The Queue: Lying

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!

You know, I had every intention of not bothering to choose between Scryer or Aldor while leveling my Nightborne in Outland. Partially because it didn’t really matter in the long run, but mostly because I was avoiding the Dreaded Tour of Shattrath. But it turns out there are quests in Netherstorm that don’t unlock unless you’ve chosen a side — and you don’t get the completion achievement for the zone unless you complete those.

So I swallowed my pride, queued up a show on Netflix and prepared to be really bored for a lengthy period of time while I followed Khadgar’s favorite ethereal marshmallow on its crawling parade around the city. It says it won’t take long. It is lying. It takes long.

If I got more experience out of the…experience, I’d be happier about it. You know what doesn’t take long? Answering your questions. Let’s get to that.

Absolutely! Well…on Horde side, anyway. Before you get too up in arms over that, I should point out that the major Alliance hub, Boralus, isn’t quite finished yet. The Horde hub isn’t quite complete either, but there’s an embassy with portals to everywhere, courtesy of Oculeth. I shouldn’t say “everywhere” either — there are portals to all Horde capitals, the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, and Dalaran. It’s the Legion version of Dalaran, however, which has a portal to Shattrath and other areas in it.

Right now the Alliance embassy is one little room and a dock that still feels unfinished. The room has a portal to Stormwind in it, but that’s it for now. I suspect — especially given all the racial representatives on the dock — that we’ll see portals to everywhere else as well, over time. Blizzard has been giving us portals in major faction hubs for a while now, I don’t expect Battle for Azeroth is going to change that.

However, don’t expect another hearthstone. As of yet, I haven’t seen any Battle-specific hearthstones offered. Since neither hub is, you know, floating in the middle of the sky, it’s not exactly needed.

A Dreadlord isn’t really a human, it’s a demon. Do…do you really want a demon-skin rug? I mean, they’re kind of notoriously steeped in fel magic. Long-term exposure to fel magic has been proven to be pretty unhealthy in most circumstances. It turns your eyes green, turns your skin green or red, transforms you into a foaming-at-the-mouth killing machine mad with bloodlust — the first two are okay-ish on the cosmetic scale, but I’m pretty sure the third would get you kicked out of most inns, not to mention capital cities.

Really though, there’s a line in regards to what kind of humanoid-like creatures you can skin. Animals have always been okay, humanoids…not so much. I feel you, though — I mean I can’t say I wasn’t slightly disappointed when I couldn’t skin a centaur. It’s half an animal, you know? There are even centaur-skin rugs in game!

You don’t actually need to be in the appropriate spec to pick up those hidden skins. That’s true for every class — I picked up the Subtlety hidden appearance while in Assassination spec on my Rogue. Incidentally, if you’re looking for hidden skins before the expansion is over with, Wowhead has an excellent guide that covers every class. Some appearances are as simple as farming for a drop item, others are slightly more complex. Like the one that involves listening for a random screech in the Druid zone. That was a hassle (but well worth it)!

All of the zones scale — currently, all the dungeons that are available for testing are scaling as well. They’re listed as being available from levels 108-120. I’m assuming that’s going to stay the same, since dungeon scaling was also pretty handy part of the Legion leveling experience. Considering they spent all that time and effort making the old world a scaling experience, I’m pretty sure this is the new normal from here on out. It works well, and people seem to like the way it works.

As for leveling, I can’t really speak for anyone else, but I do play through both sides at least once on the alpha. I have…a lot of alts on both sides of the faction divide, so it doesn’t really make a huge difference for me. In Warlords, I definitely favored doing the Alliance quests a lot more heavily — especially nearing the end of the beta. I knew I was going to be leveling a Horde character first, so I wanted to make that last playthrough an Alliance one. It doesn’t really avoid the whole repeating thing, but hey — as I mentioned, I have a lot of alts. I’m going to be repeating this stuff a lot regardless of how much I play either faction on the alpha.

You have to level all the way from 20 to max in order to unlock the armor. Once the armor is unlocked, you can use it on any character of that race, boosted or not — because it’s added to your Wardrobe. It’s a cosmetic set, so there’s no armor class required to use it at all. So for example, if you unlock the heritage armor on a Nightborne Warrior, you can boost a Nightborne Priest and still use the set.

Chronicle: Volume 3 clarified some of those dungeons and raids, but not all of them. Some are pretty obvious calls — I mean, Wailing Caverns is deep in Horde territory. And it’s not mentioned directly in the book, but we can safely assume that both Deadmines and the Stockades were cleared by Alliance. There are others that both factions were definitely present for, but the kill is assigned to one faction over the other. I’m okay with that — the book actually explains why each faction cleared each particular thing. It’s not just “the Alliance did this,” it’s “the Alliance had an interest in this area because of xyz” — each decision is given some context. For zones that include both factions, like Ahn’Qiraj, each faction is assigned a particular place. In the case of AQ, the Horde beat up stuff up top, while Alliance delved into the temple and cleared out C’thun.

I don’t really see anything wrong with it. I mean, it’s not what I’d call a major lore reveal or anything, it’s just clarifying who did what, where. Keep in mind, though, that I’m speaking from the perspective of someone on a roleplaying realm. Because of this, my characters usually have their own things they were doing in terms of raid content. Some of my characters fought at various major fight points, some were off doing other things on the opposite side of the world while all that was going down. So that factional assignment was never really a big deal in regards to my characters, or their stories. I think it’s kind of nice that they clarified it all. More importantly, I think it’s pretty cool that this volume talked about player contributions to lore — heroes of Azeroth are mentioned pretty frequently throughout the WoW sections of the book.

That said, I don’t think there’s anything that really needs to be different, or felt really out of place. The book did a good job of defining why each faction was responsible for what they did. I think the only people it might have an effect on are roleplayers that claim they killed a certain raid boss. Most of the roleplayers I know pretty much avoid that kind of thing, so if anything, it’s a very, very small piece of the playerbase.

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!