The Queue: Up with Night Elves, down with Druids

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’d take a hard look at the Kalimdor dungeons in general and integrate aspects of Night Elven culture other than Druidism gone awry. World of Warcraft has often ignored the brutal, militaristic side of the Night Elves we saw in Warcraft 3. The RTS wasn’t only focused on Druidism. We saw the Druids through Malfurion, but we also saw the vicious huntresses through Tyrande and Maiev. We get a lot of Druidism in WoW. That’s almost all we see in WoW. Shandris Feathermoon rots in some distant corner. Tyrande doesn’t do anything. Where are the warriors?

That’s something I really love about Heroes of the Storm. Heroes (and Hearthstone) don’t forget about the many other aspects of these characters. While there were people who wanted Lunara to be giggly and silly and cuddly, Lunara is representative of that part of Azeroth. She’s vicious. She’s a defender of nature. She’s out for revenge. She will kill people because that’s what she does. Brightwing, too — while Brightwing is more cute, she’s also sinister as hell, talking about how much she loves murder. We don’t get that in WoW, even though we saw it being a huge part of the Night Elven identity in Warcraft 3. Both Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone are said to be a little sillier, they play fast and loose with the established lore of the franchises they use — yet they represent a multifaceted Warcraft better than WoW. How does that work?

If you got up in their face in the Warcraft 3 era, they would kill you dead. If you get up in their face in WoW, Malfurion will ask you to please calm down. He will repeatedly ask you to please calm down while you burn everything around him to the ground. And he will continue to do nothing about it.

Let’s see what the other elves would do.

Even if Discipline is going to be completely different next expansion, it can’t hurt to get a general feel for what it’s like to play a healer now. Granted, it probably won’t hurt to wait until Legion, either — you can experiment now, or you can wait until the Legion leveling process when everyone is a little newbie. Whichever you prefer.

Personally, I’ve played all roles, though I’ve settled into mostly DPS these days. Healing is built up to be a really intimidating thing, but I never felt that way about it. Start out healing easy dungeons and work your way up to more difficult content like Heroics or raids. If you play with friends, heal a few dungeons with them. That way, if you screw it up while learning your spells, it’s unlikely they’ll get mad at you about it.

Those first few dungeons are, I think, the biggest obstacle. If you’re a brand new DPS learning how to use your spells/abilities in a group, people probably won’t notice your blunders. As a healer, you’ll probably get a few people killed while learning when/how to use your spells. If you’re in a group with strangers, someone will probably get upset and that’s the point where new healers go “screw this, I’m never doing it again.” Having friends who are willing to help you learn is a huge help.

The wardrobe had a bad habit of crashing clients in the last Legion alpha build, but it shows up as a Collection in the same window as your mounts, pets, toys, and so forth. It’s unknown whether the current implementation is final because of all of that. In that build, it seemed like you could only view your collection from anywhere, but still had to visit an NPC to actually use any of it. Is that the intended procedure? Hard to say.

As of the last build, you still need the Band-Aid Buddies.

It is awesome. That’s the root of my beef with double jump being a Demon Hunter exclusive ability. All of these other MMOs I play have mobility things like combat rolls, double jumps, and whatever else as a baseline part of gameplay. It feels great. The combat is quick and fluid and exciting and suddenly AOE circles on the ground introduce more to gameplay than “hold down W until you’re out of it.” Double jump becoming a Demon Hunter selling point tastes sour to me. Go play almost any other modern MMO and double jumps and similar abilities are something anyone can do.

While playing the Demon Hunter demo at BlizzCon, I actually had a moment where the double jump made me slip into that mindset I have playing other MMOs, where movement is a big deal and you have all of the appropriate tools. I tried to double tap D to combat roll out of an AOE. When nothing happened, I felt a little disappointed and the Demon Hunter’s mobility stopped impressing me.

I don’t mean to be a downer here, but WoW finally introducing a double jump and making it exclusive to one class is one of my few Legion peeves.