The Queue: I love my Kul Tiran Warrior

Look, I got my every two months eye injections the day I’m writing this Queue and I am utterly wiped out, just not feeling great at all. So this week’s Queue is me dressing up a new Kul Tiran Warrior in this, my favorite Classic WoW clownsuit. The armor I literally used for most of BWL and AQ40 and Naxx. Yes, it looks ridiculous. That’s the magic of it.

I’ll be up front — I don’t think we can just draw from Warcraft 3 here. Tauren were introduced in WC3, as were Blood Elves (High Elves clearly predate that, but Blood Elves as a distinct people come from WC3) and the Dwarf armor is very distinctly patterned after Magni Bronzebeard, not WC3 in general.

Goblins, I’d say some variation on Engineer Gazlowe in Warcraft 3. The problem with determining what Forsaken should get based on WC3 is that the Undead in that game weren’t really the Forsaken, at least not until the very end of it — I think it likely they’ll instead draw inspiration from the evolving Forsaken aesthetic that we’ve seen in their buildings since Wrath.

Night Elves… we’ve seen various Night Elf armor types in the Battle for Darkshore (which is also where we’ve seen an evolving Forsaken aesthetic as well) so I honestly don’t know if they’d go all the way back to WC3 for this, but if they did? Perhaps something based on the Huntress units from that game would work.

Honestly, I don’t really feel like Humans need heritage armor. There’s so much gear out there that looks like gear from the various Warcraft  games already. Similarly, I don’t think the Broken work for Draenei heritage armor — we’ve got enough sightings of Draenei culture and modes of dress from Warlords of Draenor to estimate something along those lines for them.

Pandaren I have absolutely no idea. Something Samwise drew over the years. Ultimately I just don’t think Warcraft 3 is going to be that important in terms of heritage armor — some races will draw from it, sure, absolutely, but others will likely draw from elsewhere, including previous WoW expansions or even wholly new creations.

So many shirtless Draenei mogs coming.

Quite a few reasons. First up, define ‘slow’ here — since Warlords of Draenor they’ve redesigned pretty much every race and added eight new playable races with unique skins and customization options. That’s a pretty sizeable amount of what is, ultimately, customization.

Secondly, when it comes to stuff like letting us turn off chest armor and transmog weapons into that fish mace or what have you, there is a non trivial amount of work to get that to function properly. It took them years to let us transmog polearms to swords and axes and maces, that wasn’t because they didn’t really want to do it, it was because it was harder than you think. I remember when they first put it on the PTR my polearms were mogging smaller than they should have been, and I still have no idea why or how they fixed it.

But there’s also the fact that it’s a lot easier to not do something than to do it, and then deal with the consequences if it turns out it was a bad idea.Lore even pointed this out in the Q&A. Everyone’s transmogging to giant fish all the time and it’s ruining the mood? Well, that sucks, but if we take that out everyone’s gonna lose their minds. This doesn’t mean that I don’t think they could definitely be less conservative in terms of these options,and I definitely think that now that it’s been almost ten years of having transmog it’s time to stop worrying so much about transmog restrictions. If things look silly, let them.

They also addressed while they’re not going to add silders for height or weight, they definitely want to add eye color and hair color and hair styles.

I mean, from what I understand, when Ion says Leveling needs help he’s not kidding and he’s not saying something new. The game originally had 60 levels, and that was a lot to those of us who came to WoW from tabletop RPG’s or even CRPG’s.

There’s lots of reasons why you’d consider a level squish in order to make a level feel more worthwhile, and I think the points Ion discusses about how people may take a level squish poorly — the idea of going from 120 to 60 and how does it feel to suddenly lose sixty levels. There are no actual plans to implement a level squish because there’s a lot to contemplate but it’s something I personally started wondering about all the way back at level 90, so I’m not at all surprised they’re talking about it internally.

I’m going to be 100% honest with you. I’ve read this question several times, and I do not understand what you mean by this. Do you mean the ability to optimize your character for Pet Battles and Professions over PVE raiding? Like, special talents that only work for just raiding vs. mythic dungeons, or special Pet Battle abilities and a special Pet Battle talent tree? I certainly feel like there are various ways that could be done, but I don’t have any real idea of what I would think about it until I know exactly how they would be implementing this.

I’m not inherently opposed to (and this is me hoping I understand what you’re asking) letting people decide I want to do PVP and Pet Battles and that’s it and there being special perks if you decided to play that way. But I don’t really think I’d be interested in it, either. Again, if I’m just not understanding what you actually mean, I apologize — but also, I invite you to talk about it here in the comments so I can try and get a sense of your intent.

Well, ask yourself this — how many times have you seen esports on this scale on a major television network? As much as we live in the era of streaming media and cable bundles, broadcast networks still serve as bellwethers of what people consider mainstream. OWL on ABC ultimately means that it’s popular enough and accepted enough that it could become the first of something that eventually becomes commonplace.

I definitely think it’s a big deal. Not as big a deal as it would have been two decades ago when the broadcast networks were more powerful than they are in the age of streaming and YouTube, but still a big deal.

I answered a question about Deep Dish Pizza and it destroyed the Queue. So I’m taking the hint. Y’all can discuss that one yourselves, I’m out.

See y’all next week. Take care of yourselves.