The Queue: Still waiting for Chaddius

Okay. I admit, I may have panicked about Chaddius a little too quickly. Chaddius only takes a break up by the lake when he’s Steward of the Day, which can only happen when there’s a calling in Bastion. So Chaddius was never exactly missing — it just wasn’t his day off to chill with a box of wine.

Because, really, that’s the kind of day off that we all want.

But I haven’t seen him since I started my quest. Which either means I managed to miss his day even though I thought I was paying attention, or he’s having a really long workweek. So I hope Chaddius gets a break soon so I can go say hi.

But while we wait for Chaddius, let’s get to the Queue.

I like dungeons to be a bit difficult, but not too difficult. I have a lot of nostalgia for the days of vanilla, TBC, and Wrath when I seemed to just constantly run dungeons (particularly in vanilla). Normal dungeons weren’t a walk in the park that you speed ran through like they were now, and Heroic dungeons, when they were added, were a serious challenge you had to think about.

Today, dungeons seem easy and the gear is outdated so quickly that there’s hardly a reason to go back — and if you do go back, it’s on an alt or maybe to complete a quest, so you rush through as quickly as possible. No thought or effort required.

Of course we have Mythic+ now, which adds that level of challenge, with interesting affixes that make things harder and a scaling difficulty level. But while I like some challenge, I find I don’t like M+ very much… which is a bit of a problem as it’s a major way to get gear. I find the timer stresses me out in a really particular way, gotta go fast, gotta be perfect, can’t mess up. And obviously you never want to mess up in any kind of content, but the ticking clock adds another element. So M+ seems like something I would like, but find I don’t.

Basically I wish Normal and Heroic dungeons were a little more challenging and remained relevant to the game a little longer. Blizzard has upgraded dungeon gear each season to help these stay useful, and that works well for M+ but Normal and Heroic remain for fresh level 60s — and even a fresh level 60 could do better by walking to Zereth Mortis and dumping Anima on 226 gear from the vendor in Haven. It doesn’t feel like there’s much reason to run dungeons except high level M+, and I miss them.

Basically, I miss the olden days where Heroic dungeons were pretty challenging, and gear from dungeons remained relevant for a long time so you’d find yourself running a lot. These days the difficulty is down and the gear isn’t compelling, so I just don’t find myself doing many dungeons, which makes me sad. I used to love running dungeons.

Mists continues the long Blizzard tradition of building a world and telling a story… and then completely dropping all of it when the next expansion starts. WoW is very episodic, expansion to expansion, because when the new expansion hits we always run to the next thing and forget the old.

Blizzard has been working on long, expansion-spanning stories, but they still have us doing a lot of walking away and forgetting the past. Like remember that time Sargeras stabbed a sword through our planet? The sword that’s still there and we’ve done nothing about? But that was last expansion’s problem: we’ve moved on to entirely new problems.

So we went to Pandaria, wrecked the place, and then rampaged off into the next big thing. WoW leaves so many stories on the table, unresolved, unexplored. For all that Mists has a bad reputation — I think in large part because it had such a tremendously long end of expansion lull — it created a beautiful new world to explore that didn’t feel like Azeroth. It fleshed out a massive backstory of a new land, larger than anything we’ve done before or since. Sure, we’ve gone to new continents, new places, but none of them have felt so unique, quite so unconnected to Azeroth as we know it. (Yes, even Argus felt a lot like the same old Azeroth, despite not being Azeroth at all.)

And races in particular suffer from this a lot. There’s story when the races are new, and then… well, often then there’s nothing. Often many, many expansions of nothing. When’s the last time we had Blood Elf lore? Gnome lore? They both got heritage armor sets, but neither of them had a story attached to them. So if you’re hoping for Pandaren lore… well, I wouldn’t recommend holding your breath. WoW spends a lot of time trying to move forward, and not much time looking back.

We have kind of hit the time of the year when Blizzard is announcing all of the stuff they might have bundled into a BlizzConline if we’d had one this year, which means lots of news for lots of games.

But that still doesn’t mean it’s going to suddenly restart dev on Heroes of the Storm, though I am impressed by your optimism. What’s next? More StarCraft?

It’s been a tough year, but here we are. I think persevering through, well… all of this… that’s a pretty good day. So, sure, I’m okay, for varying definitions of “okay” that have been scaled to 2022 standards.

And that’s it, my friends. I hope all of you have a good (or at least okay) weekend. Take care of yourselves, stay safe, and pet your pets — they’ll appreciate and you’ll appreciate it. I’ll see you back here next week.