The Queue: Latest and greatest Superb Owl

How about that Super Bowl yesterday, amirite? I’m writing this before the final score has been posted so I don’t know who did or didn’t win. I hope it was your favorite team! If not, better luck next year.

While I check the scores, I take you now to — The Queue.

I’m sorry that your guild folded, that’s rough. Mythic raiding is hard, I’ve moved a guild across servers before to try and give it a boost in recruitment for Mythic raiding. It’s not easy to do, and that’s not even counting in a faction change. We lost a few long term players who just didn’t want to move to the new server.

Your three options are pretty much all spot on. Without some major tweaks from Blizzard, nothing can be done. It’s almost entirely a player base perception thing now. The two factions’ racials are pretty well balanced for Raid content. Some winners, some losers in terms of powers but they’re about even. It’s just because for a while the Horde was better, so the bigger guilds raided Horde. In order to overcome that you’d have to buff the Alliance only stuff — a lot. There was almost a bigger showing of Alliance guilds in the Race to World First this time out, but Blizzard changed the Bleed debuff on Stone Legion Generals to not be cleared by Dwarven Stoneform, so the guilds who were going to swap factions, wound up not.

The Hall of Fame was supposed to be their way of encouraging more guilds to go to the opposite faction, but we haven’t seen that bear out in practice. Mythic raiding is hard, both inside and out of the raids. Players are just looking for whatever is going to make their lives easier, and for the majority right now that’s going where they can find the most players. Even the promise of a fancy title limited to the first 100 Guilds can’t overcome the natural distrust that comes with packing up an entire Guild and swapping it to the Alliance side of things. There are just too many hoops to jump through.

If it’s any consolation Alliance will always rule the Mythic Keystone and PVP Arena scenes though. You can’t beat Shadowmeld and Every Man for Himself.

Dead characters –Varian and Vol’jin. The show would be called A Very Vexing Vacation, and it would be a comedy about Varian and Vol’jin going on a road trip, but they don’t really get along. Kind of like Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Gul’dan would be the surprise third season guest star who they wind up racing to their destination to secure the last room at the hotel. All sorts of shenanigans would ensue.

If it’s live characters there’s only one choice — Khadgar and Illidan riffing on the Odd Couple.

Giant Spiders. I already don’t want to think about how big some of them can get in warmer climates than Canada. If they get to be big enough to abduct things like full-grown humans? Just burn the whole world down — we had a good run.

I’m also too lazy to sim, but from what I know about rings, you’re going to want the best stats one. The power you get for having your best two things will usually more than make up for any amount of primary you could socket. Plus since rings don’t have primary naturally, it’s way easier to just hang onto a ring with your perfect stats for a long time. There were people in my guild in Battle for Azeroth who were still using a Battle for Dazar’alor ring at the beginning of Ny’alotha progression, just because it had a big pile of their best stat. They weren’t happy about it, but it would sim higher than basically anything else for them.

I’m really hoping that we get the next heirloom armor announcements out of BlizzConline. We’re definitely due for some news there. The Goblins and Worgen armor was forever ago!

I don’t think we’ll see a barbarian highlander look though (as cool as it might be), the Gold lions/stone/blue accents are too much the Human aesthetic in Warcraft. Imagine if the Blood Elf Heritage armor wasn’t Red and Gold with phoenix wings, Blood Elf players would’ve rioted! The trick is making a good set of armor that doesn’t look out of place on Plate wearers and Cloth classes. So maybe something closer to Anduin than Varian.

That’s if we get Humans in the next batch of heritage stuff. I’m putting my money on Draenei and Troll as the next two races. Humans, Orcs, Undead, and Night Elves all got some pretty iconic looks in the Warfronts last expansion.

Yes.

I bet there’ll be a system where once you complete a part of the new questline you’re just jumped up to Renown X. It worked pretty well to keep people more or less on the same level with each other for the Heart of Azeroth. Magni just made it 50 after a point, so you could start using the Essences.

As long as it’s slightly less than what the people who played every week from the beginning are at, there’s not really any grumbling. Which is the height of silliness, it’s not like them getting jumped up faster takes anything away from the people who played the whole way through.

Today’s Anna Earworm™ Blinding Lights

Stay warm out there folks, Alberta is in the midst of a gnarly cold snap and all I want to do is cocoon in seventeen blankets. While I cocoon, y’all don’t forget to ask Anna a bunch of questions for tomorrow.