The Queue: Time Sensitive

It’s just me and a few… hundred… friends hangin in Orgrimmar, definitely not waiting for a new expansion to go live! (You think we fooled em, Rutherford?)

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we answer them in a very timely fashion.

I don’t wanna talk about it.

Nothing. The sourdough isn’t a great medium for spores to take hold, and even if it was, the agitation from the feeding and the yeast itself means a mushroom isn’t going to grow.

Unless you bake every day, I’d suggest storing your sourdough culture in the fridge, though. In the cold, that sucker will keep fine with no feeding for well over a week, and if you neglect it longer than that the culture itself will still be fine, but you’ll need a cycle or two to build enough fresh yeast back up to bake with it. In my experience, the fridge culture tends to have a deeper flavor too, but that could just be me justifying my own laziness.

I don’t think it really needs an update. It’s had a few extra items added as recently as last year, and almost every transmog aficionado I know was full-throated screaming for the length of the festival because man are those flower crowns well-done. The idea itself is great, the aesthetic is perfect for a whole lot of characters, and the thought that went into having multiple color palettes for multiple looks was the cherry on top.

One thing to keep in mind — which is interesting to me, because I’m a huge nerd concerned with general media criticism — is that in WoW, everything is kind of in amber, so making changes always results in an opportunity cost that the developers are clearly cognizant of. I don’t just mean in the usual “cost us a raid tier” sense, but in the sense that any changes necessarily obliterates the previous iteration, never to return. In general, though they may add things — more revelers might be nice, I suppose — it seems like they generally don’t tend to change or take away from holiday festivities, since they come around so rarely.

After you choose your Covenant, there’s no pop-up, so don’t worry about your UI hiding things in this case. Your Covenant abilities can be found in your Class tab in your spellbook. At the top of your spellbook there’s the General tab, featuring stuff like your Pathfinders, Auto Attack, and your racial abilities. Then, on the righthand side of the spellbook, there’s the Class tab and a spec-specific tab below it (so Havoc, or Mistweaver, or Demonology, etc).

There’s no search function for the spellbook at all, but everything is alphabetized by the name of the spell itself. If you’re a Night Fae, for instance, you’ll find “Soulshape” toward the bottom, because alphabet. It’s kind of unintuitive and easy to miss these spells at first glance, especially if you don’t remember exactly what the spell is named. For reference you tend to think like me, “Soulshape” is “that thing where you turn into a glitter animal and go faster.” So. Good luck.

I haven’t gotten around to getting my Maw mount yet, and I don’t play a Druid, so I’m pretty over that place.

It’s weird, because having a mount per se isn’t necessarily a core “thing” for me. I don’t actively seek mounts, and if there were never mounts in WoW I would’ve been fine with it. But they are, and as such their absence is felt. It’s like restarting an open world RPG you’ve mastered many times over, and being suddenly confronted with the fact that not only do you walk slower, but have to walk all the way to Solitude before you can Fast Travel. You’re so used to having that utility that not having it feels awful, especially when you’re getting lapped by Druids.

Also, making that jump still makes me want to puke.

Besides, there are so many yet-unseen afterlives to explore that I’m really excited to do just that. Maybe there’s an afterlife where it’s just a huge library, and your purpose is to catalogue as much knowledge as possible — they would certainly be at odds with the Kyrian. Maybe there’s a water afterlife, because every game has a water level. Maybe there’s an afterlife which is just Skyrim! There are tons of possibilities, and I’d rather explore them than the dark, rocky, mountless Maw.