The Queue: Fel Monday

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!

The basic framework of the wardrobe is in, yes. You can’t do much with it — whether it’s fully implemented or not hardly matters at this point, because all you can play is a Demon Hunter. You have no gear collection to work with. But the wardrobe does exist. Nothing else is accessible.

I don’t have a good answer for this, but I included it because I also think Shadow Priests being Old God-driven is really bizarre. With Blizzard aiming for the “fantasy” of a class/spec, they’re never going to nail every single individual player’s personal fantasy for their character. I get that, and if not every class aligns with my mental story for my character, that’s fine. The Old God business seems particularly weird, though. Warlocks have always felt (to me) that we have these individuals who feel they can control fel power — and their gameplay is generally built that way. They bend demons to their will, they gain mastery over these dark powers, the green fire quest chain has the player character becoming increasingly more powerful in that realm. What we’ve seen of Shadow Priests is… these are individuals who have tapped into the strength of the Old Gods and are failing at it. They slip into insanity. Their cooldowns are them losing control. It doesn’t feel very heroic. It doesn’t even feel very powerful! You have lost yourself to the madness.

That sucks.

I’ve always pictured Shadow Priests as powerful psionics — but with a strong, internal willpower, which allows them to dominate their enemies. This Old God direction for Shadow Priests feels like their will has been broken and they have been dominated. With our long history of fighting both demons and the Old Gods, the Warlocks on our team have shown they’re quite effective at fighting fire with fire. The first time we see a Shadow Priest start gibbering with madness and have tentacles coming out of their eyeballs or whatever the hell they’re going to do… it’s time to stick ’em in the ground. The Shadow Priest model they’re going with for Legion (having not played it at all, admittedly) feels like they came up with a cool story for their Artifact and retrofit the spec to fit it rather than the other way around.

As I recall, the devs said work orders dismounting you was a bug. Apparently, it is not a bug they cared to fix, so that’s just how it is now. I know there’s that whole joke where developers say it isn’t a bug, it’s a feature — but apparently if something is a legitimate bug long enough, it still becomes a feature by default.

It’s the second one. You, as a warlock, are plucking demons from the Twisting Nether and enslaving them to your will. None of your demons actually like you. This is why, back in the day, cooldown-based demons such as Infernals would become aggressive to you after their timer ran out. Nowadays, they simply despawn, but back then — that was them breaking free of your control. They were too powerful for you to enslave forever. For the sake of gameplay, they just despawn nowadays. Unless you’ve used the actual Enslave Demon spell, because the devs don’t expect you to be using that during a boss fight.