The Queue: Gol!

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 got the Symmetra ribbon dancer emote. That’s pretty much it.

It’s really no different than any other Warlords crafting profession. Yes, Enchanting gets Temporal Crystals more slowly than other professions get their crafting item (if you don’t count disenchanting things for them), but Enchanting also needs fewer of them. At most, Enchanting needs 15 Temporal Crystals for a recipe. Tailoring requires anywhere from 75 to 350 Hexweave Cloth per recipe.

Enchanting gets their needed crafting material more slowly, yes. But they need significantly less of them per recipe. And prior to patch 6.2, all of the other professions acquired their items more slowly than they do now but needed just as many of them. Prior to 6.2, I’d say the Enchanting method was faster than all of the others.

At the current stage of the game, they’re all roughly on par with one another.

I spent $10 and earned three levels yesterday, which when combined with the free crate for logging in, I believe brought me to a total of 15 crates yesterday. I didn’t get any of the Summer Games skins. It convinced me not to go all-in on the $40 package. If $10 plus some bonus crates gave me absolutely nothing I’m interested in, $40 isn’t likely to do it, either.

From those crates, I did get enough credits to buy an epic skin … but you can’t buy the Summer Games skins with credits.

Nope. They broke it with the Legion patch. It was broken all throughout alpha and beta. If you watched any of our livestreams where we ran Legion dungeons, I’d say roughly 75% of my commentary is whining tab targeting wasn’t working. I’ve been playing Affliction Warlock in the beta and tab targeting to rotate through my targets used to be how I doled out my DOTs. Now? If I try doing that, it’s highly likely I’m going to tab to something I’m not even fighting and isn’t even visible on my screen. Useless.

By column, I assume you’re asking why we didn’t post about it at all, as opposed to asking us for a full-length feature before anybody could actually play it. Is that a correct assumption? If so, we didn’t post because more exciting things happened, we were short on time due to the podcast eating up Tuesday afternoons, and we just … lost our excitement for it, honestly. I’ve talked about this before, but I don’t feel like there was anywhere near enough content in the first mission pack to justify the wait for the second pack. It’s probably the most disappointing approach to “episodic” content I’ve experienced in quite a long time. (We’re not counting Half-Life deciding not to release episode 3.)

Look at Life Is Strange, a fully episodic game. There were five episodes, each of them being a meaty piece of content with multiple paths of completion. The first episode released January 30, 2015. The final episode released October 20, 2015. The longest wait between episodes clocks in at under 3 months — resulting in a complete game and narrative within a year. I’ve also played and enjoyed The Wolf Among Us, another fully episodic game. The first episode released October 2013. The second episode took awhile, releasing in February 2014. But the subsequent episodes released April 2014, May 2014, and July 2014. Once again, each episode had a significantly longer runtime than Nova Covert Ops.

I didn’t expect Covert Ops to be a full game, but I did expect it to have more content than it does. And for how little content is in those mission packs, it sure as hell takes a long time to release them. Covert Ops having so much less content than a true new game, I’d expect it to release more quickly than they do, not take twice as long.

I was one of those people who loved the StarCraft single player stuff. The release schedule of Covert Ops has disappointed me, though.

Probably not unless they release a new full StarCraft game. With StarCraft at the point it is now, there isn’t much relevance. Similar is happening with Diablo 3; there’s very little new to be found which means the game drops from relevance. And more than that, if there’s nothing new to be found, our own excitement for the franchise drops. It’s much harder to write about something which doesn’t excite us. When there’s nothing new, the likelihood of us writing about something drops significantly simply because it’s hard to care.

If someone feels like writing a Know Your Lore on these topics, I’m not going to roadblock them from doing it. But nobody has wanted to do it.

Overwatch is recent. Overwatch is new. Overwatch continues to receive updates and release teasers in fun, clever ways. It’s enganging and we are engaged by it, so we’re making content for that. Diablo 3 is dull right now and Nova Covert Ops is completely failing to engage us, so we give those a pass more often than not. Those games need to do something exciting to grab our attention. We’re here to talk about Blizzard games and have fun doing it, but we’re not looking to be Blizzard’s hype machine, either. If they want us (and others) to be excited, they have to do the heavy lifting first. Hell, every single new character in Heroes of the Storm gets more hype and marketing behind it than the entirety of Nova Covert Ops. They aren’t doing a very good job selling people on this thing.

There are quite a few Warcraft books available in audiobook form on Audible. If you’re interested, you can sign up for Audible through our link here and receive a 30-day free trial which includes a free audiobook. Signing up helps us out, too.