The Queue: Alex invades the weekend

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 don’t know what the actual reason is, but everything I’ve been told is it’s the result of a corrupt cache, which can be fixed by deleting your cache. This seems to work, except the item is broken again the next day, and I need to do it all over again. The Underlight Angler is a generally buggy, busted item, so this doesn’t surprise me at all. I would seriously recommend avoiding the us of AP items while the Angler is retrieving item information. You don’t even get an Artifact Power progress bar in your UI if you equip it while it’s retrieving item information. As far as I’m concerned, if I’m not seeing the right bar (or any bar at all) in my UI, the AP items should not be used.

Seriously, it’s unbelievable how many headaches the Fishing artifact has caused me. I think it’s broken in more ways than it functions.

I’m glad they aren’t, honestly. The 7th Legion was built up to be super badass until Blizzard decided to use them as their go-to group to get absolutely punked by the Horde. Sylvanas wrecks them in Cataclysm, one of their coolest dudes becomes a boss in a battleground, then they get shipwrecked, gunned down, and blasted out of the sky at every turn throughout the following expansions.

They were great until they became the punching bag. I guess their built-up greatness means Blizzard decided to use them to show how dangerous a baddie was. But their win/loss ratio is quickly tipping in favor of loss, so they look like the Alliance’s clowns these days.

I’m not Rossi, and I’m no Warrior expert, but I have been playing a Warrior this expansion. When I’m soloing as Protection, my goal is always to pull more than one mob. Protection Warriors can handle it. In fact, Protection Warriors get better if they pull more mobs, because they get more rage. Thunderclap and Revenge are core abilities and they’re AOE, plus you can have Shockwave for an AOE stun and your artifact’s ability is a frontal cone. Protection Warrior is like Affliction Warlock — you can fight one mob at a time, but you’re really built to fight multiple mobs at once, at least out in the game world. Yes, there’s a critical mass where your defenses can’t keep up with the damage your enemies are dealing out, but you find the sweet spot and you stay there.

I think one reason this nerf is happening is because haste for Protection Warriors is huge. Stacking Haste is a powerful thing for rage generation. Haste means more attacks, more Shield Slams, and so on. When you have that much Haste, you can theoretically keep a maximum strength Ignore Pain going at all times. There’s no decision about how and when to use it — you use it always, at all times, you never let it drop, and with enough Haste, there’s no possibility of it dropping. The talent Into the Fray gives a baseline 3% Haste for each enemy within 10 years, up to 15% for 5 enemies. Haste is amazing threat gen.

Protection Warriors are only rage starved if you don’t do the things which help Protection Warriors get rage. Amusingly, I find dungeon bosses to be the only time I’m struggling with rage, because I don’t have the ability to pull extra mobs. My Ignore Pain uptime suffers most on single-target bosses.

This wasn’t a question, but I did want to say something about it. I’ve also had this thought, but the reality is way have an extremely difficult time scheduling large groups of people spread across numerous timezones, many of which have jobs beyond Blizzard Watch. People have asked us why the hell we have our weekly livestreams in the middle of the afternoon when most people are at work. Well, we do it at that time because that’s when we have people. The five people we have on our livestream are literally the only five people we can get together at one time, and we’re lucky enough that we’re all pretty darn good friends.

Rather than large-group stuff, I’ve thought about recording some games 2-3 of us can play together … but Blizzard games don’t work so well for that, and we’re Blizzard Watch. Would it make sense for us to upload gameplay of non-Blizzard games on our YouTube channel? Not really. One idea I had was a couple of us playing Game Dev Tycoon and trying to out-Blizzard Blizzard. Still, it’s a weird game to show up on our YouTube.

Not at all! In fact, I can’t get rid of the stuff fast enough. I only feed my friends in Shal’aran mana right before I go to to my World Quests in Suramar to make sure I get the mana from the mana pools Valtrois’s buff provides. I loot every Ancient Mana node I come across, and I have Mining, so I get Ancient Mana from mining nodes. Additionally, I keep an eye out for mana-touched wildlife — these are special, alternate spawns of the critters in the zone who drop more mana than usual. For example, you’ll sometimes see a blue basilisk. The blue ones drop more mana.

For Ancient Mana nodes, it’s worth noting the nodes inside the city give more mana than those outside the city. Regardless, you should be looting all of them.

I currently have 10 Ancient Mana Crystals in my bags because I get so much mana, I don’t need to use them. They aren’t soulbound, so I’ve considered putting them on the Auction House.

Anne is on vacation. RIP me.