The Queue: Eye see 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!

Do you ever wonder if C’Thun is sort of annoyed that N’Zoth decided to steal its whole “giant eyeball of unyielding gaze and limited mobility” shtick? I mean we had Yogg of the giant mouth, Y’Shaarj of the seven heads and numerous tentacles, and then…two giant eyeballs. Maybe that’s why Xal’atath was so unimpressed with N’Zoth in Legion.

Excellent question! Honestly, I don’t have a solid answer for you, beyond that Blizzard apparently wanted to give people a lot of different ways to pick up gear. That’s an admirable ideal, one that lets people choose to gear however they best like obtaining said gear — but the downside to that is that certain activities have always been weighted higher in importance by players than other activities.

That’s something that’s been in place ever since raiding began way back in Classic. You could get gear via questing, but it wasn’t that amazing. You could get gear via dungeons, and that was a little better. But the best gear came out of raiding, so raiding was viewed as having a higher importance — it took more people, it was more difficult, and it gave the best stuff.

In a way, PVP had to struggle against this perception, because it had a later start. When PVP gear was first introduced, it was exceptionally hard to come by, in part due to the original PVP system. And in many cases, raid gear still outweighed those original PVP sets — right up until Burning Crusade introduced Resilience on PVP gear.

LFR has had to struggle even harder to fit in that dynamic, along with Heroic gear, Mythic gear, World Quest gear, the list goes on. Essentially, players rate certain activities as having more importance than others, and therefore those activities should reward better gear in the eyes of those players. So Blizzard has to continually figure out a way to make sure the gear from certain activities is good enough to warrant doing that activity, without overshadowing the ladder of importance that players have learned to apply to these activities since the game began.

In short, it’s a big old tangle, but it’s a tangle that Blizzard itself kind of established when WoW first came out. Player perception is that one thing is more difficult/important than the other, so it should give better stuff. In an ideal world, people could simply choose to do what they liked to do, play how they wanted to play, and get good gear however they choose to play. But the game has never really been that simple — and it’s been interesting watching Blizzard try to get in front of that over the years.

I don’t know if there’s a simple solution to that.

I don’t know if I can really go into full details surrounding that situation, but here’s the general gist of it: the site we used to write for was under the umbrella of another company. That company decided to shut everything down, and fold the site into another website. You can still find the archives of the old site via Google, but it’s difficult to track down (and full of broken links).

We didn’t know it was going to happen until…well, right before it happened. Everyone was taken by surprise. Luckily, our current leaders decided the site was worth continuing, and re-launched a slightly different version of it under our current label. Even more luckily, you guys decided we were worth saving as well, and jumped to support us via Patreon.

And I don’t know if I’ve said it recently, but thank you. Without the support of this community, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do. It’s an extraordinary community, full of extraordinary people. I didn’t want to see it go back then, and I don’t want to see it go anywhere now — and I’m thankful that you guys deemed us worth saving, every single day.

Well…there are a few different ways this could go. If this expansion ends well, we might just want to turn our attention north to the guy in the helmet that’s been doing who knows what since we left him there at the end of Wrath. Given the importance of a few key figures introduced this expansion, that might be likely.

If this expansion doesn’t end well…we may end up smack in the middle of the second coming of the Black Empire.

Once upon a time, Shaman in Classic used totems almost exclusively while they were fighting. If you wanted to be effective at all, you needed those totems up, and you had to cast them one by one. At the time, one cast of an effective AOE could effectively invalidate all that casting, which wasn’t viewed as very fair. That’s why they changed it so that it takes a direct attack to wipe ’em out.

Since then, Shaman have changed quite a bit, but that rule has always stayed put. And sure, it’s annoying, but it only takes a second to tab over and swipe a totem down, so I don’t think Blizzard feels it’s worth changing that rule.

That’s actually a good point. I’ve been pretty good about referring to the old days of WoW as Classic, but maybe I should stick to just calling it vanilla. It’s definitely worth a discussion if we want to add that to the style guide and keep them separated as different entities. I mean sure, Blizzard is doing a great job with keeping Classic as close to the original as possible, but when I’m telling a story about raiding Molten Core, I mean the original Molten Core, not the one coming out in Classic.

If I remember correctly, we’re going to be getting new quests for Kul Tiran and Zandalari orphans — which also means new pets to collect! I don’t know if we’re getting a new balloon toy or not, though.

And we’re also getting the exciting and fun opportunity to clear out the School of Hard Knocks achievement! …just kidding, we’ve had that for a long time now and my heartfelt sympathies are extended to those still trying to complete the thing.

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!