The Queue: Look out below

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!

While traversing through Legion‘s newest dungeon on this week’s leveling stream, Mitch pointed out that you could see part of the Tomb of Sargeras raid far, far below. I like it when dungeons and raids intersect on different levels like this — I honestly can’t recall the last time we saw it happen. The first instance I can recall is when you could see Magtheridon through the floor of the Blood Furnace in Burning Crusade. It made the dungeon feel absolutely gigantic, it gave players who paid attention to the scenery a sneak peek at future content while they were leveling — and it also just felt really, really cool.

Yes they were! You only get one point, but hey, it’s better than nothing at all I guess.

Legionfall doesn’t have an emissary, but there are rep tokens available — I got two from a mission in my Class Hall the other day, and I believe people have been getting them from the reward bags after turning in 100 Legionfall supplies as well. Also, the story quests give out some fairly healthy chunks of reputation — more than any other method, really.

The new cap is 900 — not too bad if you already had your various champions maxed out.

I don’t think so. Here’s the problem — it takes a lot of development time and a lot of people to pull something like that off. It’s time that could be spent working on brand-new zones and content for future expansions. When you overhaul low-level areas, you’re not really doing anything for all the people sitting at max level waiting for new material — you’re doing new content for people that are either a: leveling alts from scratch or b: brand-new players that have never seen the game before.

At the moment, priority for all those low-level players seems to be focused and balanced around getting them to max level as quickly as possible. We experienced that on the leveling stream — I don’t think we ever really finished an entire zone, and by “finished” I mean “completed all available quests and zone storylines.” So why, logically, would Blizzard focus valuable time and hours on areas that people are really just going to burn through ASAP on the way to max level, where they really want to be?

And trust me, I get it. Those old zones and storylines are seriously outdated, and reflect an expansion that took place years and years ago. They don’t accurately reflect the state of the game’s story as it stands today. I would love to see them brought up to speed with current day — but the payoff isn’t really worth the effort it would take, at this point.

I’m still quietly hoping they revamp the Draenei and Blood Elf starting zones and kit them out for flying someday, though. They’re the only two really outdated spots left on Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms, and they show their age terribly.

Back in Wrath, the Horde and Alliance areas were called Sunreaver’s Sanctuary and The Silver Enclave, respectively. The Silver Covenant acted as Alliance representatives of a sort to the Kirin Tor, while the Sunreavers represented the Horde.  Obviously that all changed when the Sunreavers were summarily kicked out of the city during Mists of Pandaria.

As of Legion, the sections aren’t named after any representatives — they’re simply named after the faction leaders of each Legion campaign. For the Alliance, that would be Genn Greymane and the Greyfang Enclave. For the Horde, that would be the current Warchief Sylvanas Windrunner and Windrunner’s Sanctuary. If we see Dalaran pop up again in future expansions, I imagine the names might change again to reflect whoever happens to be in charge at the time.

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!