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The QueueMay 27, 2021 12:00 pm CT

The Queue: Queue’s been blown to pieces

What can I say, I love a running gag.

Still playing Cyberpunk 2077. I have discovered the joys of a good baseball bat with bolts in.


KALCHEUS IS A CLOCK WHO HAS ASSUMED HUMAN FORM

Morning y’all!

Yes. It is indeed morning as I type this Queue.


SJHAWK AND I AGREE

Well, Blizzard certainly knows how to make things take way too much effort to be worth it.

So, it would appear, for Season 2, with its Mythic+ Scoring system, The Keystone Master achievement is going to require you to decently time 2 +15 keys in each dungeons. A +15 on Tyrannical and a +15 on Fortified.

Alternately, you could push for the one +24 key in every dungeon.

If there’s no other scaling adjustments to the dungeons (compared to 9.0), then the new gear could actually make a significant impact on being able to do this, but otherwise, this really pushes everything involved with M+ towards those with static teams, and marginalise those without.

The slight positive with this, since KSM won’t be about the specific key level per se, it means you can do higher keys on easier dungeons, to carry your score with lower keys on harder dungeons. (or dungeons you do and don’t like etc).

I felt this way with the Mage Tower, although had I known they were going to make the appearances transmogable, I’d have actually done it. In general, Blizzard sometimes gets a little overzealous with the difficulty on things like KSM — it’s an achievement, it’s not supposed to be you can only do this if you and four other people devote your lives to it levels of hard.

And with needing both Fortified and Tyrannical, everything’s got more health and does more damage, so it’s just gonna be a slog for Tanks and Healers. I am not looking forward to that, let me be frank. It’s not the end of the world, but I hope they roll this back or lower it to just needing to do one of the two.


RETPALLYJIL

Q4tQ: Opinion on Blizzcon or the lack thereof?

Honestly? I didn’t expect a BlizzCon this year.

First off, I think they likely don’t have a ton to announce. We know we’re not getting anything but Diablo Immortal in 2021, and I have no idea how far along Diablo 4 or Overwatch 2 are at this point. It feels unlikely we’ll see either of those games before late 2022, and I don’t think there will be a lot we didn’t see at BlizzConline to showcase.

Secondly, there’s a lot of work to put on a convention, and they would have had to announce things like ticket sales and so on by now — it’s late May, with June arriving next Tuesday. The more radio silence on the subject of the con, the less likely I thought we’d be looking at one. I’m sure the idea of COVID affected their decision making, because while vaccination is going well, it’s not over yet and taking an extra year off would definitely be the prudent move.

I find it disappointing but completely understandable.


ARTHONOS

Are you the type who writes down physical notes with important info about the game you are playing? Like the location of something interesting if a game lacks a proper map, or ideas about a build you’d like to try in an RPG.

Not physical ones, no. I tend to mostly remember things, and occasionally forget them and rediscover the same thing like sixteen times.


ENO

Has there been any recent dinosaur discoveries or has COVID essentially halted a lot of archaeological work?

Technically dinosaurs and other fossils fall under paleontology, not archaeology. Archaeology is human history and human prehistory — human remains, human structures, that kind of thing. Paleontology is fossil animals and plants. And sometimes fossil fungi or even fossil unicellular stuff. Basically, if it’s human, it’s archaeology, and if it isn’t, it’s paleontology. If we ever find an alien spaceship it would presumably be xenology.

Anyway, yes, there have been some cool dino discoveries published recently. Just this month they found a potentially new species of sauropod in Australia, although they still don’t actually know what it is. That’s pretty cool. I’m sure COVID had an impact on the field, but remember, there’s a lot of dinosaur material in museums and university collections that hasn’t been analyzed yet, so new discoveries are likely to continue regardless.


RED ASKED TWO QUESTIONS

Q4Rossi: since you’re the originator of the idea, how would you implement Class Skins in WoW? Purely cosmetic feature? Linked to endgame systems, like Artifacts were? Something else?

Q4Rossi: let’s say that the WoW team has decided to end the faction divide, and allow players to group with one another regardless of faction. How would you do it, in terms of story, and in terms of gameplay?

I would absolutely make Class Skins a completely cosmetic feature, because I believe strongly that with the constant resetting of character power at the end of every expansion, cosmetic rewards and systems are the only enduring accomplishments possible in World of Warcraft. The only effort that you expend that has lasting, permanent results at this point is unlocking things like transmog appearances, allied races, and so on. Borrowed power systems don’t last, gear gets replaced, talents and abilities get added and removed.

Only things like battle pets, mounts and transmog appearances last. They are permanent. So I would make Class Skins be a completely cosmetic reward because that’s the only lasting kind of accomplishment in World of Warcraft.

As for the faction divide, I would leave it intact in terms of the game’s story. If Jaina and Thrall can be friends despite the faction divide, as they seem to be now, then why can’t a Draenei and a Tauren pal around? Players are exceptional characters, so let people have friendships across the faction divide. I wouldn’t make it part of the game’s story at all, any more than I would make transmog a huge part of the game’s story. Just let people group with their friends. In terms of gameplay, link it to battletags and real id friends and call it a day.


KALCHEUS ASKS A D&D QUESTION

What’s your favorite Domain of Dread in Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft?

Well, they took Lord Soth out (hopefully he’ll appear in a Dragonlance book if they do one) and Sithicus is gone, so I guess I’ll go with Har’Akir, because I loved The Mummy (the Brendan Fraser one) and I’m down for some Egyptian adventuring.


ABOMINABLE ROXXI

Q4TQ: Why has Mitch abandon us, his devoted followers?

The real Mitch was the friends you made along the way.

Literally, the horrible monstrosities you’re cobbling together in your basements to follow his dark will. Those friends are the real Mitch, as they will provide him with his loathsome apotheosis. Soon he will clutch at the night with a thousand, thousand maws.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. Be good, y’all. Ask Liz a lot of questions.

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