The Queue: It’s time for another Queue already?

Geez, time is weird. It  seems like I was just writing the Queue, but now it’s time for another Queue? How does this even happen? How does time work? What is orange?!

These are all, of course, completely unanswerable questions, but in today’s Queue Mitch and I will make a valiant effort to answer your questions.

Mitch: I’m not sure it’s accurate to say Blizzard had ample time to create this for Warlords. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes and I know one of the big people responsible for the Legion app was Arvaanas, which means his normal duties had to get passed off. It’s sort of the “we lost a raid tier for this” mentality, which is rarely actually true.

In any case, your question: No, I don’t think there’s too much. There’s a lot, and probably more than most people can do in a gaming session, but I think that’s the point. You’re not going to be able to do it all in one sitting, but you’re also not punished for it. Can’t do emissary stuff today? Do it tomorrow, or the next day. Miss out on Artifact Power this week? Artifact Knowledge will help you catch up. It’s a lot to do, but it’s not too much; we just need to adopt a different mindset when approaching things. Do what you want to do, what you think is fun before anything else.

Liz: It seems like it’s overwhelming to hit 110, but I don’t think that means it’s “too much.” So often we hit max level and there’s nothing to do and we get bored and we leave. Better to have that content in the game. We won’t finish it in a week, but that’s kind of the point. I do think the app would’ve been a way better fit for Warlords, though. There’s less mission emphasis here and while being able to see world quests is nice… it doesn’t feel super essential when if you’re going to quest you’ll just log on to quest, whereas missions are typically something where you log on, do missions, log off. I’m not sure if that makes sense, but it makes sense in my head.

Mitch: Oh, totally. But I think we have the Legion app because of Warlords. I mean, this thing is ready right after launch. Would it really have been worth investing in if garrison missions had flopped (well, more than they did)? It’s sort of Blizzard’s thing to see player reception and then adjust/go all in.

Liz: It really feels like people have gotten way too used to Draenor dungeons. We’d had plenty of time to play them, get used to them, gear up for them… you could faceroll them and rush through them just because you knew them so well. Now we’re into new content with a ton of class changes and some players are acting like nothing’s changed. It’s all rush, rush, rush. Tanks have fewer mitigation tools, healing is just tougher… that’s the game right now. And different tanks have always had different strengths and weaknesses. Anyone who doesn’t recognize that is kind of a crummy healer. (And anyone with an attitude like that isn’t someone you want to play with in the first place.)

Mitch: We get 100 free AP to alt-spec Artifacts. I used that to unlock the first trait and make the tree appear. #Shadow4Lyfe

Liz: I’m just focusing on my main Artifact for now. If I don’t, I’ll never get anything finished in the game.

Liz: It seems like Blizzard meant to make soloing as a healer easier, so you could get your healing Artifact and go out in the world and get stuff done without it being a major problem. In practice, though… I don’t think it worked. Sure, you can solo as a healer. I’ve almost always leveled and solo’d my healers as healers, so it’s always been possible. It’s never been fast or efficient, though, and it’s just the same way now.

My Shaman and Monk are both healing specced, and while they can handle themselves, they’re slow to kill things and rely heavily on healing for survival. So, yeah, this definitely pushes healers to work on their DPS spec to level quickly, which probably means putting at least some Artifact power into that. (The “right” way to level a healer seems to be to do a DPS spec, level without putting power into your DPS Artifact, and then switching at max level to heal. But that’s not intuitive.) From my understanding, tanks fare better with soloing, so it may not be the same for them.

Mitch: Uhhh… nope. I haven’t. Been sub’d since March of ’05. Even if my playtime has sunk occasionally, I’ve always found something to do that kept me logging in regularly.

Liz: One word: Cataclysm. My class became completely unrecognizable — I had been playing a Holy Paladin for years as Holy and now to quest and solo I was expected to spec Retribution. I didn’t have Retribution gear. I didn’t like playing Retribution. I didn’t roll a Paladin to play Retribution. There was nothing about this change I liked, but because of dual spec, soloing ability for healer specs didn’t seem to be a consideration — and I say this as someone who’s played and leveled as healing specs since vanilla — which meant questing and doing anything other than dungeons was impractical.

My options in Cataclysm were to reroll and hope I liked another class better or play a class I now disliked because it’s what I had. I tried for a while but it just wasn’t fun for me at all. Of course it didn’t help that guild broke up over differing raid philosophies around then. I suddenly didn’t have a character I liked to play and didn’t have a guild to play with. The game just lost all appeal.

Xal’atath whispers: “Thal’kiel reached into the Void. He could not wield its power and, as a result, was not worthy to be spared when his fellow peers struck him down. End him.”

Fizzl yells: “SHADOW CRAAAAAASH!”

Xal’atath whispers: “Did you feel it cease to exist?”