The Queue: My end of the year Queue

This is the last Queue I’ll be writing in 2018.

It’s been a heck of a year, some good, some really bad. It’s finally over. Next year will, I hope and pray, be slightly better for all of us. I hope you all had a good holiday if you celebrated it, and if not, I hope your week has been peaceful.

Hey, don’t forget how I talk incessantly about transmog, Ashkandi, and dinosaurs.

Here’s a picture of a Warrior punching a dinosaur in one of my favorite transmog sets.

I love that set.

C’thun is ‘dead’ in that we killed him, but since he’s an Old God and they’re ridiculously hard to kill, it may not really matter. He was giving Cho’gall orders back in Cataclysm even though he died at the end of classic WoW, so I’d put him (and Yogg-Saron, for that matter) in the ‘dead as far as we know’ camp.

Cho’gall was listening to whispers from C’thun back in Cataclysm, and it was while following C’thun’s orders that he died in the Bastion of Twilight. He’s quite dead.

Who would even plant that World Tree at this point? The last one wasn’t blessed by the Dragon Aspects, and it had all sorts of problems because of it. With there being no more Aspects to bless any new tree (Ysera is dead and neither Alexstrasza nor Nozdormu have their Aspect power anymore) there’s no purpose to planting one. The only way I could see it working would be if something as powerful or more so than the Aspects blessed the tree instead. The two candidates I can think of are Azeroth itself, and Elune.

So if there was to be a new World Tree in Silithus, either it would be named Azer’drassil (Crown of Azeroth) or Elun’drassil (Crown of Elune).

I’d expect it after the raid drops, so perhaps late January/early February.

It’s certainly feasible that post Battle for Azeroth there will be a potential armistice between the Horde and the Alliance that won’t affect the earlier leveling experience. For that matter, perhaps factions will be gone for max level characters entirely. I don’t expect that, but the only thing stopping that from happening is Blizzard’s decisions as to what to feature and focus on — there’s nothing in the game requiring them to retain factions past 120 just because they existed up to 120.

But I don’t expect they’ll remove factions. Blizzard sees them as core gameplay in World of Warcraft, part of what makes the setting what it is.

What I do expect is that we’ll definitely see a significant change in how the factions are viewed and the experience of playing them. Things I don’t expect include a third faction, the removal of all factions, or a radical redesign of which races go in which factions. I think with Allied Races we have the potential to do interesting new things with who belongs to what, and I expect we’ll see more iteration along those lines, but I don’t think the Horde and the Alliance are either going away or opening their doors to members of the opposite faction. But, just as an example, if Saurfang died and Sylvanas dropped a plague bomb on Ironforge that created a new race of undead Dwarves, I think we’d see the Alliance finally get it into their heads that they can’t win this war while trying to play nice with the Horde, while the Horde would have to decide what it wanted more — honor or victory.

I definitely think the Horde and Alliance we get at the end of Battle for Azeroth will be very different than what we have no, but I expect they’ll still exist in some fashion.

Well, there could be a variety of reasons.

1 – It’s a living being that has sustained us all and it is in pain. It needs our help.

2 – if it dies, either the entire planet dies with it (remember, unlike worlds like Draenor, Azeroth has formed around the World-Soul and it can’t sustain life without said World-Soul) or it’ll become unlivable.

3 – the planet is not an egg. It is a shell formed around the World-Soul to protect it while it develops. As far as we know, the World-Soul doesn’t destroy the planet when it ‘awakens’ and it seems as if the Titans use those planets as bodies — Sargeras seemed to be doing so when he attacked the planet.

4 – Azeroth’s fate seems to be unique among Titans — it’s been said several times that it will be uniquely powerful, and might just be able to stop the Void once and for all. Letting it die would mean that ultimately the Void and the Old Gods would triumph over all existence.

5 – my entire transmog collection is here.

Okay. That’s my last Queue of 2018. I’ll see y’all in 2019.