The Queue: Don’t tell anyone you found me; I’m undercover.

Welcome to The Queue, our daily column where you ask us questions on a varied array of topics, we give you answers, and then the comments devolve into zany shenanigans. Today we have a ton of pet battling questions, some lore stuff, and a side of esports. If there’s one word you can use to describe the Queue, “varied” is definitely a good one. I’m lying low after this one, though.

The dungeon, for sure. Hardcore raiding isn’t really my thing, except vicariously, and I’m kind of a scrub so M+ isn’t something I do regularly. In general I find WoW PVP kind of tough to jump into with no real reward for someone who only feels like doing it maybe once every couple of weeks. I always liked the idea of PVP but I have no time, and I don’t see very many tangible rewards coming out of the current PVP system. I’m almost always better served by cranking out a World Quest or two with that time unless there’s something I just have to have.

Traipsing through a normal dungeon made of adorable mechagnomes with a bunch of hapless strangers? Sounds kinda nice.

I… haven’t really done battling much at all since Legion. Even that was a little scanty — I never finished the Family Familiar series. To be fair part of that is the randomness of how and when World Quests are up. I got the Dalaran ones out of the way early except for the obvious mismatches — I’m not doing Amalia with Critters — but a lot of the others, meh.

I got kinda caught up in covering esports and fell behind — yes, even though there are more catch-ups than ever. I did each of the dungeons a couple times but that’s about it.

However, given the size of my stable and my general knowledge base I could literally get back into it tomorrow. A lot of the mechanics are the same, as Pidia will allow me to demonstrate in just a second, and endgame has technically never changed. On the one hand I love that — no level squish to worry about, no real huge power creep issues based around leveling. On the other hand, it’s a little overwhelming to see the breadth of pets I’m “missing” now. Not any more overwhelming then having to level 900-something pets an extra 5 levels, but you know.

And the fact that they grant rep now… maybe tomorrow is a good day.

Every pet has a baseline set of stats. Breed is a slight variation to that stat set, which weights one or another attribute more heavily — Power, Speed, Health, or “Balanced.” I wrote a long primer on pet breeds ages ago, and it still fully applies today.

The reason why a specific breed is required for a strat usually involves the Speed stat. If your opponent has, say, 290 Speed and the two available breeds have 300 Speed or 280 Speed, the guide needs to specify which breed you need because that affects the turn order. Turn order is especially crucial for skills that dodge, but you can also use a speedier pet to time your huge attacks too. That said, if there was a third breed with 325 Speed, there won’t be much of a difference between that and the 300 in practice.

To find out what breed your pet is, you need either an addon like Rematch or Pet Journal Enhanced, or you can manually look it up for each pet on Wowhead or WarcraftPets. I go the addon route because I’m lazy, and Rematch in particular has a whole slew of extra functionality which really streamlines the whole process. You can even use Rematch to set a mouseover macro of your favorite team to defeat a particular challenger — mouse over Squirt, autoload a team with your Mechanical Dragonling and a leveling pet or two.

Oh heck yes.

The Race To World First is a whole esportsy event now and I’m incredibly here for it. I’m a little wistful that this and MDI weren’t a thing back in my ultra hardcore days, but watching the best in the world develop and hone their strategies in real time is awesome. I’d say I can almost see the gears in Sco’s head turning if he wouldn’t probably be offended for being compared to a mechagnome.

Varian was absent for much of Anduin’s youth. His main friends and mentors at that time were Jaina and Bolvar Fordragon, and his story shares a lot of parallels with theirs.

Jaina was devoted to diplomacy and peaceable solutions until she discovered that the mana bomb that detonated in Theramore was brought through Dalaran by mages who betrayed her. I believe the final story as we’re supposed to know it was slightly different, but regardless Jaina’s heel turn happened while Anduin was off traipsing through Pandaria with his best new bud Wrathion. Up until then it was mostly puppies and rainbows from Anduin’s chief diplomatic adviser. I would also venture that he shares the sentiment of her earlier voice line: “all I ever wanted was to study.”

Bolvar Fordragon was all about valuing what is honorable, just, and right, and he likely instilled that in Anduin to the point that I think this forms a lot of Anduin’s world outlook. Bolvar holds these values so core to himself that he willingly became the Lich King. Even if all he did during his guardianship of Anduin was tell him stories about heroic knights, that likely had an effect on the young prince.

I think Anduin may have a reckoning coming when we get to Lich King 2: Electric Bugaloo and the rest of the world finds out Bolvar became the Lich King, and I’m guessing that’s when he sheds his all-but-naive nature like Jaina did. I would also guess that, like Bolvar, he eventually makes some kind of huge personal sacrifice to save the world as we know it, but whether that falls within the scope of WoW remains to be seen.

So while he was lonely, unlike Joffrey, he was surrounded by virtuous people with his best interests at heart. Well, mostly.