The Queue: The finest laundry in Dalaran
@Shadesogrey
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!
Meet Harold. He does the best laundry in Dalaran. Something tells me he’d rather be doing anything else, but look, when you have a talent, maybe you should just follow your destiny. Even if that destiny is in a dank basement somewhere in the dusty bowels of Dalaran, producing the finest dry cleaning in the city.
QftQ: Have any of you read the Warcraft Chronicles sample from Dark Horse, yet? If so, what do you think?
Yes. It is safe to say I’m pretty excited about it — the small glimpse we got was a boatload of material. And that was just the tiniest fraction of what’s going to be in that book. I’ve been waiting for this one for a long time, just because there was so much of Azeroth’s history that wasn’t clearly explained — I don’t know if Chronicle will explain everything, but it’ll give us a lot more depth on areas of Warcraft‘s history that were fairly blurry on the details.
Q4TQ: Does a June/July Legion release seem possible, with how much content the alpha is still missing (entire zones, several dungeons, all raids)? I do like how Blizz is actually responding to testing feedback this time around. That was one of Warlords big failures, imo – very little changed from the beta. But to move from alpha to release in 4-5 months is quite a jump for a game this size, I feel. Unless we’re right on the cusp of jumping into beta, the timeline seems squished.
I don’t think so. We don’t even have all the leveling zones unlocked as of yet, and the alpha is still missing a lot of material. They’ve done a little raid testing, but not a ton — heck, we’ve even got class specs that still aren’t available for testing or play just yet. Unless they suddenly develop warp-speed coding and balancing powers, I don’t think we’re going to see Legion that soon. I could be wrong though!
Is there an addon that will let me move — uh, the interface that covers my raid/party frames when putting up a puglist on the custom LFG? I have it open so I can invite, but I can’t keep track of who I have already in my group. Damn thing sits right on top of it.
Someone pointed out MoveAnything in response to your question, and I second the recommendation — I’m mentioning it here because it’s extremely useful for people that want to rearrange the UI to something that works better for them. I figure you’re probably not the only one that wouldn’t mind if a frame were situated in a different spot, so I thought I’d mention it here as well, just in case anyone’s looking for something like this.
How do you feel about group buffs going away in Legion? I miss the way it was before Cata started trimming them down. It was cool to get another player in and you’d all of a sudden have something like +spell crit debuff on boss (unless you were the mage “scortch b*****” providing it lol). I get they didn’t want you forced into bringing a ton of people, but with flex sizes, I wish it would return to those days.
That said… If they aren’t going to bring back the vast number of buffs, it makes sense to remove them. Almost all raid groups will just automatically have them all (since so few and so much overlap), so everything would be balanced for their existence, so its practically meaningless. The only small thing I’ll miss with the current model is getting so much stronger just by being in a group.
I really liked group buffs back in the day. It felt like you were bringing something valuable to the group you were in. The problem with it was that certain buffs were better than others for certain situations — and classes that didn’t provide any kind of valuable group buffs were sometimes overlooked for classes that did.
It’s not much fun if your class of choice is overlooked for group activities like raiding or dungeons, especially if there’s literally nothing you can do about it, other than…you know, rolling a different, better-buffing class that you don’t necessarily want to play. So I understand why they decided to start phasing it out. Give it to everyone, and it doesn’t really feel like a special or unique thing. Give it to a few people, and it turns into something people can hold against other people, “You don’t bring anything viable to the raid.”
Q4tQ: Have you ever loved a Class so much that you create one of every available race? I ask as I have done this with my Druids and even Monks! Paladins are another favourite of mine and they, at the time which was during Wrath, only had a smattering of playable race options.
I can’t be the only one who does this… right? o.o
I have not — I have a few characters that I take to max level every expansion, each a different class. I’m kind of a completionist though, and re-rolling one of every class means that I’d feel like I’d need to complete everything on every single one of them. That’s…a little counterproductive.
That’s me, though, and I’ll admit my brain’s a little weird sometimes. I doubt you’re the only one that does this — heck I know Rossi has a variety of different warriors he plays, of a variety of different races.
I still think it’s a bit weird they decided to go with Chronicle Volume 1 being all the way from the creation of the universe to the start of the First War, with the other two volumes apparently being about the 30-ish years between the opening of the Dark Portal, and, well, now. They seem to be cramming a lot of stuff into Volume 1, so I’m left wondering how they’re going to fill the other two volumes – though I guess those 30-ish years are rather eventful compared to the prehistoric era, and Blizzard are the ones writing the lore, not me.
Still, though, I personally would have been fine with 2 volumes dedicated to pre-First War stuff, with the third volume being First War to current day, but that’s just because I tend to find things like the Old Gods and the Mogu Empire more interesting than more recent events.
Volume 1 covers a really large swath of Azeroth’s history because we have virtually nothing from that time period at all. That’s because, historically speaking, a lot more has happened from the First War until now than ever happened in all that history before it. We’ve crammed a lot in the last 30-40 years of Azeroth’s timeline. The distant past didn’t have nearly as many influential events relevant to us, as players — so picking out the highlights of that time period (The wars, the Titans, etc) and fleshing those out just makes more sense.
Plus, you don’t really want to lock yourself into a map of everything under the sun. Part of the reason you leave gaps in history as a storyteller is so that you have room to go back and fill in with more later, if you need to. I doubt Chronicle is going to tell us everything. But I bet there’s going to be more than enough to keep us talking for the next however many years WoW continues to stick around.
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!
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