The Queue: What day is it again?

After nearly a week out of town, I have lost all sense of the passage of time and space. But no one else has written the Queue today, so I guess it must be my turn. That’s how these things work, right? Hopefully that’s how these things work.

And if not, that’s how I’m going to make them work. Let’s do this.

Sure, WoW has a big, epic fantasy story, but it’s not why I play — and if it was, I’d probably have quit over it several times already. I find faction war stories particularly tedious as they tend to feel forced on ridiculous pretenses — like in Legion, when we resolved to hate one another because the Alliance blamed the Horde for abandoning them and couldn’t have a civil conversation about it so we could come to an understanding.

But at least in Legion the players, if not necessarily the faction leaders, realized we had more important threats to deal with than each other. We came together under the banner of our classes to fight the Legion, and that felt pretty awesome. But it makes the narrative of Battle for Azeroth feel even more dissonant: we’ve jumped from the expansion where we’ve worked closely with the other faction to the expansion of all-out faction war. Yes, Blizzard has painted the appropriate story beats to build that narrative, but it doesn’t feel like the game I was playing.

I’ve left the game once, in Cataclysm. The game had changed and I found it hard to adapt. I could have just rerolled, but the real sticking point was that my guild had broken up — so on top of not knowing what to play, I found myself without anyone to play with. WoW has never been about the story — it’s been about who I adventures with, often in spite of the story.

However, Pidia did note that Blizzard could remove Gnomes from the game. I have to admit, that’s a story beat I’d probably quit over. Unless I could play a Mechagnome.

It’s going to be hard for BlizzCon to disappoint me this year because my expectations are already at rock bottom. I had a brief surge of hope that we would have an awesome Diablo reveal, but Blizzard has already stepped in to temper the excitement. I was modestly excited for the nostalgia-fest of WoW Classic, particularly since I would be able to play the demo from home — but then Blizzard announced that even at home the demo comes with time limits that will keep us from exploring too much. Jeff has said we aren’t going to have a new map in Overwatch.

Basically, Blizzard has been stomping around telling us about all the things we won’t have at BlizzCon. It’s been an anti-hype train.

I expect we’ll see a new Hearthstone expansion, which will be fun enough. Heroes of the Storm will probably also get new heroes and maybe maps. It seems soon for a new Overwatch hero, but who knows. It sounds like we might not have anything new for Diablo (again). WoW Classic is going to have trouble offering any kind of surprises since we’ve all played that game before. And for World of Warcraft itself, I assume we’ll hear about patch 8.2, which is pretty much the only thing I’m curious about at this point… and for that, I think I’m with Omedon: anything that goes somewhere more interesting than the faction war is good with me.

Tldr: I am preemptively disappointed in BlizzCon, so things can only get better from here. I hope.

I know you’re saying you don’t like the Outlaw, but Rogue — probably Assassination Rogue — is really going to be the closest analog to Windwalker. They hit hard and fast with a focus on building devastating finishers with combo points. While secondary resources like Chi are now relatively common, Rogues were the first class with that kind of secondary resource system. For that alone, I think they’ll feel familiar.

Okay, I hear you clamoring in the background about Feral Druids. But Feral Druids in vanilla were terrible. They were so terrible, that the class call-out in the Nefarian fight in Blackwing Lair, which did something truly devastating to each class, caused Druids to shapeshift into cats. That was the worst possible thing to do to Druids, because they couldn’t heal which was their one and only useful role. Yes, you could play a Feral Druid, but because you can’t switch specs without a high gold cost, you’ll be mostly stuck with your spec — and if group content is of interest, Feral just wasn’t competitive back in the old days.

If you’re dead-set against Rogue, you have a handful of bad options. There are Paladins (Alliance-only) and Shamans (Horde-only), but in both cases you’re going to be expected to heal because their DPS specs aren’t great. There are Warriors, but you’re going to be expected to tank. There are Hunters, who do have some melee abilities, but it’s very much in your best interest to stay at range if you want to actually deal damage.

So… I think Rogue is pretty much it. Failing that, Warrior, but be ready to be asked to tank non-stop.

I think the idea of flying is just too much fun for Blizzard to have ignored it forever, art or no art. There are already flying creatures in the game, so the fantasy is there, tempting us with the dream of soaring over Azeroth.

And now that Blizzard has added flying, there’s no way to put it back in the box. Every expansion we clamor for the convenience and freedom of flight. I think Blizzard may regret the choice to add it, in hindsight, but now it’s just too late. Once we have flown, we can no longer be tethered to the ground.

The easiest way, of course, is to make friends with someone with a flying mount. Team your alt up with someone’s main and collect candy together. #teamwork!

Failing that, there are heirloom books that will give you all the flight paths for Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms — they have different names for each faction, but look for them on your heirloom vendor. Once you’ve bought and learned them, you can find them in your toy panel, so just log on to your alt and click the appropriate toy to learn most (but not all) of the flight paths on each continent. It makes getting around so much faster and it’s a purchase you won’t regret if you spend any time at all leveling alts through the old world.

And failing that… well, you do have your own two feet. While it’s time-consuming (and sometimes frustrating), the run will give you a pile of of exploration XP, and offer a chance for to gatherers to pick flowers or mine ore, which can be great for XP and gold. However, if you’re a lowbie making the run on your own, you should probably plan on skipping some stops, because they aren’t all easy to get to at low levels.

And that is all for now, my Queue-friends. Our friend Adam will be back tomorrow tomorrow to… who knows! But for now, this is Liz signing out of the Queue for another week. Have fun out there, everyone!