The Queue: Let’s just chill

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!

I like that Battle for Azeroth comes with emergency meditation kits. Okay, technically it’s a scroll, but if you wanted to just sit, chill, and ponder inner peace, the game has you covered. So have a seat, relax, and let’s just chat for a while, okay?

Fun story — my old Horde main (the Rogue chilling above) jumped sides well before yesterday’s events. Nothing at all to do with factions, though. She simply saw an opportunity and took it, for her own reasons. She’s not really gung-ho Horde or die, nor is she woo-hoo for the Alliance, she’s got her own motives and reasoning for where she goes and what she does. So it wasn’t really a flip because she was unhappy with the Horde, it was more of a matter of opportunity in regards to her own personal interests. She’s not exactly happy about what she’s hearing from Kalimdor, though.

My Horde main now is currently a Nightborne (also a Rogue because look, I like playing Rogues okay) who seriously doesn’t care about anything that’s going on in the world at the moment, she’s just delighted to not be under a bubble anymore. Circumstances for her in Suramar were…challenging. She definitely* didn’t steal** the Leywoven Flying Carpet she’s currently using to trek around the world on from a random shop in the city, no sir. Factions are a meaningless entity to her — I mean, the Nightborne have spent ten thousand years under a bubble in the middle of nowhere, isolated from the world at large. Alliance? Horde? What funny words. The Horde like her people. Okay, she’ll just, you know, go along with that for a while.

Generally speaking, I try to play my characters outside of faction lines entirely. Yeah, sure, they’re Alliance or they’re Horde. But blind loyalty has never been a factor with any of them. They make their own decisions and do their own things, regardless of whatever assumed loyalty quests and other tasks throw out there. I typically keep quests as out-of-character actions. I’ll pick a few every now and again that I think would be relevant for my characters to talk about, but by and large leveling is just a game mechanic to me. Quests are a game mechanic. My character’s story is something I make up on my own.

*absolutely

**pilfered with no regrets

Technically, Vol’jin didn’t “support” Sylvanas, the spirits told him “Hey, make this lady Warchief” and he complied. He even told Sylvanas flat-out in his final cinematic that he didn’t trust her, and never had.

But…yes. And I’m not going to say more because I don’t really want to spoil anything.

You get the mount on both factions if you complete the storyline once, so you don’t really need to do it on your alts. However, doing the quest opens more daily quests for gear in Darkshore — so if you’re looking for more chances at Titanforged quest rewards, you might want to do them. The gear rewards don’t appear to be any different, you just get more opportunities to get them is all. If that’s not super important to you, you’re safe to skip it on your alts, no worries!

I have on Twitter, but I might as well here too, right? For those that don’t know (and if you’re not playing a Rogue you probably don’t), ShadowCraft was the go-to for Rogues that wanted to know what the best possible gear choices were for your spec, what upgrades you should be looking for, how much an individual piece of gear would bump up your DPS, and basically every last bit of theorycrafting info your sneaky-stabby heart desired. It was an interactive spreadsheet that ported in your WoW Armory page and made all those complicated calculations for you.

Unfortunately, ShadowCraft is closing its doors as of Battle for Azeroth. The thing was helmed by a team of volunteers with mind-boggling math skills that I still don’t quite understand. Let’s face it, I never really understood how ShadowCraft worked. I just knew that it magically knew everything there was to know about my Rogue and how to kit her out to be, if not the best Rogue on the server, at least a force to be reckoned with on the DPS charts while I was still raiding regularly.

I have a lot of fond memories of that thing. I’m going to miss it. The team that worked on it made magic happen, and I hope all of them have, or get, jobs as developers somewhere, because it was an elegantly designed, incredibly useful work of art.

I mean…you’d think it was supposed to be armor but it doesn’t really offer a lot of protection, does it? Maybe in the future, all scrunchies are tiaras. As a fan of exceptionally messy buns, I’d be okay with this development. And immediately order like a dozen of them because I can never keep track of the things.

That is, in fact, limited time only. You have to play through the Darkshore quest chain to get it. Good news though, like I said above, if you don’t feel like playing the story through on both faction’s sides, you automatically get it on Horde when you complete the quests on Alliance and get the equally sweeeeeeeeeeeeet hippogryph from that chain.

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!