The Queue: I don’t have to follow your rules

Yeah! I’ll do what I want! Even if that means wearing this ridiculous thing on my head, which is completely undignified. I am a Sin’dorei and what is this thing on my head and how do I get it out of my hair.

Okay. Maybe I will follow your rules if they don’t involve things clawing at my scalp. I’ll think about it, anyway.

So, hey, it’s Wednesday! Let’s do the Queue.

As was mentioned in the comments, every healer does have a few damage spells, so it’s totally possible to solo. I’ve done some healer soloing on Monk, Paladin, and Shaman, so I can guarantee it’s possible. In fact I really like soloing as a Holydin, as playing that kind of crazy battle cleric has always appealed to me. I usually keep my Paladin specced Holy no matter what I’m doing.

There are two snags to leveling as a healer right now: it’s slow and it’s dull. It’s really dull. You have three or four buttons to press and in between you watch their  cooldowns to come up so you can press them again. This is the biggest reason I play my healers dual-spec these days: I just get bored. When Legion first launched, I actually fully intended on playing my Monk as a Mistweaver all the way to 110 but I did not make it past 102. It was just too tedious.

However, playing dual spec isn’t as hard as it seems, particularly on a boosted character. Your boosted spec Artifact starts out with at a good level, but it’s not hard to get an off-spec Artifact to an acceptable level. At level 110 the Artifact Power zooooooms in, and you don’t have to max out your off-spec Artifact to be perfectly capable. If you want to try an off-spec, I would fill in all the basic traits and ignore the rest. The time investment really isn’t too bad.

I actually don’t feel like beta timing has a notable impact on pre-patch timing — it’s probably more about the release date. The Legion pre-patch was about five weeks before launch. The Warlords pre-patch was about four weeks before launch. The Mists pre-patch was about four weeks before launch.

There’s a bit of a theme here, so I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to guess that the Battle for Azeroth pre-patch will probably go live in mid-July. I’d expect events at around the same time, or if they’re earlier, not much earlier.

It really does feel arbitrary, but it also feels like arbitrary is the game Blizzard wants to play. Since releasing transmog, they’ve eased up on some restrictions (like transmogging different weapon types), but they’ve also gotten awfully strict on cosmetic and holiday items. Why can’t I wear my Lunar Festival dress all year? Or all of those Noblegarden outfits I spent so long collecting eggs to get? Or the Bronze Tinted Sunglasses that I’m apparently never going to be able to use for transmog again? Argh!

I don’t know that they’ve backed themselves into a corner, though. Blizzard can do whatever they want, whenever they want. So I live in hope that they’ll eventually want me to wear those sunglasses full time, as is right and proper.

One thing I really don’t do at present is PVP. I’ve started doing PVP World Quests now and then to pick up a bit of Honor, but beyond that I just don’t. At least part of that is probably because I burned myself out on the PVP grind a long time ago, back in Vanilla or Burning Crusade, maybe (the memories are kind of fuzzy). I wasn’t in a guild that had the numbers to raid, and reached the point where there just wasn’t any better gear I could get.

So I thought to myself… PVP has good gear, right? And I don’t need a raid guild to get it, right?

Both of those facts checked out. So I jumped on the PVP bandwagon and gave it my best shot, running Alterac Valley, Arathi Basin, and Warsong Gulch over and over and over and over again.  All I can say for sure is that my achievement list confirms I made it to past the halfway point or so.

And when I stopped, I stopped. Since those days (some 11 years ago), I think I’ve stepped into a Battleground once or twice because of a guild event. I’ve never gone back for fun or for gear.

However… in the Battle for Azeroth alpha there’s something called a Vicious War Riverbeast. It’s a mount, and its name implies it’s a PVP reward. I will do anything, anything to be a Gnome riding around on an armored hippo. I will even PVP. I will even join an Arena team. I will even run Rated Battlegrounds. I will do anything for this hippo mount.

So, thanks, Blizzard, I guess, for making me need to do the thing in the game that I loathe so much I have avoided it for 11 years. I appreciate it.

This is a really good point. We run all over the world killing almost everything we come into contact with. If someone tells us to kill something, we kill it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a harmless boar, an adorable puppy, or a precocious child. If the quest says to kill it, it must die.

After all, we’re here for the XP and the gold and the loot, and we don’t get those things without doing what our quest-giving masters command.

And while we can pick and choose quests a bit, most of them involve a lot of mindless slaughter, occasionally interspersed by rescuing things, setting things on fire, putting out things that are on fire, or digging through poop. We lead very exciting lives, but those lives are all about us doing tremendous amounts of violence because we were told to. Or because we wanted some shiny new trinket. Or because we hit the wrong button and didn’t mean to cast an AOE and oh no that poor innocent turtle, why. (Seagulls are evil and should die, but turtles I always feel bad about.)

I think there’s a good chance that our Azerothian alter egos just aren’t very good people. After all, we don’t get experience from helping people. We get experience by slaughtering things and taking their bloody severed heads back to our masters, who sometimes hang them up in some sort of morbid celebration of victory.

You know, I’ve got to stop thinking about this because the more I do, the more horrifying it gets. I’m going to go do something completely non-violent for a while, like pet battles. No one dies in pet battl— oh no.

And with that horrible revelation, I’m calling it a day. After all, haven’t we done enough damage in today’s Queue? It’s time to move on to new things, new adventures, and delightfully rewarding virtual violence.

Now if you’ll excuse me, there are some dragons I want to kill in hopes that I’ll find something shiny on their corpses.