The Queue: Shine your shoes

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’m pretty sure it’s not really what I’d call a major spoiler to point out that everyone’s favorite shoe-shining gnome, Sheddle Glossgleam, hasn’t gone anywhere in Legion. He’s in Dalaran over at the Threads of Fate, same as always, and if you take a seat he’ll shine your shoes until they sparkle. The random NPCs were one of my favorite parts about the city, so I’m happy to see that at least some of them are still around. Jones the cat is still MIA, but who knows, maybe he’ll come back too. I sort of hope we’ll also see some new iteration of the Higher Learning achievement while we’re at it. Speaking of learning, let’s get to your questions, shall we?

I don’t think I’ve ever felt like I had to roll a new class just because it was new. Will I make one? Sure, because it’s fun to check out new stuff and see how it plays. I don’t think WoW has ever introduced a class I didn’t feel like at least trying out. I mean, curiosity is curiosity. But I don’t have a max level Death Knight or Monk, and I don’t know if I’ll get the Demon Hunter to max level or not. It all depends on whether or not I like the playstyle and feel like it’s worth leveling. More often than not, I just stick with my Rogue!

I’m pretty sure that the entirety of Gilneas’ population, the Greymanes included, is chock full of dog people…with the exception of the little old lady that asks you to go find her cat in the starting zone. I mean, Gilnean mastiffs are a thing. Tyrande is definitely a cat person, since Night Elves and their saber mounts are also incredibly prevalent in lore — I’m thinking Blood Elves might actually lean towards being cat people too, just for the same reasons, but I doubt Lor’themar likes pets at all. Either that or he’s that one guy who says he hates cats until you catch him feeding one under the table at dinner. My dad is one of those guys. I don’t think the rest of the faction leaders come from factions where animals are particularly prevalent, though, so I couldn’t really make a guess there.

So far, we haven’t seen Dog anywhere on the alpha. Since we’re working with Class Halls instead of places that could be considered homes now, I don’t really expect to see him pop up…but I’d be kind of happy if he did, roaming around in one of the grassy areas and barking happily at you if you walked by. I sort of wish they’d make Dog an official pet — not a Battle Pet, just a companion pet. That way, you could take him anywhere.

I don’t actually play Heroes of the Storm myself — there’s only so many hours in the day, and frankly I’m just not very good at MOBA games — so I asked our resident players to chime in on this one.

Mitch: He is a tough hero to get used to, but I have a lot of fun on him…especially with the game’s best skin, Pajamathur! He’s only been on free rotation once in the past, maybe, year and when he was… well, a lot of people complained. The hardest part of Abathur is getting used to needing total map awareness. You need to make sure he’s soaking a lane but also keep an eye on your allies, meanwhile making sure you’re placing mines and keeping an eye on yourself.

Is he worth 10k gold though? Honestly, there’s no easy answer there. If you like multitasking heroes (Rexxar and Vikings come to mind), then he’s somewhere in between those two as far as difficulty goes. Abathur is one of Heroes’ most unique, so the only way to know for sure if you’ll like him is to play him. Personally, I find him a lot of fun but he’s not someone I play all the time because it’s a challenge to play well and sometimes I like to turn my brain off and just stomp the AI.

Alex: My hero buying strategy is to buy whatever’s cheapest and eventually I’ll get through them all because I’ll eventually get more gold. Given you will always eventually get more gold, treat yo’self to a big spend once in awhile. Get that 10k Abathur to make yourself feel better about shopping in the bargain bin.

Anna: Abathur is super fun and everyone should buy him. 10k is just a deterrent, because he’s unique and tough to start with. A really good Aba is like that one quote from Futurama where people won’t notice you haven’t not done anything at all… Except for the score screen, where you dominate everything. I’m sorry, haha. I’m like a door to door abvangelist.

There was in fact some information datamined in the latest alpha build, we posted on that earlier this week. Keep in mind though that this is datamined material — it’s definitely not everything there is to know about the things, and of course this is still alpha so things may change before release.

I’d really like to see what happened to Magatha Grimtotem after the events that played out in Thousand Needles. If you haven’t played through that zone since the Cataclysm revamp, I recommend it. It was left very open-ended, with some disturbing implications, but we haven’t heard a peep from Magatha since. I don’t know if Legion is the best place to bring her back, though — it seems like we’ve already got more than enough loose ends being addressed so far.

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!