The Queue: Double bubble trouble

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!

I hit 110 on my Forsaken Priest last week. I get the distinct impression that Khadgar isn’t terribly fond of my little undead adventurer. One floating head just wasn’t enough to make sure she wasn’t being shady. Of course she’s Shadow, so technically she’s always shady, but hey we don’t need to tell Khadgar that. Let’s answer your questions instead. I’m sure Khadgar would be much happier with that, right?

On the one hand yes, it absolutely would. On the other…dialogue takes time to write. That time could be utilized elsewhere. But there are moments of dialogue you can pick up on Argus — the Vindicaar has several NPCs standing around with dialogue options that change depending on where you are in the storyline, and where you are on the map. The chaos in Dalaran also seems to have ramped up over time — try talking to one of those freaked out NPCs sometime. It’s not quite the same as what you see in Diablo 3, but there’s at least a little indication of the passage of time.

Speaking of time…

If you happen to have a Hunter and do the Marksmanship Artifact chain, you’ll get a couple clues on that front. The Mage that summons a portal for you and Vereesa makes note that time passes “differently” in the Twisting Nether. Later on in the quest, Vereesa speculates just how long her sister was imprisoned on Niskara, the Legion world you travel to. She says the Mage was right, and that “time has little meaning in this place.”

Essentially…time is messed up, in the Twisting Nether. We don’t really have a way of tracking just how it’s messed up, or why. Turalyon’s lived far, far longer than any Human reasonably should live. But he’s also been allied with the Army of the Light and working side-by-side with a prime naaru. It’s entirely possible she had something to do with it. So there aren’t any “solid” answers surrounding that one — but there doesn’t really need to be. The only thing we really need to take from that information at the moment is that Alleria and Turalyon both have been fighting the Legion for a very, very long time.

Talbuks are native to Argus — when the Draenei fled, they took the talbuk with them. Elekk, however, are native to Draenor. Alleria and Turalyon spent quite some time on Draenor before joining the Army of the Light. When they joined, they pointed out the usefulness of the animal, and the Army took several along for training. So talbuk could be considered an invasive species, but elekk were on Draenor before the Draenei arrived.

{PB}I don’t know if the shal’dorei were ever “immortal” so much as really, really long-lived. As you said, they weren’t part of the group that was affected by the World Tree. They were already encased in a bubble when Nozdormu blessed Nordrassil. And there’s no indication that the Nightwell granted them immortality — they used it for sustenance. It was food, not a font of magic to draw from like the Sunwell. It’s like the difference between a sandwich and an outlet — the Nightwell is the sandwich. You eat it so you don’t starve to death. The Sunwell is the outlet — it’s something the Blood Elves plug into to fuel their spells.

It’s possible that the Nightwell extended the life span of the shal’dorei — after all, it was altered by a Titan Artifact. Or they simply extended their own lives through magic — the shal’dorei are highly skilled in the arcane arts. But I don’t recall any of the shal’dorei claiming that they had immortality due to the Nightwell. Being restored by the arcan’dor simply means they no longer need to depend on the Nightwell for sustenance. They can get their food elsewhere, they won’t wither away anymore.

I’m not a huge fan of on-use trinkets to begin with. It’s not that I don’t like them, it’s just that I am incredibly lazy, to be honest — I don’t really want another button to push. I’ve got enough buttons to push already. If I do end up with an on-use trinket (and I do have one, it’s pretty great), I’ll try and keybind it with another ability that has the same cooldown. If I can’t do that, then I will begrudgingly give it its own button. Having two trinkets with on-use abilities doesn’t appeal to me at all — but hey, if it’s the best option out there, I’ll take it. I won’t like it, but I’ll take it.

There are actually female Broken in lore — in the short story Unbroken, one of the survivors with Nobundo was a female named Korin. The physical changes she underwent are described in the story:

Nobundo stopped at the entrance to Rolc’s cave. Korin was there, lying on a blanket. She had now transformed so that she almost looked no longer like a draenei, but rather like some parody of their race. She was sickly and emaciated. Her eyes were milky, and her lower arms had swollen to a massive size. Her hooves had sloughed away to twin bony protuberances, and her tail was nothing more than a small nub.

There’s also one briefly visible in the Shadow Wing manga — you can see an image of her on Wowpedia if you don’t have the book. By all appearances and descriptions, they degraded in the same way that the male Broken did. There was even an untextured version of what may have been a female Broken in the game files at one point in time, but it was never implemented. I kind of wish — what with all the other model upgrades we’ve seen so far — that they’d come up with a female Broken model. Especially since we’re seeing Krokul again on Argus. It seems a little silly at this point that they haven’t.

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!