The Queue: Monday medley

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!

Hilariously, I find myself unable to answer this question. I’ve been disabling helms on every single one of my characters as soon as possible since 2004. I don’t know what most of them look like unless I go and closely inspect someone in-game. Once in awhile, I’ll notice a helm is particularly cool and turn it in, but keeping helms off is my default. I’m partial to simple cowls and masks on casters or rogues, but I don’t know what most helms look like.

To be fair, helms generally being lame isn’t the only reason I turn them off. It’s a reason, yes, but not the only reason. I like seeing my character’s head/face even when it doesn’t make sense. For example, I disable helmets in the Mass Effect games. You should almost definitely wear a helmet when there are bullets buzzing about, or… you know, you’re in the vacuum of space, but whatever. It’s a video game. I want to see my character’s face. I identify with my characters much better when their faces aren’t hidden from view.

I also don’t have an answer to this one, but I’m calling attention to it just in case any of our readers have input/the ability to help out. Diablo 3 is my super-duper casual game where I boot it up once every six months to blindly smash demons. I’ve never exhausted the seasonal requirements or any of that.

I’m pretty sure every dragon and dragon-like creature in Blackwing Lair (and any other dungeon/raid related to Nefarian) was created by Nefarian. Either they’re lab experiments, or he straight up bred them in captivity. Remember how the Dragonmaw Orcs used to use red dragons as mounts in battle? The red dragons certainly didn’t volunteer for that job. The various dragons working for Nefarian are in a similar situation. See: Vaelestraz in BWL. You have to kill him, but he didn’t sign up to work for Nefarian.

They all have their pros and cons, but I don’t find any of them too terrible. I find the Warlock class hall to be a minor inconvenience because the terrain is a twisted, twisty mess to navigate, but it’s still not that bad. The portal to the Warlock class hall also has a tendency to not work properly — sometimes just walking through it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes clicking on the portal works, sometimes it doesn’t. You’re flipping a coin on which method of accessing the class hall is going to work any given time you try to visit.

I also feel like they built the Demon Hunter class hall before they tested the functionality of their glide/double jump/leap abilities. The class hall should be a demon hunter jungle gym, and it certainly looks like one, but it’s plagued with line of sight issues and pathing issues which make those movement abilities fail to work properly. It’s frustrating every time I think I’m gonna do some cool super-speed parkour between the mission table and the Artifact empowerment thingy. Instead of feeling awesome, I get an explosion of red text on my screen telling me I can’t do that.

I’m feeling like a broken record today. I have a lot of non-answers, all of which have different reasons for being non-answers. In this case, I feel like people take the return period way too seriously. Needing to formulate a to-do list before logging into a video game sounds like the opposite of fun. Games should be fun! Log in, look around, and decide what you want to do.

That said, if you must formulate a list, you haven’t missed anything in the span of a month. Seriously. I know you were playing when the current patch launched because we did the dungeon on our livestream. If we’re pretending you haven’t played on this patch, you can: Check out the Broken Shore, hit up a Demon Invasion in one of the leveling zones if it’s active, work through the new chain of Class/Order Hall quests, and that’s pretty much all there is to it.

With limited playtime, and potentially variable playtime that could be cut short, I feel World Quests must be the easiest way to do it. You can knock them all out (or at least some of them) in 30 minutes, and if you get a little more playtime, you can keep going. If your playtime gets cut short, you’ve still accomplished something.