The Queue: You are not your faction

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 do think Warlocks, in Legion, are going to feel how Warriors and/or Rogues have felt in prior expansions. The base classes have such a vague concept that whenever a more specific class is added, they inevitably rip some concepts away from those generalized classes. Death Knights intruded on Warriors and, to some extent, Paladins. The Monk stole some Rogue thunder. Demon Hunters are tearing concepts (and potentially raid slots) from both Warlocks and Rogues. In the case of Warlocks, Demon Hunters are straight up stealing some spells and abilities. And hilariously, the Death Knight stole Death Coil from Warlocks all the way back in Wrath.

This is part of why I’m always ambivalent when Blizzard announces a new class. They do things with these classes which they could’ve done with the old ones — and on top of that, snip cool concepts off of the old ones and add them onto the new ones. What I’m seeing in some of this “class fantasy” revival coming in Legion is Blizzard realized they’ve cut, cut, cut away at what made the classes really cool and unique to begin with in the interest of adding these new classes (or homogenizing flavor for the sake of raids). The basic Rogue concept has been eroded so much over the years, the number of reasons to play a Rogue has dwindled. They need to reinvent that class with things like the Outlaw spec to make them interesting again, particularly in the face of the leather-wearing highly-mobile melee Demon Hunter.

Warlocks are getting the short end of the stick right now. They’re losing beloved abilities, they’re losing what made them unique and interesting, and that really sucks. It doesn’t feel good to be in that position, particularly in an MMO where you might’ve been playing that character for years and years and suddenly you wonder if you made a mistake. Hopefully Legion can give Warlocks something cool to compensate for Demon Hunters swooping in and stealing their toys. If it doesn’t happen in Legion, I expect a couple years from now, we’re going to see the devs scrambling to make Warlocks cool again, much like they seem to be doing with Rogues.

Until level 75, yes. Then, at level 75, you pick the Ice Nova talent and 2-shot your way to level 100.

Ice Nova is absolutely ridiculous. I enjoyed playing my Mage so little, I don’t think I’d have gotten her to 100 without Ice Nova being so overpowered. Caster gameplay is not for me, methinks.

They’re barely implemented in the alpha, so there isn’t much we know about them yet. It sounds like there will still be garrison-style missions, but they might be a bit more active. I saw a screen which suggested you could send your champions to specific zones (for example, sending Grandpappy Paladin to Highmountain), but I don’t know what that does. Provide a buff? Give you new quests? Let them adventure with you? We can’t send those followers out yet, so we don’t know.

The devs have mentioned they want the champions from your class hall to be a more active activity than garrison followers, but we haven’t seen enough of it in action yet.

You know, I genuinely have no idea. I’ll put that on our list of things to check out later. Currently, you can only create premade characters. Since Survival is the only Hunter spec available, that premade character starts with a spear equipped and a gun in their bag. If I had to guess? I’d say you probably need to acquire a spear on your own. Given all of these changes will probably be in the Legion pre-patch, you’ll likely have a few weeks (or months) to acquire a weapon to play with.

Honestly, I think it’s completely irrelevant. How often does that actually matter in our coverage? It isn’t going to factor into news. It’s only going to factor into opinion pieces or editorials — where our opinions are supposed to be part of the piece. And where people got this impression that the site as a whole has a certain bias, I have no idea. We have people who play Alliance. We have people who play Horde. This idea that we all play Alliance is absurd. Some of the people on our staff most often accused of having an Alliance bias play Horde almost exclusively and have either never done an Alliance quest or only did it once on an alt simply to see it.

Some of our audience put way more stock into this than we do, or interpret it in whichever way fits their own biases. I have a lot of problems with how the Alliance’s story is told. I speak to the Alliance gameplay experience because that’s what I know best. I get a lot of “yes, but that happens to the Horde, too.” When I say I don’t like something that happens to the Alliance, that doesn’t mean I’m okay with it happening to the Horde. I just don’t know the Horde content as well as I know Alliance content. If what I dislike about the Alliance’s narrative also happens in the Horde narrative, that would mean I dislike it in both cases, not that it’s okay to happen in one place and not the other.

Hell, over the weekend, I wrote a Breakfast Topic wherein I talk about how I don’t like how character death is handled in WoW. I didn’t actually mention any Alliance characters in it. The only names I mentioned were Illidan and Gul’dan. I guess Velen was in the header image, but I didn’t actually say anything about him. It was a pretty picture and nothing else. Yet, somehow, there was a long discussion in the comments about the article’s (and my own) Alliance bias. There was no mention of the Alliance! “What about Cairne?” they ask, automatically assuming I mean only Alliance characters because obviously I have that much bias despite not a single word in the post suggesting anything of the sort. And that’s part of the problem here. The perception of bias is much greater than the reality. Even in pieces where we’re specifically avoiding discussion of faction to combat that perception of bias, people will scream bias. Even if we’re completely objective in what we say, people will see a bias. But being completely objective on a site like ours would be incredibly dull, so I’m not going to bother putting energy into that. Can you imagine a podcast where we can’t have opinions?

People put way more time and energy into this than I do. I’m not personally offended people play Horde characters. I’m not personally offended if someone prefers the Horde’s faction, story, whatever else. But there are a lot of people who are personally offended when we talk about which faction we play and enjoy and that’s weird. It’s a video game. Speaking to the general populace, and not specifically you, Drindaar: Play what you want. Do what you like. Don’t get angry when people play differently than you. The faction you play changes nothing about you as a person and which faction you play should have nothing to do with how you interact with other, real humans. When someone is talking about “the Alliance” or “the Horde” in World of Warcraft‘s story/narrative, that isn’t you or me. I am not a citizen of Stormwind. You do not live in Orgrimmar. I did not do any of the things the NPCs in this game have done. Neither did you. Our factions shouldn’t define us or our interactions. Your faction (or my faction) starts and ends when you (or I) log in or log out of the game. It has no bearing on anything past that point.

Yes.