The Queue: In which I am starting to suspect I have moved into a haunted house

Let’s just get on with the questions. And the answers. Y’all know how it goes.

I stopped playing for six weeks because I moved from Seattle to Edmonton back in 2006. So getting married and moving to another country did it once.

But you asked about in game stuff.

• Removing the Warrior class or nerfing it into utter ruin. I’m not even saying nerfing it a lot, I mean to the point where they weren’t capable of even leveling.
• Burning Teldrassil and leaving the Night Elves homeless in the Eastern Kingdoms. I’m really close on this one. I’m willing to give it a chance, but this decision is one I’m very, very unhappy with and it’s getting me close to “I’ll just play Diablo 3 until things get better” territory.
• Velen goes Shadow. That’s it, I’m done.
• They make it possible to get old transmog appearances on Classic servers. Or otherwise make playing Classic incentivized. If people want Classic servers, great, let them have fun. I do not want to feel like I have to play on them to get stuff I deleted in Vanilla back.

Looking at the players here, I think there’s a lot of reasons why the faction conflict would start up again.

There’s the Forsaken. Not only do they have an “Us vs. the World” mentality that barely remembers that the rest of the Horde is on their team sometimes — no, I’m never going to forget playing my Tauren back in vanilla and seeing a Forsaken Alchemist murder a Tauren because he thought it was educational — but they’ve made a lot of enemies over the years. They drove the people of Southshore away or killed them, invaded Silverpine and Gilneas, drove into Alterac and even the Hinterlands. A lot of people, including in many cases people who escaped Lordaeron and thus are essentially their kin, want the Forsaken wiped out.

As long as Genn Greymane and the people of Gilneas are part of the Alliance, they’re going to want the Forsaken gone. And it’s not like the rest of the Alliance is going to argue with him. They use plague to wipe out whole towns — they’re essentially an existential threat to everyone in the world who isn’t undead.

Sylvanas’ motivations also put her on a collision course with the Alliance. Even if we didn’t know that she intended to attack Stormwind we know she’s in a position where she just lost the best chance she had for immortality for her people. Without the ability to command Val’kyr, the Forsaken as a race are doomed to extinction. The only other person she could possibly turn to is Bolvar up in Icecrown, and I don’t see that happening.

But none of that even touches upon all the players. The Horde has never liked or trusted the Alliance or its intentions — they generally view it as suspect at best. Orcs view Humans as weak and contemptible despite having lost the Second War to them and many hold on to resentment over the internment camps. Humans, for their part, view Orcs as murderous invaders who used up and destroyed their own world and then sought to do the same thing to Azeroth. Trolls hate Elves and Humans, and they hate Trolls right back. Blood Elves hold a grudge over Garithos.

There are Admirals on the Alliance side who lost family in Southshore, and on the Horde side commanders who view themselves as underdogs who must band together against a hostile world and make it submit. I could fill this entire Queue with grudges and animosities between the Alliance and the Horde.

In short, it’s amazing they ever manage to find common cause, not that they turn on each other as soon as the bigger threat is gone.

Honestly, none of the Warrior abilities feel necessary. They’re all just extra attacks and none of them look particularly cool or feel particularly important. What I’m really going to miss are all the passive bonuses to things I’ve unlocked over the past year or so. That’s going to hurt to give up. But Warriors didn’t get anything as cool as a second pet or a moon we drop on people, so it’s not going to feel like much of anything to lose the Artifact.

I’ll miss being able to go to the Isle of Thunder and chase Trolls around, though. That was fun. They literally ran around in terror and I could just hit them with impunity.

Obviously I don’t know the answer to this one. I’d hope not — a lot of time and effort was put into the new looks Druid players got from their artifacts like the Werebear form. I’d hate to think that’s all going away.

I know a lot of players farmed up the staff from Firelands only to have to give it up and they introduced Burning Seeds so players could have the appearance without the staff. Maybe they can do something like that for all the various artifact based appearances like the Werebear or the various skins from the Claws of Ursoc.

I don’t know, but I’d think some effort to let players have their unique forms would be appreciated.

If you don’t count the demon in Son of the Wolf, then yes, as far as I know. If he kills anyone in Before the Storm I don’t know about it yet.

They stated that the way they’re doing level scaling won’t make all original content accessible to starting characters. So, instead of all of old Azeroth scaling 1 to 60, some zones will scale 20 to 60, others 40 to 60, to preserve the sense of danger for low level characters who travel too far into zones they’re not ready for. They don’t want to erase that sensation of danger when, as an example, a Horde character in Tirisfal Glades travels into the Plaguelands and gets a death hug from the nearby murder bears.

I’m going to assume it’s actually blood. If it’s not, I don’t want to know about it.

If you kill Sarth fast enough, you don’t even have to touch the drakes and he’ll have a chance to drop anything on his loot table. You don’t have to fiddle with the drakes at all. I’ve killed him so fast that I then had to stand there waiting for all the trash to show up, and a few times I’ve even shadowmelded after a kill to speed it up.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. I’m going to hope nothing else breaks or disappears in my house this week. Y’all have a good weekend.