The Queue: My mistake was resting for even a second

Yesterday, I wrote a couple of posts about WoW Classic and the Season of Mastery, went downstairs and fed my cats and made breakfast for my wife, and looked outside at the snow that’s literally everywhere because I live in Edmonton, which becomes Hoth in winter. Then I decided to sleep, because I’d written a bunch and I was tired and I figured it would be a nice, quiet day on the site and I needed some catch up sleep pretty badly.

So yeah. That’ll learn me. I’m never sleeping again.

I don’t think new death knights is a thing we will actually need to address — that was pretty much handled back in Battle for Azeroth. As for Arthas, I think there might be something involving him in 9.2, thanks to the discovery of the Jailer’s little soul collection. Icecrown and the Scourge we might well see, and as for that big hole in the sky, I suspect defeating the Jailer might well close that, or show us how to close it.

But to be fair, Blizzard has gone out of their way not to really directly involve Arthas in this expansion, outside of the effect he had on others. Arthas for himself is less important to Shadowlands than how he affected Uther and Sylvanas and how his fate mirrors that of Anduin. So maybe we won’t see him directly at all.

Since folks were talking about Ruined King, here’s a review of it that seems pretty solid for a first look. Maybe spoilers, I honestly couldn’t tell you.

Vanilla WoW and the charge desynch bug says hello. And the Sword Specialization bug. The Paladin Seals bug from the original Open Beta period that they left in the game for six months and then patched out, making Paladin DPS drop like a rock. Reckoning bombs.

There hasn’t ever been a time without bugs and known issues that players specifically warned Blizzard about going live. It’s not new. It’s pretty much always been the case for as long as I’ve been playing.

I spent years railing against so many different issues — I mean, we kept telling Blizzard that Warriors needed Thunder Clap in Defensive Stance, that we needed more threat generation in general, that Armor Pen was bad for Warrior DPS design, I could sit here and list things we told Blizzard were bad before and during the early PTR phases for World of Warcraft for literal hours.

I mean, isn’t Ewan McGregor cute in everything?  He’s 50 and he looks amazing.

Look, let me have one nice thing, okay? Ewan McGregor is pretty.

I mean, I’m still pretty proud of the Invictus domain I created for a campaign set in my fantasy version of Rome, Alron. It was a bit more serious than the Garlic Bread one, but I still had fun coming up with the Channel Divinity — it was called Victory’s Flare, and it let you break all restraints and remove all effects that kept your party from moving freely under their own direction within 60 feet. Mind Flayer dominates the party Fighter? Victory’s Flare! Everyone is grappled by the lair action? Victory’s Flare! Monk Stunning Strike’s your Wizard so they can’t Counterspell the evil Wizard? Victory’s Flare!

Then of course my players used it against me so much that I started to realize I had made a terrible mistake.

I mean, we live in a world where the Tamam Shud case happened. There’s the whole Andre the Giant has a Posse thing, which was a really cool example of how ideas and images went viral before the internet was the leviathan it is now and people actually used word of mouth to spread them. There’s the Monster with 21 Faces, or the still unsolved mystery of who Kaspar Hauser was. People still want the McRib back.

The Mad Gasser of Mattoon may or may not have happened at all, which is pretty weird either way — either a mysterious figure gassed the town of Mattoon, Illinois two dozen times in the 1940’s and got away with it, or a widespread case of mass hysteria took hold of the town, and we still don’t know which. Someone just left a metal monolith in Utah in 2016 and we found it in 2020, we still don’t know who did that or why. Life is bizarre and random and so are we.

Some people absentmindedly eat fruit stickers. I think we can admit that’s not all that weird.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. I will refuse sleep for as long as I possibly can, because clearly I can’t be trusted with it.