The Queue: Ghost wolves make the best sea captains
@AlexZiebart
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!
To be honest I’m kinda nervous about the zone scaling thing. At max level it’s amazing because all the content can be daily quest fodder rather than a few small areas per zone, but I’m wondering how the story will work.
I know each zone will be a self contained story- which is awesome! But the freedom of choice will also cause a few other factors I enjoyed in MoP and Cata and WoD from being possible, like seeing an NPC progress a story through mutiple zones as you level like Yrel, or meeting characters you first contacted in Jade Forest in the second two zones, then finding your pals from JF in Kun-lai before heading over to Townlong and Dread Wastes with them.
Unless this is also going to herald the return of quests that span multiple zones, like the old Linken chain. Maybe there will be some questlines where you are sent from one zone to another before you’re necessarily finished, or once you’re max level if you’ve done all the content for a zone it unlocks extra content in another zone you’ve done?
From what little I’ve been able to do in the alpha, it does seem like each zone’s leveling content is self-contained. Stormheim is all about the vrykul and the conflict between Genn Greymane and Sylvanas. Highmountain doesn’t have any of that conflict in it at all. Neither does Val’Sharah. They’re all their own thing.
My guess is any overarching story will either be at the level cap or given to you in your class hall and/or Dalaran. That way, it won’t matter which zones you have or have not done. It’ll send you where it wants you to be for that particular quest. I agree it’ll be a shame if we lose out on something similar to Yrel’s arc or don’t have any recurring characters — but if the max level content is done well, it might not be so big of a problem. Of course, we can’t see any of the max level content yet, so who knows?
How much of the movie, if any, do you think we will see in game. I am not talking lore or story, I am talking making some sites, items or NPC’s look like or brought in from the movie. I am looking at this from a marketing standpoint in that if the movie is a huge hit, then the game would see an increase, for a bit, from those who have never played. Do you think things will be put in to give these players a reference point to maybe get them hooke faster? Then there is the other side, if it tanks they would have put a lot of work into something that would have proven a wast of time. What affect to the game are you expecting from the movie if any
If they really wanted the movie to prop up the game and vice versa, they probably shouldn’t have decided to use a different version of events in each one. The Warcraft history being used in the movie is different than that of the games. Given that, they’re likely limited in the sorts of tie-ins they can do. To bring characters from the movie back into the game, we’d need to do a Warlords all over again — because they’re all dead. I would expect easter eggs or references, but not much more than that.
Would you agree that the state of RNG in WoD, and going into Legion, is worse than it’s ever been in WoW? To clarify, I’m referring to the Baleful gear of WoD, without reforging, and also the zone drop legendaries of Legion.
Well, we’re not entirely sure yet how the Legion legendaries will work. From the early description given at BlizzCon, it sounds like you’ll be able to perform activities which increase your chance of getting that Legendary over time. So while yes, it still sounds like there’s an element of RNG, it also sounds like you’ll eventually be able to eliminate that RNG. Lucky people might get theirs early. Unlucky people will still get it. The difference between those groups of people will determine whether it feels fair or not. And none of it has been implemented yet, so those items might end up with a different system altogether.
I do think Warlords of Draenor had elements of RNG above and beyond previous expansions and I wasn’t a fan. Constantly rerolling items on crafted gear sucked. Buying a piece of gear and getting random stats sucked. I feel like, intentionally or not, this was one of their first borrows from Diablo 3; you can reroll stats on items you don’t like over and over again until you get the one you want. The difference is, in Diablo 3, you acquire the items needed to reroll those stats as part of core gameplay. It’s all built with you doing that in mind. In WoW, you were using the same currency you used to craft/purchase items to reroll them. It didn’t feel like you were crafting the perfect piece of gear; it felt like you bought something online, they mailed you the wrong item, refused to refund it, and made you buy a new one. Over and over again.
In early WoD I fished up fishing hats and poles often. Why were these removed/nerfed? They were so fun.
I don’t know if they were removed from Fishing, but it did seem like something changed with the rate at which you get them. Eventually, though, I unlocked my level 3 Fishing Hut in my garrison. With the level 3 Fishing Hut, you can fish up Lunarfall Carp/Frostdeep Minnows inside of your garrison, and using them spawns a murloc which can drop the Tentacled Hat, Ephemeral Fishing Pole, and so on. So it seems instead of those items being something you got from the act of fishing, they were a reward of sorts for unlocking the level 3 Fishing Hut. You could always have a good hat and a good pole from that point onward.
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