The Queue: Sell, sell, sell!

My favorite part about this patch isn’t the new raids or Assaults or anything like that. No, with the Auction House revamp, I might finally clean out my bank to a useable state! Sayonara to all those mats from the Garrison. Buh-bye, lowbie transmog gear. Hasta la vista, Pandaria veggies.

This is The Queue, where you give us questions, and we answer them. We promise we won’t hoard them in our reagent bank for five years. Oh, and while we’re here don’t forget to update your addons.

While I don’t have a citation, Paragon rep tends to be one of the few things that remains unchanged from patch to patch. I still have a couple thousand rep with Prince Farondis before my next box, for instance. All the various fansites — including us! — are advising people to save their boxes for the Artifact Power change.

By the time this post goes live we’ll already be in downtime, but it’s the thought that counts.

In addition to the typical array of new pets from raids and tamed in new zones, the Blackrock Depths Pet Dungeon is coming! I haven’t taken a spin through it yet, but something tells me this is one that Lil Bling won’t be able to brute force his way through. Rabbits are probably a solid bet though.

PVP talent? That’s the thing I need to go to the Heart Forge to activate, right? So many messages, so little reading.

I’m pretty sure that, among the staff, I’m alone in my opinion that “extra,” non-game works can jump in a lake — Rossi will give you an absolutely different answer if you ask him for tomorrow. Books and comics can be fun, and I’m okay with it when they just supplement the story of the game. I’d love a comic about the adventures of Lillian Voss, or a Talanji short story dealing with the politics of the Zandalari. The thing is, there are a few instances where the in-game omission of events that only occurred in books are egregious, and make it hard to be invested in the game. This has been happening less as the cinematics team has been doing more, so it’s somewhat due to general tech and time constraints, but it’s still frustrating.

For instance, though I wouldn’t have wanted to sit through the whole series of events in War Crimes, going from “whew, we got that Garrosh” to “welp Garrosh is on another planet in the past so we gotta go do the thing” with no in-game segue was jarring and nonsensical. In a series where we have to suspend a whole heck of a lot of disbelief to stay on the story treadmill that kind of cognitive dissonance took me out of it completely. Games have been evolving as a storytelling medium, and if they can make the current plot line make sense — y’all, we’re hoarding the liquid blood of the planet in a precisely quantifiable fashion in a piece of gaudy costume jewelry — just tossing in a couple quests that go, “something something Bronze Dragons” would’ve smoothed things over a lot.

To be fair, I do think that some events which happen in comics start off as being relatively insignificant and then wind up being major plot points later, and I don’t fault them for that. The death and resurrection of Calia Menethil, for instance, is something that makes sense for a comic or short story, but at this point if you didn’t read that story and didn’t play through the Priest Order Hall — who? It isn’t quite as jarring as the Garrosh example, and just saying “oh she’s Arthas’ sister” gives you enough context that it makes sense she’d have some claim, but between quests, animatics, and guided scenarios they have a whole lot of tools in their toolbox to give quite a bit of additional context.

Also, selfishly, I don’t generally like reading novels about games because games are a lot of my job, and books are one of the few escapes I have from that. I’m not saying that Blizzard should stop producing novels as a favor to me, I’m just saying if they did I’d be totally on board.

You used to be able to check this manually with a script but that function was broken a while ago. I used to use Titan Panel for this, because you can see your coordinates in real time and I liked all the other data it gave me — gold per hour is super informative — and there are tons of extra widgets you can install for it. You can ‘hide’ Titan Panel so it only shows up when you mouse over it. The downside is, this won’t display the coordinates on your map, so if a rare is up at 22.75 but you’re at 42.80 it’s hard to tell at a glance whether you’re close enough to get there in time. Why don’t I use Titan Panel anymore? Honestly, when I updated my computer a few months back the installer didn’t retain any of my previous information, so I only re-installed the absolute necessities — dps meter, Rematch, and Can I Mog It.

I don’t have personal experience with it, but TomTom is a pretty good, relatively lightweight map mod that’ll tell you coordinates on the map itself. You may get some more recommendations in the comments, too!

Y’all know I’m allergic to spending money, but Vulpera are such good boys and girls I’m sorely tempted. I’m pretty well settled on rolling a Rogue, because their stealth animations are amazing, and a tiny fox on a huge crow from the rogue Order Hall mount sounds like a childrens’ story I want to be a part of. But race changing outright? Eh.

However, that said, I still have 7k rep or so to go, so the sale may be over before I get a chance to use it. Emissaries plz.

You will be able to earn Heritage Armor for Allied races with Death Knights by leveling to 110, but not Pandaren, according to the official preview released last week. Both points are unambiguous, since Blizzard issued a correction stating that Pandaren will not be able to earn Heritage Armor on these new Death Knights.

All this assumes you’ve pre-ordered Shadowlands, of course.