The Queue: Playable Vrykul and other things WoW should have

Ever since the introduction of the Vrykul I’ve thought we should get them as playable characters. In a perfect world they’d be Alliance, to counter the Horde having Tauren (or perhaps Ogres, if the Horde ever gets those) and they’d look like the ones in the header image. Honestly, while I don’t really care that much for male Vrykul models, I’ve always dug female Vrukul models.

I’m listening to Killswitch Engage’s ‘Always’ as I type this. Let’s do the Queue.

At present my level 109 Warrior has the Arms and Fury Artifacts and switches between them based on mood. It’s rough and if there’s a catch up mechanic in the alpha I have not seen it — I’m forced to simply split my Artifact Power items between Artifacts, and as a result neither is as progressed as it should be.

If they do implement such a mechanic, I’d be all for it. Right now, you basically can be a dilettante like me, or you can have focus and get one of the Artifacts leveled at a reasonable pace, but you can’t have both.

1. Player generated content. Probably with a system that calculated the challenge of said content and assigned reward tokens or points to buy rewards with, rather than letting players just pack the place to the gills with awesome gear.
2. More playable races, and the concept of faction neutrality/defection. If your Forsaken just isn’t down with Sylvanas’ program, or your Human feels more at home with Orcs than his own people, you could defect to the Horde or Alliance and keep your current race.
3. A new threat to the cosmos that isn’t the Legion, the Old Gods, or anything else we’ve seen to date.
4. Argus.

My computer’s about five years old (it was brand new when Cataclysm was released) and it runs Legion fine if I keep the settings in the middle of the quality range. Honestly, even if I kick it up to Ultra for a few SS’s it’s not terrible, but I haven’t tried things like raids like that yet.

I’m no expert on Macs — there have been some weird bugs that have affected people who play on Macs — but I’d suspect that your computer should be able to run Legion, if not as well as someone who hit the technical benchmarks for minimum performance. WoW has always been a very forgiving game compared to others.

As of this writing raid sizes and difficulties are unchanged from Warlords of Draenor.

The word ‘ettin‘ is an old English version of the word ‘jotun’ or ‘ Jötunn ‘ and that makes me think that the ettin in World of Warcraft were known of by the Vrykul. Look at this map:

The Broken Isles are directly south of Northrend, specifically the Howling Fjord region, which was home to the Dragonflayer clan of Vrykul (the ones who were ancestral to humans, as it was their King Ymiron who ordered any children suffering from the Curse of Flesh to be eliminated) and are due west of the Eastern Kingdoms, where ancient Vrykul and Humans settled following Tyr and where modern Ettin can be found.

So my theory is that either Ettin are not related to Ogres and were instead some offshoot of the giants of Azeroth (and thus were known well enough by the Vrykul to be given the name ‘Ettin’, a clearly Vrykul name) or that the ancient Ogres somehow at some point came into contact with the ancient Vrykul. Was there at some point a period of time when the Ogres of the Gorian Empire used their magics to attempt to invade Azeroth? Did they find themselves blocked by the equally powerful Vrykul?

I don’t know, of course, but I’m suspicious. The Ettin seem to predate the Ogres. Perhaps they’ve been here all along.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. See y’all Friday. Tomorrow is Alex. Ask him more about ettins.