The Queue: Be excellent to each other

I have no words today. Nothing pithy or eloquent to say. Sometimes, life just smashes you in the face and all you can do is stare.

This is the Queue. Let’s talk about Blizzard games. Heck, I might even go off topic.

One of the reasons I’ll never truly turn my back on the Horde side of the faction divide is because, back in 2005, I rolled a Tauren Warrior to play with friends on Malfurion. His name was Vorn. (I’ve since changed it a few times.) For whatever reason, I decided to RP Vorn, even though Malfurion wasn’t an RP server, and I had a very clear picture of Vorn in my head.

Vorn was terribly worried about everyone.

He worried about the Orcs, because they were small and prone to getting so very upset all the time. He worried about the Trolls, because while they were almost a proper height, they too were fairly small and they had some very bad habits. He worried about the Forsaken, because, well, they were dead and that didn’t seem right to him. When The Burning Crusade came out, he started worrying about Blood Elves, because they just so small and fragile looking and they were by and large entirely too into magic.

Vorn’s approach to tanking was basically that he was trying to herd these small, breakable, always in trouble people who reminded him a lot of children or puppies through the awful dangerous things they seemed entirely too eager to do. He was always relieved to meet another Tauren — at least he didn’t have to worry about them, although often even the Shu’halo seemed to have picked up awful habits from the smaller folk.

Sometimes people would get mad at me for RPing in the dungeons, but sometimes people would play along, like the Orc Warlock who got very, very comically upset at my constant attempts to get her  to stop summoning demons because ‘it’s bad for you’ — we ended up doing a running back and forth of ‘It’s my life’ vs. ‘But you’re so tiny and demons are so scary’ and it was a lot of fun.

What I’m getting at is that I can relate, because each of my Warriors is a very different person. My original Human was world weary, a refugee from Lordaeron who’d grown up in Brill and simply seen too much to ever retire — what would he even do with his life? It wasn’t like he could go home. I have three Draenei Warriors and each of them has a different backstory and personality — one of them saw the Draenei flight from Argus, another is only a hundred or so years old, and the third lost her memory in the Exodar crash and doesn’t even remember her original name, and no one who survived the crash was very close to her.

So yeah, I think it’s cool to do that, reroll a class because you have a different idea in mind. It’s your time after all, play however works for you.

Thank you. I’ll have to take your word for it, I don’t feel like I look very nice. I feel utterly destroyed. But it was a nice gesture on your part.

I managed to miss that they were doing this and had a panic moment when I couldn’t play my level 104 character, but some helpful folks on Twitter straightened me out and I hopped on and tested it on a new level 100 transfer.

It definitely feels closer to launch. Some non spoiler highlights:

1. The Broken Shore is mostly unchanged but most of the sound files are in (some aren’t, like Jaina and Velen in the Throne Room) and in general it feels like it’s ready to go, or close to it. Still no cinematics. Man, I want those cinematics.
2. The post-Broken Isles stuff is further along. You’re basically given a quest to take part in one of the Invasions in Azeroth proper, which to me says unequivocally that we’re getting the Broken Shore part of the story before Legion drops — I’d already expected that, but it’s nice to see it confirmed. There’s also a new quest chain with a lot of lore in it that I won’t spoil for you here.
3. I’m still annoyed with how they’re writing Jaina this time around.
4. Overall it definitely feels like it’s in the home stretch to launch.

So yeah, I had a positive experience all around. Definitely looking forward to the pre-patch.

Two weeks. I was originally going to see next week, but after the Beta launch test, I think they’ll need one more week to get all the polish in place. I bet the 19th of July.

Nope, there are no changes in Legion to the DMF. This isn’t to say there won’t ever be any, but right now, nope, none.

Because there’s really no way to make Sunder cool.

Sunder was never a fun ability that you enjoyed using, it was something you did to build threat. That’s it. Wait for Three Sunders was such a cliche it became a guild name on several servers I played on, it was a running gag. Other tanks complained until they got an ability with parity but none of their parity moves were as boring as stacking Sunders was.

Sunder was so boring that they added Devastate and folded Sunder into it to try and make people like it. And still no one really did. DPS hated waiting for it, Warrior tanks hated applying it, it wasn’t ever part of the fantasy of the class, just a tedious reality, a mechanical necessity.

Now, keep in mind I tanked raids in Vanilla. I’m ridiculously intimate with the Sunder mechanic. But let’s be fair — the fun buttons to hit were always Shield Slam or Revenge. Sunder was the obligation ability.

So you have an ability that wasn’t fun, wasn’t interesting, debuffed targets in a way that would open the door for all tanks needing something like it, and didn’t even really headline the spec that used it.

I’m not surprised it didn’t come back. I would have been more surprised if it had.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. It’s been a brutal week for everyone. I’m hoping next week will be better.