The Queue: Dragons gonna dragon

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!

It isn’t that I refuse to use addons entirely, I just try to stick to addons which do something I absolutely cannot do with the base UI. I use TradeskillMaster for glyph production because the base UI is woefully underequipped when it comes to maintaining a full stock of glyphs for auctioning. I use an RP addon on RP realms because WoW doesn’t support RP tools. I don’t use an action bar addon because I’ve learned to work with the default UI and its associated hotkeys. Throughout Warlords, people wailed and screamed whenever they saw me doing garrison missions without Master Plan, because Master Plan made it so much easier. But I like the default UI for garrison missions and enjoy the puzzle element of figuring out which followers will give me the best result. Why would I use an addon to remove that puzzle if I enjoy it? If I get worse results due to not automating it, that’s fine. It’s a game. I’m having fun doing it manually even if it isn’t optimal.

I avoid addons where possible because I find maintaining them to be frustrating and, once you’ve hit critical mass of addons, they can have a larger impact on game performance than I’d like. I still remember the days of GearScore causing serious lag for people back in Wrath of the Lich King. I have no interest in extending my loading times for custom UI elements I don’t need. And updating addons, customizing them, and recustomizing them every patch is the most obnoxious thing in the world — even at times like this where we’re going to go a year between patches.

It feels great being able to simply log on and play on a patch day. Meanwhile, my friends are grumbling because their custom UI is out of date and they need to update it but now they lost all of their settings so the first afternoon of a content patch is spent rebuilding their entire UI. See ya, losers. I’ll be playing the game!

I suspect this question was inspired specifically because I shot down installing MogIt during yesterday’s podcast. I was logged onto a male character and wanted to see what a particular armor set looked like on a female character. People suggested MogIt. That was a good suggestion, but if I hadn’t been streaming, I would’ve logged onto another character and solved the issue in about 30 seconds. That’s faster and easier than installing and maintaining an addon I wouldn’t otherwise use.

I have nothing against addons. I’m not going to sneer at people who use them. I’m just picky about which ones I use myself. Master Plan is a great addon which helped a lot of people in Warlords. If someone wants to use it, more power to ’em. It’s just not for me.

I’m not sure there’s too much of a rift between new and old players in regards to difficulty of mobs. We’ve been experiencing these leveling oddities on our weekly stream where yes, we’re one-shotting our way to level 100 without heirlooms or any such things. It’s all a big numbers game, which is easy to point out, more complicated to fix. Either mobs need to be tuned up, leveling characters tuned down, or both. And the extent to which characters need to be tuned down while leveling differs from class to class, ability to ability. A monk’s keg smash 1-shots mobs throughout most of the game. One ability on its own can more or less take you to max level. That shouldn’t be the case.

Ion pointed out they consider 15 seconds to be their sweet spot for combat with a world mob. Right now, for some classes, combat lasts 14 seconds less than that. What’s your hardest hitting ability? Use it. Mob dead. Loot it. Move on.

I don’t think leveling needs to be hard. I don’t know if it even needs to have a “challenge” depending on how you define challenge. But it does need more meat to it. Combat does need to be a part of it. You shouldn’t be able to 1-shot your way to max level (again, even without heirlooms) and you should have a satisfying number of spells to do whatever you want to do. There are healer classes who have only one healing spell for a long, long time. Try healing a low level dungeon on a priest who only has Flash Heal. It won’t go well. Now, imagine you’re playing WoW for the first time, and you decided to play a healer and picked the one who doesn’t get their healing spells until later. Are you going to play WoW very long? Not likely.

This isn’t a question, but let’s talk about it, anyway. Yes, I waited in a 35 minute queue to get into a Warlords heroic last night. When we got in, the tank said they’d never run that dungeon before and… quit the group. I don’t understand what that was all about, but it meant the group had to wait another 20 minutes for a new tank. While the four of us waited, I decided to inspect everyone and what I saw was unexpected — people were still wearing a lot of greens. Not the ilevel 640 greens you get from boosting to 100, but questing greens which barely let them skirt into queueing for heroics. At this point in the expansion, especially with Tanaan being something which exists, I expected everyone hitting level 100 would be able to kit themselves out pretty fast. Not true, apparently!

I was the only one who had Tanaan gear and a squishy caster probably isn’t going to be able to tank a dungeon.

These long queue times are the primary reason why I stopped running dungeons despite dungeons being my favorite content in the game. It’s absurd to waste an hour waiting to play rather than actually playing. And for DPS queues, it’s been that way for years and years, and I’ve never seen it improve. If something was done about this — letting an extra DPS in each group, for example — it’d take me a lot longer to get bored of an expansion, because I’d actually want to run dungeon content. I could roll a tank, and I have done so — I have tanks. But sometimes I want to play a DPS character. That barrier to entry which is the queue timer is so brutal, I don’t bother with dungeons anymore. That sucks!

:(

I would spend a lot of timer wondering why in the world they would ever make that decision because it makes absolutely no sense at all, then… play Legion, I guess.

Every race on Azeroth has a bone to pick with the Burning Legion, so I can’t see why any of them wouldn’t do it. Of course, I still don’t have my Draenei Warlocks, so maybe they wouldn’t do it. And Tauren Demon Hunters would look weird. So let’s exclude those two, but everyone else gets to do it.

But seriously, I’d play a Draenei Demon Hunter. And if we got that, Tauren can be Demon Hunters too, because why not?

I don’t think they have rules, no. Given what we’ve seen of dragons, they usually pick a form which suits their usual audience. Ysera isn’t a Night Elf, but her humanoid form is a Night Elf because those are the people she deals with. Deathwing, Onyxia, and Nefarian all had Human forms because they were manipulating Humans. If I remember correctly, Krasus had more than one humanoid form which he used at his convenience.

Dragons gonna do what dragons gonna do.

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