The Queue: Eyestrain

So yeah, I got stabbed in the eyes yesterday. Needles and eyes, never fun.

How’re y’all doing? Anyway, here’s the Queue.

Dang it, I missed a “How’re y’all Queueing” joke.

Well, as we know, Ethereals have no bodies as such. They’ve been so utterly torn apart by uncontrolled Arcane power that they have no physical forms and are only constrained by the enchanted cloth they wrap their essences with, binding them to the physical world.

Now, that’s really cool, but it also means that you’d need to really think about certain things. First off, do Ethereals have gender? All of their leaders are known as Nexus-Princes, for example — there are no Nexus-Princesses or Nexus-Queens that I’m aware of. And considering they’re all bodiless magical entities who wrap themselves in mystical cloth so they can sustain any sort of physicality at all, maybe they could be the first playable race in WoW that doesn’t have a gender to speak of.

Instead, all of the player customization could come in the form of what their wrappings look like, and you could even have their ‘death’ be them losing their wrappings and having to travel as displaced astral forms to reclaim them. Similar to wisps, really. We know that Ethereals can appear outside of their wrappings as vaguely ghost-like beings of pure Arcane force, so perhaps there could even be a racial that utilized that ability to divest themselves of their wrappings in some manner.

As far as how Ethereals would work in terms of the game, well, that depends on a lot. The Ethereals are not a unified people, they’re in fact broken up into countless factions, many of which are at cross purposes and conflict with each other. The Consortium, the Protectorate, the Etherium are just the ones we know about. So you could easily have Ethereals join either faction.

Last year there was a rumor that people were saying that about this years BlizzCon, perhaps because they knew I’d be there. Haha I kid no one cares about anything i do. But sincerely, there’s been very little in terms of hype from this year’s BlizzCon aside from the usual things like Virtual Ticket goodies and the like. I suspect, with Blizzard having skipped Gamescom this year, BlizzCon has been where they’ve intended all their big gaming news this year. We’ll find out in two weeks.

It’s generally a bad idea to put an IV of something that isn’t strictly speaking required into you. Coffee would certainly be very dangerous to take intravenously. At the least, it would mess you up really badly. A note — I found at least one case of a person (granted, an 81 year old person, but still) dying after a nurse accidentally injected them with coffee.

Seriously, don’t do this. I really want to stress this. Injections are traumatic, even for those of us who get them fairly regularly, definitely don’t put something like coffee into your veins. It might not kill you, but it’s not a better way to get your morning caffeine. I really want to emphasize this. Don’t do this.

There won’t be faction mechanic changes in 8.3 I don’t believe.

There will be more news about 8.3 at BlizzCon. It’s in two weeks. I guarantee they’re going to talk about 8.3 there.

Actually, that’s not entirely clear at all.

Yes, Genn said That’s the last of the troops but the problem with that statement is that it doesn’t tell us what he means by that. Does he mean that’s the last of the soldiers the Alliance has? That can’t be right, because the Alliance has soldiers stationed all over the world. There are troops at bases and strongolds everywhere the Alliance has a military presence. Similarly, the troops Anduin brings to Orgrimmar at the confrontation with Sylvanas are the only ones that could be spared, because as we’ve seen throughout the Mission Table and Warfronts, the Alliance is engaged in ongoing combat in the Arathi Highlands and there are certainly Alliance forces there.

Another way to look at it is that during the War with the Lich King, the Alliance did institute a draft. People who went off to fight in Northrend absolutely came from farm backgrounds — it’s a big part of the Cataclysm story for Westfall, even. So Anduin has not yet done what his father did when he fought against the Lich King and called up any sort of levy to bolster the armies of Stormwind.

The Horde clearly had a pretty big standing army before the 4th War, one they used to push through Night Elf lands and destroy Teldrassil. They also clearly suffered casualties — the Terror of Darkshore cinematic makes it clear that the Horde was losing troops to guerilla war well before Tyrande showed up with an army of Night Elves and Worgen. Ironically, Tyrande and Genn’s force is almost certainly made up of just about every able bodied member of their prospective people who could possibly fight, since they were both driven out of their homes and don’t have people like farmers to worry about anymore.

So it’s actually very hard to determine how many soldiers each faction has at its disposal. They could both call up levies, but seem to have resisted doing so thus far. In terms of what would happen if the Legion attacked, or an Old God went on a worldwide rampage? I suspect adventurers, the cause of and solution to all of Azeroth’s problems, would be heavily involved.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. Two weeks till BlizzCon, y’all.