The Queue: Day 5 of Social Distancing

I hit the grocery store for the last time early on Thursday morning to pick up a couple vital medications, a gallon of milk, and some candy which is currently hidden from everyone in the house, including me because I forgot where I hid it. I looked into doing musicals on stream but that’s kind of a no-go, because aside from limited medleys you still need to pay for performance rights on everything newer than Pirates of Penzance. My four year old is also incredibly unimpressed by my belting skills. Maybe I’ll learn the ukelele with my daughter’s plastic 4-string Minnie Mouse guitar? I just superglued my fingers together, so that might be a no-go too.

No, I’m fine, it’s fine, everything’s fine, it’s fine. It can’t be that hard to cut your own bangs, right?

This is The Queue! Please wash your hands before asking us questions, which we’ll answer from way, way over here.

I accidentally got the Time Lost Proto Drake in November 2008, because I was one of literally two people on my server at level cap. I was farming for leather in Storm Peaks to grind up leatherworking, and thought to myself, “hey, I bet that random dragon up there has some.” He only dropped two. I was mad.

But because he was introduced much later, I’ve failed to find Loque’nahak to tame him. There are ways to ‘trick’ sharding — is it layering now? does it matter? — but I’ve never been able to find him, regardless of how busy servers are or where we are in terms of expansion lulls. I’m not sure there ever is a good time to go back to old content for rares like that. On the upside, this also means there’s no bad time!

Sharks are the natural enemies of anything that goes in the water.

Especially you.

I feel like there’s a sort of odd push-pull between collectors trying to get the geegaw and developers trying to extend the life of the content. On the one hand, the fact that we have transmog, pets, and mounts to hunt has extended the life of old instances well beyond the wildest dreams of the Classic devs. On the other hand, every time RNG doesn’t grant its favor that’s another week they’ve bought themselves. Though running one particular old raid doesn’t take too terribly long, if you’re interested in a mail piece from here and a cloth piece from there and then the staff from this other place, it can really add up, to say nothing of the people who run multiple alts for open pool drops like mounts or pets.

I do think a universal token could have merit, but I feel like the cap of three would feel incredibly restrictive for old content — even though right now there’s no option to do so at all. It’s better than nothing, but.

I will say that beyond anything else, the level cap (N+10) model of Personal Loot for last-tier’s raids has to go. This is only slightly influenced by the fact that there are very few Hunter sets worth pursuing, and one of them is Nighthold (which is still Personal). You should really be able to go farm the bosses of the previous expansion for transmog without having an even bigger hurdle to contend with.

Nope! Have fun storming the temple!

We do have a major Hearthstone announcement coming today! It is a huge surprise, despite Hearthstone influencers making reference to it for the past month and the teaser from the Hearthstone Twitter yesterday, and a couple accidental broken press embargoes! Actually it may have gone live by the time the Queue does, but regardless, that’ll be a fun thing!

Considering everything in my state is literally closed until after the first week in April, we can give it a week to breathe. Space it out a big. We’ll probably be Animal Crossing Watch for about a week after Friday, and then we’ll start clamoring for a Shadowlands playable preview in earnest.

Actually, I bet I could write a song about it on the ukelele by then!