The Queue: Happy long weekend!

It’s a long weekend! Or it was the long weekend, depending on when you’re reading this. Time’s tricky like that.

I had a pretty good weekend. Took care of some errands that needed to be taken care of, killed some bosses, ate a giant cinnamon bun that I found frozen in the freezer. Great job past Cory for leaving that there! Monday I’m going to be helping my Mom cut up a bunch of the apples from her yard to make pies, so that’s gonna be delicious too!

While I try and cram a little more relaxation into my weekend, it’s time for — The Queue.

Your questions were in the same ballpark so now they’re one question!

I still only have two characters at max level in Shadowlands, but I do think that the upcoming changes will affect who I level next. I was probably going to make my Demon Hunter the next one I leveled, but I may lean more towards Shaman now. Then I’d have 3 of the armor classes covered, and could unlock most of the armor sets from the Covenants. I am wondering what’s going to happen with the Covenant hopping, will I have to play through the campaign each with each Covenant, or will I be able to just use the skip to the end of the 9.0 campaign button and unlock all of those armor pieces?

It’s definitely too much work to grind out every tint of the armor, but I guess I have a metric butt-ton of the Grateful Offerings stocked already, and if I keep getting Anima I could maybe buy the Anima sets of 4 Covenants. At least for my Druid. Any alts I made would be relegated to base looks only. Unless 9.2 adds another tier of Anima catch-up, no way am I going to be able to play that many characters enough to complete Covenant halls.

I really liked the idea of the Zoom meetings between the Horde Council leaders in Shadowlands and the ones still on Azeroth. I guess he’s probably got Gazlowe and whoever the Troll leader is still back there with him. The Alliance feels like it could be in a more precarious position honestly, with Jaina, Anduin, and Tyrande all off-planet.

I hope that they’ve left some competent people in control…which brings us to:

It would be fun to come back through the portal and see everything on fire, like that .gif of Troy from Community coming back with the pizzas. I have noted on a couple occasions in our Staff channel that it feels weird how Faction agnostic this expansion has been. There hasn’t been any specific Horde or Alliance content at all, and almost no thoughts as to what’s going on back on Azeroth.

I’m not even talking about the faction conflict. There haven’t been any stories of Goblins showing up and trying to strip mine part of Maldraxxus for natural gas deposits(tee-hee), or Gnomes hanging out with Mikanikos to learn more about how he’s putting his constructs together. They even set up canonical teleports for getting people back and forth, I find it a little hard to believe that there aren’t Goblins battering down the door looking for new resources, other than Gallywix in Tazavesh — but who knows how he got there.

So what I hope is that assuming we get two more patches of Shadowlands story, we spend the next one getting Anduin back from under the Jailors control. The next raid could be a fight through the layers of Zovaal’s control of his mind, or we could spend a bunch of time rampaging around whatever locus of powers that he’s headed towards fighting minions like Mal’ganis until we arrive as he’s getting his plan put into motion. While Anduin keeps us busy Zovaal gets the power he needed and starts remaking the universe, or breaking time, or whatever his grand plan winds up being.

Then for the 9.3 patch, we infiltrate alongside Ve’nari into the heart of the Jailer’s new empire and engage in guerilla warfare as we work to slow down his spread of influence — eventually toppling him in the final raid of the expansion. Taking the seals he stole at the end of the Sanctum of Domination back to the Arbiter and restoring the proper flow of souls to the different Covenants.

With our jobs done, we walk back through the portal to Azeroth and find out that it’s been five years and things have not been going well. Queen Azshara has taken power in the east, a fragment of one of the Old Gods is trying to resurrect Yogg Saron in the north, and there’s a new sect of fiendish tinkers who’ve been experimenting with Legion tech who might’ve got themselves possessed — maybe we shouldn’t have left so many broken war machines lying around all over the place.

World of Warcraft: The Reign of Queen Azshara.

Without a doubt! How hard can it be, why won’t any of them teach me how to do it!

Falrinn pointed out that all of the Covenants have pretty unique things that could let them fly — wings for Bastion, Soulshapes for Night Fae, Red clouds of Anima for Venthyr, Necrolord necropolis thrones. Of course that once one Covenant got wings, then everyone else would want them. Which is doable! Let Demon Hunters use their wings first off, I know that they’d be upset if they couldn’t. Then Venthyr would get stone gargoyle wings, Necrolords could have bone wings like Kerrigan, and Night Fae could have a pair of the fairy wings, but bigger.

At the very least how come I can’t do fancy waltzes while floating? If they add even more Covenant-specific toys in patch 9.2 I hope that they consider giving Venthyr one that would ask a party or raid member to dance, and then do the floating waltz with them until canceled.

Most likely Soulrender. We still have to get through Heroic Sylvanas first though. We’ve just pulled her for the first few times on Sunday and almost saw phase three. So we’ll either need a good night of consistent practice, which is hard with only two raid nights and all of the other bosses that we want to spend time killing — or we’ll need to get really good really quickly, and hope that everyone immediately grasps the damage and mechanics of phase three with no issues.

I am interested to see firsthand how having to get rid of four knockback debuffs works alongside everything else on Mythic Ner’zhul. I know it’s not as easy as it was because we can’t just do Mass Dispels since they changed how that works. It could go terribly — But that’s half the fun!

Today’s Anna Earworm™: The Workers Song

I hope that you all spend the rest of your long weekend relaxing and eating tasty food — while also remembering to leave lots of questions for Anna tomorrow!