The Queue: You guys really care about the sex lives of dragons

I feel like the title tells the story. Let’s talk about things, including but not limited to why dragons don’t make babies with different colored dragons.

I get what they’re going for and I hope it works out.

Warriors have always been a gear dependent, feast or famine kind of class. Often, the Warrior is weakest when starting a tier of content and gets steadily stronger the more geared they get, which makes for a bit of a paradox — if you bring Warrior DPS to a fight, you’ll get the best bang for your buck when it doesn’t matter as much because the content is on farm. Similarly, as a class, the Warrior becomes difficult to keep on pace with other DPS classes — often by the end of an expansion Fury starts running away from other classes and requires nerfing to keep them in line with others. If I’m not wrong, Fury is near the top right now, in fact, although Warlocks are well ahead.

This has been a perennial issue with Warriors as a class — you want Crit, and as you get it, your rage goes up and up and up until you’re basically unlimited in rage gen and can just go nuts. Essentially Warriors double dip on gear increasing their stats/damage, and they look to be trying to smooth that out, so that you’re not barely even able to solo a trash mob when you first hit 120 and an utter god once you’ve gotten geared up.

I’m not 100% sure it’s going to work out as it currently stands, mind you, but I applaud the effort. If it means a leveling Warrior feels like like an utter weakling I’ll be happy to see the end of “Now that it doesn’t matter because everything is dead, you’re unstoppable” in Warrior DPS.

I don’t think you’ll have to stop leveling at 110. There’s a lot of questing in the three zones that has nothing to do with attacking the opposite faction. It’s ultimately up to you how comfortable you are playing opposite faction characters — I always level my Tauren, even though I consider myself Alliance and I don’t mind attacking Alliance on said Tauren — but everyone needs to find their own level in this way. With the War Campaign, you might have to decide if you’re willing to attack the faction you identify with once you’re a bit higher level.

Yeah, a new feature — Matthew Mercer is going to be narrating everything you do in real time and providing responses.

No, as cool as that might be, the fact is that RP in an MMO is a player driven activity and that for it to be something that retains the flavor it’ll always be something that the players have to do without much support in the game itself. I mean, anything you changed to encourage RP would keep you from doing some cool idea you came up with, ultimately.

I suppose Blizzard could put in last names for characters. But ultimately I don’t feel like there’s much you can add to servers that would make RP more or less enticing. It’s always going to be something you do with other players.

This isn’t intended as a comprehensive list, but I found that there are some demons in Ashenvale you can kill to the south, especially in Demon Fall Canyon and the accompanying ridge. There are also some Shadow Council Warlocks and demons in Felwood to the north of Ashenvale and a fair amount in the Blasted Lands around the Dark Portal and in the twisted forest to the south of the zone.

Obviously there are a fair amount of demons on Outland so when you hit Burning Crusade zones you’ll get a benefit from that racial as well. Honestly, playing my Lightforged, I found myself stumbling onto demons surprisingly often. And certainly once you hit Warlords they’re more and more common, with Legion being an absolute party in that regard.

That dragon is going to live tens of thousands of years. Even after the Hour of Twilight, that dragon’s lifespan is indeterminate. That Gnome will be dead in what, a hundred years? Even if the dragon really, really loves that gnome, it’s not like they’ll have time to get really attached. It certainly isn’t a “Let’s have babies” relationship.

But we’ve seen that Chromatic dragons are considered taboo and that only Nefarian really ever tried to make dragons with the blood of multiple flights, so perhaps it was simply considered something twisted or perverse by dragon standards. Gyth was the only Chromatic Drake to live past infancy and it died in Blackrock Mountain.

So aside from Deathwing and his flight, no other dragons seem particularly interested in cross-flight breeding. Could two dragons just have a relationship? I assume so, but perhaps the taboo is so strong that they just don’t do it.

The Albino drake is specifically said to be not able to be placed in any particular flight — it’s unsure where it came from. As for what would happen if Red and Blue mated, considering that it took thousands of years of evil experimentation to produce Gyth, and that the Twilight and Nether Dragonflights both involved dragon eggs being exposed to powerful magic energies — Nether being exposed to the full power of the Twisting Nether as it swallowed what remained of Draenor and the Twilight’s were an artificial creation using a Nether Dragon named Zzeraku and several artifacts to induce a vampiric hunger for all magical energies.

None of these dragons would have occurred naturally and we don’t even know if it’s possible. For that matter, we know that Deathwing often sought to steal dragon eggs and that he used them in his experiments, and that one of the signs of his corruption by the Old Gods was that he wanted both Alexstrasza and Ysera as “petty slaves for mating” — we also know that  Malygos used his power to try and break the will of Keristrasza and force her to become his consort, a cruel and unnatural act for a variety of reasons.

So it isn’t clear whether dragons can’t mate naturally (or at least couldn’t before the Hour of Twilight seemingly rendered all dragons sterile) or just wouldn’t.

There’s no sign in the lore that dragons of different flights consider themselves different races. Alexstrasza calls Ysera and Malygos her siblings — Ysera literally was Alexstrasza’s sibling, both were born from the same clutch of eggs before the Titan Keepers changed them into dragon aspects. In fact, Alexstrasza and Ysera had another sibling, Dralad, who was an orange proto-drake and it’s clear that proto drakes in those times were not limited to one color as the Dragonflights are.

Considering that the loss of the Titan’s blessing has sterilized the dragons, it’s entirely possible that the reason dragons didn’t pursue many cross-flight relationships was entirely because the Titans changed them so that they wouldn’t be fruitful and the dragons simply wanted to avoid the pain of knowing they’d never be able to have whelps with another dragon that they loved. Considering that each aspect took many consorts, there is clearly also a premium placed on breeding among dragons.

So, to answer your question, it doesn’t seem like dragons view one another as different ‘races’ at all, but rather that they considered consort style relationships between dragons as primarily being for mating, not love. We saw that when Malygos took a red dragon for a consort, he did so against her will as a form of revenge for her role in killing one of his other consorts, which is insanely creepy and quite frankly seems like rape to me.

The Black Dragonflight isn’t evil. Deathwing himself was mad, driven so by the Old Gods, and his Dragonflight’s link to the Earth left them vulnerable to corruption in the same way he was corrupted. But not all Black Dragons are evil — some were purified like Wrathion and some were shielded from corruption like Ebonhorn. If there were somehow a clutch of Black dragon eggs found today and hatched successfully, they’d be no more evil than any other dragon.

If you want a serious lore answer, look to the above. As for a discussion of homophobia in Blizzard games, well, WoW could certainly do better in terms of representation of LGBTQ+ characters. I don’t think it actually has any. If it does, it keeps them on the serious down low. Overwatch has done a lot better than WoW in this regard. I certainly don’t think a Red and a Green dragon getting together would be comparable to having a LGBTQ+ relationship.

And yeah, I know about Chromie and the whole gender not matching the name convention, but it’s never stated in game.

Okay, y’all got really into dragons there. Hope I managed to answer some questions. Talk to y’all next week.