The Queue: The best Rogue that ever was

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!

And now, in Curious Alpha Bug news: It appears that Troll models are slightly messed up, in that they spontaneously disappear at random moments. This isn’t limited to NPCs — playing my Troll Shaman meant that for a good chunk of time, my character was simply absent from the screen. In other news, this Troll Uncrowned Peacekeeper has won the weekly award for Best Underbelly Rogue. We’d say he wears this new badge of honor with pride, except we can’t actually tell if he’s wearing it or not.

On to the questions!

It’s not bad at all — Mulgore is fairly spread out, but the Cataclysm revamp managed to corral the expansiveness into a series of quest hubs that gradually escort you through the zone. The Tauren storyline is interesting, because it’s the fallout from Magatha Grimtotem’s coup in the novel The Shattering — which I recommend reading if you haven’t, although it isn’t really necessary to understand what’s going on while you’re leveling, it’s just the backstory that kind of frames the zone.

That said, if you’ve never played a Tauren before, the zone is a little sad in places, just because Mulgore got a little wrecked. If you played the Tauren leveling zone in vanilla, expect to be punched in the gut with feelings, because a lot of familiar faces from the early days of the leveling experience are no more.

Because it’s not ready to go just yet. There are still specs that aren’t open for play on the alpha, and still zones that haven’t been opened up yet, and still features that are being worked on and haven’t been fully realized. They have to make sure everything is working properly — and by automatically generating characters that all have the same base stats, same starting gear and same abilities, they can test things against those blank templates and get them to a point where they are functional. Once that’s done, they can bring in the character copies and see how all those features and quests work against the wide, wide variety of characters out there on live servers. Any problems they encounter will likely be a little easier to identify, because they can then look at the copied character and figure out what the differences between that one, and the character creation generated ones, and spot the difference.

Well the only one my rogue can use is Thunderfury, so I’d be using that. I mean, come on. It’s got a sweet proc.

You know, I had no idea what the answer to this was, so I hopped on the alpha and headed to Stormwind to check it out, just for you:

Currently it looks like all that old gear will be available by gathering Marks of Honor, as shown above. You get those by doing PVP, so yes, PVP gear will remain a thing you still need to obtain by doing PVP. Which…well, that’s only appropriate!

Overwatch is a multiplayer first-person shooter. If you want to play it, you’re going to be fighting other people. You can set up games vs. the AI system if you like, but from what I’ve experienced so far, a lot of the fun of Overwatch is just getting a pile of friends together and playing as a team. Plus, fighting the AI doesn’t get you the Loot Boxes or experience, so it’s not really accomplishing anything in the long run. It’s good for practice, but I don’t think I’d really enjoy doing nothing but playing the AI. Your mileage may vary — I’d encourage you to check it out once the beta opens up and see for yourself, though!

I find it odd that Garona isn’t green, honestly — it just looks weird, especially since she’s green in the actual film, or at least she has been in all the trailers. I understand the reason for it though, because having a big blob of green on a poster that’s predominantly trying to feature the whole red vs. blue of Warcraft would be visually jarring, to say the least. But if they were trying to avoid that, they could have just faded everyone to grayscale or sepia tones, instead of changing her skin tone entirely. It’s a little confusing, and for people unfamiliar with the franchise she might be mistaken for a vampire or something.

That second TV spot is pretty sweet though, I like it a lot.

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!