The Queue: What is time?

Time is an illusion, Queue-time doubly so. In which the Queue may be running a little late, depending on your particular point of view.

I haven’t yet, but I am seriously eying those Overwatch League jerseys. At a staggering $80 each, there was no way I was getting one. But now they’re $21 each. And the jersey-style tshirts are just $15 each. That’s basically cheap enough where I could just have a closet full of OWL jerseys.

I probably don’t really need a closet full of OWL jerseys.

But I’m thinking about it.

This is a really interesting concept that definitely pushes you to play differently. Death in WoW is really a minor inconvenience. You have to run back to your corpse and pay a little repair bill, but it’s not such a hardship that it makes you cautious. If death really had consequences, you might play differently. You would take more care with every pull and you would would gear and spec defensively.

However, there are a lot of potential snags here. Lag or disconnects could ruin your day. Other players could — accidentally or on purpose — put you in danger. Grouping with people who weren’t as serious about safeguarding their characters as you were could be hazardous. There’s a huge potential for trolling, and being trolled usually isn’t fun.

Diablo has a hardcore mode which I think works better because Diablo isn’t a proper MMO — you aren’t surrounded by other people all the time, so your fate is more in your own hands. The more players you’re surrounded by — and you’re surrounded by a lot in WoW — the less control you have over your own character. I’m not sure what you’d do in WoW to mitigate that fact.

I do think it would be fun as a challenge, of sorts. Perhaps you’re in “hardcore” mode until you die, and then you keep the character as a standard character so whatever you’ve earned isn’t completely gone — just any benefits you might have gotten from playing hardcore would be gone. But perhaps you’d level “hardcore” to 60 for an achievement or title (or both), then 70, 80, 85… it would be a challenge, to be sure, but a fun one that required you to change up your game to get there.

Don’t let meters get you down, because even the best ones only show part of the picture: raw healing done. (Addendum: Most meters do show more than that if you drill down, but total raw healing is typically the default.) Some fights require movement, which is hard for healers who have cast times. Some fights require dispelling which takes time away from healing. (The Zul fight is especially big on dispelling.) Some fights have specific mechanics that require you to get out of the fight for a while — I’m looking at you, G’huun, where my healing numbers are always terrible because I do an orb run.

I find meters and logs to be informative because they give me a lot of detail about how I play, and they let me analyze fights after the fact. When you’re in the middle of a fight, you probably aren’t thinking very analytically because you’re too busy pressing buttons and trying to keep everybody alive. After it’s over, you can look at the logs and think about how you’re performing and how you can do better. I like doing that.

But that doesn’t mean you have to like doing that. Healing meters can be useful, but they’re not a competition. Having the highest healing numbers doesn’t mean you’re a good healer and having the lowest healing numbers doesn’t mean you’re a bad healer. If seeing the numbers makes you feel bad, uninstall the meters and don’t look back. I assure you that you’re still doing a fine job whether you’re staring at the healing meters or not.

YAY!!!

Yes, that’s an all-caps yay with not one, not two, but three exclamation points. A Gnomish Allied Race means new story and new Gnome character looks, and I am into both of those things.

As to what I would actually play… that’s a bit more difficult. I don’t think I would race change my current Monk main. I’m just too attached to her. But I also definitely don’t feel the urge to level a brand new character from scratch. I have a Gnome Hunter, Mage, and Warlock that I might swap to Mechagnome (or Junker Gnome?) if the eventuality comes up. I lean a bit more towards the Hunter, because it feels like a good fit for the robot pet aesthetic.

But if they have really cool heritage armor, I may have to reconsider rolling something new. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

Whatever reason, huh?

Well, by my understanding we elect our leaders based on who makes the awesomist, shiniest, noisiest inventions — which I think we can all agree is a very sensible way to select political leadership. So we just have to think of Gnomes that make cool stuff who could be in the running for High Tinker if the position were available.

So I thought about that for a while and then I gave up and found a Wowpedia list of Gnome characters. I was surprised by how long the list was… until I realized 98% of them were personality-free NPCs, minor questgivers, or Hearthstone/TCG card characters. We have Silas Darkmoon and Bizmo (of Bizmo’s Brawlpub) who haven’t exactly invented anything useful (that I know of) but do have their own very showy stakes in Azeroth. Toshley (of Toshley’s Station) hasn’t done anything recently, but maybe we just don’t know about his recent exploits because he’s stuck six expansions in the past. I’m not sure if any would be interested in leaving their day jobs, but if these three were running, I’d vote Silas. I think he’d really improve the style standard for New Tinkertown.

But beyond this list, there is one Gnome who has dared to use science to break through the ultimate barrier. One gnome who has taken the most audacious leaps of ingenuity to subdue her scientific target. While other Gnomes have building flying machines and robots and explosives, Toki has used technology to push beyond the boundaries of time and space. And does it really get any showier than time travel?

Toki would take the Gnomes in glorious new directions. Sure, at least half of them would be terrible ideas, but that’s just life. Gnome life. YOLO.

That’s it for today’s definitely-not-late Queue. Thanks for reading (and being patient) and I’ll see you next time.