The Queue: All I had to do was ask?

To my great shock, apparently all I needed to do to collect plenty of questions was hop into the comments section and ask for them. I’ve been writing this column on and off since before Wrath of the Lich King was released, and I genuinely had no idea.

I’ve already heard a lot of people buzzing about the possibility of new Classic content. But while seeing some of Blizzard’s old plans come to life would be fascinating, it really doesn’t fit with the spirit of Classic. Both players and Blizzard have been big on #nochanges, and this would be a big change.

I think what’s far more likely is that we’ll see the roll out of more expansions, letting us experience more of WoW-as-it-was. That would stick to the Classic ethos of #nochanges, but also offer new/old content to progress through.

But whatever happens, I think we’re a long time from it happening. Classic is still brand new, and even Blizzard may not have a long-term plan for it.

The pre-order page promises it before the end of the year, so my guess is that we’ll have a release date at BlizzCon — possibly even an “available now” announcement.

Feel free to print this out and keep it so you can remind me how wrong I was when BlizzCon rolls around!

It’s not that we couldn’t heal, it’s that everyone underestimates us and assumed we couldn’t heal. Very rude.

While I have a growing mental list of annoyances, the first one was weapon skills. I’m playing a Priest, so weapon skill shouldn’t be important… right? But everything costs so much mana that hitting things with whatever weaponry you have to hand is really the most efficient way to level.

As a Dwarf, I started with a mace. But when I got an awesome staff, I couldn’t equip it without training it. I ran to Ironforge — on foot, of course — and found the weapon trainer. There are two weapon trainers in Ironforge… and neither will teach me how to use my staff. I can only learn that in Stormwind. So I took the tram to Stormwind and found another weapon trainer.

And learning to use a new type of weapon costs 10 silver. TEN SILVER! How is anyone supposed to afford that? What is even wrong with this game???

Ahem. Yeah. Weapon skills. Great fun.

I don’t think there’s a good story hook for Allied Races right now. Early in the expansion we spent a lot of time and effort recruiting other races in preparation for the ongoing faction war. But we’ve recruited our allies, and I don’t get any story sense that we’re looking for more allies.

But at the same time I have no clue where we’re going in patch 8.3. Will we need more allies to defeat N’zoth and/or Sylvanas? And if so, where can we turn? There are Mechagnomes, which I’d love to see added, but they seem like a natural fit for the Alliance and I’m not sure who would be the Horde alternative. The Vulpera have been around since the start of the expansion and we haven’t bothered to recruit them so far.

Tldr: I’m as interested in finding out as you are.

I don’t know if it’s worth the time it takes to level, but I am playing because I want to revisit the pre-Cataclysm world. I miss that world, and this is the only way to see it now. I want to go through the Onyxia quest chain again, and dramatically reveal her manipulations in the middle of the Stormwind throne room. I want to relive the opening of the gates of Ahn’qiraj (mostly I remember lagging). I want to quest through Ashenvale and Darkshore. I want to visit Thousand Needles in its un-flooded glory. I want to run Scholomance again.

All of these things are unique to pre-Cataclysm WoW. There’s no other way to experience them. If you didn’t play during this time, I think it would offer a very interesting new view of Azeroth, and the evolution of Azeroth.

There is a certain amount of suffering involved in Classic leveling, and, unfortunately, I think it’s suffering I’m willing to go through in order to go back to old Azeroth one more time. Your mileage may vary.

I think Blizzard made a mistake by not releasing more Classic realms sooner. They’ve added more than 20 new NA realms since they initially released a realm list, but adding these realms hasn’t exactly fixed the overcrowding problem.

Blizzard has been waiting for realms to fill up (or mostly fill up) before they add new realms, so they don’t wind up with tons of empty realms in the long term. But by the time Blizzard started putting out new realms, players had already established themselves on existing realms. Players had decided where they were playing, and where they would form their guilds. Even pre-launch, adding realms didn’t do much to draw away players who had already decided they were playing here, that they would found their guild here.

So Herod has 10k player queues if you try to log on in off-hours. Pagle, otherwise known as “the realm everyone Liz knows said they were rolling on” still has 10k queues during prime time.

Adding new servers at this point doesn’t fix the existing servers, and I think by launching at low capacity they’ve only guaranteed that the initially launched realms are packed and will stay packed.

I know, I know, I’m late and I apologize. But look! You got a seven-question Queue for the delay of a scant 15 minutes! That’s pretty good value, right?

I’ll see all of you next week, when presumably we’ll all have level 60s on Classic, right? Right.