The Queue: That post-holiday feeling

I didn’t think it was possible to be more exhausted than I was last week (or was it the week before last?) but as it turns out, a diet rich in cookies and not much else will really take a lot out of you.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we answer them while our pancreas silently begs us to eat a damn vegetable, any vegetable, please.

It’s not the size, it’s how they use it.

…ahem.

Part of the reason it’s large enough for me is, I’m not good at overall navigation, even in real life. I tend to go by landmarks as opposed to cardinal directions and roads, and it’s really easy to get turned around if you go by “ok, so take a left at the one big church where we went to that Girl Scouts event, then go a bit until you pass the tire store (no, the other tire store) and take a right at that one Thai food place you really like (ooh, we should order from there)…” It’s a recipe for not realizing that you’re right around the corner from the coffee shop with the really good croissants, and then you’ve completely missed out on the good croissants! Or, uh, in this case you end up going the long way around to everything because you forget which path goes where.

It almost seems in some ways like they designed a lot of Northrend with the idea that you’d be flying through it, so they made it bigger, but you’re not airquotes “intended” to fly in the Shadowlands, so it makes more sense to pack everything and make winding, multi-level trails instead.

I think with Icecrown in particular part of what made it seem so big was partially the space per se, but also it was pretty packed from stem to stern with Scourge. There were wide swaths of it that were very clearly designed to be just the writhing mass of undead that would eat your face in an instant like a swarm of hungry piranhas. With a very few exceptions — the Arena in Maldraxxus when you first enter, for one — I don’t think the current zones are intended to convey that same feeling of not only danger, but hopeless, insurmountable danger. The Mawwalker is supposed to be able to contend with pretty much everything thrown at them, even in The Maw, until the Jailer puts his finger on the scale.

The real NA downtime is the friends we made along the way.

That depends on your definition of ‘bad.’

In terms of efficacy, if you’re just grinding and doing sidequests Threads of Fate is actually may be slightly faster — you’re not spending time cooling your heels while you do, say, Forgelite Sophone’s stoking the forges quest. However, it can be hard to do that for a lot of people.

I do think that there are probably more than enough sidequests to get you past the mark, but they’re a little disorganized and may be tough to find — I swear once a week I’ll be minding my own business and then suddenly come upon a whole new random set of sidequests I’ve overlooked. Plus, since you’ll be starting in on all the nonsense you can usually only do at cap, that’ll start adding up a bit, too.

With just one level left a couple weeks into the expansion, you’re probably not expending all your rested XP, so you’re that much closer!

This question is a little tricky, because it’s Tuesday. When you wrote it on Monday the Renown cap was 15, and with rollover — today for US, tomorrow for EU — it’s 18. If you’re following along with this handy chart from Wowhead, we’re about to roll over into week 6.

This response is really just intended as a reminder to try to hit Renown 15 before you pick up the Redeemed Souls quest for this week, because as of Renown 15 you can upgrade your Soulkeeper to pick up 10 every week to upgrade your Sanctum, not just 5.