The Queue: ’tis the season

It’s time to play the music! It’s time to light the lights! It’s time to break out the skeletons, turn on our favorite creepy movies, and either eat too much candy corn or tell the world that candy corn is the worst.

It’s October 1st. It’s our time.

Cheetos taste like Cheetos and nothing else. And worse they cover your hands in Cheeto dust, which is second only to glitter in the way it gets everywhere.

My initial thought was that this would be a bit like Diablo 3’s Seasons — a reason to jump back in the game and start the merry race of clearing content all over again. And it is… but also it isn’t.

But speeding things up seems like a great idea. Leveling in WoW, particularly Classic, takes forever and content rollouts take forever. This will keep things exciting, but as you say it also begs the question of what comes next. Do we go around in an endless cycle of the same? Or will the game keep tweaking to make things new and interesting?

This is where it becomes useful to think about Diablo 3 again. Early on, Seasons were just reruns… but then they added themes, so each Season has something new and different. What if we applied this same thinking to these new Classic servers? Perhaps we could see the next “season” speed things up even more. Or perhaps add some unique new ability. Perhaps Onyxia really does deep breath more. Just like Diablo 3, I think making continual small changes could do a lot to keep the game interesting.

But none can predict what Blizzard may do. We’ll see what comes of this when it comes, which will probably be a while.

Blizzard seems to aim for a three patch cycle and I’m going to assume Shadowlands will be the same until I see evidence otherwise. Not to say that T&E are wrong. This expansion’s patch cycle is an odd one. We’re well into the expansion and only recently got patch 9.1. If patch 9.2 and 9.3 go out on the same timeline, this will be a long expansion with lengthy droughts between patches. And considering 9.1 was a sizable patch and even 9.1.5 seems to contain a lot of good content, perhaps we don’t need a patch 9.3.

But I am going to be optimistic for once. I still think that Blizzard aims for a three patch cycle, basically breaking the expansion’s story into a three-act structure. We get two patches where the story heads more or less in the direction we expect, lining up threats one by one,  and then an act three where the story takes a dramatic turn and we wind up wrestling with an unexpected threat. I feel like Blizzard enjoys a good patch X.3 twist. In BFA, patch 8.3 suddenly pitted us against N’Zoth when it had looked like Azshara would be the big bad of the expansion. In Legion, patch 7.3 sent us to Argus with the Army of the Light, a place we never expected to go with people we never expected to meet.

Of course the devs could change their minds on the “right” kind of patch cycle at any time, but I think three patches has worked well for quite a while — save the two-patch Warlords of Draenor, which felt very content light — and I just don’t see concrete evidence they’re planning on changing it. So I’m going to stick with the assumption that we’ll get three patches until I see something clear to say we  won’t.

I haven’t gotten all the way to heroic Sylvanas yet (currently working on Painsmith), but in normal my biggest problem with the fight was length. I find phase 1 intensely boring. It feels like there’s very little to do. I chase Sylvanas around to hit her, I run around to dodge things, I spend a lot of time waiting for something to happen.

I get bored. Particularly when we’ve already done this a few times and I just want to get to P2 or P3 to do something new and interesting. And when I get bored I get sloppy and I die. And when one player dies (particularly a healer, like I usually am), it’s easier for more to die, and then it turns into a raid wipe just because we’re all tired of doing P1 and want to get on with it. And wiping just makes trying again even more frustrating. Argh.

Sylvanas is about a 15 minute fight, and it’s tough to keep your attention focused through all of it, particularly when you’ve cleared phase 1 or phase 2 a bunch and you only need to practice on phase 3 which takes ten minutes to even get to.

I’m not sure what the ideal fight length is, but the Sylvanas fight is long.

In short: I wish you luck. I wish us all luck.

Because it’s October 1st, I can officially wish all of you a happy Halloween. I hope you all have a good Friday and a good weekend to follow. Remember to pet your pets and tell your loved ones you love them. It’s Halloween, after all, time for good cheer all around!

I will see you again next week. Until then, take care.