The Queue: The demon in the pigskin

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!

This isn’t a question, but I wanted to address it anyway. I wouldn’t say there’s a “ton” of weapon drops in the alpha. There are some, yes. I’d say I’ve looted 5-6 of them from treasures. Currently, they’re rare-quality weapons with “PLACEHOLDER” in their name. Whether they’re there to stay or not, we don’t know. Whether there’s one for every weapon type or not, I don’t know that, either. There might be more I haven’t found. But they don’t drop from bosses, they don’t come from quest rewards, none of that.

Theoretically, these exist to let people play their off-specs. But if there’s only one healing mace for Priests who went Shadow, I don’t know how viable that is — you’d need to specifically quest in the zone in which you’d find it, and you’d need to decide whether you want to loot it at level 101 or level 110, assuming it scales with level like quest rewards.

I’d say they’re rare in that there aren’t very many of them. They aren’t rare in the sense you can go get it whenever you want.

As far as I’m aware, none of that has been explained yet. We don’t know when Khadgar took over. We don’t know where Jaina went. Nothing has been said about either one in-game.

I will answer this as simply and directly as possible to avoid revealing any potential spoilers. They’re spoilers I would consider minor, but my definition of minor isn’t the same as others.

There is/will be Blood Elf representation in the Kirin Tor. The Horde’s district in Dalaran has Forsaken guards.

I just tested this on my Rogue. My Rogue is an Outlaw with the Fate and Fortune artifact. With the swords equipped, I changed my spec to Subtlety. The swords turned red on my character sheet and my character behaved as if unarmed. If I unequipped the swords, I was not allowed to equip them again until I switched back to Outlaw.

If you aren’t the correct spec, your artifact cannot be used at all.

Off the top of my head, Monks are on The Wandering Isle, Priests are on an unknown planet, Shaman are in the Maelstrom, Warriors are in Vrykul Heaven, Demon Hunters are on a spaceship, and Warlocks are on the Legion planet of Mardum.

Azeroth’s abundance of portal magic and/or technology really makes physical proximity irrelevant.

Let me tell you a story.

My freshman year of high school, I decided to join the football team. Up until that point, I’d lived in an environment where I didn’t get to participate in extracurricular activities. I’d never participated in team sports. I didn’t even get to hang out with friends after school very often, so I didn’t participate in informal sports, either. Playing outside was usually something I could do alone — like riding a bike around the block solo. High school seemed like a really great time to get involved in something, and I was a pretty big guy — weight, yes, but also height and general build. I was super happy to get in shape and be a lineman or something.

Actually participating in that team turned out to be something wholly alien to me. I didn’t understand locker room behavior, and after a year of that, I still didn’t. The way coaches treated people didn’t align at all with prior life experiences. The level of young machismo involved was completely incomprehensible. While most of the boys on the team saw it as perfectly normal, I couldn’t come to terms with it. I wasn’t having fun. After a season, I still wasn’t having fun. It was miserable. I didn’t sign up again the following year and had no regrets.

For many years afterwards, I held quitting football as some bizarre point of pride. I quit, because I’m better than them! This carried over into my adult life where I’d roll my eyes at people who enjoyed sports or mock people who’d get excited about the Super Bowl or the World Series. I called sports “sportsball” and found it clever and hilarious. All of that was, ultimately, rooted in my inability to identify with this thing other people liked doing. While I can’t find it anymore, it was actually a webcomic — maybe five or six years ago — which made me realize how silly my behavior was. There have been many like it since, but I can’t find this specific one anywhere. Essentially, it posed the question: why can’t you let people enjoy things which you don’t enjoy?

I asked myself if peoples’ enjoyment of the Super Bowl had any lasting, negative impact on my life. Does it? Not at all. Worst case scenario, I stop reading Twitter (or whatever else) for a few hours. Who cares? I can find something else to do during that time. In any other capacity, it doesn’t hurt me whatsoever. If I expect people to respect my enjoyment of certain things, I should respect their enjoyment of different things. Wasting time and energy spewing “sportsball” at people hurts me more than it hurts them. At best, I put myself into a bad mood that way. At worst, it makes people — potentially people I care about — really hate having me around.

It’s not that I can’t figure out what a third down conversion is. I just don’t care. And that’s fine — if I keep it to myself and don’t go around telling everyone excited about the Super Bowl how much I don’t care about the Super Bowl. That’s useless to them and to me. Nowadays, hearing people say “sportsball” is more annoying to me than people saying “Super Bowl.” Fans’ excitement is way better than bitter spite.

One of the reasons I find esports so fascinating is this clash of worlds. Nerds who get angry about football get hyped about the latest Heroes/Dota/LoL/Hearthstone tourney. Sports fans are, in turn, getting angry about video game tournaments. Both groups of people hold regular pissing contests about “real sports” and it ultimately comes down to the same thing — those groups refuse to accept some people enjoy different things.

Pick your battles. If it doesn’t have a lasting, negative impact on your life, ignore it and find something else to do.