The Queue: Why the turtle though

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!

While doing the umpteenth run through of Suramar’s quest chain, I happened to look up at the right moment and notice…this painting. It’s a turtle, but it’s a glowing turtle. And sure, those candles could be just for more reading light, but they almost look like a shrine to the glowing turtle. What’s the turtle for? Why’s it glowing? Most importantly, why is this not a Battle Pet already? Inquiring minds want to know, Blizzard.

You guys also have some inquiring minds, so let’s just answer your questions while we’re here, sans turtle-confusion.

I highly doubt he abandoned the Krokul — seeing Argus again affected him deeply. I don’t know if we’ll ever see the Krokul being super active again, or if we’ll see them around Azeroth or not. But I can’t really see Velen leaving them behind without at least inquiring as to whether or not they’d like to leave. These guys have been fighting for their world for thousands upon thousands of years. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that, in the wake of the Burning Legion’s defeat, they’d choose to stay behind.

Keep in mind too that what we learned from MacAree was that Velen wanted to return — begged to return, even — and the naaru told him no. So it wasn’t exactly a willing abandonment in the first place. Velen’s gotten really interesting in Legion, I kind of hope we see his story continue from here. With Legion, he’s finally gotten a resolution to that thing that drove him for all those thousands of years — so what now? That’s a story I’d like to see.

It’s not just StarCraft, the Overwatch heroes are absent from the festive skins list as well! Honestly, I don’t really know what Blizzard’s criteria is for holiday skins. I don’t think it’s a deliberate omission, I think they just pick what they find they can do something interesting with. I agree with you on the Probius front, though — I’d love to see a holiday skin that just turns him into an ornament. Maybe next year? We can hope, anyway.

I don’t know about anyone else, but for me, it’s not really about the old quests and things so much as it is the general design of the area when I’m leveling alts. If I can pick and choose where I can go, I’ll usually pick places that are visually interesting. In the case of Burning Crusade vs. Wrath, I think I’ll be picking Burning Crusade a lot more often. It’s not that the content is any better or worse, it’s that I like the way the zones look, and I like being someplace that isn’t half covered with snow.

Plus, I’ve usually been able to get away with doing maybe a zone or two in Outland before I outleveled it and had to go to Wrath content. I kind of miss doing all the other zones, this gives me a chance to do so without losing out on leveling XP. I mean, I might get bored eventually and go back to traveling through Northrend, but for now, I kind of like the idea of being able to go all the way through Outland again for a chance of pace, you know?

I don’t know. On the one hand, it’d be cool to have that option, but just paying gold for it seems kind of boring. Quest-wise, how would you make something like that a quest? What would make that quest meaningful for players? How would they introduce something like that without making it feel awkward?

I think if they were going to do anything to make that viable, they should add an item to the Leatherworking profession that’s just a sheath for your back. Leatherworkers could construct it, sell it on the AH if they wanted to, and using it would allow you to sheath one-handed weapons on your back like Monks do. Leatherworking doesn’t exactly get a lot of stuff that’s particularly viable for making a profit on the AH — it feels like this would be one of those cosmetic things they could produce that would fit the bill nicely.

You know, I’m not sure on that, other than Magatha has a deep and abiding respect for the elements, regardless of her other actions. And in her own way, she did the elements a favor back in Cataclysm. The Twilight’s Hammer wanted to use the Doomstone to destroy Thousand Needles, and Magatha prevented that (with the help of a hapless adventurer, of course). In Legion, she goes to the Earthen Ring not because she wants to, necessarily, but because the Doomstone has fallen into the hands of the Burning Legion, and she needs to get it back. She can’t do it on her own.

In both cases, while Magatha might be intent on keeping the Doomstone for her own purposes, she never actually used the thing to destroy anything. She was just keeping it out of harm’s way. Despite her misdeeds (and she’s got a lot of them), she’s got a great deal of respect for the elements. She’s never used them to needlessly kill — remember, she poisoned Garrosh’s weapon in Cataclysm, she didn’t just strike at Cairne using the elements or anything.

Then you have Thrall, who has performed a litany of good deeds over the years and holds a great deal of respect for the elements — and yet he called on them to kill Garrosh during that mak’gora when he couldn’t defeat him hand-to-hand. He crossed a line, and the elements are not happy about that.

That’s the thing about the elements — they don’t really make moral judgments based on people’s reputations when they decide to help. You respect them, they respect you. What Thrall did in Nagrand was therefore somehow deeply disrespectful. While there’s no evidence that Thrall forced the elements to kill Garrosh, it’s still blatantly clear that they didn’t like doing it, and didn’t like that Thrall asked them to do it.

Magatha’s never been in that situation with the elements. Heck, the whole Doomstone debacle prevented the Twilight’s Hammer from draining elemental power and using it for bad things — they were probably pretty okay with that, and with her…for now, anyway.

I have a love/hate relationship with Fandral. He was horrible for what he did, at the same time, I loved his character and I think he died way, way too soon. He could’ve been a really viable long-term villain, and I’m still irritated that he was brushed aside and relegated to loot fodder in Firelands instead of being allowed to stick around.

But you’ve got sort of a point with Teldrassil, in a way. The place wasn’t blessed by the Dragonflights when it was created. Fandral grafted a piece of Xavius to the thing and corrupted it. Despite how nice it appeared to be, Teldrassil maybe shouldn’t have been made at all — and who knows how deep the roots of the World Tree go, or what they’re poking. I mean, we’ve seen what happens to corrupted World Trees before in Northrend — and that was also Fandral’s fault.

At the same time, Teldrassil was fixed in Stormrage, and both Alexstrasza and Ysera blessed the tree, although Nozdormu still hasn’t done so. So supposedly, the tree has recovered from its corruption, you know? And despite its dubious origins, it’s served quite nicely as a picturesque home for Night Elf players.

So yes, the tree is burning. Given its origins, maybe that’s not such a bad thing in the long run? I don’t know. What I do know is that Night Elves better get something pretty extraordinary for their next home, wherever it happens to be.

…hey, so I heard Gilneas is deserted now, and the Worgen do owe the Night Elves a few favors, don’t they…

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!