The Queue: Polearms

One of the things I don’t like about playing a Night Elf Warrior is how they hold 2h weapons. They tend to hold axes, swords and maces up in front of themselves in a somewhat awkward grip that obscures the face. It’s really bad on a lady Night Elf.

But they don’t do this with polearms.

I’m always going to love Ashkandi best, but I’m indulging in the polearm animations on my Warrior right now, especially since I have a whole host of polearm skins I rarely get to use. The Ulduar ones in particular (the one pictured is Lotrafen if you’re curious) really go well with my current look.

Let’s talk about stuff.

I feel like Plate, overall, just always seems to have the strongest Mog game. There’s more variety in plate — you can get raised textures, textures that are barely there, whatever you’re looking for. I know this is by and large a matter of personal preference and if you prefer leather gear looks you’re welcome to it, but one of the reasons I stopped playing my Monk on the leveling stream was that I really hated how all the gear looked.

Mail has some good sets — I can get into my Hunter or Shaman more easily as a result — but overall I prefer how plate looks. Especially for the pants slot — there are raised plate textures, plate skirts, even plate hot pants. You can find a variety of looks in plate I feel other armor types don’t have.

Well, for starters, you’re not going to pull off a Wrathgate style cinematic twist too often, nor should you try to. The last thing we need is Blizzard chasing after twists — Shyamalan at your peril and all that. But I’d disagree that Blizzard only gives the faction leaders love in their cinematics. The Ysera one was pretty amazing, as an example. Still, you have a point about where the story focus has gone. I mean, it’s hard to argue that Bolvar, Arthas, and Saurfang weren’t major figures — it’s not like the Wrathgate cinematic was a bunch of nobodies — but Legion’s best cinematic moments were Varian’s death, Vol’jin’s death, Sylvanas and Genn fighting, and now Anduin’s moment on the Broken Shore and these all featured faction leaders. Even the 7.2 trailer is mostly Velen, Khadgar and Kil’jaeden (with a special guest appearance from Sargeras’ glowing ball) so you do have a point.

I mean, I think Warlords had a lot of faults but the cinematics weren’t in that list. They were generally pretty awesome. Horde side I still get a bit choked up watching Ga’nar die. And I get why people are upset about Maraad’s death, but for me, the guy got to go out making up for his greatest regret and I can’t feel bad about that. And the end of Shadowmoon? No way is that a bad cinematic. And I’d argue that the Sylvanas/Genn cinematic might be my favorite one they’ve ever done.

So I guess I’m generally in support of what they’re doing over there, but I sure wouldn’t mind a cinematic like the Ga’nar one again.

Here’s some context for folks who don’t know what we’re talking about. Essentially, they’ve proved that feathers were an extremely early adaptation in troodontids (which are a likely closer relative of both birds and bird like dinosaurs such as various dromaeosaurs) and thus, it’s very likely that other bird relatives such as Tyrannosaurus had feathers or at least evolved from ancestors that did.

This is very cool. It’s not necessarily something we didn’t already know — Archaeopteryx is older and had fully developed flight feathers, and there are other rivals for oldest transitional between birds and non-avian dinosaurs like Xiaotingia — but the Jianianhualong fossil is another direct link between actual dinosaurs and feathers and it’s one of the oldest and strongest yet established. 

I don’t know that we need a mount based on it, though — we basically have the WoW equivalent already, since WoW tends to add unnecessary features  to animals anyway.

Generally speaking, I don’t do this. If I start a work I almost always finish it. I mean, I sat through the entirety of Lost in Space in the theatre. I paid money to see Spawn and managed to get enough enjoyment out of Martin Sheen’s over the top performance to stay in the theatre. I even went to see Dungeons and Dragons and found Jeremy Irons a delight, so awful I simply could not look away. So something would have to be truly awful for me to stop once I’d gotten started. There’s lost of stuff that might indeed be that bad, but I didn’t start reading or watching or playing it in the first place so I don’t know.

I honestly can’t think of a video game I’ve started in the past six years and walked away from because I thought it was bad. With the amount of information out there, I generally get a good idea of how I’ll feel about a game way before it comes time to plop down money on it.

The closest I’ve gotten was that I stopped reading Captain America: Steve Rogers after the first issue when they revealed the big ‘Hail Hydra’ bit. Haven’t gone back since, and Marvel seems determined to get me to stop buying every comic they put out. But I finished that issue before I walked away.

I’m not really qualified to talk for Paladins here, my Pally stalled out again at 102. But I feel like Shamans have drifted too far away from Totems and need to get back to them. If Legion is all about that class fantasy, part of the archetypical WoW Shaman kit is dropping Totems. Who can forget the Earthbind Highway in Blackwing Lair? Sentry Totem? It’s not even that Shamans today are bad, but Totems were a unique and interesting way to buff a group and they’ve been so greatly diminished that every time I log on to one of my shammies I feel weird and alienated because more of them are gone.

The last we heard, KT is dead, but his phylactery wasn’t on the body the second time we killed him. (Remember, the first time it was, but we gave it to Father Inigo Montoy who didn’t destroy it but instead handed it over to the Scourge in exchange for becoming a Lich himself.) So we really have no idea what Kel’Thuzad is doing at the moment. For all we know he’s hiding until he figures out a way to wrest control of the Scourge from Bolvar and raise Arthas to be the Lich King once again.

Because none of those gates were actually meant to protect ICC at all.

Arthas very specifically tells you when you fight him that everything he’s done in Northrend was designed to funnel the Alliance and Horde’s greatest heroes into fighting their way through the Scourge to reach him. He didn’t intend to protect ICC from assault. He simply wanted to funnel that assault in the exact direction he intended it to go, with as much conflict between Alliance and Horde as possible along the way to help ensure that whoever made it to the top of the spire would be the strongest heroes possible.

Keep in mind that, had Tirion not broken Frostmourne and allowed all the souls trapped inside it to escape and attack Arthas, he would have won. Even after he’d been hit with the Scourge’s plague weapon (the one Putress made with Varimathras’ help, likely influsing it with fel magic from the demon’s Legion masters) and been greatly weakened, and even after Tirion destroyed his heart and dealt him another blow, Arthas as the Lich King had us beat. He extended his power and killed every single one of those heroes who’d fought their way to him, and if not for that timely interruption and the assault of the tortured souls from within Frostmourne, said heroes would have risen from death as an unstoppable army of the strongest Scourge ever to exist.

Considering that Arthas was hit by the Plague weapon, blasted by the destruction of his own heart and attacked by all the souls of everyone ever trapped inside Frostmourne, we barely squeaked a victory out of that fight. And that’s after we passed through the maze that Arthas deliberately created over a decade to funnel us to him.

ICC wasn’t a fortress. It was a trap. And we fell into it.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. I’ll talk to you guys on Friday.