The Queue: Shameless

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!

Ahh, it’s good to be back. Not that I’m not here regularly answering questions alongside the Cho to my Gall, but today is special. Since Liz is once again off traversing the magical world of Disney and drinking lots of adult beverages, that means I get to have my second official solo Queue ever!

Sadly, those of you looking for an epic follow-up to my masterpiece of a tragedy might be a bit disappointed, as no such tale exists this time around. There is, however, a theme to this Queue. Can you figure out what it is?

The little elements that really bring a class’s fantasy to life are topics I’ve discussed before, and Shadowform mounts are no different. Sadly, these days I tend to go with the Water Strider purely for logistical reasons. I can’t fly, and the Broken Isles have water everywhere.

However, when I’m not focusing on gameplay, I love Tyrael’s Charger with the Shadowform effect. No, it’s not inherently shadowy, but it’s transparent in a way that works surprisingly well with Shadowform. On the other end of the spectrum, the Hearthsteed‘s blue flames look phenomenal with Shadowform. Those two are definitely in the top, but really, any mount that has some sort of glow effect tends to have really cool interactions with Shadowform (except maybe the Felfire Hawk…that just ends up sort of weird).

It may not come as much of a surprise, given that I’ve written about it twice now, but I love Surrender to Madness. I know there are a lot of people out there who hate it — and I’m pretty sure Blizzard wishes they hadn’t implemented it since it’s becoming a nightmare to balance — but I think it’s one of the most interesting talents the game has to offer. Not only does it require strong knowledge of your class and an actually difficult talent choice thanks to its risk/reward factor, it also ties into the lore very well.

Don’t believe me? Check out this cool thing I wrote before we had details about Insanity of even knew Surrender to Madness was in the game. That bit where I point out how Yogg-Saron’s fight had us “die horribly”? That is something Blizzard added to S2M’s tooltip to tie it into Old Gods even better. I love it.

What do these two questions have to do together? Well, if you take a gander over at this here article, you’ll see that the shrieker (“Downfall“) is actually something that Havoc Demon Hunters need to kill in order to obtain their hidden appearance. Among all the hidden appearances, it’s not actually terrible, considering you can cheese the part that requires an RNG drop from mobs in Suramar.

But yes, some of the other appearances are a pain to get, and I think that’s because Blizzard had a lot of ideas about how to obtain hidden appearances and wasn’t sure which ones players would respond well to. After all, the upcoming hidden skins have been in the game files for a while — if Blizzard wanted to, they could have allowed players to get them already. But instead, they waited and now we’re getting spec-specific quests that are going to be more akin to the classic Anathema/Benediction quests in Vanilla. On top of that, I think maybe Blizz just didn’t know how to make some interesting. Retribution Paladins get a crazy, intricate chain that calls all the way back to the classic Ashbringer rumors. That’s amazing to me. Meanwhile, other specs can only get them as drops from raid/world bosses that only kind of tie into their class fantasy, which is annoying on many levels.

A couple people answered this in the comments, but I wanted to point it out here because I have strong feelings about PVP in Legion — you can read them here! — and I like to bring attention to the new PVP system whenever I can. First, no, they’re not phased. Horde and Alliance towers are, oddly enough, located in different areas. If you want to engage in actual PVP, you’ll have to watch your Local Defense channel to see when someone is attacking your forces.

At first, this wasn’t a great design because players who do enjoy PVP found themselves having to do world quests every few hours to farm honor most efficiently. However, the world quests now spawn once per day, making them something PVP or PVE players can do without worrying about having to do them too much. Really, their purpose is to ease PVE players into PVP content, I think. Having Horde and Alliance towers in different spots makes it less intimidating to do, and you’ll be able to experiment with your PVP talents safely and at a slower pace. And, again, your PVP talents are probably really dang cool — check ’em out if you haven’t.

While I don’t necessarily think the answer is, “No, they never will,” I also think it’s more likely something that will happen a lot further down the line than anyone would like. After all, Blizzard changed the teleport options in Ulduar with Legion, several expansions after people had already been farming the place. At some point, the trash in Dragon Soul’s first couple bosses was changed to not aggro you if you went straight for the bosses, and more recently, they make Galakras in Siege of Orgrimmar soloable, which is something requested for a while (though admittedly not as long as Ordos).

So… it may be a while, but never say “never.” In the meantime, I heard there are a few Transmog articles on this site if you’re looking for new outfits to fit your own particular theme.

For the unaware, Liz decided to drop the title of “Maiden” and instead don the “Newlywed” title. That’s right, she is now a married woman! Before I get back to being my usually Mitchy self, I do want to sincerely congratulate her. To quote one of my favorite movies, everybody needs a co-pilot. If y’all haven’t given a shout-out to Liz, hop over to Twitter and send her some love — she and her new wife deserve it :)

As for the question portion of this: No, I did not preside over the ceremony. Sadly, as awesome as the Priest Order Hall may be, Liz insisted on not being wed in a dark, shadowy room full of creepy-cool candles and a well that draws its powers from The Void. Her loss, imo.

I hear Warlocks are pretty cool ¯_(ツ)_/¯

That’s all for today, folks! I’ll see you in another six months or so (assuming I haven’t been fired for some tomfoolery or another).