The Queue: We’re home

Hey guys, guess which Covenant I picked.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions, and we’re finally in our natural habitat so we don’t mind taking a while to sit down and answer.

I started on my second character already — my Undead Priest destined for Bastion — and she went Campaign, for a number of reasons.

Up til now I used this character for two things, mostly. She did a lot of herbalism for me, and she’s an enchanter (mostly disenchanter). I actually leveled her up almost entirely via Herbalism last expansion, and then just kept… herbaling, which is a word, I assure you. When she arrived in the intro sequence in The Maw — which all characters have to re-do before they’re allowed to opt in to Threads of Fate — her ilvl was sitting around 45. Things were bleaker there than usual, believe it or not.

I took her Campaign because I need — no really, I need — her to get gear, and cutting off an extra path to do so as a lowbie doesn’t make sense. I’d planned initially to do a lot of dungeons with her, but her gear is so bad that seems unfair to whatever pugs get stuck with her.

From what I understand, the current leveling “meta” is to take the Campaign to level 59.999, then go back to Oribos and take Threads of Fate before you level up so you don’t have to continue to punch your way through vampires in Revendreth after you hit cap — the option to take Threads of Fate disappears when you hit level 60.

Threads of Fate isn’t any faster than the Campaign, and you have the disadvantage of not being on the rails of the questing path, so it’s a bit less guided and more random. If you choose Threads, the Campaign questline is ripped out completely, so it’s not like you can skip it through Maldraxxus and pick it back up in Ardenweald, or just pick your way through the story beats you like and avoid that one quest you think is a drag — it basically marks all the quests from the Campaign as fully completed, and there’s no going back.

I feel like certain parts of the storyline can be affected greatly by the context in which you experience them, and that may be coloring your perception here.

(this answer will contain spoilers for a lot of stuff)

When I first went through the Bastion storyline in the beta, it was a surprise when Uther showed up. We knew he was dead, obviously, but we didn’t know yet who we were going to meet up with from Azeroth — I expected Tirion Fordring to show up there for sure. It was even more of a surprise that Uther was the one who showed up to the secret meeting with Nikolon. Surprise turned to shock as you realized that he’s a bad guy — no wait, maybe the Kyrian are the bad guys — in the space of a sentence or two. Who did this? How could Uther be swayed to the side of the Mawsworn?

But if you’re playing through the storyline for the first time now, you have the added context of the Afterlives short. You know Uther is going to be there at some point, and you know his injury from Frostmourne shook the Paragon of Loyalty so deeply she strayed from her duty and took him with her. You were expecting him, and expecting him to be bad, and… there he is. Welp. Next story beat, please.

Every zone had a somewhat memorable twist, some of which were spoiled in Afterlives, but all of which only hit home if you bought in to the narrative of that separate zone. The story overall to this point is much more about set dressing and establishing who these people are than they are our existing stories or the overarching plot. We’ll get more soon, too… if you’re Night Fae, for instance, you may have noticed that next week when the Renown cap moves and we’re allowed to progress the Campaign, we’ll get to see… something… about the Night Warrior.

They’re definitely doling out the story beats more slowly, and I dig it. It’s not like previous expansions where we got all the story in the first few hours and then just ground out gear until the next patch.

I’ll also add that none of the cinematics were there in the beta, so for me there was this weird lowkey intrigue in every zone. In Bastion Vesiphone tells you a whole lot about how you can’t speak to the Archon directly but she’s totally fine and real, you just can’t see her personally right now because she… goes to another school. In Canada. It seems kind of silly now, but since you only ever see the Archon in content which was unavailable, the narrative they intended — you’re kind of an unimportant slob beneath her notice — took on a totally weird twist. It’s all about the context.

My personal least favorite are the ones with multiple steps.

I usually don’t do all the World Quests and pick and choose based on both rewards and objectives. When I get to one and it’s all, “kill 10 dudes,” it’s great! No weird streaky drop rates, no bizarre mechanics to forget to do when you opponent is “weakened”, just make Rutherford bite em, good bear, done. But then the next part of the quest kicks in and my will to live instantly starts fading. This especially goes for the ones that I can feel coming, where there’s a named NPC in the middle of the area that I know I’m going to have to kill, and conspicuously placed doodads I know I’m going to have to deal with as soon as I finish killing these ten dudes. Let me kill ten dudes with one stone, y’know?

Scroll of Elchaver.

Nothing else even comes close. I haven’t seen it in the live game yet, but it is the best ability ever.