The Queue: I’m sleeping, don’t bother me.

It definitely isn’t Tuesday, so I can just sleep in and be cute. It’s my brand.

What’s that? It is Tuesday after all, so I have to panic write the Queue? Sounds like a plan! Make sure to leave some Qs for the next cuddly creature, and we’ll get to some As.

I have one of the Deviate Scale recipes on my Hunter. Unlike nearly anything else I sell on the AH on a regular basis, if I sell it, I’ll never see one again. But I’ve had it so long I don’t want to just SELL it. But I can’t just learn it, it’s worth hundreds of thousands of gold! And it keeps gaining value the longer it sits in there!

So now it just sits in the purgatory of my bank. It’s not like it took me so long to bake it, it’s just sitting there in the rain.

Meh.

Like the other commenters pointed out, it’s pretty likely that the behavior reactions of NPCs is somewhat hardcoded, in addition to being pretty OP in a lot of ways. Can you imagine, just as a single example, letting some people have both sets of flight paths? On the basis of that alone there would be no reason to roll anything else. But then you’d have to do the same thing for every NPC in the game from every expansion. They’d have to determine how every murloc in Stranglethorn Vale reacts to this new faction. Every dog in Boralus. Every unique named individual in Dalaran. You can’t just make like Allied Races and tick the box that says everything reacts to this race the same way they do for any Horde player character. You’d have to create a completely new faction condition from scratch. Just thinking about it has me feeling overwhelmed and I wouldn’t have to do any of it.

I will say that I find it a little silly at this point that in literally every single expansion and Vanilla, at one point or another we’ve done the whole “enemy of my enemy is my friend” bit and united to face our common foe. While in expansions like Legion this was front and center most of the time, even in expansions like Battle for Azeroth where we were at each others’ throats we still got the “ooh, we’re working together now, but like, covertly, because of the real threat” canard.

So, from a story point, sure. But from a logistics standpoint, that’s a gordian knot I doubt we’ll ever see untied.

Uh, sort of.

Confession time: In this year of our lord, April 21st, I still can’t fly on Draenor. Still. The only thing keeping me back is a single rep in Tanaan Jungle, where you have to go grind catpeople. At level, I could never find a group. Now that we’re outleveled it still seems packed, and even with shared tap because we’re all level 120 it’s rare to land a shot on more than a mob or two before you’re waiting on respawns. With this new buff, it’s essentially now or never for me, and I know that if I don’t do it now I’m basically never going back to Draenor. Flying isn’t totally necessary for me, but if it’s a choice between an expansion where I can fly and an expansion where I can’t (especially since that expansion is Warlords of Frickin Draenor), I’ll pass.

But man do I not want to spend time in a jungle one-shotting cat people.

It’s a struggle.

So, “alpha is alpha; things change” disclaimer, but in my experience thus far Torghast is more like a dungeon (you can do it with up to four people, I believe) than anything else. There is no timer, either in fact or essence. I intentionally chose the class I was least familiar with to poke around in there (uh… what did they do with Soul Shards though?) and screwed around for an afternoon, and even in between getting an orange for my son, and then editing a post, and maybe taking some screenshots, answering questions on Discord, I was just idling away in between killing a mob or two here or there. Like dungeons there seem to be patrols so you do have to pay attention to where you’re going AFK, but there’s no Sanity mechanic or tight DPS race. The only real failure is death, and even there you get three chances before the Tarragrue comes for you. The Tarragrue is the failure mechanic, but instead of just ending your run immediately like the previous examples, you can potentially outrun it… for now. Given my experience it seems like it’s there to let you know your run is at an end, and to spend out the currency you’ve earned that run and get out. You’ll only encounter the Tarragrue if you start idling from the point you have those three deaths — or if you decide to get cheeky and keep going.

That said, yeah, I think it’ll be that variety of necessary-but-not-necessary you were talking about. This seems like it’s going to be a central feature for this expansion, and due to its dungeon-y nature, coupled with the fact that its replay value is upped because it’s procedurally generated, it’s a pretty good bet that we’ll be coming back to this well repeatedly for currencies and other thingamabobs. I would caution you on writing it off completely before you’ve given it a try or two yourself, though.

Every damn time, my answer is going to be player housing. Every time.

I want to have to go farm ICC for some cool spikes to ward off thieves, and SoO for other, slightly warmer spikes. I want to upgrade from a tiny wagon in Voldun to a manor house in the middle of Dalaran. I want a tiny place that I can hang that Onyxia head or put my particularly interesting Archaeology solves. The Garrison was close, but no cigar.

These big expansion features are somewhat intended to be scrapped and iterated on. I’m not sure that a whole lot more work went into every piece of the Garrison than went into each raid on the same tier, for instance (though clearly, it did not “cost us a raid tier”) and I still visit my Garrisons pretty regularly — the herbs and ore still sell well enough for a trip, but don’t let anyone know I told you that. It does seem like they’re moving into content which is more evergreen, particularly with the evolution we’re seeing in how they’re changing leveling for this expansion, but I don’t think that they truly intended for us to still be hanging out in our Order Halls much once that expansion is over. Heck, I wouldn’t be in Legion content at all right now if I didn’t have a Dalaran hearthstone and a penchant for some of that Suramar transmog.

But if I got to design my own house back in MoP I’d probably still be there right now.

That’s not a bug — that’s a feature.