The Queue: Much speculation

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!

I really have no idea what it could be other than a potential Diablo IV, which I would actually enjoy quite a bit. What often made me sad about Diablo is they have a really cool world, but you don’t get to see much of it. Either Diablo titles are set in relatively small parts of it, or the gameplay means you totally gloss over it. Diablo III’s patches added new areas, but there wasn’t much they could do with story or narrative there just due to the nature of the game.

I’d accept a Diablo IV which resets the grind to show off a new part of the world, or some other Diablo-related title which actually lets us immerse ourselves in that world.

I don’t think this is a new “fad.” I’ve known guys (and gals) with bright pink hair since I was in high school. It might wax and wane, but it’s been around a long time. Without naming names, because I don’t think it’s my place to do so, I know there are some people (including YouTubers and streamers) who do it in memory of someone they’ve lose to cancer. However, there are people who do it for funsies, too.

I was working from the mall yesterday and saw a lot of young people with their hair dyed pink/orange/blue/whatever and it made me wish I was still young enough, and cool enough, to get away with doing that.

Disclaimer: I’m not Rossi.

I always feel weird answer questions about my work which isn’t Blizzard Watch-related, but … those of us who write fiction, it’s slow-going because we can only do it part-time. Blizzard Watch is our full-time job, so then writing fiction part-time can be brutal. There are days I can make a lot of progress. Then there are days where BW eats up a lot of time and I’m too frazzled to write fiction in the evening. So yeah, it’s a slow process.

That said, the Lady Superior sequel is going to my editor in August and will be available sometime after that. I’m trying a serial approach so I can get these out faster than I have been. I hope you’ve been enjoying the first one so far!

This should still be the case, and perhaps even moreso than Warlords. No matter where you get a piece of gear, there’s a small chance you can proc an upgrade on it — and potentially a massive upgrade. For example, a world quest might offer an item which has a relatively low ilevel, but if you’re extremely lucky, you could end up receiving something on par with raid gear.

You need to equip the item and soulbind it, yes. You can’t buy a piece of Bind on Equip gear off of the auction house, get the transmog appearance simply by holding it, then re-list it on the auction house to make your money back. You need to equip it, bind it, and then you can vendor or disenchant it if you want.

I’m probably the wrong person to tackle this question because, once again, I actually dislike flying. I like Blizzard’s game world much better when I don’t need to compete with people swooping out of the sky — which results in me also swooping out of the sky because I get tired of it, and then the gameworld might as well not exist. I say the longer we don’t have flying, the better. Once upon a time, World of Warcraft being a massive open world without loading screens between questing zones was one of the game’s huge selling points. It wasn’t a standard thing back then. But now, the game world might as well have those, because people fly over the whole damn thing.

But, I digress. I know there are people who like flying and I don’t want to poo-poo that too hard. I would say this is probably the case, yes. If Blizzard wants players to actually play the content before earning the ability to skip it, and Legion is intended to have more content, you’ll probably need to do more before being able to fly.

I’d say chances are pretty good we’ll see one at Gamescom if not earlier. From my understanding, they have a hero mostly ready to go. And from what I’ve heard, people who’ve visited Blizzard HQ have already played it, but they’re under NDA and can’t tell anyone about it. It being playable by people other than employees seems like a pretty good sign of readiness, though. Finished? Maybe not. Close to it? Probably.

Which hero will it be? Obviously, we don’t know that yet, but I’d be pulling for Sombra. They’ve heavily hinted toward Sombra both in-game and out, and when it comes to the Overwatch roster, I think we could use another support before anything else — and Sombra is speculated to be a support sniper. How will that work? We’ll see!