The Queue: Vacation mode
@CoryjTaylor
Well after my guild’s second kill of Dormazain Mythic for our bench — it’s officially break time until the next tier comes out! Time to kick back on a beach sipping drinks with tiny umbrellas in them and putting my feet up. I liked the tier pretty well overall, although I do think that Kel’Thuzad is a fight that works better on paper than he did in actual practice. Fighting the same encounter three times in a row before killing it for a final fourth time didn’t hold up as a super fun fight in the long run.
Onward to the Sepulcher!
While I try and flag down a bartender for another margarita, it’s time for — the Queue.
So what do y’all think the big Hearthstone Battleground changes are?
Factions! There’ll be boards that you can put together that have all Horde or Alliance characters and if you do that they’ll get special bonuses. So you could have a really strong Demon board, but if you matched that up against an equally strong Demon board that was also all Horde tagged you might not come out on top.
Maybe a way to regain health to your hero over the course of a game. So maybe you’ll take some early hits, but you can bounce back! This of course means that there’ll need to be a new “Pretzel Mustard” achievement: Tactical Nuclear Spicy Pretzel Mustard for ending with more health than you started with while also never losing a match. I heard that was banned from the show Hot Ones after a guest permanently lost the ability to taste salt.
There’s always the new tribes being added too. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some intergalactic visitors in the next season, Zerg, Protoss, and Terran anyone?
These are all pretty big longshots admittedly. While I’m only 50/50 on wanting healing and faction based cards in Heartstone Battlegrounds, I would really enjoy seeing how wild and wacky StarCraft cards would be.
QftQ: What would you say are the top three things Blizzard has to do to for the next expansion, regardless of it’s setting, to succeed?
For me I’d go with:
1. A big expansion-agnostic gameplay feature. Blizzard has fallen into the habit of introducing a whole bunch of features in an expansion and then leaving them in the past. While it’s been an issue to some extent since WoD, it’s reached the point where there’s very little expectation for any systems introduced in Shadowlands to be carried forward, because that’s more or less what happened with the last expansion and all the new systems are all very clearly tied to the setting. This could be the often-suggested player owned housing, but some sort of expansion-agnostic take on borrowed power could also fill this slot.
2. New Class. While I will generally agree that the old pattern of having a new class every other expansion was unsustainable, breaking the old pattern does not mean “no new classes forever”, and I do think a new class could be what’s needed to shake things up. I’m personally partial to Tinkers, but I do think other options exist (Spellblade/Spellbreaker, maybe Dragonsworn if we are doing the Dragon Isles).
3. Break down the faction barrier. This is honestly something that should of been in the game at launch. It’s long past time for the story to stop running from the conclusion of WC3, and having an artificially enforced division in the playerbase is causing a lot of problems both in terms of community toxicity and imbalances in high level gameplay. I shouldn’t be able to predict that a Horde guild will achieve World First against the Jailer because no Alliance guild is even vaguely in the running, but I can.
All of those are strong points. Something to do outside of the day-to-day power grind for the expansion would be my fondest wish. Player housing is a great example of that, especially since it’s something a lot of players (including me) have wanted for a long time. Especially if it involves going and hunting down rare pieces from old raids and dungeons. Give lots of players to go back and visit old content if they want their house to look just so.
My top three would include your first and second points for sure. However, my third point would probably be something along the lines of getting more of a roadmap of expansion development from the developers. If we could know roughly how long it was going to be between patches I’d love it. I know that in the real world deadlines change all the time, so I’m not asking for up-to-the-minute information, just targets. I think it’d help more people plan out whether they want to stay subscribed, or how hard they want to go on the content.
I’ll have ye all know I’m leet.
We did wipe on Sylvanas hc (what, still?? you ask, but yeah, we took a break since mid december and this was our first raid back. We’re on 68 wipes), but got to the 3rd platform of phase 3, and I’m at 96% by ilevel in terms of dps. Never had an *orange* parse before, at least not one for a fight that lasted over 12 minutes.
Congratulations!!
I hope you’ll get her soon, although if you’re getting that far into phase three you’re pretty close to a kill.
Speaking of high parses, on our first kill of Soulrender Dormazain we had to bring a person’s Death Knight alt so that we had two in order to gather up all of the adds he brings in. We tried with only one DK and it was way more effort, and we started falling behind on the damage check. The only hiccup was that this person’s alt was only ilevel 213…
So now I know the Blood Death Knight who has the top 100% ilevel parse for the encounter!
QftQ: What’s your latest random “Get out of Dodge” life idea? Am becoming very curious about getting a job on a freighter…
Lighthouse keeper has always been pretty high on my list, but I’m pretty sure that with the advances in automation they’re probably all controlled by one guy in the basement of a government building somewhere.
A million years ago when I went to Thailand, the urge was pretty high to just stick around a little longer and get a job on a dive boat. Warm weather, SCUBA diving, and delicious food every day? It was mighty tempting. My life would’ve turned out very differently if I’d done that though. I don’t think I made the wrong choice, but sometimes I wonder what SCUBA boat Captain Cory would’ve looked like.
Q4TQ: Any good lists somewhere of the new druid forms they added in 9.1?
I have heard that there’s a pretty nice article on this very site that has all of the information that you’re looking for! The guy who wrote it is pretty cool too.
Q4tQ: what’s your favorite (or a particularly memorable) unexpected gameplay change?
Asking because I’m playing Final Fantasy VII Remake and I was wholly unprepared for the dance battle sequence.
Most recently I was playing the Guardians of the Galaxy game when the gameplay switched from the third-person action into a rudimentary aerial combat game as I took the controls of Starlords ship the Milano. It wasn’t anything fancy, just a few dodges and some three-dimensional flying while I tried to blow up some bad guys — but it was still a neat change of pace.
My favorite though, was when Destiny 1 introduced the Sparrow Racing League. Slapping a racing mini-game into their first-person shooter, and having it something where you could actually compete against other people, worked really well. I still don’t know why Destiny 2 hasn’t done something similar.
Maybe I was the only one who really liked it.
Today’s Anna Earworm™: Do you Wanna Taste It?
Stay warm out there folks, remember that layers are your friend!
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