The Queue: Three days left!

It’s my final Queue for 2020! It’s hard to believe that we’re almost out of this year. We’re in the final three days, that’s practically nothing — we can do it! Hold on that little bit more and we’ll soon put 2020 in the rearview mirror where it belongs.

Without further ado, it’s time for — the Queue.

I haven’t tried that. I’ve usually preferred to brute force my way through the run. I am a bear after all. But I have reset the run if I get some annoying packs of guys in the first few pulls. Like if I see an elite enemy right away. Give a bear some time to get fat for winter before you throw them in the deep end!

It looks like it wasn’t possible to reset your powers in that first cell before the hotfixes from December 18, but now if you want to try and get a new starting set of fancy powers, you just need to reach the end of the first floor.

There are a lot of great, fun fights in the Castle, I don’t think I’m unhappy with any of them. I’m fully through Normal, and my group has gotten 4/10 in Heroic, so it’s not like I can say with 100% certainty which is the most finely tuned, but from these first few raids I’d say that the toughest fight was the Blood Council on Normal — and Heroic I’m sure when I get there.

With the Blood Council, you have to bring the thunder. The damage ramps up so quickly if you’re not pushing the Councilmembers to their health breakpoints fast enough. Plus you have to decide with your group what sort of nonsense you want to deal with; do you want to have to find partners and run away from the bad red circles, do you want to dodge dancing vampires, do you want to have to spread out so you don’t overlap circles, how about dealing with wave after wave of Dredger butlers — choose wisely. It’s not as bad once you’re in the thick of things, but you can have very different fights depending on what you chose.

Don’t get me wrong though, I love the fight. I especially love the dance intermission mechanic. It’s super fun to see your whole raid line-dancing for some fancy vampires.

I really like the Denathrius fight too. It’s so much faster than the other end bosses from the last few raids. You get in, and if you can maintain your damage and execution for the next few minutes you’re gonna win. But he doesn’t make it easy, there are tons of things happening and if you don’t keep all of those plates spinning, you’ll be left in tiny pieces on the floor while his sentient sword laughs at you.

The slow drip of gear is a real thing though. Once the raid started getting closer to the 200 ilevel that Normal drops, even just in the second week, you feel the difference. I’m not sure if it’ll be nearly the same in the next raid tiers. If Blizzard wants to keep the same feeling they’ll have to jump the ilevel up a huge amount so we don’t just come in with Heroic+ and completely steamroll Normal.

Favorite: De Other Side. It’s got a great variety of locales, some Manastorms, Hakkar, and Bwonsamdi! I liked hanging out with him and getting all of those juicy lore tidbits. I really love the Manastorm section because I can use my Venthyr Door of Shadows to skip over the ooze gauntlet and then laugh at all my non-Venthyr friends.

Least Favorite: Sanguine Depths. This one just feels like a punishment. There’s the trash that puts chains on you that you have to run away to break, or the claustrophobic encounter space for the 2nd boss, or the gauntlet before the final boss. Even the superpowered buff you can get if you’re a Venthyr from popping the Anima collectors along the way, I’m not a fan. Maybe it’s my fault for running it so much in the early days trying to get my Luffa Legendary memory. I like it so little I still haven’t even run it in M+ yet.

Probably the Dark Iron Dwarves.

I want a real fire and brimstone style Preacher. Something that really gets the audience fired up. If you’re not walking out of there feeling stoked about the light, they haven’t done their job. I just think that the Dark Iron can really fan the flames of devotion in their flock and keep those embers glowing. I bet that they can even kindle the spark of belief even in nonbelievers. Nobody else even holds a candle to them.

Buttons is great, no question, but have you met Meatball? When I stumbled on him in Torghast, he was just so hungry, and that mean old Mawsworn had stolen his food. What’s more relatable than that?

I love that he keeps finding his way into the game. The last time we saw him was during the Brawler’s Guild trial, where he was a bailiff. It’s sad that at some point after that he died, but now we get to keep hanging out with him! Hooray!

I understand completely why they did it as one line. It’s so much easier to plan out the story that way. You start in Bastion with the drought and the Kyrians not having their purpose anymore and wind up in Revendreth where you get some answers about who is behind the whole thing. They know that no matter what you do before you can move on to the next thing you know everything before it. If you read the quest text that is.

Changing it to be something you could hop around in like the last two expansions, wouldn’t be impossible but it would be a ton more work. You’d have to make sure that for the big important quests there were so many different possibilities. Each would have to work as the starting point, so they’d need to cover basic exposition, but also there would have to be connections to other major story beats about the other zones that could show up in any order. Sure you could do it, but if you make your writers have to string together all of those different connections that means they’re doing less writing on other things. It would also mean that we didn’t get the Threads of Fate leveling system, which is a good idea! I bet that they’ve already been learning so much about a Threads of Fate version 2.0 for the next expansion so it becomes a great idea.

Today’s Anna Earworm™: Jukebox Hero

You’ve all been great, but I’m ready for a holiday, I don’t want to do this again until next year! (Get it?)