The Queue: Cosmo-tology

Welcome back to The Queue, our daily Q&A feature for all of Blizzard’s games! Have a question for the Blizzard Watch staff? Leave it in the comments!

Is it just me, or does anyone else sometimes find themselves getting “cosmology” mixed up with “cosmetology,” even though the two are very, very different things? Unrelated (but very much related), I wonder what a World of Warcraft eyeshadow palette would look like. I’d want to see at least one blue shade with some kind of punched up silver glitter effect just to reflect Algalon and the Titans, you know? Maybe some earth tones — obviously a red for Horde, a Blue for Alliance, maybe a green for the Emerald Dream. Heck, you could have two different faction palettes and a cosmos palette.

…anyone want to get Colorpop in on this? Anyone? No? Just me? Okay, let’s get to your questions instead.

I did, in fact, pick this up — because I think that’s a great idea! Micro holidays are always really fun, and it’d be neat to see birthday celebrations for major NPCs as a micro holiday of some sort. Nothing that gives you something major, just a nice side something to do with a non-permanent item. Maybe a birthday hat? A 24 hour balloon or something? Or have Anduin (or whichever major character) give a zone-wide 24 hour buff to Stormwind once an hour, sort of like the buffs you get when someone turns in Onyxia or Nefarian’s head. There’s lots of ways to do it, and I think it’d be a fun little lore acknowledgement.

I also think it’d be fun to get something for your character’s “birthday” — the day you originally rolled them. However, between faction changes and server transfers, I’m wondering if that information is retained. If you made a Blood Elf back in Burning Crusade, but switched servers three or four times, does the database still remember the original creation date? Or does it generate a new creation date for the server you’re currently on? If you swap factions, does it retain your Horde origination date, or does it create a new Alliance one for you? Basically I think it sounds like a cool idea, but I don’t know how feasible it is, given that I don’t really have an inside look into the data Blizzard keeps for individual characters.

Of course, they could always send you something for your birthday, but you’d have to give them your birthday for that to happen. I still think that’s a cool idea, but some people might not be as keen with being reminded about their birthdays. For me, I’m all about the free stuff — virtual or otherwise — for a birthday, but some may not look as kindly on that sort of thing. Points to ponder!

Not at the moment — and it’s a good question as to whether they’ll add those in the future. I’d say for transmog reasons they may do so, but if they do, they’re going to wait until the expansion is completely over at the very least. Basically, people worked really hard for those sets, and even though it was at the beginning of the expansion, it’s still considered relevant content. So you’ll have to wait a while, and I’m not really sure how long “a while” is — sorry about that!

Okay, this is a complicated fight to solo, even if you’re super well geared — and honestly if you’re super well geared it almost makes it harder. But for the rolling, you can alleviate the flying off by simply running in circles around his back so he never quite manages to get a roll off. Make sure you have DBM installed, because it’ll give you an audio warning when he’s going to roll, and you can simply make sure you run to the other side of his back before it fully triggers.

You want to make sure you have at least one tentacle alive at all times, which will negate the respawning altogether. But that’s not always possible, especially if you’re using AOE. Depending on your level and your gear, I’d avoid AOE during that fight, and just single target everything. It’s a long fight, but the only reason it’s long is because you have to wait for things to spawn. I generally kite the blobs around in circles and wait until I have enough to make a big pile of goo — nine or ten should do it. Once you have that many, then hit your AOE, killing all blobs and the last tentacle, which should spawn an Amalgamation and allow you to immediate beef it up enough to kill it and pop a plate.

Just don’t forget to keep running in circles while you’re doing all of this. It’s going to make you semi-dizzy, but it’s the best way to guarantee you never fly off!

The Paladin mount is the only class-specific mount available at the tournament. There are also Heirlooms you can purchase as well, but those aren’t class-specific — you can purchase whatever Heirloom you want regardless of armor class and it’ll be added to your Heirlooms tab. The easiest way to get everything is to have one Horde character and one Alliance, and make one of those characters a Paladin. That way you can get the charger mount, and you can get all faction mounts from both sides, as well as whatever associated pets you’d like.

Don’t forget to get an Argent Pony Bridle for your Argent Squire or Gruntling — that will allow your companion to access your mail, bank, or a trader so you can sell stuff! It has a four hour cooldown, but having an extra mailbox or bank access around is never a bad thing in my book, particularly since there will be an entire zone in Shadowlands that has neither readily available.

Good luck with the grind! It’s lengthy, but the rewards are worth it for collectors.

It depends on what angle you’re looking at it. On the one hand, the PTR is a definite boon to developers and players from a playtesting perspective. Bugs and balancing can be sorted out before the patch goes live, so that the final released product is as painless to play as possible. And some of these bugs need a lot of players looking at them — sometimes it’s not just “Oh dear, I’ve clicked on something I shouldn’t have,” it’s “If you get more than fifteen players in an area they fall through the world/hide an NPC/make it impossible to click on that something I shouldn’t have.” It’s not just about having people looking, it’s about having sufficient enough numbers to uncover everything that could possibly go wrong.

On the other hand…you have story spoilers. Of course you do, you’re playing something in advance, and you can’t exactly play something without looking at quest text. Heck, sometimes that quest text needs to be corrected, and that’s a bug you can report. While you can try and avoid spoilers for the most part by not playing the PTR, there are still news sites reporting on spoilers — Blizzard Watch included. And while we try to slap spoiler warnings on everything, that doesn’t mean those spoilers won’t hit social media or YouTube and have people talking.

It’s…a tradeoff, in a way. Blizzard is trying to lock things like cinematics down so that they can’t be datamined before a patch is released, and that’s good. But you’re still going to have quest spoilers out there to avoid. Yes, that might be annoying at times, but the payoff is a patch release that’s relatively smooth and bug-free. I think I’d rather have the bug-free patch than a patch that is literally unplayable for a day or two after release because of bugs that nobody caught, you know?

That’s an excellent question, and I wish I had an answer for you. Unfortunately, we don’t know what happens to Titans when they die…well, we have an inkling, because we saw what happened when the Pantheon died, but it feels like they were a special case — Norgannon wove a protective shroud around their souls, and launched them into the Great Dark Beyond just as their bodies were destroyed, according to Chronicle. If he hadn’t done that, would they have ended up in the Shadowlands? Will we find Argus kicking around in the Shadowlands? That would be…an awkward reunion, to say the very least.

All we can really do is speculate at this point. I’m inclined to say no, simply because of the cosmology chart. The Titans exist in a space dedicated to order, and in the chart they’re outside the Shadowlands. It’s the creatures of Reality — the ones in the center of the chart — that get ferried to the Shadowlands, or the Emerald Dream. But then we have the Wild Gods, who definitely go to these places to rest and recoup before coming back to the world. Do the Titans exist on the same kind of planetary level as a Wild God? Are they kind of Gods into and among themselves?

It’s all stuff we’re going to have to wait for definitive answers for, and hopefully we’ll get some when Shadowlands comes out. I’m really looking forward to this expansion, because it has the potential to define some blurry cosmic concepts we’ve only gotten glimpses of up until this point.

That’s it for today’s Queue — if you have any questions you’d like to see answered, be sure to leave them in the comments below!