The Queue: Well swash my buckles

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!

It took over 40-some-odd tries, but I finally managed to get the Outlaw Mage Tower challenge appearance just under the wire. I don’t actually play Outlaw on my Rogue — the last time I saw that spec it was called Combat and I was raiding Icecrown Citadel. But it’s easily the prettiest out of all of the Rogue weapon appearances, so I’m glad I got my hands on it, even if I had to drop a chunk of gold on flasks, elixirs, and food in the process. Thanks, Legion. If I ever get around to picking up swords again, I know what I’m using for transmog.

I would say that’s just an updated descriptor — there’s been no changes to which classes can use which weapons. Besides, class abilities are still tied to weapons. On my Hunter, I need a ranged weapon equipped to use any of my shot abilities. On my Assassination Rogue, I still need a dagger for Mutilate. In this case, “preferred” means “this is what you should be using if you’re playing this class” — there’s no bonus to using the weapon you’re supposed to be using.

You likely do have the answer to this already, but I went ahead and decided to answer this one for the benefit of anyone else that might still have that question. No, we are not getting any story stuff this week — it starts next week. This is likely to give Blizzard a little time to iron out any wrinkles that may have popped up due to the patch. What’s worse — being unable to play due to some bugs, or being unable to play the brand-spanking-new amazing content that everyone else is playing due to some bugs?

The week of buffer also gives players a little time to figure out their new class abilities/specs/talents and how they work before leaping right into new content. Battle for Azeroth’s class and talent overhaul wasn’t nearly as aggressive as some we’ve seen in prior expansions, but there are still some classes out there that got major reworks and will take a little re-learning.

Beyond that, every single one of us needs to get used to our Artifacts being gone. Artifacts were amazing, they empowered us with massive amounts of damage, new abilities, and utility. That’s all gone now — we’re back to square one. Well…not quite square one, but we aren’t carting around weapons with ungodly powers anymore. That’s going to take a little getting used to. It’s better to get used to it in content we’re already well familiar with. That way when the new stuff comes out, we can focus on what’s happening with said content and story, instead of what the heck we’re doing, you know?

You absolutely can tame the new Hunter pets right now. Just to test it (and let’s face it, because I really wanted to), I went to go snag a Dreamrunner over in Val’sharah for my beloved Hunter. I learned two things: Yes, you can tame Dreamrunners now. But you should probably ditch any Order Hall bodyguards you have with you before going to tame, because Rexxar absolutely murdered my first tame attempt before I had a chance to finish the cast. Whoops!

Sadly, the gold reward from Order Hall missions has been replaced by Order Hall Resources. I would be more upset about this, except we saw the same thing happen at the end of Warlords of Draenor, so it was almost expected. That and I’ve managed to amass more gold than I know what to do with over the course of Legion already. I mean, it’s not enough to get that Brutosaur mount right out the gate or anything, but it’s a lot of gold.

I do, however, expect that we’ll have some new way of raking in a lot of gold over the course of Battle for Azeroth. After two expansions of gold-grabbing, it feels like this is a trend that will happily continue.

Nope! So here’s the deal, there are two separate PVP options for PVP-minded players right now. You can go to a capital city and turn on War Mode, which will phase you out into a realm of other War Mode players. But you can still also just turn on PVP by either typing /pvp, or clicking your character and selecting the PVP option under your portrait. That won’t stuff you into War Mode, it won’t give you the XP bonus, but it’ll let you PVP with other players that choose to flag.

What you saw was likely a player that had either flagged up for fun, or was possibly doing the PVP World Quests and hadn’t had the flag drop just yet. Or maybe he just made some opposite-faction guards really mad and got flagged in the process. Either way, he wasn’t in War Mode — if he’d been in War Mode, you wouldn’t have seen him at all.

To my knowledge, everything about existing playable Allied Races is staying the same. I haven’t seen any mention made of increasing the Heritage Armor requirements for those four Allied Races. Keep in mind that the new ones that are being introduced and unlockable in Battle for Azeroth may have the level 120 requirement. I’d assume that since the four playable Allied Races are technically unlocked with Legion content, their Heritage Armor is still unlocked with Legion max level. Battle for Azeroth Allied Races may require Battle for Azeroth max level for the unlock. I will reiterate, though — this is all speculation on my part. We haven’t had any official word yet.

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!