The Queue: More wine please

If there’s one thing Mitch and I can agree on, it’s that wine is great. It just makes everything better. Leveling up a new alt? Wine! Grinding for rep? Wine! Waiting on a Battle.net queue? Wine! Arguing with your co-workers? Definitely wine.

Shgla'yos plahf mh'naus.

So let’s get on to the arguing part, shall we?

Liz: Yogg-Saron is my favorite. Which is a sentence that sounds weird out of context.

Mitch: Well, for starters, Hearthstone doesn’t care about lore so any answer would only really be loosely based in anything. But Yogg’s whole thing is insanity. Obviously, he’s not hurting himself in WoW, but a big part of his encounter is the players trying to avoid going insane.

Kill them all... before they kill you...

Mitch: If you do go insane, you see your allies as enemies — to you, they are Faceless ones. So you attack everyone around you doing as much damage as possible to everything. But you also only do this for 1 minute before dying horribly yourself. So, really, while Yogg can’t hurt himself in WoW because of game mechanics, his mechanics in Hearthstone kind of match what the players experience in his fight.

Liz: You have to learn to embrace the inherent chaos that is Yogg-Saron. The joy here is the fact that Yogg could do anything. It could win you the game or it could lose you the game. You have no idea. And it happens so quickly you can hardly actually keep track of what’s going on. Having the choice between life and death completely removed from your hands is strangely liberating.

There is no escape... not in this life... not in the next...

Mitch: I don’t want to be a Malcontent Mitch…

Liz: Here we go.

Mitch: …but I absolutely hate the idea of every race having every class. At some point of inclusion, you lose the fantasy aspect of the game. Pandaren Death Knights would canonically not make sense.  Goblin Paladins? Draenei Warlocks? Sorry, for me it just doesn’t fit the lore well enough to even make a loose connection work. That’s not to say there aren’t some race/class combinations in the game that don’t make sense to me, or even some that aren’t in that would make sense, but overall I am not a fan.

Liz: Gnome Paladins, Mitch, Gnome Paladins.

Mitch: Yeah, good luck carrying anything that doesn’t weigh three times your weight.

Liz: We can be Priests. We can be Warriors. Why not Paladins?

Tell yourself again that these are not truly your friends...

Liz: Wait, what?

Mitch: Fun fact: at some point during Wrath, if you changed your character super quickly at the log in screen before logging in, you could appear as another race. I did this to turn Fizzl into a number of different Priests (including a Tauren before they were available).

Liz: If anything it’s worse because they’ve pruned down skills even further. I started leveling a Gnome Hunter and it reached peak tedium within ten minutes. (Note: I have limited tolerance for tedium.)

Mitch: I’ll be completely honest, I don’t know. Ever since I knew Legion was coming, one of my goals was to test the leveling experience and see if it had gotten even more broken but then time did what it always does and there was only so much of it and I didn’t actually test. The closest thing I’ve done to testing leveling is when I did the Pandaria intro earlier today (yesterday?) and the cinematic seemed all kinds of messed up.

Trust is your weakness...

Liz: Trust me, it’s terrible.

Mitch: I really, really want to test Shadow because it’s all kinds of different now and I have no faith that Blizzard will have gone back and made it make sense for leveling.

The void sucks at your soul. It is content to feast slowly...

Liz: They’ve pruned more skills so you just wind up with a button or two to press through level 10. And then maybe one more button for the next ten levels… and… you see where I’m going with this.

Mitch: Yeah, Shadow didn’t actually get too much pruned… but it did still have some done, and even more altering/adding.

Liz: My bet’s on terrible.

Mitch: I’m going to say patch 1.10 precisely because it breaks the rules of the question and that’s sort of how everyone reacted when it first came out. “Wait, isn’t 1.10 the same as 1.1?!” It was amusing and still probably confusing for anyone with a math-orientated brain. As for worst… come on, really? I can’t even muster sarcasm for this one — you know the answer.

Liz: Whoa now. You have ruined everything.

It was your fault...

Mitch: As is my modus operandi.

Liz: With Legion coming, I think I have to say patch 2.1. Still not prepared. But I’m totally with Mitch on the worst.

Mitch & Liz: Ag ssaggh thoq fssh patch 6.1.