The Queue: One shot, one kill

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!

I think that would have come with its own host of problems — the garrison grind was bad, but I think people engaged in that grind over and over again because there wasn’t much else to do in Warlords. Reduce it down to only one garrison per account and suddenly there’s even less to do. Personally, that’s what it came down to for me: I got a billion alts and alt garrisons up and running because when I looked at the expansion’s content, I saw nothing else… but still wanted to play. I did what was available within the expansion and that was nothing but garrisons. If I only had the one? I’d log in for 15 minutes, do my sole circuit, then log off.

Granted, running multiple garrisons burned me out hard, but narrowing it down to just one garrison would’ve resulted in boredom just as quickly if not more quickly.

I don’t believe any of the music has been implemented yet, no. Though it’s possible I just haven’t noticed it. I’m not one of those people that finds the WoW soundtrack particularly compelling and usually turn it off. That said, I haven’t turned it off in Legion just in case I notice something new, but I have yet to notice a thing.

As I recall, the music tends to be one of the last things added to WoW betas, along with the bulk of the voiceover.

The Class Hall has mission-like activities, but no, that’s not implemented either. There are signs of things, but that’s it. Followers still exist in some fashion. Currently, when you’re in your class hall, you also get a UI showing a rudimentary army of some sort. In the warlock class hall, for example, you get a bar at the top of your screen that shows how many acolytes, imp packs, or other demon-thing you currently have available. Presumably, you’ll be deploying those troops somewhere in some fashion. I don’t think there’s any way of recruiting/training any of those troop-types yet or any way to do anything with them even if you could get them.

We probably sound like a broken record in regards to the Legion alpha, but seriously: almost nothing outside of the basic questing experience has been implemented yet. You see shades of things here and there, some indication that a feature or mechanic is supposed to exist, but it doesn’t yet. I have absolutely no special insight to Blizzard’s development process, I have no idea what’s complete internally, and so on and so forth, but going entirely on what’s available in the alpha right now… I feel like Legion is still in a seriously early stage of development. Maybe from the developers’ perspective it doesn’t feel that way, but from a player perspective, Legion seems like it’s an eternity away from being ready for launch.

I only vaguely remember this so I could be wrong, but I believe Blizzard suggested Nova Covert Ops is something of a test bed for that kind of content. If Covert Ops is popular, we’ll get more mission packs. If it crashes and burns, seeing more of them isn’t likely. Personally, I’ll be playing the heck out of it — StarCraft is a purely single-player game to me. Blizzard, like Valve, seems to be moving further and further away from making games with narrative. I’m going to support whatever gives me a story.

This isn’t a question, but I felt like responding: when I tank for our alpha livestreams, when we go dungeoneering, my protection warrior who gets scaled up to level 110 has something like 1.5 million health. I honestly have difficulty wrapping my head around it sometimes. I see something hit me for 300,000 damage and my reaction is “holy crap!” Then when I stop and think, that’s not significant at all. It’s a chunk of my health, sure. But it isn’t a huge one. And that’s weird.