The Queue: this is fine.

We’re on week four of de facto crisis homeschooling, and yesterday I basically just let my daughter watch Nailed It for most of the day, and today I’m writing The Queue as quickly as possible so she can commandeer my computer for a Zoom meeting with her class. So I guess you could say I’m nailing it.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we stave off existential dread for just long enough to answer them. Just long enough.

If I don’t get the proper back transmog on the proper characters what’s even the point, honestly.

I will say that as a… less numbers-focused player, it can be very difficult to parse what the heck is going on without seeking out those extra sources. Sometimes tooltips will be helpful and intuitive, and sometimes they’re a little more vague. An example I had to contend with recently was the level 15 Priest talents. Fortress of the Mind is spelled out in percentages, and Shadow Word: Void is straightforward but requires a bit of thinking to compare it against the others as opposed to just regular Mind Blast (which it replaces). The issue is with the talent Shadowy Insight, which tells you it has a ‘chance’ to reset the cooldown on Mind Blast and make it instant when Shadow Word: Pain deals DoT damage. Depending on what ‘chance’ means that could either be underwhelming or vastly overpowered.

Most of the abilities we’ve seen thus far seem somewhat straightforward, but some of them seem markedly less so. It’ll be interesting to see how these new abilities shape encounter design — even if they’re limited to non-dungeon/raid settings, there’s always a loophole like Reckoning Bomb.

I doubt it. Having it in place already was a fairly generous gift in the first place, and with the uncertainty of the world right now, it’s hard to say when it would be appropriate to stop it if they just keep it going. It does make a useful bridge for the leveling squish, but it seems weird to just keep it going until 9.0.

If they want to extend it, they should either make a ‘new’ XP buff with different perks (maybe a 50% XP, 50% rep boost?), or link it to Twitch Drops and make people watch Shadowlands beta streams in order to gain a day here, a day there. Not that I personally would enjoy that, but have you seen the numbers on Valorant right now?

Nah, WoD is in a separate but adjacent timeline in the past. After we left Ashran to go on to the next thing, those vendors had a long, happy life without much conflict, and they all slowly died of natural causes.

I almost always very carefully study the other people who are playing my class, because transmog. I like to see what the trends are!

I will say that in LFR/LFG raids I pay close attention to the meters, less because I want to top them — because either I’m playing BM Hunter and it’s easy mode or because I’m playing MW Monk and it’s impossible — but to scope out their ratios and uptime. It’s definitely possible they’re just noobs, especially with that low HOT uptime, but sometimes it also shows me ways I could improve.