The Queue: Nostalgia

So, who’s gotten a chance to run Black Temple in its Timewalking form yet? One step closer to all content being current, am I right? Well, I’m kind of kidding, but at the same time it’s actually sort of true, and that kind of amazes me.

This is the Queue. Let’s chat about Blizzard and games.

Someone from Overwatch because I’d be relatively sure they ate human food, spoke English and wouldn’t randomly murder me. Any of the ones currently in game seem perfectly personable, but most like D.Va (I could ask her questions about Starcraft) or Lucio because to him everything out now would sound quaint, like an oldies station.We could talk about music. He is a DJ after all.

Yes, since right now, all that’s different is that people are using the Group Finder to run it. It’s still a pick up group with people you don’t know. They’re still the same kind of groups that would be running it with LFR, only now, you get people demanding that everyone who runs BT in their groups be at 920 ilevel or have completed normal ToS, which is absurd. It basically means that you’re at the mercy of the whims of strangers before you even step in the door, instead of just being at the mercy of the whim of strangers once you enter.

I’m sure it’s much more fun in a guild group, but for people in a smaller guild, that’s not feasible. In the end, it’s just Group Finder instead of LFR. Letting people queue for it wouldn’t have made it any better or worse, but it would have been more convenient and you’d have to deal with less gatekeeping.

“Can we expect people to take off three weeks for a game?”

No, but should we expect the game’s design to be changed to favor people who are taking weeks off just to beat it?

See, I come to this from a completely different perspective. I remember when there was no Mythic, no Heroic, no Normal and no LFR — there were just raids, and everybody did them at the same difficulty level. I remember fights like C’thun taking months before they were cleared. People didn’t take time off work expecting to blow up a raid in a week or two because it wasn’t feasible. A lot has changed since then. As people have pointed out (including myself, yesterday) Al’Akir took 42 days to kill, and with seven guilds now working on Kil’jaeden (and the fight being retuned already) it isn’t likely we’ll see anything like that this time around.

In other words, if Mythic raiders want to be Mythic raiders, they’re going to have to accept that some fights will be very hard, and may require tuning adjustments before they can put them to bed. Fallen Avatar wasn’t a cakewalk, and Kil’jaeden will likely be worse. Does that mean Blizzard won’t have to make tuning adjustments? No, of course not. But the idea that Mythic = taking weeks off work so you can blitz to the end might not always be tenable. Sometimes it takes hundreds of attempts to kill a boss, and that’s okay.

It should also be pointed out that World First Mythic kills are generally done with less gear than the encounter is actually designed for, and most of that is tossed to the DPS to try and get the encounter down faster. That’s usually a solid gearing strategy, but it isn’t always and that might be the case with Kil’jaeden.

Do I think Kil’jaeden is defeatable? Yes. I’m sure someone at Blizzard has run the encounter, probably quite a few times now. But often players will approach fights entirely differently and Blizzard will end up saying “See, we intended players to do X, but most of them went with a Y strategy” — you often can’t predict what will happen when the encounter is actually run by players. Kil’jaeden will likely die in a week or two now that enough groups are working on him.

Best wishes to you, your mother, and everyone else affected by this. I hope it all goes well and there are no complications nor an undue burden on your family.

I’m sure someone agrees with you.

I don’t, at all, not even a little bit, but it’s never just you on the internet. I would never tell you no one agrees with you.

For me, the Burning Legion barely even featured in The Burning Crusade. Magtheridon was one of them but he was imprisoned in the basement of Hellfire Citadel, and as others have pointed out the only real time we saw the actual Legion in TBC was one big robot outside Black Temple and then the Shattered Sun Offensive/Sunwell raid. And as good as that was, it always felt tacked on to me.

Honestly I’d almost have rather had it end at Black Temple, maybe ZA as a ‘side raid’ and then Kael’thas could have come back in Legion as a major threat. But I liked Sunwell as a raid, and I’m glad we got to do it. Maybe we could get Sunwell timewalking in 7.3? (I doubt it.)

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. Thanks everybody. Ask some good questions for Adam. Talk to you all next week.