The Queue: Great Worm From Beyond

It’s all fun and games until this dude shows up.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we answer them with a sinuous hellbeast breathing down our necks.

It really depends on how the expansion plays out. I feel like a few of the factions we’ve seen already — the Kyrian Owlpeople in particular — seem like a lock for an Allied Race from a model-related, “this is cool” standpoint. However, from a story standpoint, if we seal the veil and restore the death machine (or whatever) at the end of the expansion, it seems like all those Covenant races would be sealed there, too.

So I can definitely see either path going on. I’ll add that, I feel like if we don’t have any announced Allied Races from the Shadowlands by 9.2, it’ll be a tip off to me that we’re sealing off the Shadowlands entirely.

Our friend Taliesin or Evitel of Taliesin and Evitel fame did the math on this one:

If you don't enjoy that Vale daily where you kill 4 rares… don't do it.

It's worth 0.5% of a Horrific Vision ticket. Someone who does it every day will get into one more Vision than you every 7 MONTHS. Just don't do it, it's fine :) pic.twitter.com/P6RycX4cSO

— Taliesin & Evitel (@TaliesinEvitel) January 18, 2020

(Yes, they are our friends, they totally said hi to Mitch once at BlizzCon, he claimed).

In general, it’s not great to feel ‘forced’ to do things, but often if you take a step back and look at the your cost/benefit of doing a single task, it becomes very clear whether it’s worth your time. I’ve found that this also makes doing chores IRL more bearable — it usually takes me less than 10 minutes to do all my dishes, but more than 20 to fold a load of laundry and put it away. In this case, the actual benefit is remarkably not great. Feel free to skip it.

Speaking of skipping things…

This is one aspect where I’m truly cursed, because I started off patch 8.3 with a BM Hunter at like, 390 ilevel. Even though my gear is held together with scotch tape and wishes, Rutherford Bear Hayes rips through everything in his path and can live through 5-pulls pretty easily. I nearly clinched killing Thrall on my first go, and probably would have if I paid attention to get out of that conal attack thing he does that strips Sanity.

I plan on getting my new Vulpera Rogue up and active eventually, plus the Undead Priest I’ve been playing for the Blizzard Watch stream (though this week we’re doing more 8.3 stuff), and I am absolutely dreading the thought of attempting… honestly nearly anything with either of those two classes in comparison. I’ll do it, but man is it going to be rough.

I’m also running up against the overall issue with MMOs. I recently got Hello, Neighbor which looks really fun, and I’ve been intending to try The Forest since I like The Long Dark so much, plus we’ve got Girl Scouts this weekend and plans to grab coffee with the in-laws, not to mention the Overwatch Lunar New Year event. A couple hours worth of dailies — or more! — every day really puts a damper on doing literally anything else. I’m still trying to play catch-up with the older reps so I can unlock Vulpera and finish Pathfinder for flight. I don’t see myself having the time to invest to work on alt cloaks for the foreseeable future.

And with THAT said…

I don’t feel like I’m a hardcore WoW loyalist anymore. My sub is currently 3-month recurring, and if I’m not playing I’ll just shut it off.

For me it’s rare that there’s a line in the sand, as opposed to just waning disinterest. I tend to get less invested when things have a heavy group-oriented focus and more into it when I can find solo activities that I don’t have to be incredibly hands-on with (see: pet battles). Sometimes I’ll get very invested in another title which kinda pushes WoW by the wayside, and WoW also has the issue where, if I do that, it’s really tough to get back into it.

I’ve been fumbling my way back into WoW for a couple months now. I played for roughly two months after the expansion hit, and then life happened and I wasn’t in a headspace to continue the grind, opting for solo games I could pause if I needed to go AFK. When I came back in late November of this year, I didn’t expect to go from a standing start to finished with the expansion in a week, but despite earnestly trying to clear a few dailies for every rep every day — a whole time investment in and of itself — I’m still barely Honored with a couple that I need to finish up Pathfinder. It’s really, really discouraging, especially in places like Nazjatar where everything takes me tons of time to fight my way to and navigate around, and then people just swoop down from the sky to grab the doodad or quest mob I was after. The problem compounds itself. It’s especially weird to see all these gear catch up mechanisms and yet I’m still gaining 75 rep per quest turn in.

So nah, there’s no big ultimatum for me with expansions, but if I’m not into it, it gets real tough to get into it.

I think it’s a little of both. I don’t think that, in an expansion that features Titanic creation as heavily as BfA, you can discount this whole Curse of Flesh business from back in the day. Mechagnomes tie into that theme and this expansion perfectly. Earthen seem to be mostly just an alternate Dwarfy skin, but Mechagnomes have been fairly different from Gnomes since Mimiron and all his helpers up in Storm Peaks.

I feel like the two arose together in some ways. Mechagnomes are a natural fit for an Allied Race, and the expansion’s theme.

I do feel like the concept of Void Elves was kinda thrown in there as a way to give Alliance High Elves without really giving them High Elves (because Ion said that one time, etc). Void Elves get especially sketchy when you throw in the fact that they were already actively working on BfA with N’Zoth’s void-fueled mayhem as the big bad.

First of all, same.

It seems like the majority of the ghosts on Azeroth are interrupted in some way, many of them unaware they’re even dead. Little Pamela, for instance, or all the Highborne in Nazjatar. They’re still doing what they did in life, so they don’t go to their final rest. Admiral Taylor is unique, in that after the quest he knows he’s dead. It’s possible that by that time the machinations of death were already broken, so that could be why he didn’t go to his rest. However after that quest it seems like he still has some degree of unfinished business, and he’s using you as a proxy for that until he can rest. Little Pamela was unable to rest until her father’s name was cleared, even though she didn’t know it.

Oh, and by the way, I’m pretty sure that canonically Little Pamela is in super hell now, so have a great Tuesday!