The Queue: Proud of you, my precious egg

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!

My only regret with the end of this expansion is that eventually I’m going to run out of alts to use silly toys on during cinematic sequences. Let’s hope Battle for Azeroth is full of many more opportunities in which our characters can take their place in the annals of history as…an egg. Or a tree. Or a murloc. Or the rear end of a horse. Or, you know, whatever else you’ve got kicking around in the ol’ Toy Box.

You know what I’ve got kicking around? Questions from you guys. Let’s answer those, shall we?

Just to be immediately up-front here: No, I’m not offering to go get Field Medic for you.

However, I just picked up the achievement last week, so I have experience with doing it, which I will happily pass along! The solution to your woes is the Group Finder. If you look up “Field Medic” in the Group Finder, you will find groups in pretty much every zone that are mindlessly grinding for the quest items required for the achievement. Is it exciting? No. Absolutely not, it’s pretty boring actually — but since it’s just mindless killing and looting, you can easily catch something on Netflix, listen to a podcast, or pretty much anything else while you’re mindlessly killing things.

At first, I was just clearing areas solo, and it took…I’m not sure, the better part of a week to clear Val’sharah? I used Group Finder for the other zones, and I spent maybe an hour in each zone, thanks to groups. It went way, way faster. So if there’s a TV series you’ve been meaning to catch up on, a movie you’ve wanted to watch, or a podcast you’ve been keen on listening to, just queue that up and hit the Group Finder. It’s probably not the most productive use of your time, but it’s oddly relaxing regardless.

I think I’ve mentioned several times over now that I hope we end up in Ny’alotha. It’s the sleeping city mentioned in the Puzzle Box of Yogg Saron, and it’s been pretty heavily hinted as the home of N’Zoth. It’s also been mentioned at least a couple of times in Legion, both by Il’gynoth and Xal’atath.

N’Zoth was responsible for the Emerald Nightmare. Yes, we’ve taken care of the Nightmare issue in Legion, but we didn’t confront N’Zoth directly. The Old God is still out there, somewhere. And despite Battle for Azeroth’s seeming focus on the faction war, there’s been more than a few Old God references on the beta.

Azeroth is in danger of bleeding out, but Azeroth has also always been in danger of Old God corruption as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if we took a swerve somewhere during the later parts of the expansion and turned our focus to N’Zoth and the Old Gods. Whether or not we’ll be knocking on N’Zoth’s front door this expansion is kind of up in the air, but it’s…a least a small possibility.

Oh no, JDMac. No no no — look, we got “aerial flying combat” in Wrath. It ended up in the Oculus. Do you remember the Oculus? You probably don’t, because almost everyone playing during that expansion avoided that dungeon like the plague. It wasn’t just that the dungeon was a three-dimensional maze of “where do I fly,” it was that the mounts themselves were pretty clonky. Aiming wasn’t easy, and the UI was pretty awkward to say the least.

Oculus has since been streamlined and improved a little. I went and soloed it a couple weeks ago for reputation purposes, and the dungeon really clearly explains where you need to go and what you need to do to move on. But trying to aim and steer on a flying mount is still pretty obnoxious.

Plus, even if the explosion doesn’t damage other players, it still creates a visual effect. People could easily decide to grief other players by just following them around plopping explosions everywhere they go. Harmless, sure, but utterly annoying, and liable to generate a litany of complaints. Sorry, I just don’t see this one happening anytime soon, if at all.

Nope — or at least, not that I’ve seen. The Curious Coin vendor appears to be permanently established in Dalaran, and nothing new has been added to his inventory (to my knowledge). To be honest, I’m pretty okay with this, because it just seemed like a weird arbitrary addition anyway. Instead of putting a mount and a few interesting toys in various dungeons, they stuck it behind a vendor with unique currency instead. There’s no story behind the vendor, he just camps out waiting for the opportunity to sell some turtles. It’s not really what I’d call engaging gameplay, it’s just another reason to run dungeons and do World Quests, when maybe we didn’t really need another reason to do so.

War Mode is pretty much the new face of PVP. There won’t be any PVP servers anymore, there’s just War Mode. The XP boost is a big feature of War Mode — so yes, that additional XP applies to leveling in general, not just in Battle for Azeroth zones.

Once you hit up a capital city, you can enable War Mode on your character’s talents pane. It says flat out that you get the 10% XP bonus. I’m not sure if this starts at level one, since I can’t currently create a level one character on the beta. However, I copied over a lower-level alt (level 39), and I enabled War Mode with no issues.

Please note: the PVP toggle and War Mode are currently two different things on the beta. You can still flag for PVP by right clicking your character portrait and selecting “enabled” for PVP, but that doesn’t automatically activate War Mode. You have to be in a capital city, and you must choose the option from your character’s talent screen for the XP boost to take effect.

Since we’re looking at an item squish and some class overhauls, it may be a little more difficult for a while. In theory, all soloable bosses, dungeons, and raids should properly scale and remain the same level of difficulty — in theory. Historically, there’s always a few bosses that slip through and suddenly become way more difficult to clear after pre-expansion and scaling changes. Blizzard’s pretty good about correcting those issues as they pop up, however, so I wouldn’t be too worried about it.

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!