The Queue: Style is the only thing that matters

Goblins or Vulpera? Gnomes or Mechagnomes? These and other questions I don’t have answers to right here in Wednesday’s edition of the Queue.

Nope. Macros can’t do anything based on range.

However, they will perform actions based on priority: the first action you list in the macro is the top priority. If conditions aren’t met for the first action, it will try the second, then the third, etc.  So you could have a macro that prioritizes doing something to your focus target, and if it can’t do that it will do something else.

Here’s an example healing macro that should do something like that

#showtooltip /cast [@focus,help,nodead] [@mouseover,help,nodead] [help] [@targettarget,help,nodead] [] SPELL

That will try to cast on your focus target if it’s friendly and alive. Then on your mouseover target if it’s friendly and alive. Then on your target if it’s friendly. Then on your target of target if it’s friendly and alive.

For DPS, you would replace “help” with “harm.”

You just have to keep your order of operations in your head so you understand what a button does in which situation. There’s not a right or wrong way to order it, but you do have to organize your thinking around how you’ve organized it. For example, I have a lot of help/harm macros that cast one thing if I have a friendly target and another thing if I have an unfriendly target, but its top priority is to heal my mouseover target, so if my cursor is accidentally hovering over a friendly target it will cast a heal on them even if my actual target is an enemy that I want to kick in the face. (I cast a lot of accidental Vivifies this way.)

My characters all have a hairstyle that’s specific to them, though I will occasionally change up hairstyles to suit a transmog — usually color, but sometimes also cut if it’s a helmet that crops oddly. And when I change cut, it just feels weird, like my character has vanished and become someone completely different. I always wind up going back.

But then again, there is the siren song of the new. Mechagnomes have some really awesome hairstyles.

Still. It’s weird.

I’m having a similar problem with Gnome or Mechagnome. My very first World of Warcraft character was a Gnome, and my current Monk has been a Gnome since creation. And as you might guess from my answer above, I tend to stick with character appearances. They feel “right” for that character, and all of them look at least a little different.

An extreme example of this: I struggled a fair amount in the last third of Dazar’alor because I had genuine trouble recognizing my character on the screen. It’s a silly problem to have. I’m always in the center of my own screen, and during Burning Crusade and Wrath I mained a Blood Elf, which is what Gnomes turn into in Dazar’alor. But size, height, and animations between the races are really different, and it consistently threw me off.

But Allied Race racials seem so powerful compared to the classic racials, and from a power standpoint it makes sense for me to play a Mechagnome. And Vulpera have great racials, too. Making a switch is extremely tempting.

So what do you want? It’s a choice between familiarity and the allure of the new; between what you have and what you could have; between being happy with who you are and changing to (potentially) become more powerful.

And I just wrote an awful lot of words for a question I don’t have an actual answer to.

I think we’ve seen the broad strokes, but there’s a lot of depth that we don’t have many details on.

We know the aesthetic and role of each Covenant, but we only know a handful of the benefits we’ll get from joining them — which means all of us are currently gravitating towards one or the other based purely on design. (On one hand, that’s kind of nice because I worry that Covenant abilities will be difficult to balance and we’ll “have” to pick certain ones to perform. On the other hand, I want to know what I’m getting out of helping these unknowns.)

There are companions we’ll be able to “soulbind” with to earn a new talent tree of abilities and bonuses, and we’ve gotten one screenshot of hard information on what to expect.

The only dungeon we know about is Torghast, which sounds awesome, but we have no idea what else is coming and whether we’ll have any more of that roguelike gameplay, which I’m really looking forward to.

We know there will be class changes and un-pruning, but the details are practically non-existent.

It felt like the most specific information was about the updated leveling system, which is a pretty huge change. It’s going to be a much smoother experience for new players and will make it easier — and more satisfying — for existing players to level alts. But for those of us who have been playing for 15 years… is there really an alt we haven’t leveled yet? And if so, are we going to wait for — in the worst case — 13 months to level those alts with this new system? I think it’s a great change, but it’s not one that’s going to do anything to my gameplay unless Blizzard adds new races or classes (which they aren’t).

So I think we’re due a lot more details on just what’s happening, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing any big new systems. I don’t think Blizzard is going to surprise us with a new class in a few months (as fun as that might be). But there are a ton of details we don’t know yet — and I think it’s those details that make up the game, which is why the news feels a little sparse.

I think the big problem with a Necromancer class is how to differentiate them from Death Knights. Blizzard has tangled with this once already with Demon Hunters, which have a lot of thematic overlap with Warlocks — and even snatched up Warlock abilities like Metamorphosis.

It was a pretty exciting addition if you really wanted to play a Demon Hunter, and a pretty miserable change if you played (and enjoyed playing) a Warlock.

Hopefully, Blizzard learned a lesson there: new classes need a really clear space in the game, because that much overlap makes it hard to give each class an identity that doesn’t involve borrowing (or stealing) abilities. And I find it hard to see a niche for Necromancers that Death Knights don’t already feel, even though they would fit Shadowlands thematically.

Azeroth is a terrible place of non-stop awfulness. It’s a violent, dangerous place full of violent, dangerous people.

I think the top of my list would be Pandaria zones, which were particularly beautiful. Jade Forest is my favorite except… oh, wait, we went to the Jade Forest and wrecked the place forever. Vale of Eternal Blossoms is also… wait, that’s also wrecked (at least until patch 8.3, so it will only have been wrecked for seven or so years). And then there are beautiful places like Teldrassil and Ashenvale, both lost to flames.

And the zones we haven’t wrecked ourselves are just wrecked. Most of Northrend has a severe undead problem. Silvermoon City and Eversong Woods are lovely, but also have a slight (slight) undead problem. Gilneas has a great Victorian vibe, but is so wrecked you can’t even visit it after the opening scenario. Karazhan is a world of wonders — inside — but is full of death traps.

I’m not sure there’s anywhere safe in Azeroth to settled down. You would have to become a hermit and find an isolated cave or island. And even so, Tirion tried the isolation thing, and look what happened to him.

Those are all the words I have for today, so please continue to talk amongst yourselves, and maybe ask a few questions for Mitch tomorrow.

Have a great Wednesday, people.