The Queue: Tomorrow is my birthday

My birthday is December 7th.

There’s lots of stuff going on in my  life right now, I won’t bring it up, but it really brought home to me how fleeting life can be and how you never know what’s going to happen. Treasure the experiences you get, the people you  love, the experiences that make your life what it is.

This is the Queue. Let’s get to those questions.

Did they escape the lab again? I’ll get the meat.

For my characters? No, why would they do that? People have no idea who those guys are, they’re mostly just rank and file Warriors who show up, hit things, and leave. Even my Battlelord or Deathlord characters like to stick to what they do best and leave the whole being famous to people who don’t work for a living like Anduin or Thrall.

Yeah, let those guys have the birthday parties. I’m busy.

Ours is primarily “Please keep off of this tree, cats.”

Fun fact, Cataclysm debuted on December 7th, 2010. It was my 39th birthday. (That’s right, I’m 48 this year.) I remember it pretty well, and I was excited for it at the time — and honestly I enjoyed it a lot more than most people did. I felt like it at least reined back on the ridiculous over-saturation of raid difficulties. Plus it was when I joined my Horde guild and raided on a Tauren for the entire expansion, including when we killed Heroic Spine and Madness.

I read through the comments pretty deeply yesterday, and one thing I took away from it was that no two players are exactly the same on this (or perhaps any) topic. For every player who enjoys the way talents have been since Mists of Pandaria there’s a player who loved the way talents worked from Vanilla to Mists.

If we’re looking for my personal opinion, as a guy who played Warriors all through the old days (and who wrote a Warrior column from 2007 until 2016 or so) I can tell you this much — I was literally forced to write column after column after column after column telling people what talents to take. In my experience, for every player who wanted to tinker and come up with their own cool, idiosyncratic talent build that let them express themselves and play their way? There were dozens of players who just wanted to know what talents were best.

Remember this column? I did it from memory. Because even before I was writing for the original site back in The Burning Crusade, I was the guy in my guild who had to tell all the other Warriors what spec they should be using. Over and over again. Until I went mad, and yes, I absolutely did go mad. The Diablo 2-esque talent system from Vanilla to Mists has its fans and admirers to this day, and I’m not here to tell you that you’re wrong for preferring it, but I absolutely can tell you that I saw a lot more people who just wanted me to tell them how to spec. They weren’t excited to try an Arms Dual-Wield build and customize it for their own playstyle.

If you happen to be one of those players? Great. And that’s just talents. For every player who doesn’t care about leveling feeling significant, there’s a player who does. World of Warcraft is now divided into so many groups — people who played in Vanilla and who won’t shut up about it (the author is making fun of himself here) and players who started later. People who raid vs. people who don’t. People who prefer retail vs. WoW Classic players. We’re even divided by what expansion we started playing in. WoW is such a big game, with so many players and people who once played and people who are just now returning after an absence, it’s impossible to find absolute common ground for every single player.

So if you feel like just the ding of leveling is enough? Good. If you feel like you want more? I hope you get it. Because there’s never going to be a way for WoW to be all things to all players, and we all have to find our fun where we can. Even if you’re in the minority, you’re not wrong to enjoy the game however you do.

Okay, well, happy birthday to Cataclysm and also to me. I’ll hopefully see you guys next week. Try and remember me as fondly and generously as you can and do what you can to treat each other with kindness.