The Queue: A day ending in Y

I don’t think it’s a hot take to say that Stormwind is just the worst.

I think my feelings can be summed up in a single word: ugh.

But okay, in seriousness I’ve been dragged through visions (with masks!) on both my Alliance and Horde characters this week. It’s something my characters are in no way geared for, so mostly I followed along behind and died a lot. (With thanks to Cory and Mitch for dragging me along and resurrecting me a bunch.)

I will go back to doing visions without needing to be dragged through next week, when Orgrimmar returns.

Mostly it just feels like a grind with a rather disjointed difficulty level. Orgrimmar and Stormwind are such different challenge levels, but offer identical rewards. As I tend to squeeze in soloing time at odd hours when most of my friends aren’t around, skipping Stormwind week just makes sense.

Which brings me back to my initial point: ugh.

It is with a heavy heart that I say this, but I think the next patch is going to be 9.0. And by then, Essences and the other quality of life improvements we care about now just won’t matter. They’re looking ahead to Shadowlands and Battle for Azeroth is winding down.

Ask Mr. Robot actually just added that! So head over and let it do the hard work of figuring out what the heck to do with your gear.

Skip it. You can thank me for this sage time-saving advice later.

I do think we’ll get a BlizzCon late this year, per usual. That’s a lot of time to get this virus under control, and I certainly hope it won’t be a serious public health threat for that long. But even if coronavirus remains a concern, it would be an interesting time for Blizzard to throw a virtual BlizzCon. A lot of us do a virtual convention anyway, watching from home, and though it wouldn’t have the glam of a standard BlizzCon it could still have all the exciting info.

So, early early early BlizzCon predictions. I think Shadowlands will be out before BlizzCon, which would mean news on patch 9.1. I think release dates for Overwatch 2 and Diablo 4. If you take the philosophy that BlizzCon has “on” years and “off” years, this would be an off year. It doesn’t feel like any big new game announcements are likely to be on the agenda — but I expect some release dates and new content.

Should you go or should you skip? I’ve honestly been having a pretty good time skipping lately — I do miss seeing my friends in person, but I don’t miss the stress and cost of travel.

Well, I hadn’t thought about it before but I am now. It feels like it would have been something new, whereas Warlords was a retread of everything we already knew. On one hand, that gave Warlords a lot of story weight (at least for people who knew the lore, i.e. not me), while the Mongrel Horde would have had to build more, and give us reasons to care. Late in the expansion cycle, the new and novel has a lot of appeal, so now I’m definitely thinking about the Mongrel Horde.

Usually, though, I think about the World of Warcraft we might have had if we’d never done the Burning Crusade quests to cheer Garrosh up and convince him he can be a leader. In the long run, I have a lot of regrets about that quest chain.

I’m hoping for something new. Come on, undead, surprise us!

You know, despite all of this — just imagine here that I am making a gesture to indicate this whole website thingy — there’s a lot that I just don’t pay a lot of attention to. It’s nice sometimes to just stumble into things in the game without knowing it all in advance, and though I can’t usually do that, I don’t always pay a lot of attention to things before they’re right in front of me.

So my knowledge insofar as Covenants is… there is one that is definitely evil, one that is definitely good, one for Druids, and also a fourth one. The system seems like Class Halls 2.0 to me, and since I liked Class Halls and the stories that went with them, I’m looking forward to the unique stories Covenants will bring, too.

And with my exhaustive knowledge of the subject, there’s a pretty good chance that the stories are going to surprise me. Hopefully in a good way.

That’s all for now, friends. Be kind to each other, hug your pets, and have a good weekend.