The Queue: Lowering the bar to raise the bar

Ugh, Mitch is the worst, always raising the bar on the Queue with his whole “I’m so impressive that I can answer ten Queue questions every day” thing.

Because, really, there are only so many hours in the day, and when I spend 15 minutes going through comments to find one question about Transformers (i.e. what I was doing up until I gave up and started writing this introduction), well… making enough time to question-hunt is tough. FeyMercurial suggests I should lower the bar on questions and “do some some limbo dancing,” but I’m not so sure.

But fine. Let’s give it a try and see how I do. But I’m still not answering questions about Transformers. Or tentacles. (These comments can be a real minefield, I’m telling you.)

So, I was asking Mitch for advice on how to better answer Queue questions, and he said I should include this with the answer “maybe.” Which is unfortunately true: we just don’t know what happened to Nithogg. Blizzard hasn’t said anything about removing World Bosses, but we also haven’t seen Nithogg in a while. What gives?

Ugh, I should be able to answer questions better than this. I just feel wrong after typing that. Let’s see if I can manage something better…

Okay! Here we go! A solid question I can provide an actual useful answer to! Let’s do this!

The upgrade process is pretty straightforward, albeit a bit of a grind. You need to pick up 50 Writhing Essence, which can drop from Emissary Caches, Tomb of Sargeras bosses, your weekly Mythic+ chest, Legionfall War Supply turn-ins, and weekly PVP rewards. The number of Essences you’ll get from each can vary, and you may not get any — though reports so far say there’s a 100% chance to get them from your Mythic+ chest and Tomb bosses. Once you’ve collected 50, turn them in at the Dalaran Blacksmith (note that you don’t need to have the quest in your log for Essences to drop) to get a Stabilized Titan Essence which will upgrade your Legendary to ilevel 970.

Whew. Giving a real question a real answer feels pretty good. Let’s see how long I can keep this up.

I feel like this is one of those questions we get a lot in the Queue, by people who come and go from the game. (After all, no one can read every Queue question. Probably.) But it’s always a relevant one, especially right after patch day. The game keeps changing… so is now the right time to come back?

If you haven’t played since 7.1, I’d say it’s absolutely worth coming back now… even if you just hang out to go through the Broken Shore content, get your class mount, pick up flying, and beat up Kil’jaeden in the Tomb of Sargeras raid that just opened today. There’s a good amount of new content in the latest patch, so why not hop online and enjoy it while it’s fresh?

To catch up with what’s happened while you were gone, here’s what you need to know about patch 7.2, patch 7.2.5, and the Tomb of Sargeras.

I’m not sure if this falls into the “lower the bar” advice, but I have a great one-line answer for this question, so I’m going to go with it. Jaina can do better and should dump that guy.

Okay? Okay.

{PB}This is a goofy question, but I’ll allow it because I have strong feelings on this subject.

The short answer here is that I really, really don’t like Mists of Pandaria. While it had some great storytelling, the story was basically: you and your faction ruin everything you touch. The storyline showed us how anger can consume and ruin people… and though that’s not a bad moral tale, we were forced to go along with it without any say in how it would turn out. And you’re forced to go along with pretty awful things just because you need the XP or reputation or achievements. I found Mists of Pandaria a very hard expansion to play through on a Horde character, because I felt physically disgusted by some of the things my character had to do in order to advance.

Pandaria isn’t the only place this happens (after all, you don’t have a choice in any of WoW’s quests other than to do them or not), but it was a definite theme in Pandaria.

So, no, I don’t finish the Jade Forest storyline. If I could skip out on destroying the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, I’d do that, too… but we’ve ruined the Vale and moved. WoW throws us from expansion to expansion without looking back, so the damage we did to Pandaria is forever. I wish we could undo it.

That last answer got pretty gloomy, so we’ll close out with an even sillier question to try to end on an up note.

Plus Blizzard Watch basically is the Azerothian Enquirer, so I hardly even have to put on my RP hat to come up with an answer to this one! Though I’m imagining something called the Azerothian Enquirer would be a little more tabloid-y than we are, with headlines like:

• INSIDE THE ALLIANCE CONSPIRACY TO OUST VARIAN WRYNN
• JAINA PROUDMOORE VANISHES, KHADGAR DENIES RESPONSIBILITY
• VARIAN’S DEATH FAKED! FORMER KING SPOTTED ON ELWYNN FARM
• ILLIDARI ARE INVADING OUR AUCTION HOUSES
• GUL’DAN:  A PORTRAIT OF AZEROTH’S MISUNDERSTOOD WARLOCK

The more of these I write, the more convinced I am that an actual AzerothianEnquirer would be a fun read.

This is a really good question for a day that I’m grumbling about questions. The trouble — if you want to call it that — is that I’m a casual player of lots of Blizzard games. I don’t really laser-focus on anything in the Blizzard world. I have a working knowledge of Diablo, Hearthstone, Heroes, and Overwatch,  though I play WoW the most (and don’t play Overwatch at all). In WoW I lean towards playing healers and do a little raiding, a little grinding, a little collecting, and a lot of screwing around and doing nothing of importance with my guild-mates. (We have a D&D group for weekends.)  I have a fondness for Gnomes because they’re petite and adorable (as I like to think I am) and they have an underdog thing going for them that makes me want to cheer them on. If I can play a class as a Gnome, I’ll always play a Gnome. I know a smattering of lore from all Blizzard’s titles, but I’m not an expert like Anne or Rossi. And I’ve been playing Blizzard games since… I’m not sure. A long time. So I have a long-term perspective.

I have a breadth of knowledge, but not a depth of it. As Archmage RC commented, I have an approximate knowledge of many things, and as Kalcheus commented, I am something of a “miscellany” writer. So, really, you can ask me anything, but you’re probably going to get better responses from big picture questions, opinion questions, or social questions. If you ask me how to handle Kil’jaeden’s phase 4 as melee, I’m just going to stare at you blankly. (And does Kil’jaeden even have a phase 4? I don’t know!) But if you ask me about how Tomb compares to older raids (I’ll tell you when I get there), which NPC should have shown up to help us (Yrel),  or why we’re doing this when we could be retaking Gnomeregan, I’ll have an answer.

Maybe not a good answer, but an answer.

Whew. That was a tough Queue.

As always, please leave your questions in the comments for Anne to answer tomorrow. Rossi is out this Friday, so I’ll be back with then to play more raising the bar/lowering the bar with your questions!