The Queue: You asked for it

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!

Okay I confess, the first question in today’s Queue was one that I mentioned wanting to be asked on Twitter. So somebody asked it. Which means I get to talk about it, which is great because I totally wanted to do that in the first place. So if you ever wanted to know what kind of hero I’d throw together for Overwatch, you’ll be happy. If you didn’t…well you’ll still be happy anyway, because I answered a lot of other questions, too!

Okay so hear me out — Overwatch already has a pretty good spread of characters that fill a variety of roles, and those characters kind of fall back on classic superhero tropes to a degree. I would love to see some kind of hero that fills an Oracle-style role.

For those unfamiliar with DC comics: Oracle was the alias of Barbara Gordon — Commissioner Gordon’s daughter, a.k.a. the original Batgirl. In the graphic novel The Killing Joke, Barbara was shot by the Joker in her home, leaving her paralyzed. She later reappeared as Oracle, and it was immediately clear that her paralysis wasn’t a handicap at all. A computer expert and information broker, she later worked with Black Canary and others in the Birds of Prey series, serving as the little voice in the ear of her team that gave them information and could hack into just about anything. Basically, she was awesome.

I’d love to see a hero that fills that kind of role — obviously a support hero. Maybe some kind of super genius computer/tech expert that Winston finds while he’s rounding people up, and adds to the team. Here’s the trick, and what sets them apart: They can never actually physically be on the battlefield. Instead, they hack into the heroes that are already fighting, piggy-backing Cho’gall style and either buffing heroes on their side by boosting their armor or weapons to give them amped up abilities, or hacking into the other side to sabotage their attacks.

Or maybe not the hacking into the other side, because that might be just a little too powerful.

So what’s the disadvantage to playing the hero? Well first off, your team is going to be down a member for moving payloads, capturing objectives, and just offering some additional fire on the field. Second, you don’t really have physical control over your character, so you can’t control where you’re going at any given moment — you can only hop from hero to hero, seeing what they see on their screen. Third, you die when the hero you’re hacking dies — which means if you hop into the wrong person, you could be face-planting before you actually manage to do anything.

But I think it’d be a fun spin on the superhero theme, one that Overwatch doesn’t have just yet. Part of the reason I loved Oracle (and Barbara Gordon) so much was that she never let anything stand in her way, and never let anything stop her, and that seems to jive with the whole hopeful optimism theme that Overwatch is embracing.

Yep, you’ll get it! It doesn’t have to be a brand-new toon, you just have to have a character that levels in game and dings level 20. Boosting does not count — you have to actually level. But if you have an existing alt that’s really close to level 20, you can just level that, no worries!

Oh I highly doubt Blizzard is going to ignore April Fools — they seem to like putting pranks out there. I’m wondering if we’ll see something Overwatch-related this year. The game doesn’t release until May, but people are really interested in it, so maybe they’ll pull something out of their hats this year instead of waiting until next.

For abilities, I tend to use a combination of keyboard and mouse buttons, with occasional clicking for abilities that I don’t use all that often. Typically my most-used stuff is on my mouse and 1-6, keys 7 through – are reserved for “Uh oh” abilities or longer cooldowns. Sometimes I have buttons off to the side on my screen — those are reserved for stuff I want handy, like mounts or buff food that I’d like to access without opening another window — and those are always clicked. I move with my mouse.

I’m kind of on two minds about this one. From an overall game perspective, I think it’s kind of cool that our little guys from so long ago have finally achieved enough status and fame that they’re recognized and rewarded for everything that they’ve done. It makes that whole leveling grind feel kind of satisfying, like we’ve accomplished something really amazing — and, let’s face it, we really have.

On the other hand, I’m also a roleplayer, and I typically like playing characters that are in some kind of underdog role, not necessarily the big amazing hero. Characters that like to skulk behind the scenes, always on the outer edge of main events, maybe trying to indirectly influence them without actively participating in a way that would garner too much attention. For those characters, being assigned the role of leader or hero just doesn’t…work, and doesn’t quite feel right.

However, it’s pretty easy to just ignore the in-game story at that point and play my character the way I’d like them played. Part of the beauty of roleplaying is that you’ve got the option to pick and choose what elements of the main story you want to apply to your character. Maybe I’ll talk about this more in next week’s roleplay column.

As for your question, it does raise the question of just how much higher our heroes can go. If they’re already the unquestioned saviors of Azeroth, where can they really go from there? How do you make them feel better, when they’re already the best there ever was? It’s an interesting kind of problem.

I don’t think there’s been any confirmation that yes, Gul’dan is totally a demon now or anything — he’s always been a warlock, affiliated with the Burning Legion, willing to serve the Burning Legion, but not actually demonic in nature. His skull was powerful because after he died, it was pretty much turned into a channeling vessel of sorts for demonic energy.

That’s why the Skull of Gul’dan was corrupting the forests of Ashenvale — it was channeling fel corruption directly into Felwood. That’s also why it transformed Illidan into a demon — it wasn’t the Skull itself that did the deed, it was the fact that Illidan basically stuck a bendy straw into a direct channel of fel magic straight from the Twisting Nether and went to town on it.

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!