The Queue: The dawn of a new day

A new day, a new expansion. Welcome to Battle for Azeroth, everyone.

Millennials couldn’t have killed the Queue because the Queue is still alive. (Also, is Mitch actually old enough to be a millennial? I’m not actually sure.)

However, Mitch will be writing Wednesday’s Queue and thus reading these questions and thus we can’t be too mean to him. He has delayed his Queue responsibilities rather than abandoning them. Long live the Queue.

Also, please do not ruin story points for anyone. Even Mitch.

What an insightful question!

I am tremendously surprised by how smoothly things went. Some players had issues getting their Heart of Azeroth, some players got blank login screens, and a few servers were offline for a while… but for the most part, servers have been online, running smoothly, and pretty bug-free. I was prepared for a lot more launch day hiccups, but the WoW team has done a hell of a job keeping everything running.

Do they have a Ko-fi? Because I definitely want to buy them a cup of coffee. Or ten.

I wouldn’t say it’s cost prohibitive, though there will be some cost if you want to play at your absolute best in multiple specs. You Azerite armor pieces each have three traits (or four for high-level gear) for you to select. These traits will probably be better to one spec or playstyle, which means if you switch specs you’ll have some useless (or not very useful) traits. You can work around this by collecting multiple sets of armor for each spec, or by respeccing your Azerite traits.

You can reset your Azerite gear at an Azerite Reforger in Boralus or Zuldazar, but it has a cost. The price starts at a tremendously modest 5 gold, but doubles for each reset after that… which, as you can imagine, gets crazy pretty quickly. However, the price drops by half every 3 days, so if you wait a while it will go back to 5 gold. Though I haven’t had the opportunity to play with it yet, I think it’s a reasonable balance between making it too easy to change your traits and too hard to change your traits.

For my part, I’m going to start playing without optimal traits. I’m going to pick the traits that provide some benefit no matter what I’m doing, so I can get started without fussing too much about anything. I won’t start worrying about optimizing until I’m spending most of my time doing group content… and by that point I’ll probably have had enough time to pick up extra armor.

The next High Tinker, obviously. She will be a fierce defender of the people who will finally retake Gnomeregan. This is definitely, absolutely going to happen.

Honestly, I don’t care where we see him — I’d just like to see him. He was such a presence in Mists of Pandaria, and there’s hardly been a peep from him since. It’s a waste of an interesting character.

I do, however, see him as a neutral (more or less) observer of Azeroth. I don’t think he’d play faction politics, but a bigger game… that we may or may not understand.

I personally find the gray background pretty okay (or at least better than stark white, like the WordPress interface I’m using to write this). However, we will have dark mode and light mode options in the next iteration of Blizzard Watch. Adam has given me a time frame, but I’m not going to share it just yet because you never really know when Adam is going to finish something. So whenever it’s finished, I’m just going to tell everyone we planned this schedule precisely.

There’s so much new stuff to do, this isn’t on my list at all. The only thing I might do is go back and craft the legendary boots for my shaman when I decide to level her. But that may not be any time soon… and I may be too lazy to do it, anyway.

And that’s all for today my Queue-friends. Tomorrow marks the glorious return of Mitch who will presumably be level 120 and thus able to answer every last one of your questions. Until next week, everyone!