The Queue: The worst Druid

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’m pretty sure whalloping sleeping seal Druids is gonna get me kicked out of the Cenarion Circle right quick. And I doubt they’re going to take my industrious beak-clubbing technique into consideration, either. Or the fact that I felt really guilty about doing it.

I’d actually like to see Coilfang Reservoir and Tempest Keep get a reboot. I mean Black Temple Timewalking is nice and all, but a little variety never hurt anybody. And both Vashj and Kael’thas were ridiculously complicated encounters that are now thoroughly trivialized for soloing. It’d be neat to see all the old strats pop up again. Who remembers the Tainted Core macro?

I’m…pretty sure we’re doing just fine on gold — in my opinion, of course. We’re either at Warlords levels, or above it. I’m regularly pulling in several thousand gold a day just from gold missions. Between my decked-out followers and their equipment, I get the bonus gold pretty much every single time. Tokens generally rise and fall depending on what kind of new content Blizzard is putting out there. If there’s new things to purchase, you’ll see prices go up — but they’ll invariably come back down after.

I don’t really think they need to make it any easier to get gold. I mean, right now I have to hit three buttons and send NPCs off to go gather it for me. I wouldn’t exactly call that difficult.

Not at the moment, no — although there are some quests currently in Silithus on the PTR. I won’t say too much about them, spoilers after all, but I will say at the moment they’re limited. No World Quests or anything like that, just a series of story quests that have a definitive end. Whether or not more will be added is up in the air. The only information we really have at the moment is what’s on the PTR right now. Sorry!

A new class? That’s doubtful. More Allied Races are far more likely. Keep in mind that with new classes, you have to balance them with all the other existing classes in the game. This invariably means all the other classes have to be rebalanced as well, adjustments for the new addition. That’s a substantial undertaking, and it’s probably why we only see new classes added between expansions.

There’s more than enough time in alpha/beta design stages to figure out all the fine tuning needed to make a new class work. Mid-expansion? The time spent devoted to making sure that new class works correctly would be time taken away from new patch content. I don’t think that’s a trade-off Blizzard is willing to make.

With new races, the only thing that really needs to be balanced are the racial abilities. That’s a much less involved problem. I think we’d be way more likely to see new races over new classes, if Blizzard decided to try that out.

Here’s the problem with professions: They’re only good for a very limited window, and for a very limited amount of items. You can’t make profession equipment better than the rewards you find in raids. If you did, why would you bother raiding? The same is somewhat applicable to dungeons — if you make profession gear better than, say, the best of the best Mythic gear, why would you bother doing Mythic dungeons? The reward has to be good enough to warrant the efforts made to get that reward. And better gear is available through other methods as well — the tokens you can purchase on the Broken Isles or Argus give you pretty high-quality gear without having to jump through the hoops of gathering mats and crafting.

So professions are in a weird place where they aren’t necessarily rewarding at all. You can make items with them, you can upgrade those items, but they still aren’t really worth the effort for a substantial chunk of players. You can’t sell something if it’s not worthwhile, so there are very few professions that are worth the financial investment. And Blizzard has managed to gut the few professions that had some kind of financial reward. Glyphs are no longer a thing, when they used to be a source of income. Gems are no longer as profitable as they once were, because sockets aren’t a regular occurrence on items.

To be perfectly honest, I think the best way to fix professions is to simply change the game. Get rid of the performance-enhancing items like gear or gems and just introduce cosmetic items. Tailors could still make cloth items — but they’re cosmetic, purely intended for transmog. Jewelcrafters and engineers could focus on toys. Ditch the idea of trying to make craftable items that are useful stat-wise. We already have a million ways to get that gear. Give us a selection of craftable items that are just there for the fun of it. If people want to craft the fun stuff, they can. If they don’t, they don’t feel pressured or somehow obligated to do so.

I’d like to see Remembrance Day added in the game. It was mentioned in the short story Blood of Our Fathers, but it’s not an official in-game holiday. Given how many heroes we’ve lost over the years, particularly in Legion, it would be nice to see their deaths honored somehow. I know we’ve already got the Harvest Festival, but that doesn’t quite fit the bill, somehow. I mean, the Alliance honors Uther, the Horde honors Grom Hellscream. Neither one of them are really relevant to present-day. We have way more current heroes to remember now — Varian, Vol’jin, Cairne, Tirion, Bolvar, Dranosh, Maraad, the list goes on and on. Give it some kind of cosmetic reward, nothing major — maybe a weapon enchant or something. Like the heroes of the past are blessing our weapons so we can remember their battles and continue to fight on with as much courage as they did.

Maybe that’s not the most “fun” idea for a holiday, but it feels appropriate, especially given the sheer number of heroes we’ve lost over the years. It’d be nice to see them commemorated, you know?

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!