The Queue: Queen for a day

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 haven’t played through Blade’s Edge in years — and I almost forgot about the quest chain where you end up Queen (or King) of the Ogres at the end. I also forgot how horrible it felt to have to then go murder your subjects for quests you haven’t finished yet. I mean yes, I know this makes me a terrible ruler, but you don’t have to spend your last breaths continually pointing it out, you know?

You know what’s a better use of breath? Answering your questions. Let’s do that instead!

I’m assuming you’re referring to the novel The Shattering here, and her attempted coup of Ironforge — if that’s not what you mean, I apologize! However, I don’t think Moira has ever needed “redemption” from a story standpoint. Even in The Shattering, the issues with her father are brought up — the lack of respect he had for her simply because she wasn’t the son he always wanted. Does that excuse what she did in Ironforge? No, not really.

However, Moira is and always has been considered the rightful heir to Ironforge’s throne, according to the laws of succession. Magni never disinherited her. So why the coup in the first place? Well if you look at it from Moira’s standpoint, she was the rightful heir. She also knew that being married to a Dark Iron and bearing his child wasn’t likely to go over well with the general Ironforge populace. Nor were they likely to accept the Dark Iron clan at all, for that matter. So she forced the issue — which also didn’t go over well at all.

Essentially, Anduin had the right of it in The Shattering. Moira simply wasn’t a very good leader — but in time, she could learn to be a better one. And if Varian had just assassinated Moira as he’d intended to do, all it would’ve done was throw the line of succession into chaos, the very thing that ignited the War of the Three Hammers back in the day. That’s the last thing anyone wanted to happen. Varian flat out told her if she wanted to be a leader and unite the dwarven clans, she’d have to earn that crown by earning her people’s respect. The Council of the Three Hammers was formed so that leaders from all three clans would have a voice and be heard.

At some point in the future, Moira’s son is going to step into that leadership role, and hopefully solidify that re-unification of all three dwarven clans. But if he’s going to do so successfully, that foundation of unity needs to be laid first. Hopefully, the Council can do that.

There’s been nothing new added beyond the initial storyline. I suspect we won’t see more out of Silithus until we’re a little closer to the pre-patch for Battle for Azeroth. Any major story beats out there are going to involve the next expansion, and if those beats have anything to do with how we’re eventually losing our Artifact weapons, I doubt they’d want to push that too soon. We still kind of need those weapons right now!

Additional hidden appearances don’t really require the weapon to be equipped, they’re just a cosmetic thing. You don’t have to apply them to the weapon, it’s just an on-use item that you click. Other appearances are tied to achievements, rather than an item — but again, you don’t have to have the weapon equipped to unlock that appearance, you just have to complete the achievement.

Then again, I also think it’s entirely possible that we’re still going to have those Artifact weapons, but they just aren’t going to have the power they once had. I suppose that depends on Blizzard — as it stands, we can’t actually get rid of our Artifacts. No really, try and throw yours out, it won’t work!

I think holiday restrictions on transmog are pretty ridiculous either way, and they should get rid of them entirely. But if they don’t want to go that route, allowing them during the Trial of Style would be nice. Or at least allowing their use in the competition — a Witch Hat would work really well for a couple of the themes in the Trial.

The problem with crafting is that you have to make crafted materials worthwhile, but also make sure they don’t invalidate gear or items you can get from other sources. In other words, you don’t want crafted gear that’s better than something you can get out of a dungeon or a raid — because if that were the case, why do the dungeon or raid at all? At the same time, if you don’t make it something at least a little desirable, nobody is going to get into crafting.

We’ve seen that a lot this expansion. There have been cases where a piece of crafted gear looked pretty good in theory, but in the process of gathering materials and proficiency to make that gear, you get a better piece of gear from a drop. At that point, why bother finishing the crafting process? It’s a weird balance, and I don’t think Legion managed to master it.  They made the leveling process slightly more interesting, but possibly a little too convoluted — and making people run dungeons to increase their crafting skill didn’t exactly help.

So there’s a couple things they could try out there. First idea — make crafted items cosmetic. Take them out of the “needs to be competitive” gear equation entirely. Between raids, dungeons, quests, world quests, tokens, and everything else, we don’t really need crafting as a gear source.

Alternatively, make crafted gear enhancement items. Remember the days of armor patches, enchantments, and other things that were applied to the gear you already had? Flip the script and make all crafted gear something that does that. This would essentially negate the “is this still going to be an upgrade by the time I actually craft it” issue. But it would also make the items desirable, because they’d improve your performance.

I think a combination of those two things would be ideal — enhancement pieces for the gear you’ve gathered through the myriad sources already available to you, plus cosmetic items to give you some new transmog options for the fun factor. Mix that in with the usual round of toys and crafted mounts, and crafting might be a little more worth the effort.

Fun trivia tidbit! That Warlock is actually a representation of the character Christie plays as her main in-game. There’s no special story behind her or anything, and she doesn’t appear in WoW — well, unless Christie happens to be online playing her Warlock, I imagine. But I mean, if you need to write some random background characters into a novel, might as well make them the characters you’re familiar with, right?

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!