The Queue: Tuesday your Artifact turns back into a pumpkin

They’ve been the defining progression mechanism in Legion, and as of next Tuesday they’re paperweights.

This is the Queue. Let’s say goodbye to our awesome weapons, died to save Azeroth.

The volcano hypothesis is extremely old — they were proposing volcanoes as far back as the 1880’s. I think it must be said that the dinosaurs didn’t die out — non-avian ones did, but all of Aves (birds) were and are Dinosauria. Birds are dinosaurs.

Okay, now that I’ve said that, I’ll address the question — I think a combination of factors, including the rising CO2 from volcanism, the asteroid impact, global winter lasting a very long time and killing off a lot of plants, and the gradual shift in Earth’s climate all played a role in the extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period. While it wasn’t as bad as the Permian die-off (almost all vertebrate life on Earth died at the end of the Permian) it was exceedingly bad. It’s likely that if any of the components hadn’t happened — the asteroid misses, perhaps, or the volcanic gases taper off before they reach a critical stage — then the extinction would have been less severe.

But we’ve seen numerous extinction events in Earth’s history, and we will inevitably see more. Well, we won’t. We’ll be long dead. But they will happen, because that’s a part of how the planet cycles.

It’s also possible that there are factors we simply don’t know about that played into the extinction event at the KT boundary. Bacteria or viruses might have attacked plant life at that same time, there may have been widespread mammal predation on dinosaur eggs as the extended winter got worse and every life form was competing for dwindling resources. Maybe the Horde decided they needed Azerite and were willing to burn down all the trees to get it.

That last one is unlikely, but you get my point. We’ll never actually know exactly what happened, or how long it actually took. We can make educated statements using our best information but there will likely be more information to learn that can and will change our hypotheses down the road.

It’s a quest. You’ll be called upon to defend or attack depending on your faction, you don’t have to do it until you want to.

Probably.

I’ll just say it — this is an enormous rebalancing about to happen. Not only are you going to lose your Artifact (RIP, you magnificent pumpkin) boosting you with all those traits and specials, you’re also going to get your items squished a LOT. It’s an enormous change and as much as Blizzard doesn’t intend it to weaken you in current content? It’s going to.

I expect, as much as Blizzard has in house testers and has run the PTR and Beta for months, that there will be problems and raids will be struggling tomorrow. That’s just how it goes with such a significant change. I expect that if they can, they’ll make hotfix changes to balance it all out. If they can. If not, we’ll have a month before Battle for Azeroth and an extra ten levels plus Azerite armor to fix things.

I can only guess — I only know a few people who work at Blizzard and I’d never ask them for information like that — but I don’t think it likely at all. I do not expect it, and if it happened I would be very surprised.

No.

I think Horde players would have been excited to see Azshara anyway. She’s a big deal and she has been teasing us since Vanilla days, she’s a major figure in the War of the Ancients trilogy, she’s been in five man dungeons and made appearances in quests. I suspect they just felt like the Nightborne had more in common with Blood Elves, and that they were close enough to the Night Elves physically that giving them to the Horde and the Void Elves to the Alliance meant that each faction had two distinct kinds of Elves.

Does not appear to be the case, nope. I enjoyed it as well, but I am not surprised they’re not doing that again. The Invasions were a big one time deal that really showcased how serious things were getting, not something that should be repeated with different invaders every expansion.

Okay, that’s the Queue. Next week, we’ll all be mourning our pumpkins.