The Queue: I’ve got my eye on you

Welcome back to The Queue, our daily Q&A feature for all of Blizzard’s games! Have a question for the Blizzard Watch staff? Leave it in the comments!

Fun story: Way back when I was working on the WoW Ultimate Visual Guide, I had a helper on Blizzard’s team of historians that I could email regarding any questions. Poor Lor’themar had gone through a variety of model changes in which he did and then didn’t have his eye, despite supposedly having lost it in the Sunwell Trilogy manga. Since I was striving for complete accuracy, this led to one of the strangest emails I’ve had to write, simply titled “Lor’themar’s amazing vanishing and reappearing eyeball,” which asked for the official status of Lor’themar’s eyeball and how it went kaput.

I’m very pleased that Lor’themar now not only has a stunning new model, but there’s absolutely no doubt left that his eye is very much busted. (I was also told that this was far from the strangest question they’d ever received, which only reinforced my interest in working for that team someday.) But that’s enough about my strange question — let’s move on to yours, shall we?

I think with very few exceptions it’s always been their WoW name, unless they introduced themselves differently, or their WoW name was something mildly objectionable to say in polite company. I mean, in pretty much every instance they were people I’d been talking to on Vent for years — and on Vent we’d always refer to each other by our WoW names. It was what we were used to calling each other, so we just did the same when meeting face to face, too. We’d been using those nicknames for so long that there wasn’t really any “who are you talking to” issues — everybody responded to their nicknames just as regularly as they would’ve to their real name.

I can’t decide which was worse, the corpse run in Loch Modan, or the one in the Wetlands. Both were pretty long! As far as Chok’sul goes, he was the subject of a wanted quest in which players were tasked with bringing back his head. Given that he’s no longer in game, I’d say we finally succeeded, and he’s gone for good.

That would be the hair color your Troll is currently kicking around with — you can change your hairstyle without affecting anything, but if you swap your hair color, the color of your various forms will change as well. The same applies to all Druids, with the exception of Tauren — fur color determines the animal form, rather than hair color. Worgen are a little different — the hair color you choose in Human form is what determines your Worgen fur color, and the color of your Druid forms. Basically it’s all in the color of your hair, unless you’re a Tauren!

Keep in mind that the Siege of Boralus takes place before we recruit Ashvane. The Horde isn’t really in there to protect Boralus, they’re in there to take advantage of the chaos. Since all the infighting is going on, it presents a good opportunity to just bust in and start grabbing all the Azerite we can get our hands on. There’s one little difference between the Horde and Alliance versions of the dungeon, and that’s the first boss — Alliance fight one of the Ashvane loyalists, Horde fight a Kul Tiran boss who’s there to stop us. Other than that, the dungeon is pretty identical.

As for the damage — well, the Horde lost a faction leader in the Battle of Dazar’alor. Boralus just had to clean things up afterward, is all. And if you’ve ever been through Boralus on Alliance side, there are sections of town that are already pretty chaotic, with NPCs that will happily attack you in the seedier parts of town. I’m guessing this isn’t the first mess the citizens of Boralus have had to clean up over the years.

Technically yes, but they usually try to space these things out by a few weeks, just to give everyone a chance to check out and explore all the new stuff that’s been introduced before slapping us with another pile of new stuff to look at. And given the size of 8.2, they could be finishing up their own internal testing and polishing before throwing it out there for us to explore. We’re looking at a lot of new stuff in 8.2, it’s much larger than the 8.1.5 patch, so I wouldn’t really be surprised if it takes a little longer to show up on the PTR. Don’t worry, we’ll see it soon enough!

Well the Mogu were originally titan-forged — they were given life by Ra-den, and basically served him as shapers of the land. They served Ra-den, but they were essentially heartless creatures of stone, just kind of obediently doing whatever Ra-den tasked them to do. When the Pantheon fell and their spirits were whisked away to Azeroth, Ra-den realized what had happened to them. He extracted the last remnants of Aman’Thul’s power, stored them safely away, and then, depressed by the weight of what had happened to the Pantheon, retreated into the catacombs beneath the earth. The titan-forged were left to continue their work alone, with no one to guide them.

And then the Curse of Flesh hit. Suddenly all these titan-forged went from heartless creatures of stone to mortal beings made of flesh and bone, capable of bleeding and dying — and Ra-den still didn’t speak to them. They were left on their own, abandoned by their creator, terrified and struggling with the burden of their inexplicable mortality. That mortality didn’t just make them soft and squishy, it also opened them up to the wonderful world of emotions like pride, greed, fear, anger — things they barely comprehended, much less knew how to deal with. Combine that with sitting on a continent where the lingering, corrupted essence of Y’Shaarj was left to haunt the landscape, and you’ve got a not very pretty picture of a brutal race of beings bent on conquest.

That conquest, though — on one level, it was brutal, unforgiving, and incredibly harsh. On another, it was the Mogu attempting to do what they’d been tasked to do so long ago: Shape the land, control the land. Despite Ra-den’s absence, it’s almost as if on some level they were still trying to complete their prime directive, although the purpose of that directive had been so warped and twisted over time as to barely resemble the original intent. By now, they’ve been at it for so long that I feel like it’s really unlikely we’d ever run into a Mogu capable of things like hope, compassion, and generally being…you know, friendly.

That’s it for today’s Queue — if you have any questions you’d like to see answered, be sure to leave them in the comments below!