The Queue: Recurring characters

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!

That is currently the case on the Legion alpha, yes. You can take a portal from Dalaran back to Orgrimmar or Stormwind, and there’s also a portal back. There wasn’t a portal back for quite some time, but I imagine that can be attributed to it being alpha and incomplete rather than Blizzard actually considering not letting people return to Legion content once they leave. That would be silly.

You can find that on our Supporter Benefits page. Enter your email address (if you’re in the appropriate benefits tier) and your ads should disappear.

As a general note, we’ve made some fixes to our caching system recently — that should hopefully fix the situation where ad free wasn’t working for some people, as well as some issues with our guild listings.

You can trade inks down because older glyphs are still relevant. A glyph released in Wrath of the Lich King might still be really good/fun/whatever and people still want it — it has no iLevel, it isn’t gear which can expire, it’s just a glyph. So scribes still make them, and people still use them. Is that the case for other professions? Maybe, but I can’t think of any examples. Older professions might have one or two cool vanity items, but I can’t imagine a situation where I’d want to turn True Iron into Copper Ore for crafting purposes.

Enabling someone to trade True Iron for Copper Ore simply because it’s more valuable on the auction house seems strange.

Yes, you can turn off your shoulders. Disabling shoulders, helm, and cloak are done via transmogrification now rather than a UI option — when choosing your transmog outfit, you choose a blank option for those slots.

He was in Highmountain with a fairly major role as recently as a month or two ago — then the quests suddenly changed and he’s been completely erased from the zone. I don’t know if they have other plans for him or if they decided not to incorporate him at all.

I know this isn’t a question, but I wanted to comment on it. One of my problems with World of Warcraft’s story, and why I get bored of it so easily, is characters with a compelling story get rotated out for years at a time. A major character does something, then they’re gone for 2-4 years. When they finally come back, either they’re picking up right where they left off — which is weird, because you’ve probably forgotten the details — or their character progression has happened off-screen and their behavior seems totally out of character.

This is my beef with Jaina, for example. She was just hit with another tragedy after a lifetime of tragedies, and she’s reaching the point where something’s gotta give, her character is undergoing a transformation, she’s made some realizations — and she gets shelved for the entirety of Warlords of Draenor. She may or may not have a meaningful role in Legion. We don’t know yet. But after a point, does it matter? If we haven’t seen her for two years, are we seriously supposed to act like her story is picking up right where it left off? Other things have happened since then. Other stories have been told.

For Wrathion to continue to be relevant, he needs to continue to exist in the narrative. Personally, I don’t give a damn about Khadgar or anything he’s doing in Warlords of Draenor or Legion. I just don’t care. He’s been out of the picture for a decade and, to give him screentime, more recent characters — characters I do care about — have been bumped out of the spotlight. If Wrathion were to disappear for an expansion or two, I’m not going to care about him anymore. I’ll have moved on. For me, that’s just how it is. Wrathion is particularly problematic because he’s so often tied to legendaries: They remove his quests once an expansion is over. That sucks. I don’t even care about the item, but removing the story outright is just the worst.