The Queue: Panic at the disco

It’s been a really long week, but instead of dwelling on that, let’s answer some questions.

We’ve had Kraken, Mammoth, Raven, and Dragon so far, which doesn’t seem to have much rhyme or reason to it. Kraken started out with Whispers of the Old Gods, but there was nothing terribly kraken-like from there. I don’t feel like there was a single mammoth in the whole Year of the Mammoth, which took us to Un’goro, Icecrown, and into some random catacombs. Year of the Raven started with the spooky Witchwood, which seems to suit the raven theme, but then we went into Dr. Boom’s aptly named Boomsday Project and Rastakhan’s Rumble. And the Year of the Dragon didn’t have any real dragon focus until the very end with Descent of Dragons.

What I’m saying is that it could be literally anything with just the faintest tie to the actual year’s content. Or no tie to the actual year’s content! Anything!

All that said, I’m voting unicorn.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether there was a class that I enjoyed every spec on. And in picking over my experience with every class, I realized that … no, the game does not have a class like that. I always have a favorite spec, and sometimes a second that’s okay.

But frankly if I want to switch, I’m more likely to switch classes than specs. I already play my favorite spec, so why would I want to switch to second best? If I’m not happy, I’m probably going to make a straight up grass-is-always-greener jump elsewhere.

There’s no reason not to. Hearthstone can be an expensive timesink, but Battlegrounds don’t cost anything. You don’t need any cards. You don’t need any deckbuilding experience. You can just log on and play.

If you think it looks cool, download the client through your Batle.net app (or via the app store on your Android or iOS device). If you don’t like it, you’re only out some time.

It’s always going to be Deadwind Pass for me.

When the game launched, there was no raid in the zone. It was simply a gray, desolate space full of dead trees (some with corpses hanging from them). There were no quests and no real reason to be there beyond getting out again. It was a dead space in every sense of the word, and it was ominous to walk through.

If you really wanted to explore, you could sneak into the Karazhan crypts, where you could find even more corpses with piles of skeletons and bodies chained under water.

Today, there are things to do in Deadwind Pass, but it hasn’t lost any of its foreboding nature. Walking into the zone today doesn’t feel all that different than it did 15 years ago.

Engineering is a multi-discipline affair that requires known-how of all of the different sciences, depending on one’s particular interest. So obviously a Gnomish school would focus on math and science, training the designers of the future.

But the sciences don’t exist in a vacuum. Designing gadgets means you have to recognize problems that a new gadget might be able to fix, and once you’ve spotted the problem, you need to come up with creative solutions to it. And that’s where a broad study of art and culture comes into play. You never know what bit of knowledge might spark an idea, and the curious minds of Gnomes want to know everything.

He’s a goblin (albeit an extremely polite one), continually juggling money just so he can loan more out to the poor, desperate homeowners out there.

However, I’m not sure WoW has the perfect class for Tom just yet. Maybe ehe’s a charismatic bard or a careful diplomat, but it’s hard to say he’s a heavily-armored warrior or a deadly hunter.

So there’s precisely one-half of an answer to your question. You all are going to have to DIY the rest.

And that’s all, my friends. May next week be better than this week.