The Queue: Superb Owl Sunday

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!

The Vault of the Wardens has a lot of owls in it. So many. This is the 50th Superb Owl I found, and is thus far more superb than any previous owl. I totally counted, I swear. …let’s just get to your questions, shall we?

It’s actually kind of nice that they’re offering to help out — spending some time learning raid techniques and the like isn’t exactly a bad way to spend the end-of-expansion lull. That said, sure you might have a better time learning tanking right now. Since you know the encounters already, it means that the raid can have proper back-up plans in place if there’s an unexpected whoops mid-fight. And tanking isn’t just about knowing which sequence of buttons to press, it’s also about being aware of positioning, abilities, where your raid is sitting at any given time, and other general situational awareness. That can be a little overwhelming in a brand-new raid that nobody has any experience with, so getting a feel for the rhythm of tanking in general while things are fairly calm isn’t a terrible idea at all.

But — and you know there’s going to be one — keep in mind that abilities and classes are changing fairly substantially in Legion. Those buttons that you’re getting used to pushing right now and those abilities you’re learning to use may not look the same in the next expansion — or they might simply cease to exist. Or, in the case of Demon Hunters, you might be dealing with a new class with an entirely new toolkit of abilities to learn.

However, while the buttons, or maybe even the class, might be changing, that situational awareness that tanks need to have isn’t going to change. So why not rehearse now and get a feel for it while you’ve got the time? I’d say go for it.

I don’t really know about anyone else, but as far as I’m concerned, that line between main and alt tends to get really, really blurry at the end of an expansion. For me, my main is the character I level first when a new expansion is launched — the one I use to clear every dungeon, the one I immediately start to gather gear for, the one I raid with (if I’m raiding). But when we get to the end of an expansion, I usually find myself with very little left to do on that main character, because I’ve already spent the entire expansion going about the business of doing it all.

That’s when I usually hop to another class or another alt and play the heck out of it. And yeah, that alt might start to feel like a main at some point, especially if I’m spending all my time on that character — but when a new expansion arrives, I’ll inevitably drift back to my main to do the leveling process with first, and the cycle will start all over again. I think if I ever got to the point where I played one of those end-of-expansion alts enough to decide that I wanted to immediately level that character first when the next expansion came out, that’s when I’d say my old main is no longer my main.

We don’t know just yet. We’ve been told there will be a way to get a second Artifact for your offspec, and some kind of catch-up mechanism in play for that second Artifact, but we don’t know how that will be implemented, or what that catch-up mechanism will be. Once we have that information, we’ll definitely be covering it, though!

Mass Effect. It would require a slightly different approach (after all, not everyone can be Shepard simultaneously in an MMO), but the way Bioware fleshed out the lore of the different alien races and cultures leaves plenty of room for an expansive MMO. And there are plenty of side stories and opportunities for villains that aren’t necessarily of the universe-ending variety, but still pretty lethal nonetheless. Plunk it somewhere in the nebulous fallout post-ME3, and I think there’s room for some pretty compelling stuff.

I know you want me to say Ravenholdt here. I mean, I guess I could say that. But given how the story in Legion has been playing out so far on the alpha, I don’t know if Ravenholdt is actually a good choice, weirdly enough.

Now before you rip my head off, let me clarify — the Class Halls are currently concerned with that whole Burning Legion situation down in the Broken Isles. So it almost makes sense that the Rogues of the world have gathered in the shadowy depths of the city sitting smack on top of the situation, rather than out in the middle of nowhere. They can gather information from Dalaran that they couldn’t get just sitting around in Ravenholdt. Heck, stand by the right grate down there and you can probably overhear some pretty choice gossip. Plus, everyone else is sort of collected around Dalaran, which means hey, if there’s various shiny things to be pilfered, that’s where all that shiny stuff is going to be.

In the absence of the sewers however, the logical pick would be Ravenholdt as the next step down the chain — although one has to wonder about the state of the manor, after what happened to it during the Rogue legendary quest chain in Cataclysm. It’d be a nice way to find out, though!

Alternatively — they could take over the abandoned parts of Gilneas. I mean, nobody else is using it, right?

If Jaina Proudmoore had her way, it absolutely would. But Jaina’s not in charge anymore, Khadgar is. And Khadgar hasn’t got any qualms at all about working with the Horde, considering the Burning Legion is knocking down our door. Keep in mind that even while it was in the Alliance of Lordaeron, Dalaran itself didn’t really get too involved in politics — and when the Alliance of Lordaeron fractured after the Second War, Dalaran remained loyal, but stayed completely out of politics and didn’t really want to get involved.

As a whole, Dalaran and the Kirin Tor are kind of walking this line between faction alliances and simply wanting to save the world from whatever dreadful thing happens to threaten it. The Horde happened to be that thing threatening the world in Mists of Pandaria, so Jaina turned Dalaran’s support and defenses towards stopping it — and rightfully so, although she definitely had her own personal vendetta surrounding that one as well. But if that dreadful thing threatening the world turned out to be the Alliance itself at some point, I’m pretty sure Dalaran and the Kirin Tor wouldn’t hesitate to turn and open fire.

Dalaran is basically less concerned in the politics between Alliance vs. Horde, and far more concerned with not letting Azeroth itself get wrecked by whatever happens to be threatening it at the time.

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!