The Queue: Did I hear someone talking smack about vegan tacos?

This is The Queue, where you ask questions and I answer them — even when the question is technically unasked and I just want to rant about something for a while. Let’s jump right in!

What if I told you there actually is a good version of a vegan taco? Like any good millennial I’m very familiar with avocados, but I was really weirded out to see vegan avocado tacos on a menu once — reader, I ordered them.

It’s almost like a fish taco, but the avocado is even more tender than fish, and you basically can’t overcook it to a rubbery mess. You can put beans on it to ‘glue’ the avocado to the tortilla but I think it’s better without. If you make the crema with cashew cream and forego the cheese this recipe is vegan, and tastes even better with a tall glass of dark red sangria. Being weak-willed I always opt for cheese but even without it, this is crunchy and salty, a little tart from lime, and just melts in your mouth with a big old round fatty finish from the avocado. If you like fish tacos it’s worth a try, seriously.

Friday queue writer, I’m not even sorry.

Eh. Meh. Other grumbly noises.

My general feeling is, a date this late allows everyone a bit to get back in the swing of things after the holiday. I’m not sure what Blizzard HQ looks like right now, between Blizzard World being broken and all the stuff we’re uncovering about patch 8.1, something tells me a few elves are working overtime right now. A later release date allows the company to sort of stagger their team so it’s not quite a skeleton crew through the holiday break.

I do feel like maybe they could’ve pushed it to the 15th in particular, but I’m ambivalent. While I do appreciate the relatively speedy delivery of content patches, I do miss the days of “it’ll be ready when it’s ready,” when you stepped straight into a world of wonder and joy instead of a world where you’re all pissed off that the Azerite Knowledge numbers aren’t doing the thing they’ve been doing. There’s also the fact that, although Blizzard has been decreasing the amount of time between expansions proper, earlier on they were relatively fast at the beginning of the expansion before lengthy lulls — remember Siege of Orgrimmar? An intentionally slightly larger gap here means that later on we’ll hopefully get a shorter one.

While we’re on the topic, why did they separate the content and call it the same patch? In terms of revisions, we should be getting patch 8.2 when the raid drops, after the big balance patch last week was 8.1. I get the philosophy that each patch should have a banner raid but it makes the pedant in me a little uppity.

This queue’s face is a little uppity.

Other commenters answered this, but it’s a pretty handy little addon, so I’m going to reply for visibility: Warfront Rare Tracker. It’s updated for Darkshore, so any time you’re ready to kill a bunch of Horde or Night Elves — depending on your faction — it’s ready to roll.

Heroes of the Storm has a really uniquely short PTR cycle. Starting from today, their usual habit of releasing the teasers over the weekend — why over the weekend, though — for a PTR on Tuesday and a patch release the Tuesday after would put patch release on Christmas. I’m going to say that you’re right, and we’ll probably see the teaser the weekend after Christmas, so probably December 29th with the actual hero release in the first couple weeks of January.

Again, why the weekend release? I want to sleep, man.

If you’re Horde, Tranquillien rep from the Ghostlands is a relatively easy one to get, but beyond that it can get a little tricky. I will say with the changes to scaling as you level it’s theoretically easier to stay in single zones longer to get max rep with certain factions — Cenarion Expedition in Burning Crusade for instance, but pretty much all of those reps are tuned around doing a slew of dailies later.

If you’re looking for (relatively) fast, easy rep for those new achievements, I’d guess running old raids like Black Temple are the way to be. You can pull just about anything and AOE, and there are good transmog and pets to sell. To be fair, I haven’t run these since the most recent stat squish, but it should be a steamroll for any toon over level 90, and there are several reputations like that.

That’s it for me for this week! Looking back on our time together today, my main takeaway is that I need more coffee. I love pulling that late Wednesday night on our Twitch stream to hang out with y’all, but I’m sensing some latent crankiness that could possibly be attributed to sleep deprivation.