The Queue: Monday-est Tuesday ever.

Don’t mind us, we’re just farming a few raids for pets and transmog before the ol weekly reset tomorrow and– what do you mean it’s today? Ugh, why didn’t you warn me?

This is The Queue, and while I get my bearings we’ll answer a few questions.

Well it’s a chocolate muffin and you’re a dog, so you can’t have any anyway.

Let it be slowly reclaimed by the sea. Teldrassil was corrupted deep down because the elves were trying to rebuild a World Tree without the blessing of Elune, so rebuilding it again on such a thoroughly cursed foundation would be the worst kind of hubris. If a tree miraculously takes root on its own that’s different, but even then I’d rather it be left alone because again, it would be wildly, wildly cursed.

Leaving the whole mess be opens the door for yet another haunted Elven underwater zone in 2035, but I’m okay with that.

To keep you playing until the next thing comes out.

If a Thing has a 1% drop rate, that means that roughly 1 in 100 kills will drop The Thing. That sounds like a whole lot of kills — it is a whole lot of kills! — but 100 days of a kill per day starting right now puts us sometime in late May. Now, I don’t really have any kind of inside track or source within Blizzard, but if Shadowlands is fully released by the end of May I will literally eat the Blizzard Watch hoodie I have coming in the mail sometime next week. The fact that you have to wait around in-game, increasing social ties and pressure with guildmates by chatting while you wait, is just a bonus to keep you engaged. You can’t quit, you have to run an M+ with Jovan after this rare spawns!

RNG is a Skinner Box, where the biological reward is dopamine, the lever is killing rares, and you’re the rat.

The cinematic alone put me at hype level 3,000… but that was 4 months ago.

I am glad that we’ll have a true city hub for everyone to suffer through equally (Dazaralor knows what it did). I freaking love survival games and roguelikes so I’m really looking forward to Torghast — as long as I don’t have to grind geegaws for the privilege of trying my hand at it (Horrific Visions know what they did). As someone who generally only runs a couple characters I’m kind of annoyed that it looks like I’ll have to run a minimum of four through some degree of endgame content to get all the goodies from the four Covenants (Order Halls know what they did). I’m also annoyed that it seems like I won’t be able to transmog a different set of cloak-wings if the mood strikes me, even if I ground it out on a different character already (cross-faction restrictions know what they did).

In general as long as they don’t mess with my bear Rutherford too hard my Hunter will still be fun to play, so I’m not too worried about having fun in that aspect. I do tend to check out mentally though, the more junk there is to grind out in a self-driven fashion, so we’ll see how long I stay invested. Honestly, life’s too short and there are way too many good video games out there to keep trying to shove a square player into a round rep grind.

And though it wouldn’t fit the Shadowlands per se, y’all know the one thing I always hope they’d add: player housing. Also, some slightly less awful looking Hunter transmog would be nice.