The Queue: Water breathing, DPS rotations and John Madden, and The Godfather

There’s three movie trilogies I watch every year: The Godfather, Hobbit + Lord of the Rings, and The Matrix. I’m saying this because you all need to do the same; three movies that are just some of the best ever made.

I agree entirely with the above statement. And this raises two interesting questions for me:

First, are we ever going to go through a pruning (and a Great iLevel Shrink) again? The cosmos nearly collapsed when this happened last time, but in the long run it was incredibly necessary for the game. Even when they got it wrong (aka: water breathing), the overall effect was incredible balance across all classes both in terms of power and complexity. You lost rotations that you needed a John Fu!@ing Madden playbook to execute, and gained (more or less) rotations that were consistently easy to learn and difficult to master across the board.

Second, the ability to not breath underwater  seems like a dead mechanic to me. What does it offer? The time to stay underwater is so long that Blizzard intentionally hides entrances to underwater caves so you have to search around for five minutes before you find that entry under an overhanging rock. Don’t tell me that they’re easy to find too — they’re only easy once you’ve looked up the quest on Wowhead. If the point of the breath timer is to actually emulate somewhat realistic breathing under water they should make it short again, like in the classic days, or just eliminate the mechanic entirely from the game and allow everyone to breath underwater.

Or put an NPC in that gives you that ability for some unnecessary reason because they found a potion laying around and here now you can breath underwater like some underwater fish eating beast or something.

…. I think I might have nerd raged on this one a little too much. Let’s move on and never speak of it again, just like Khadgar and that stupid 2,500 shard quest. Because great storytelling reasons to give us more nethershards.

Okay now I’m done, I promise. Happy Monday!

Besides The Godfather teaching you everything you need to know about leadership, business, and product development (I’m not even kidding… my day-job is a Sr. Director of Product for a big media company, and using the Rules of Vito Corleone to make decisions has never failed me), it made me ask the question: where is the mobster story in WoW?

There’s certainly mystery and betrayal, but there isn’t really a crime syndicate that’s working to subvert and make gains for itself based on skirting the flaws of the system. There’s a clandestine element to SI:7, and the Rogue storyline has some great flow to it; but it’s not Godfather.

There has to be some organization that’s operating undercover in a big way (as in, not the Defias Brotherhood) on Azeroth… The world is in too much turmoil for a crime syndicate not to thrive. Crime goes up when there is chaos, and down when there is order. My point of all this? I’m betting a month’s salary that eventually there’s going to be a Godfather-esque expansion to WoW.

Not much!

For one, don’t take advantage of the instant-level boost thing that Blizzard offers. Just level your character. The next two expansions will be fast enough to level through, especially if you’re going to use upgraded Heirlooms — which I heavily recommend. Go and buy a WoW token and then buy the heirlooms and upgrades. The levels will fly by.

One recommendation is when you get to 110 don’t just stop the questing. Finish off all the chapters in each of the zones, and then head out to the Broken Isles to do that quest chain. Once you’ve started there (and can turn in shards and other things for gear), head to Suramar and start slaughing through that.