The Queue: It’s happening

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!

Your chests will not despawn after the invasion event. Any in your possession, you’ll keep them. The rewards scale with your level, so you can pack your bank full of the things and pop them all open at level 100 for the goodies. Honestly, though if you aren’t going to hit level 100 through invasions, you might want to open a few of them early. The gear in the boxes is really, really good, and they’ll help you power through the questing you’ll have left to do to hit 100. Once you hit 100, you’ll be going to the Broken Isles and replacing everything you have relatively quickly. Might as well make the road to 100 easier, right?

The glaive thrower. The other vehicles are pretty neat, but the extreme range on the glaive thrower meant I could participate in fights at a safe distance with no risk of pulling aggro and dying. With the glaive thrower, you can fight the endboss in Gadgetzan without actually being in Gadgetzan. That’s rad.

You don’t need an addon! Blizzard added this functionality to the base achievement UI. If you open your achievement window, you’ll find a tiny search box in the upper right, next to your achievement point total at the top.

Your Order Hall campaign is much like the Garrison Campaign. You’ll unlock a series of quests over time – including during the level up process – which eventually reaches its climactic conclusion. If I remember right, finishing the campaign is what allows you to stick three relics into your artifact rather than two.

Whether or not the servers are stable likely depends more on whether or not they get DDOS’d again. Blizzard has gotten better and better at keeping their servers stable, but there’s only so much you can do when your network (or your ISP) is being bombarded by DDOS attacks. I don’t recall Warlords having many stability issues in regards to people being gathered up in one place, but I do remember a number of questing bottlenecks. Hundreds of people needing to take turns clicking on a flag was a serious problem. I expect we’ll run into a few of those again purely due to minor oversights — beta tests simply don’t compare to a live environment. We’ll see some frustration followed by hotfixes.

It’s also worth noting they did try to simulate the Legion launch on beta realms quite a bit. They schedule tests where they specifically asked beta testers to log in on a new character and head to Dalaran to see what happens when  a massive number of people port to the Broken Isles all at once. Given they ran those tests, we can hope they got it running smooth.

Obviously the XP was amazing, but I really liked seeing bits of WoW history in the invasions. We got to see characters like Gryan Stoutmantle and Helcular again. We got to see what the Burning Legion was doing in each zone — gathering Blight in Hillsbrad, turning our creations against us in Westfall, gathering resources in places like Azshara. Each of these invasion sites contained a lot of details for something which is going away forever.

You’re going to be thirsty for materials, that’s for sure. You won’t have a free gathering point like you did with the garrison’s mine in Warlords of Draenor. While you can get the Bind on Pickup gathering materials through questing or other gameplay, you’re going to be accruing them at a slower rather than someone with gathering would, and you’re going to need to spend gold to get your ore. I, personally, do not recommend going double crafting, but it isn’t impossible to do, either.

We don’t know exactly when invasions will stop. They might stop just before launch, run right up to launch, or remain for a little while after launch. It’s probably safe to assume they’ll end at midnight Pacific when Legion becomes playable, though.

Bang.