The Queue: Back in Icecrown

So far, I’ve run around killing a bunch of stuff that was already dead. Just like old times.

This is the Queue. Since it’s Wednesday and the EU should have been in the new content for several hours by the time this goes live, I’m assuming any content that’s a World Quest isn’t spoiler territory at this point. Just as a head’s up, I mention a specific character and his death in today’s Queue.

Yes, I saw the Warrior buffs. Yes, I like them. Yes, I think Fury got more than Arms, and Arms needs some work — not necessarily more damage, but more something. A new ability that’s as cool and fun to use as Rampage would be nice. Rampage feels very Fury — it’s like an explosion of attacks, your Warrior just goes berserk and starts swinging wildly. Arms could use an attack that feels like the Warrior is just dismantling someone with a precise chain of strikes. That’s just my opinion, anyway.

Let’s Queue this. Yes, it’s a dad joke. I have cats.

There is a quest that sends you up to take care of ‘that guy’ but I didn’t get it until later so I ended up having to kill him twice.

This was not a problem for me. I’ve killed him close to 8 times at this point and I’d do it 8 more. Easily. If he was a daily I’d kill him every day.

Also, if you don’t have the quest from the Argent Crusade that sends you to kill him, the cinematic doesn’t play. I found that out the same way. It’s a great cinematic, so I recommend you go kill him some more.

I mean, you’ve hit upon one of the big flaws of inherited monarchy there, sure — you get to be leader because of who your parents were rather than your own merit. But that’s why Varian got to be King, too.

Anduin’s not pure as the driven snow in my opinion, and he was never really shown that way from the beginning — he’s arrogant, proud, willful, completely willing to disregard others because he’s so sure he’s right. He’s young, of course, and that kind of moral certainty is something that comes with youth, but while Anduin is a fundamentally decent person, willing to take risks to pursue what he believes to be the right course of action, there can be no doubt that he’s got character flaws.

It’s interesting in a way that he was juxtaposed against Sylvanas this expansion because the two of them share a certain ruthlessness — a willingness to go further and risk more than others in the achievement of their goals. Anduin’s actions on Pandaria — running away from his Alliance guard, directly placing himself in Garrosh’s path and being gravely injured for it, then later placing himself in the room with Garrosh at his trial — were all born out of a conviction of his own moral correctness and the willingness to impose it. Anduin was so certain of himself, he failed to understand what Garrosh was telling him and was easily manipulated by Wrathion, something he clearly still feels angry about today.

I find Anduin interesting not for what he’s done yet, but what he could do. Varian took advice a lot more readily than Anduin does.

First off, I don’t know about you, but I watched that cinematic and we didn’t kill him, She killed him. And I think her thought process on this subject is the same as mine is — Nathanos is, and always has been, unimportant.

Nathanos is a hound. He is to Sylvanas what those plaguehounds of his are to him. He is not, in and of himself, important. She killed him because he didn’t have anything to offer her, because he wasn’t providing her with anything useful for her goal. Just like she wiped out those plaguehounds and kept walking, she killed Nathanos like the minor obstacle he was and moved on.

Sending him to the Shadowlands means he’ll be, at worst, something she’ll have to step on again on her way. He simply doesn’t matter. Nathanos, since his death and undeath, has never been important himself. His important derived directly from his relationship to Sylvanas and now that she’s basically done with him (the fact that she didn’t tell him to come with her shows you the importance she places on him now, which is to say, none) his suddenly showing up in the Maw will be likely seen by her as irrelevant.

Because the reward comes from a World Quest, you need to be relatively close to him when he dies, so if you release and run back and he dies when you’re just out of ranged you don’t get a drop. I had this experience and had to stay and kill him again on my Dwarf, unrelated to the problem I had killing him twice on my Nelf.

If you die on Nathanos and he’s close to death, just stay there. Don’t release and run back, just wait for him to die and you’ll get your reward.

One hopes not? I mean, their characters might be, but I sincerely hope that the person playing them remains more or less human.

A lot of Burning Crusade dungeons were designed so that you could more easily run back to the entrance when you finished them. It wasn’t applied universally — to my knowledge there’s no shortcut at the end of Shadow Labyrinth, for example, but you can get back pretty fast from Mana Tombs and Sethekk Halls.

I’d like it if that kind of dungeon design was more prevalent — a door opens when you kill the boss and hey, we’re back at the beginning. Doesn’t need to be a teleporter, but I’d be fine with that too.

It’s a very pretty game, I haven’t played it far enough yet to have a deep opinion on it but it’s gorgeous. I feel like the team sort of reinvented stuff from Odyssey that, frankly, worked better there.

The definition of the word ‘Crusade’ has two main meanings in English. One is very specific — the Crusades, the attempts by European Christians to conquer the Holy Land and hold it against the Islam over the course of the 11th to 13th Centuries.

The other is A vigorous campaign for social, political or religious change.

The second would apply to the Argent Crusade. The Scourge didn’t go anywhere. For the past several years, while the Alliance and Horde moved on from Northrend, a hostile army of the undead just sort of milled around Icecrown Glacier and someone had to keep watch against it. While the Crusade did have some success in the Plaguelands, recolonizing some areas, it’s hard to say that the forces of undeath were eradicated or even pushed all that far back.

Now, suddenly they’re in a full fledged resurgence — the Crusaders you work with even point out that they weren’t prepared, that they didn’t have the resources and personnel to deal with this new Scourge eruption. If we view the goal of safeguarding the living from the Scourge as the Crusade’s goal — the change they seek is an end to the threat posed to the living by the restless undead — then it’s a perfectly valid name for their organization.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. Take care, everybody. Tip your wait staff.