The Queue: We’re gonna do great

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!

Based on prior experience, probably not. How often do we see the off-shoots of various player races come back again once they’ve been revealed? The Dark Iron Dwarves are potentially one of the only exceptions, and they’re largely only represented because of Moira. The other Trolls don’t do much, the Tauren branch we met in Northrend doesn’t do anything, and so on. They tend to be created and then forgotten.

That said, I would really love it those groups did hang around. The Yaungol and the Taunka were pretty cool. I’d like to see those other Trolls do stuff. Even groups like the Wastewanders in Tanaris have the potential to bring something to the table that someone from Stormwind, for example, can’t do. Azeroth is a rich place with a lot of potential but all of that tends to be left to rot in the past.

I’m bringing this question in because it (and others like it) seemed to kick off an interesting conversation over the weekend. During this expansion, one of the things I’ve taken into consideration for content is considering whether or not we’re the best people to do something. In many cases, for hidden appearances, their acquisition is as simple as getting a drop off of a boss or talking to the right NPC. When that’s the case, you can get the answer by typing a word or two into Wowhead.

I can see where saying “go to Wowhead” is a copout and might seem counterintuitive to running a site like ours. At the same time, when it’s such a simple thing, what do we contribute by trying to write a lengthy guide? How useful is that, really?

To put it in another context, let’s say I’m following a recipe. I need to know how many ounces are in a cup. I go to Google and type in “how many ounces in a cup” and I see a bunch of websites who will walk me through the process. However, at the very top of the search, Google has given me the formula. I don’t need to visit any of those websites and, for that purpose, I never will. That doesn’t mean I’ll never use those websites. They might have recipes I’ll want, or more complicated cooking tutorials, but better tools exist for that specific thing I was looking for at that given moment.

We have our strengths. We have our weaknesses. Our strength is most certainly not the raw information of a database.

The patch 7.1.5 PTR indicated you could start queueing for holiday bosses starting at level 20 with appropriately scaled rewards. We haven’t had a holiday on live realms to know if it carried over or if it’s working properly yet, but we can probably assume it’s there. We just won’t know 100% for certain until the event is live.

No, Lucio isn’t going to step on Brightwing’s niche. They both have passive AOE healing. That’s it. That’s all they have in common. Brightwing has a point-and-click polymorph/CC and can actually deal a surprising amount of damage. Further, her niche isn’t her passive AOE healing, but her global presence. She can teleport across the map to unexpectedly reinforce a teammate in a fight. She can spent more time in a line soaking XP before teleporting over to a team fight or an objective. Brightwing is the Support version of Falstad. Falstad is strong because he has that global presence — he can get more done with less travel time and he can appear in unexpected places.

Lucio can’t do any of that. Lucio will have his own strengths and weaknesses. They have one ability in their entire kit in common. It’ll be fine.

If the only thing you took into consideration when choosing which Support to play was their healing output, you’d already never pick Brightwing. You pick Brightwing because of everything she brings to the table in addition to her healing.