The Queue: I hope you like cute bears

…because if you ask me about being a Hunter for Cory’s Class Week, well, chances are Rutherford Bear Hayes is going to steal the spotlight. It’s fine though. He has a lot to say.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we give you the answers. Or our bear does. Whichever.

Wow, it’s gonna take Rutherford a minute to get over this particular line of questioning. Wow.

While I do totally get the whole sniper/ranger archetype, especially for Blood Elves and Gnomes, I definitely tend to like pets and pet management. It makes the class relatively unique, and I’m a total sucker for a companion. My Hunter is the one character I have where I don’t always have a battle pet out. I tend to be more of a loyalist, as opposed to someone who wants to collect all the pets there are, including the challenging tames. I just like having a buddy, I guess.

I don’t feel like I’ve been shy about wanting player housing.

Fully buildable player housing a la Wildstar is, in my opinion, well beyond the scope of anything we could expect. I’m not sure we could even expect placeable 3D objects like Animal Crossing. Even something as relatively trivial as Fable‘s archetype — where you can buy a house, and then buy one of a few different decor packs, and are able to hang up notable trophies — would scratch the itch. However, that’s almost exactly what Garrisons are already.

However, lately the common thread among almost all the non-Blizzard video games I’ve been playing aside from a few mobile games has been customizable environments — Cozy Grove, 7 Days to Die, Valheim. So if I can just do all that in WoW, well, I’d probably never leave. Especially if I could also run old raids in order to get furniture or furniture parts.

I also want to see a bit of resolution from some older plotlines, namely the one where we spent a solo scenario rescuing Chromie from assassins hunting her through time, and we found a letter with “familiar-looking writing” and then that was it, that was the whole thing. This whodunnit really piqued my interest, and then, ????

Do you have to have a main spec?

I mean, I get that if you’re raiding they may say, oh Roxxii, you’re an elemental so we’ll funnel elemental gear to you and resto gear to our healers, but that’s less about a main spec and more about the role you’re playing specifically for them. Of course your raid would give you elemental gear to elemental better if you’re elemental-ing with them. If you want to resto in your off-hours, depending on your guild’s loot strategy, you can always tell your raid leaders that you’re building a set so if possible when there’s a resto trinket you’d like to trade a shard for it or something.

I say, don’t waste time worrying about it. Just go try your best and have fun.

My transmogs tend to be focused on being kind of outdoors-y — stuff that would feel nice and/or protective to wear on a hike or trek through the jungle. Luckily, that also includes flower crowns! I suppose Rutherford sort of matches, but that’s mostly just coincidence.

Though I really tend to err on the side of being kind to developers and granting them as much grace as I can — especially with the incredibly small, limited, coding experience I have and how hard every tiny bit of minutiae is to get right — I have to say Blizzard is a pack of cowards for not allowing me to shove a flower crown on my bear’s head. Sorry, not sorry.

I go with bows because ever since they changed the gun foley I think it sounds cheesy and don’t like using them. In terms of immersion or whatever my Blood Elf was only rarely into guns anyway (they’d scare the animals) but now I go out of my way to transmog out of them.

I’ll miss my Night Bae, sort of, maybe, but beyond that I’m really ready to get to the next place for a myriad of reasons.

This expansion has felt largely like a disjointed mess. It reminds me a lot of the semi-pretentious artist party game, Exquisite Corpse. Basically, somebody draws the top of a drawing and then folds it over so the next person can only see a couple short lines peeking out as a guide where to begin their drawing, and that cycle goes through several people, so that at the end you’re left with a drawing which is connected but not in any way cohesive. The story we’re seeing zone-by-zone is amazing, as always, but it seems very much like the overarching story is slowly but surely being brought back from a disjointed mess of elements thrown out there by people who may have been intent on destroying everything.

Ironically, this kind of mirrors the Jailer’s whole schtick so closely I’m not sure it wasn’t intentional.

But, still, regardless of the grace we might want to grant the good folks still trying to right the ship, this seems like an expansion of rebuilding, and I’m ready to move on.