The Queue: Lizard Watch

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!

You know, my dad told me there was a lizard in our living room, but I didn’t actually see him until yesterday. We’ve dubbed him Sir Couch, Lord of the Cushions. Basically he’s just hanging out until spring because it’s way, way warmer in here than it is outside. I don’t really see a problem with this, seeing as how the little guy is probably dining on bugs that would otherwise be way more annoying than a scaly buddy just minding his own business. So I guess I have a not-a-pet now. Fun!

I have way too many favorites, going all the way back to good old Victor Nefarius in Upper Blackrock Spire. I think the least favorite is easily Sindragosa, though. The fight was difficult enough to pull off without the dragon’s repeated ear-piercing howls. That was one of the few raid encounters in which I turned off the vocals entirely and just put some soothing and upbeat music on instead. Believe it or not, it actually helped me pay attention better.

This is kind of getting into areas outside of my general realm of expertise, here. But right now there’s a default “mount” animation that is essentially the character sitting down — and that default mount animation works for every mount they’ve ever created. Put the character model in the sitting position, position that on top of the mount model, and you’re good to go.

If, however, they wanted to make the legs move with the mount when our characters ride them around, they’d have to adjust the animation on that lower half for every single mount they’ve ever introduced in game, and for every player character model. That is another level of difficulty entirely, and eats up far more time. I don’t think it’s a matter of whether or not they can do it — I’m sure they could — it’s more of a matter of how time-consuming the process would be, and that’s time that could be better spent on other things.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a trash can anywhere on Azeroth, now that you’ve got me thinking about it. Given how many people are playing this game, and how much random junk people have probably just tossed from their bags at one point or another, you’d think we’d all be perpetually wading through a slog of leftover sigils of random whoever, and vendor trash we couldn’t be bothered to take to the vendor.

Frost Death Knights will get dual weapons, but Blood and Unholy both only get one weapon to wield. So if you’re wanting to dual-wield in Legion, go Frost.

I don’t think they’re going to update race intros. As it stands right now, the race intros serve as a good introduction to what you’re going to be playing through as you level from 1-60. If they updated the intros to current events, you’d get the current intro, and immediately be thrown into a world with a cast of characters that don’t actually make sense. For instance, if you’re Horde and your introduction talks about current Warchief Vol’jin, and then you go play through Horde content where everyone is talking about Warchief Garrosh Hellscream, it’d be really, really confusing, wouldn’t it?

If they wanted to update those intros, they’d have to update a lot of other stuff, to. And as they’ve said they aren’t going to do any more old-world revamps, I don’t see that as being very likely at all.

Ashran was…confusing, to say the least. Basically the island used to be the home to a great ogre empire — either the Ashmaul, or whoever the Ashmaul defeated — ruled by Kor’lok. The Alliance and Horde are both after an ancient that apparently holds a lot of power, and Harrison Jones theorized it’s powerful enough that it could be Titan in origin. If you wander around either Warspear or Stormshield, you’ll hear the various residents talking about it. The Alliance wanted to get the artifact before the Horde could get their hands on it, the Horde wanted to get it because the Alliance seemed to be so gung-ho about getting it.

Which is pretty much why we’re fighting each other, even though the Alliance and Horde are supposedly under some kind of cease-fire, or were at the end of Mists. To my knowledge, there was no resolution to this storyline at all. I doubt we’ll see one. It feels like it was mostly thrown together to give us a reason to PVP, and didn’t really carry any kind of weighty significance on the rest of Draenor’s story at all.

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!