watch both in succession).

It’s always difficult to judge an expansion in advance, but based on current information Legion is certainly going out of its way to send all the right nostalgia notes to make us think about either Burning Crusade or Wrath. We’re back on the trail of Illidan. We’ve got a new hero class for the first time since Wrath. We have Gnome Hunters, which is… okay… entirely irrelevant, but still a good thing.

Whatever Legion becomes, Blizzard is very intentionally calling on our nostalgia for the Wrath era — and I, for one, hope it sends us back there. (Only, obviously, with Gnome Hunters.)

I admit, I don’t have a good answer for this. (Except that, considering the Legion trailer, Varian ought to be thankful for parachutes. And also carry them.) However, it seems like a good question to throw you of the Queue on this (American) Thanksgiving day. Just what do you think our Azerothian leaders are thankful for today?

And what am I thankful for today? It’s you lot — because the community is, as ever, the best part of Blizzard’s games.

That’s a wrap on today’s Queue, but if you have questions, please leave them below for Mr. Matthew Rossi to answer tomorrow (and do send him your lore questions, which I always avoid answering because lore is a mystery). Happy Thanksgiving to the Americans in the audience and happy Thursday to everyone else!