The Queue: What will become of the spooked Brutosaurs and their cargo?
When BFA is over and most of the game’s players are living it up in the Shadowlands, what do you think will happen to all of the spooked Brutosaurs and their cargo? Will Dazar’alor run out of supplies from all the destroyed cargo? Will the city become overrun with spooked Brutosaurs? Azeroth must know!
Anyhow, while you ponder the fate of NPCs left without player help, let’s Queue, eh?
Did someone find life on Mercury? If not, what are we waiting for?
As long as humans like to compete, and math is involved, min-maxing will be a thing.
QftMitch: What’s your third-favorite dinosaur?
Saurolophus.
Speaking of dinosaurs, does it strike anyone else as ironic that of all the druid flight forms, the trolls’ are the only two that aren’t dinosaurs?
Wait, don’t Zandalari Druids use a Pterrordax? That said, I do find it a bit ironic that we have so many birds and then Trolls are all, “Nope. We can do better.”
Q4tQ: Are Shadow Priests the baddies? I phrase it like that because of inconsistencies in Blizzard’s own writing, even recently. The lore behind Shadow was pretty minimal until Legion, but since then we’ve seen Locus Walker and Alleria describe the Void as a source of great power that requires immense mental strength to control without succumbing to it. Now we have a more recent reversal like in the recent novel, where one priest is mocked when they start to call on the Void, being taunted about “slipping” and that they “will serve well”. People have been analyzing this scene as the priest having “a moment of weakness”, as if it is a forgone conclusion “Void=bad”.
Obviously whatever direction Blizzard chooses won’t affect players, they would never remove the spec, but do you think they are ever going become consistent on whether or not all Shadow Priests are doomed to eventually fall to madness? More importantly what is the impression that you Queue readers have about Shadow? Do you view it as flat out morally wrong for a class to attempt to use the same power as the Void Lords and Old Gods?
I don’t think Shadow Priests are the baddies, no. We’ve done questionable things for seemingly good ends, but I don’t feel like we’ve done anything as outright bad as Death Knights did in their Legion campaigns. But because their actions were more character-level bad and less “calls upon the Big Bads themselves” bad, it didn’t really stick around as a facet of their class.
Will Blizzard ever really acknowledge this? I’m starting to think they won’t. Sure, we’ll get lore characters like Alleria and the Locus Walker, but I feel like Blizzard’s been neglected actual Shadow Priests in favor of making Priests all about the Light when it comes to in-game lore advocating for Priests to be one thing or another. I hope I’m wrong, but it really does feel like Blizzard neglects that Shadow side of Priests when it comes to most Priest-centric lore.
Personally, no. I think it’s fun! And like I said before, it’s used as a means to an end — and that end is rarely to do something in service of evil. Sometimes we’re tricked, and sometimes we choose to do something sketchy… but it’s not such a binary approach to magic, and I appreciate that.
The fresh Queue smell
Q4TQ: What is your favorite version of shadow priest that has existed? I am partial to Clarity of Power dotweaving in MoP
I think Burning Crusade’s version of Shadow will always be my favorite. There hasn’t really been an expansion since where I’ve felt so useful as a class in a raid, and that was a really nice feeling. It also felt like a fantastic extension of the Vanilla Shadow experience that didn’t fundamentally change the class. I’m not saying spec upheavals are a bad thing — but at the time, it felt like a really graceful shift from a largely solo/PVP spec to a must-have raid spec without taking things away we’d had before.
My second-favorite iteration of Shadow is probably Warlords of Draenor’s. Not necessarily because I loved the playstyle the most, but because I loved what Blizzard did with talents. Our final tier basically gave us three sub-specs that completely changed our playstyle. We had a more classic approach, a single-target/DOT-less approach, and an approach that more heavily emphasized us as a DOT class. And among all that craziness, players will managed to invent DOT Weaving, which separated the goods from the greats. It was a really interesting time, and even if it wasn’t perfect, I loved it for the willingness to experiment it represented.
Q4tQ: Will Mitch post later on asking for more questions? If so, does someone want to ask him what he thinks about the big batch of Shadow changes coming in the next beta update?
To which MusedMoosesaid… I was planning to ask him if nobody else did. Because I love seeing the Queue writers rant about what they love.
Which prompted Eno to say… That reminds me, I need to ask a question regarding things he loves.
And then Kalcheus the Fluffy revealed his evil plan: Nooooo, I was hoping no one would ask him so he’d be forced to stifle his opinion!
I didn’t actually need to ask for more questions this time! Good job, y’all! I’m so proud <3 Also, someone did ask me about my opinion (more on that below).
I’m glad you appreciate when I talk about Shadow, because I can definitely talk about it a lot. But I have no idea what Eno wanted to ask. Maybe Kal reached Eno and stopped the question from ever being asked… Classic Kyle.
In case nobody actually says it:
Q4tQ: Mitch, what do you think of the new shadow priest changes?
Personally, I like them. Ever since Legion, it’s felt like the spec is focused around doing One Big Thing – hitting Voidform and keeping it going as long as possible. I am terrible at that One Big Thing, so it’s felt like I’ve been unable to properly shadow priest for two expansions. I’m looking forward to re-learning the spec and hopefully feeling like I can be decent at it again.
I’m cautiously optimistic about them. I’ve been wanting a larger overhaul for a while now, and Blizz has delivered just that. So that’s a really solid step in the right direction.
Mechanically, I only did a little testing on some target dummies, but it does still feel like it needs work. With the way it works now, Insanity feels like a pointless resource, to be quite honest. You use it every 1.5 minutes to activate Void Form, and you use it to cast Devouring Plague. It feels like its only purpose right now is to help you cast more Devouring Plagues while Void Form is active, and there’s definitely a more graceful way to do that interaction. Heck, we used to have Shadow Orbs as a mechanic of casting Devouring Plague, and that feels like it would fit a lot better here.
It also feels like the spec has potential to become too overwhelming and create a big gap between the top players and the average ones. That analysis completely depends on theorycrafting — e.g., maybe it doesn’t make sense to DOT three targets with Devouring Plague, even if you can — but I found myself getting a little lost about what I should be doing during Void Form and how many targets it would take to min/max the new Mind Blast procs. Again, theorycrafting will likely come up with specific numbers on what exactly to do with your resources, but for a casual player, it does feel like it could be a bit much.
Keep in mind, this is all based on like 20 minutes in front of a target dummy, and it’s largely with me trying to multi-DOT. Single-target feels a bit smoother, albeit with a heavy emphasis on Devouring Plague damage (it did more than 30% of my total). All in all, though, the changes are a really solid first step — now they just need some refinement.
Resurgences are common, in music, in fashion. Suddenly, the 80s are “in” again. Then it’s the 90s. Etc.
Q4TQ: do you think we’ll ever see a resurgence of old memes? What if, 10 years from now, everyone is hooked on Nyan Cat or trollface or FFFFFFFUUUUUU-?
This is actually a really interesting question that I hadn’t thought about. I certainly agree that trends seem to cycle, but memes are also sort of their own beast. If anything, it feels more likely that older things will become new memes. For instance, a random clip from a 90s show resurfaces and suddenly everyone’s memeing it.
Who knows, though! It’ll be something to keep an eye on for sure.
Q4tQ: What do you do with your Seasonal D3 characters after the season expires?
With apologies to those characters, absolutely nothing.
That’s all for today! I hope you all have a great Thursday and nothing crazy happens.
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