The Queue: Fishing mad

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!

We have absolutely no idea what the Legion intends to do with Illidan. So far, there’s nothing which suggests the Legion is who frees him — we last seem him encased in a green crystal, so the Legion might be intending to leave him in that crystal, or mess with him while he’s trapped in there. Maybe they expect they can turn him to their side while he’s still trapped, and when they release him, he’ll be a full-on Legion adherent.

If Illidan escapes, it’s likely because someone else intervened — or he escapes on his own before the Legion’s plan comes to fruition. Ultimately, we don’t know what the Legion wants with him. And if Illidan ate another skull, he’d probably be more grotesque than he already is!

Are we saying neither character has their fel power yet? Or Gul’dan has his, but Medivh doesn’t? In either case, Medivh would probably win. He was the Guardian. The Guardian was one of the single most powerful beings on Azeroth. One of the Guardians took Sargeras out in a fight — and is why Sargeras had to use the Guardian to come back again. Sargeras played it sneaky and it worked, though it took an extremely long time to come to fruition. If Medivh in his prime with a clear mind went up against Gul’dan in a straight fight, Gul’dan would be screwed.

Yes, it does give you a weapon. It isn’t a particularly cool weapon, but it’s a high ilevel weapon nonetheless. It’ll be good enough until you get your artifact to replace it. I did experience some weirdness with it on certain classes, though. For example, the quest gives a mage a spellpower sword. The quest does not give you an off-hand. If you’re currently using a staff, you won’t be able to switch to the sword unless you go get an off-hand from elsewhere.

The 6-player version of the 1992 X-Men game. It’s fun, and that’s one factor, but the larger factor is its unique construction. Rather than using one CRT screen, it uses two — but to eliminate the blank space between the screens, one screen is in the bottom of the cabinet and reflected up above via mirrors to put the two screens directly side-by-side. It’s brilliant. But it’s also exceptionally rare. You need a lot of cash and a streak of good luck to get your hands on one.

I have no particular affinity for arcade games, but cabinets which use unique configurations to tackle a particular technology challenge are fascinating to me.

I had a hard time figuring this out, honestly! The invasions appear to be set up like scenarios, but I don’t know if every player gets placed in the same scenario or not. And if the invasions are broken up until multiple phased scenarios, what determines the invasion’s completion overall? If you complete it in a certain zone, is it only over for you, or for everyone? Does it disappear from your map, or everyone’s map? With the constant disconnections I was experiencing during the test, I couldn’t quite figure it out.

However, the individual invasion scenarios didn’t take very long at all. I didn’t time them, but it seemed to go quickly. I’d arrive in Kharanos, the scenario would start, and there were so many players in the area, we’d chew right through it. Whether it was a result of beta being beta, I don’t know, but even during what was supposed to be focused testing, I had a hard time finding active invasion sites. After completing Kharanos, I went up to Hillsbrad. After completing Hillsbrad, I went to the other invasion zones one after the other and there was nothing happening. Based entirely on gut instinct (because again, I didn’t actually time it), I’d say we cleared out a zone in somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes.

I only theorize invasions might be split up into different scenarios because, when I saw a zone being invaded, nothing actually started until I arrived. I’d show up in Kharanos after seeing the invasion on my map and I’d get there just in time for phase 1 of the scenario to begin. Was that by design? Was I lucky? Did I just get there fast enough? I have no idea.

Pow.

I believe this is intended to go live, not simply for beta testing. The Broken Shore scenario is pre-Legion content — you’ll do it in the pre-patch, I’m pretty sure. It’s a fairly hefty piece of content, so I think it’s intended as something for you to chew on while you wait for the release date, but once Legion is live, you can skip it as long as you’ve done it once before. If they didn’t allow you to skip it, every single alt you create would have 2+ hours of quests and scenarios to do before you could even go to the Broken Isles. That would be far worse than the Tanaan Jungle scenario.

I’m going to answer this in terms of gameplay and aesthetics rather than lore, because I think things like that often guide the lore and story of a game more than people care to admit. Fel green is iconic of the Legion, yes, but imagine if everything related to the Burning Legion was neon green. Everything. Green fire, green orcs, green succubi, green felguards, green Kil’jaeden, green Archimonde, green skin, green eyes, green hair, green teeth, green weapons, green voidwalkers, green felhounds, green spells, green shivarra…

That’s really boring. Particularly the character design. Why are Kil’jaeden and Archimonde different colors? So they have distinct, defining features. When is green used? When they need a shorthand for “this is demonic.” Orcs who drank the fel blood turned green. Orcs who drank the fel blood twice turned red — because using a new color showed players “these guys are double demonic.”

If demonic traits are represented in different ways — establishing the shivarra are demons by utilizing them in demonic spaces, for example — you don’t need to use the green shorthand. We know shivarra are demons. They look like demons, they’ve been established as demons. Thus Blizzard’s artists don’t need to paint shivarra green to get that point across.

I’m tentatively excited about it! I genuinely love fishing in WoW and having a fishing artifact seems super cool. However, last time I did fishing on the beta (which was admittedly a long time ago), it was particularly boring. The only rare fish you could catch gave you a permanent +5 boost to your fishing skill up to the cap. But once you’re at the fishing cap … then what? Nothing?

This may have changed since I last went fishing, because using my limited beta time to go fishing seems like a waste.