The Queue: Look up

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!

This is your obligatory weekend reminder to take a moment every now and again while questing or doing dungeons or what have you and look up. Sometimes the ceilings and skyboxes are absolutely beautiful, you know? Just take a little quiet moment of serenity in between all the grinding for reputation or gear or Artifact Power or whatever else you’re after. The environmental design in Legion is really pretty.

I generally try to clear stuff out by section, because I want to see that particular bit of story from beginning to end. Legion‘s done a marvelous job of messing up my usual routine, though — I keep randomly running into exclamation points while I’m out doing different things. It feels natural, though, so I don’t mind it too much. But I am a pretty stalwart completionist when it comes to questing — I don’t like leaving quests out in the world unfinished.

Weirdly enough, dungeon spamming isn’t a very effective way to level in Legion — you’re better off questing. I do a mix between the two methods you described — by and large I ignore dungeons until I hit max level, just because I typically play DPS classes and the queues are still kind of long for DPS. The exception to this, however, are the moments where the dungeon finishes a zone storyline. With Legion, most of the Pillars of Creation need to be grabbed from dungeons. I have an interest in completing all that gathering, so I hit up the dungeons as I go. But dungeons that aren’t part of that main quest path? Yeah, those I’ll skip until I randomly feel like knocking a dungeon or two out.

It wasn’t the watchers that gave the Aspects their powers, it was the Titans acting through the Titan keepers. Now I suppose you could argue that hey, the Titans are gone too — but honestly, they were up against Sargeras. He was substantially more powerful than our little mortal armies were. The watchers and keepers weren’t really cognizant of the fact that the Titans were gone, either. At one point in the legendary quest chain in Mists, Wrathion ate the heart of the Thunder King, which possessed the powers of the Titan keeper Ra-den. After his vision, he says “It is gone. I don’t remember any of it. Oh! None of them remembered. The irony!” Ra-den was the only keeper who realized what happened.

I’ve been asked this before, and my answer at that point was something about yoinking Med’an right out of existence. But they said at BlizzCon that the whole him being a super-powerful Guardian thing was no longer canon, so that alleviates a lot of the issues I had with that character from an in-game standpoint. Honestly, I think the one thing that still bothers me to this day is Fandral Staghelm — I feel like he got shoveled into a raid boss role before his story got a chance to really take off. There were a lot of compelling elements to Fandral’s past that were never fully explored. And I thought he made an effective and interesting foil to Tyrande, which we also didn’t get to see a lot of.

Let’s face it, the Night Elves that are annoyed at Tyrande and Malfurion kind of have a right to be annoyed, you know? When the Night Elves were just hanging out in the forests, everything was fine. The moment they got involved with the Alliance was when things started going south really fast. I’m not saying that’s the correct viewpoint, mind you, but it’s a viewpoint that does make sense. Fandral wanted to get more aggressive about defending Night Elf lands from Orcs — which wasn’t a bad idea — and believed that Night Elves were superior and didn’t need to be involved in the affairs of other races. And…well hey, when you look at what’s happened to the Night Elves since joining the Alliance, maybe he kind of had a point.

I like that his history was expanded in Chronicle — turns out Fandral was responsible for letting the Old Gods into the Emerald Dream in the first place. But all that expanded history just makes me wish the cranky little jerk was still around.

Most of them don’t have a ton of lore — but there’s a story in Warcraft Legends Vol. 5 that tells the tale of how the Headless Horseman came to be. It is delightfully creepy. And while it may not be a holiday, Warcraft Legends Vol. 4 has a really good story about the Darkmoon Faire in it. Honestly, I’d recommend all of the manga series, if you’re looking for something different to read. Each volume is an anthology of various short stories about people and places in Azeroth, and there’s all kinds of interesting little stories in there. I wish they’d re-release the entire series as a complete collection in one volume.

That’s it for today’s Queue — if you have any questions you’d like to see answered, be sure to leave them in the comments below!