The Queue: Jellyfish. Why did it have to be jellyfish?

Ugh.

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The one right after the opening ceremony. Whatever they have to announce, the panel right after the opening ceremony is usually a deep dive into the most exciting news.

I can see a few options, but I think the most likely is remastered games. We know the Arcade space downstairs will have a lot of classic Blizzard games, like Diablo 2, Blackthorn, and Lost Vikings. With the excitement around WarCraft 3: Reforged, I could see Blizzard mining its game library for more titles to remaster, possibly also on mobile. (I mean, come on, WC3 and D2 would both be great on tablets.)

Alternately, I can see Blizzard pushing into TV with the rumors of a Diablo Netflix series finally coming to reality. I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing an Overwatch animated series, either.

But while it would be amazing to have a panel of something completely new, it’s also possible it could be a deep dive into the story, lore, or making of a newly announced title rather than something new itself. For example, if Overwatch 2 is announced, maybe we get a deep dive into gameplay in one panel and a deep dive into lore in another series.

I’m pretty excited by the BlizzCon schedule, but I’m also trying to temper my expectations.

I want mechanical eyes so I could see everything. They would see in the dark, zoom in like a telescope, identify enemies’ weaknesses, reminding me when my cooldowns are up, remind me that raid times are in a different time zone so I show up when they start… you know, basically an awesome pair of glasses with built-in WeakAuras and DBM, all in an awesome set of mechanical eyes.

I could be me, but better, smarter, faster… well, okay, probably not faster, but definitely those other things.

I’m just as confused as you are. I can only think that they either wanted to get Heroes news out of the way to make room for other things at BlizzCon — there is one 45-minute Heroes panel on the schedule, but that’s it — or they’re planning a really big Heroes announcement and they wanted to make room for that.

I find the former more likely than the later, but there’s so much uncertainty around this year’s BlizzCon, I really don’t know.

I think all Allied Race abilities are overpowered compared to the original racials… but Mechagnomes really have some killer racials:

• Combat Analysis: You gather and analyze combat data every 5 sec, increasing your primary stat by 50, stacking up to 8 times. The data decays while out of combat.
• Re-Arm: When you fall below 20% health, heal for 20% of your maximum health. This effect cannot occur more than once every 1.5 min.

These are both extremely powerful, whether you’re soloing, raiding, leveling, PVPing, or anything else I might be forgetting. Combat Analysis is a power buff for any class or role and Re-Arm is a very large, life-saving heal, even on a 1.5 minute cooldown.

That seems really powerful, even amongst the really powerful racial abilities of our new allies — but I’m not convinced that it’s there purely to make the Alliance competitive in raids. (What, is everyone supposed to pay for a faction and race transfer? Not that high-end guilds haven’t done it before, but that’s a big ask for correcting a huge imbalance between the Alliance and Horde.)

And then, this could also be toned down before patch 8.3 hits, making this whole conversation moot.

Have a happy Wednesday, friends.