The Queue: I don’t believe in Thursdays

Holiday weeks are tricky. It feels like we ought to celebrate our work week being even the slightest bit shorter. Except you head in to work and you find you  have a full week of work to do and one less day to get it done in. Whose terrible idea was that?

Because of this abbreviated week, I have decided to stopped believing in the existence of Thursdays. So does today’s Queue even exist? Do we even exist? Maybe. And maybe not.

Because we currently exist in a timeless world free of Thursdays, it’s just me today. How peaceful!

As commenters have pointed out, perks are gone in Legion. And I can’t say I really mind because they were a particularly strange method of progression in the first place. I understand what Blizzard was trying to do: they wanted progression options that didn’t mean bogging us down with more spells and talents when our bars were already overflowing with absolutely essential abilities.

But there was so little choice involved in perks that they felt rather meaningless. Sure, I’m never going to say no to a passive buff, but because I never had to choose which one(s) I wanted or have to actively cast any of them, I couldn’t name a single perk for my class. So while they’re nice, they don’t feel meaningful. As Blizzard tries to dive into the fantasy of just what makes each class fun, I totally understand why perks are going away.

Okay Chrth. I’m not going to say you have a problem because I, too, am a big fan of planning and meticulously organized to-do lists. So let me preface this by saying I understand. That said, not even I am planning this far in advance.

That said, my track history of boosting isn’t great and, at this point, if I want a new max-level character on a new realm, leveling isn’t so hard (or so time consuming) to be a huge hurdle… plus if it’s a class I haven’t played or haven’t played lately, burning through the levels at least gives me some experience in which buttons to press when. I’m sure your mileage may vary, but I always find it helpful.

But the real problem here is that I’ve been playing this game for over a decade now. Which class combos do I want that I don’t already have? Which class combos do any of us want that we don’t already have? This entire question has started to confuse me. I’m going to blame Thursday.

Personally, a repetitive daily task as a reason to log on has always bored the heck out of me. I just don’t have the attention span for it, I suppose, because I can never quite be bothered to keep up with these daily chores for long — because “chores” are exactly what they become.

But for those of you who are fans of dailies, I’m not convinced we’ll be away from the garrison model for long enough to get withdrawal, because the class hall is just a pared down garrison. Sure, you won’t have the grind of collecting your daily ore and herbs, but you still have champions to collect and missions to run. I think it’s similar enough that you’ll be able to log on, spend a few minutes playing in your class hall, and log off again with the feeling you’ve accomplished something — which admittedly is nice when you’re short on gaming time.

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If we’re talking Black Temple Illidan, Valla would shoot him in the face while he was giving his opening monologue. He wouldn’t even get around to talking about how unprepared she was.

I mean really, Illidan, all you have prepared is your de facto supervillain speech. Can’t you do better than this?

For starters, why isn’t your Shadow Priest your #1 toon? That’s something that should be rectified like yesterday.

As for your question, the way Shadow/Voidforms work on beta right now (and have for a while) is that, as long as you’re specced into Shadow, you remain in Shadowform. There is no toggling it off (which is a huge pain for first-person screenshots but that’s a discussion for another time). To balance this out, however, the default Shadowform is more transparent, much like the glyphed version you’re using on live. As you gain more Insanity, it gets darker and darker until you reach 100. When that happens, you can choose to manually activate Voidform, which is a super, tentacle-y version of Shadowform. It’s awesome.

Oh, and to increase visibility, #BlameLiz. Happy Thursday, y’all!