The Queue: Even a holiday dinosaur can’t hold me back

Hey guys.

What, that? Naah, I’m fine. Sure, being horribly masticated and swallowed by a dinosaur was terrifying at first, but after a while I realized that if I let myself miss out on the holiday season simply because a multi-ton carnivore had messily devoured me then it would be seen as awfully inconvenient. So long story short I accepted the res sickness, waited out the timer, and here we all are, doing the Queue two days after Christmas.

Hope you guys all had a good Christmas if you celebrate it. If not, I still hope you had a good weekend. Mine was pretty good – I got eaten by a T-Rex with a Santa Hat on. Also it ate Mitch but I’m pretty sure he’s okay now too.

I don’t think that’s a good idea.

Capital cities aren’t there to be explored in the same way as Suramar is. Suramar is a city, but it’s also expansion specific content, part of a big story hub and an unfolding chunk of the expansion that leads up to the Nighthold in January. It’s not meant to serve as a player hub.

Similarly, Stormwind and the other capital cities are meant for you to conduct various business in. Sure, they have bits of color and alternate locations for you to do that in (Stormwind and Orgrimmar have two AH locations, for example) and they provide you opportunities to RP in but if they were jam packed with low-res NPC’s you’d see those a lot more and you’d start to notice how low res they are.

Suramar gets away with its throngs of low res NPC’s by making it difficult for you to ever get comfortable. The constant patrols of demons, World Quests and “An Illusion! What are you hiding?” all serve as a means to keep you immersed, and thus too busy to stop and say Hey, every bloody elf in Suramar is the same bloody elf.

After playing Titanfall 2 for a while, what I really wish Suramar had was the wall walking and zip lines from that game. How cool would it be to run, take a jump, go diagonal along a wall for a while and then hit a zip line to go hurling down from one of the terraced levels of the city to the level below it?

I’m not entirely serious about the wall walking but I absolutely mean it about the zip lines.

In a way I actually feel like you’re missing out on a part of WoW’s history here. What’s so bad about elevators in WoW?

Mostly it’s a variety of problems, as players listed below. The Elevator in Undercity was notorious for simply disappearing on disconnect, dropping you into the jagged spikes at the bottom (by the way, there are jagged spikes at the bottom of the Undercity elevator shafts). Thunder Bluff didn’t have that problem, but it was extremely annoying to see the elevator on the other side come down when you were waiting for it and to then know you had to wait even longer or try riding really fast to make that one. You usually couldn’t. But on the up side, if you were Horde and the Alliance were raiding, before flying in Azeroth the elevators were a great choke point and Shaman could blow like half a 40 man raid right off the top with a well timed spell. Good times.

The Serpentshrine elevator was notorious for disconnecting people and again, when they’d log back in it wouldn’t be there anymore and they’d plummet to their deaths. The one in Blackwing Descent drops so fast that you can’t catch up with it and it doesn’t stay in place very long, so that if you miss it by a fraction of a second you will plummet to your death right next to your raid members, who are riding it down safely at the same speed you’re falling. Other elevators aren’t so lethal but they do tend to make you wait for them, only get half the group and force you to wait at the top for people to catch up.

Take the elevator in Siege of Orgrimmar after you kill Nazgrim. That thing managed to combine BWD’s high speed, Serpentshrine’s ability to disconnect people, and best of all it split raids up so that people would be up top waiting for it while others were down below getting destroyed by trash. That thing was a show stopper, really, it was almost harder than Nazgrim himself.

Since y’all do a transmog thing every time I’m writing a Queue, I wanted to join in.

I’m not 100% on this one yet. It’s hard to find matching belt and gloves and the blue on the BP doesn’t quite work with the Artifact. But I do like the overall feel of the set, the gold and blue feel very Alliance to me. It’s a good set for an Alliance Warrior, I think. (Would likely also work for a Paladin.)

I’m glad that works for you, but for me that would be exhausting.

I actually found being a hardcore player a lot less time consuming than my current state of ‘raids very casually, does a lot of non raiding stuff’ because I only played just enough to get my character ready to go for raid nights, and then I’d raid, and then I’d be done. ‘Casual’ play takes up a lot more time — I’m logging on at least an hour a day, which is a lot more over the course of a week. If I played a lot of alts that would easily skyrocket. That’s way more time than I want to invest. I love WoW, but once it goes up above two hours a day I tap out. (The leveling stream is about as long as I can play in a sitting, my eyes will not tolerate any more than that.)

Plus, I really love Warriors. My DK is a very useful character to have, but I don’t love the class the way I do Warriors.

Okay. That’s the Queue for this week. Hope everyone’s having a good holiday and I’ll see y’all Friday for my last Queue of 2016. Next Tuesday’s Queue will be in 2017. What’s the deal with time and that whole inexorable forward momentum thing?