The Queue: Have you tried looking up?

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!

Aimee, I understand you’re probably super busy with all your cake-making endeavors, but I find it very difficult to believe you haven’t noticed the giant, malevolent, Legion-infested planet looming over us all. I mean, come on. It’s right there. You know what else is right in front of us? Your questions. Let’s answer some of those.

I think the problem with that is balancing. You’d have to make the discount large enough that Blacksmiths would be happy with it, but small enough that people wouldn’t feel immediately compelled to go pick up Blacksmithing simply for the discount. It’s a problem with any kind of profession bonus, honestly — if the bonus is too good, then people will drop whatever they had and pick up the hot new profession solely for the bonus. Sort of like picking talents, in a way. If one talent gives you that extra 0.4% DPS increase, everyone will immediately jump on that talent as ‘the best talent,’ even though an increase that small isn’t really going to be noticed by anyone except maybe the most hardcore of hardcore progression raiders. You know?

I don’t think they stopped dropping gear, but I can’t be 100% on that one — I know I usually just check the towers to see if they’re offering marks, and ignore them otherwise. I’m not sure if we’ll see a change to the gear level in 7.3. Luckily, we don’t exactly have very long to wait to figure out the answer to that one!

Not to my knowledge. I mean, she lost the thing, you found it. Finder’s keepers? If nothing else, you’re making really good use of it anyway. I mean, you went to all the trouble of empowering it, collecting Artifact Power and making it way, way stronger than it had ever been. You put in all that effort to make it your own — it’d be rude of her to suddenly demand to have it back again. I’d be surprised if she didn’t at least mention the thing, though. I don’t have a Marks Hunter currently on the PTR, so I’m not sure if she says anything about it.

I don’t think that one is going anywhere. All the pre-Legion scenarios are still in place for new players — you can skip them if you’re playing an alt, but they didn’t outright remove them from the game or anything. I’d imagine they’d want to keep this one intact as well, especially considering that it really hasn’t been in the game that long, yet we’re getting 7.3 next week. I mean…it’s only been here for a couple of weeks. Why would they take that kind of content out of the game, right after they just added it in? {PB}

On top of that, there’s the matter of the scenario itself. There’s some important information to be learned in there. And I’m not just talking about the big old reveal at the end of the scenario, either. Azeroth is having nightmares, and those nightmares aren’t just about the Burning Legion. I have a feeling the information we learned in that scenario is going to be relevant even after we’re done on Argus.

Anyway, they haven’t told us it’s going away, so I think it’s safe to say that Magni’s adventures in Titantown will remain exactly where they are after the patch launches on Tuesday. If they were going to yank it out, they would’ve said something about it already.

I don’t think they’re “holding back” on anything. Blizzard typically spaces out their announcements, and they don’t drop an announcement until they feel it’s ready to be announced. I do, however, think we’re going to hear about some pretty cool new things at BlizzCon this year. And I don’t think that’s a case of them holding back information as much as the timing just working out correctly — which is kind of what schedules are for, after all. Gamescom is a big event, they’ve given us some big stuff, BlizzCon is also a big event, I imagine we’re going to get some big stuff there, too.

Well, Aimee’s certainly in a tizzy — one that could be avoided if she actually paid attention, but I won’t blame her. She makes some really good cake. But yeah, ever since Argus appeared it feels like there’s been a ramp-up of NPC activity in Dalaran. It’s actually pretty cool, it makes the city feel a little more alive. I talked about this a bit on the podcast this week — I kind of appreciate moments like this, when the NPCs break out of the usual vendor/questgiver mode and start reacting to the world around them. I mean, we’re big old heroes changing the world. It’s nice when someone unexpected acknowledges that.

That’s it for today’s Queue — if you have any questions you’d like to see answered, be sure to leave them in the comments below!