The Queue: Time for a makeover!

No, no, not me of course. I’m fabulous. But you… are you sure you aren’t ready to update that hairstyle just a little?

This is The Queue, where we answer the questions you ask and then wait until the servers come up on patch 9.0!

We could absolutely throw talent trees in the bin.

The talent system as a whole is kind of odd. It seems to be designed to allow you to mold your character in the way you want, but in practice a vast majority of those talents get essentially no play at all. There are always some talents that are downright non-negotiables, whether they alter an existing ability in a way to make it powerful, or add an activated ability that suddenly becomes the center of a spec’s rotation. This has always been the case — if you play a DPS Priest but don’t take the 31-point Shadowform talent you were flat out doing it wrong, even though it’s what you felt in your heart of hearts or whatever.

In order to accomplish this, we could just… not have them. Let the developers design a spec in full without making power assumptions on the convergence of talent X plus talent Y (but if they take Z instead, they could…). I get that this is probably a controversial opinion, but honestly talent trees strike me as similar to that 6 morrowgrain I still have in the bank. I don’t need it, it’s a throwback — but if I don’t have it anymore, well, I won’t have it anymore! You can see why it’s a dilemma.

For me, BFA draws parallels to Classic, which I’m saying mostly because I want a do-over on Pandaria. Leveling an alt through Halfhill especially is such a nostalgia bomb, and comparing it to BFA doesn’t seem like much of a fit for me besides the Horde vs Alliance conflict. It’s a bit closer if you mostly played Alliance, but the dino jungle experience on Horde-side in BFA is completely different from Pandaria in a lot of ways. Maybe I just want tan expansion where a good amount of the endgame is centered around mouthwatering noodles. It’s possible.

I’m not sure we can get to a “Cataclysm redux” just because that expansion was so defined by worldwide upheaval. Or maybe, more accurately, I’m not sure a change like the one we saw in Cataclysm is worth the dev cost. While it seemed necessary at the time, sacrificing more endgame stuff in order to get a new, dynamic leveling experience didn’t really pan out as I’d hoped — even though it’s pretty funny to watch Garrosh pitch a dude off a cliff because he didn’t live up to the Horde standard for honor and glory.

Oddly, I feel like the one thing that really punctuated a lot of Cataclysm was something we got quite a bit of in BFA — the heavy emphasis on time travel and catastrophic prophesied futures.

Going into Shadowlands, I’m really trying to focus on my main character, and one alt per faction, so I can get all those Covenant goodies. My Hunter tends to be my main and the first character I go to for a number of reasons. I can solo almost anything with her, and while Hunters do benefit from gear, they aren’t quite as hard up with that first spate of crappy greens as a class that scales amazingly with gear, like Rogues. I’ll wait on playing my Rogue until there are enough geared up people going about doing their dailies and stuff where I can wait a minute or two and get a bit of ‘help’ with elites. The second character I level will probably be my Priest, because the one thing a Hunter isn’t great at is getting into groups, and I honestly like healing. Bringing up the rear will be my newly rolled Death Knight, because somebody has to do Maldraxxus. I also plan on finally getting my butt in gear and doing all the Legion Order Hall stuff on her for the pets.

I’d say, figure out your Covenant assignments first, then narrow it down based on that. If you have, say, a Paladin and a Priest both headed for Bastion and a Druid going for the Night Bae renown, maybe put one of the two Kyrians on the shelf initially.

First of all, how dare you.

Just before it. It takes a while to ship anything these days, even infected grain.

It’s hard to say, and it probably varies from designer to designer. I do think there are several which were designed as anti-strategies — the last boss of the Gnomeregan battle pet dungeon was pretty clearly designed to stymie the Clawpede strategy, for instance. There also seem to be a few where you really need a per-hit shield like Stoneskin.

Multiplicative buff synergy has always been a bit of an issue, and even though the additive buff will be applied after the multiplicative buff, Clawpede will still be a really strong strategy — for certain battles. The issue with Clawpede isn’t that it’s effective strategy, but that it’s too effective. You can essentially ignore everything else about the battle and just use that to win no matter what family your opponent is in or what their moves are. While I don’t necessarily advocate for making battles hard per se, it’s nice to make it so that a little thought goes into it.

Unfortunately for Cory, as soon as I had the idea of “makeovers” in my head, it became an all-Wicked kind of day. Enjoy your amazing new makeover, instead of dreary who-you-were — well, are.