The Queue: Definitely not setting the world on fire edition

Nope. No fire here. What would make you even think that?

At any rate, it’s just me here today, so let’s dive in to your questions. Murlocs may or may not be included.

I actually had to google Greg Weisman when he first came up, so I can’t really comment there. However, I’ve gotta say I’m pretty excited for these books anyway. It seems like a really novel idea to have the protagonist be an artist — rather than a warrior, a hunter, an engineer, whatever else — and have be a central part of the story. The main character is young and can’t really fight his way out of problems, and we’ve seen so many stories (it’s Warcraft, after all) where it’s all about the fight. I’m looking forward to something different.

The answer is… we don’t know.

Which, okay, is technically not an answer.

Blizzard has said you’ll be able to get an additional artifact fairly soon, but it’s not currently in the Legion alpha. My hope is that you’ll have to do the artifact quest for your second artifact, because most of the artifact quests are great. But we really don’t know except that you can start out as Ret for leveling and pick up the Holy artifact after not too long.

Though, entirely unrelated to your question, I think Holy’s really fun to level right now. You get a giant hammer and enough self-healing potential that nothing’s going to hurt you. It’s a win/win in my book.

While this sounds like it could be a fun challenge, I feel as though leveling is fundamentally broken right now. With the stat squish and the removed skills, getting through lower levels is rough. You don’t have enough skills at lower levels be effective, you get talents that modify skills you don’t have yet, gear a hundred ilvls over what you’re wearing isn’t an upgrade… anything other than max level is a complete mess. Heirlooms are the only thing that make low levels doable right now, and if you amped up the difficulty I think this would only be more noticeable.

So… I think to implement a hard mode of some kind and not have it be a misery, they’d have to fix some of this — smoothing out the curve at which you get skills and talents, so playing at level 10 is as doable as playing at level 60. And that’s probably more difficult than just adding some kind of hard mode.

Though what about a “hardcore” mode like Diablo 3? That means that if your character ever dies… it’s gone. On one hand, it makes lag a nightmare. On the other, it definitely teaches you to play defensively.

I think there’s a feeling that smaller raids aren’t as much of a challenge as larger raids, which I personally disagree with. Organizing 40 players or 25 players into a coherent group is tough. But organizing 10 players is a different sort of challenge.

It always felt as though in small raids you had to take real care with balancing your team. You’ve got a tank or two, a healer or two, and fill the rest of your slots with. And hopefully in that DPS you have a couple of hybrids who can handle tanking or healing if things go south. Sure, I did Molten Core and Blackwing Lair and Ahn’Qiraj back in Vanilla — even with 40 players there was almost a way one player messing up could ruin things. But with 10 players, you just didn’t have any backup if something went wrong.

Some of my fondest game memories are in Karazhan.

Liz: No.

Mitch: …did… did someone say my name? Oh jeez, did someone let Liz do the Thursday Queue all by herself? I think her answer to this last question is all you need to see just how great that turned out. But to answer your (largely rhetorical) question: yes, of course. Have you seen my life? My decisions are always the best. Less than one year here and it’s already at least 60% #MitchWatch. Follow my lead, and you might just find you in charge of your own website someday.