The Queue: Still kicking

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 like to think that the Lich King is fully aware that there’s a pint-size singular hero still angrily poking at his ankles, and he’s just desperately trying to avoid breaking character, all the while inwardly bemoaning the fact that he’s stuck performing with amateurs that won’t stick to the script. He went to Juilliard. He’s a professional.

Meanwhile, I still don’t have Invincible.

It would be interesting to see Velen at least react to the thing — I mean, Thal’kiel was essentially planning to overthrow Velen and Kil’jaeden, back in the day. One could argue that Thal’kiel’s initial experiments with fel magic were what eventually drew Sargeras’ attention to Argus in the first place. Heck, the whole reason Archimonde was so gung-ho about accepting Sargeras’ offer was because of the influence of Thal’kiel’s skull, which Archimonde had bejeweled and kept as some kind of gross keepsake.

Side note — you know, maybe we shouldn’t be in the habit of keeping people’s skulls. Between Gul’dan and Thal’kiel, I think we’ve got a pretty good case for just…leaving those things alone. Or incinerating them before they can start any trouble.

I think they’re mistaken. There was a manga issue where Jaina had a ‘what-if’ dream where she became the Lich Queen, but I think that was about it. At one point in Warcraft 3 development, Jaina was apparently supposed to die, but that idea was scratched — it never actually made the live game at all, and definitely didn’t make it into any manuals. There was also a moment at the end of the War Crimes novel where everyone thought Jaina was pretty much dead, but that obviously wasn’t the case — Chi-Ji healed everyone, and she was fine.

I think it’s the same drop rate as any of the other enchants — but I don’t honestly know if enough people have gotten the enchant to really give that a full test. The difference between regular shoulder enchants and the Boon is that with Boon of the Nether, you can get one of any of the various supply bags that drop (skins, enchant mats, gems, etc), instead of only one type of bag. So you’re not limited to only getting bags for one profession, you’ll instead be randomly getting bags for all of them.

Weirdly, we have no idea who Illidan and Malfurion’s parents were — the same goes for Tyrande. By the time we first encounter them in the War of the Ancients trilogy, they’re already old enough that they aren’t really in contact with their parents at all. We don’t know if they died during the War, or if they were already dead. Either way, it doesn’t exactly matter — whoever they were, they aren’t alive anymore, and they didn’t really play any part in the big stories we associate with these characters. So it might be nice to see a reference to them, but it’s not really what I’d call information we desperately need to know.

I’m not sure where you got your hands on a copy of the book, as the release date for the title isn’t until March 14. Personally, if I do talk spoilers, I’m very clear about labeling them so people can avoid them if they’d like to. I generally keep labeling spoilers for at least a month or two after a title is released, because that seems like ample time for people to get their hands on the material and read it.

We will absolutely be talking about the title on Lore Watch once it’s released and we have a chance to devour it for ourselves. I imagine we’ll probably have more than one episode discussing it. This week’s show talks about the 15-page preview that was released, you’ll see that on the site later today. And yes, there are spoilers, fair warning!

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!