The Queue: They grow up so fast

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!

Every time I visit Stormwind’s throne room I get a little bit weirded out that the little boy I remember from classic is now sitting on the throne. I think it’s just that it’s a visual reminder of just how long this game has been around. He’s certainly changed from the days of Generic Blonde Child Model, that’s for sure!

You know what doesn’t change? Questions — you have them, and you’d like them answered. So let’s get to that, shall we?

None so far — frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the entirety of Dalaran decided to soar away through the skies to some distant beach somewhere for a well-earned vacation for a while. I’m pretty sure, given Khadgar’s response to the news that the Alliance and Horde were at it again, that the Kirin Tor is just going to nope right out of that whole faction war situation.

Maybe we’ll see them come back into play in regards to the whole Azeroth needing healing situation, however. The survival of the planet is something they really care about. I mean…you kind of need the planet to live on, after all. They just spent an entire expansion saving the planet from the horrors of the Burning Legion. Letting it die now would make all their efforts a waste.

Either way, we really haven’t seen the Kirin Tor pop up on the beta in any official capacity, so they’re out of the picture — for now, anyway.

It’s not unique transmog — the models appear to be the same as boosted gear sets, or the gear you could get from salvage during Warlords. It is, however, pretty good gear as far as ilevel goes. If you have any alts that aren’t kitted out in the best of the best, they could get some upgrades from the event. And the weapons may actually be better than your Artifact weapons, in some cases.

I don’t think they are — we went in and stopped what the Infinite Dragonflight was doing, and that was that. But I’m not 100% on that one. Time is a weird thing in the WoW universe, it could be that those instances are there in perpetuity. Lore-wise, I think we dealt with that whole scenario and once we did, we were done with it.

But even if they were still up and running, I don’t think Jaina would go meddle with the timelines like that. She’s smart, she knows how dangerous it is to go tinkering around with time — it’s one of those things you just don’t do. Sure, Jaina’s fed up, but I don’t think she’s fed up enough to go do something as extreme as attempting to re-write history.

Unfortunately, the supercharged Artifacts were just around as a temporary thing prior to 8.0’s release. I believe you can still go do the quests for the story and the cinematic, but it’s not going to do anything to your Artifact weapon at this point. Artifacts have officially ceased to be relevant. Sorry!

They haven’t really released an official timetable or anything, no. But they have stated several times that they were pleased with how well the timing worked out in Legion. It was received really well, and the pacing was pretty close to perfect. Given that, I can’t really see them making any major changes as far as scheduling goes, other than maybe trying to smooth out any rough patches if needed. I imagine it’ll be similar to what we saw in Legion — they were really happy with how it went.

I’ve written a lot of roleplaying columns over the years, and one of the things I recommend people do is…ignore the leveling experience entirely. You can go out and level and do quests and keep that shelved as separate from your character’s experience. Just because you piloted your character through a quest to get some XP doesn’t necessarily mean they actually went out and did that themselves.

I usually treat leveling as an OOC experience, and keep it separate from roleplay altogether. So you can take your Druid through the quests and get the gear and other rewards, but roleplay him as having not participated. One of my main characters keeps her nose firmly out of politics and faction conflicts altogether — she has her own motives and goals that align elsewhere. So while I did level her through the Legion experience and she did become leader of her Order Hall from a game mechanic standpoint, that’s not what happened to the character as far as my story for her goes.

I would say that as a Druid in particular, it’s not at all unreasonable for your character to take a neutral stance. The Cenarion Circle is known for neutrality — they take Druids from both sides, regardless of faction. If you really love playing the character, by all means go ahead and play him. Treat his leveling as OOC. Take a look at the quests you’re doing, pick and choose which ones seem relevant to his interests. He doesn’t have to be on Zandalar because he’s fighting for the Horde — maybe he went there for his own reasons. Figure out what those reasons are, and play the character that way.

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!