The Queue: I am always ready for a nap ̶o̶n̶ ̶F̶r̶i̶d̶a̶y̶

That’s my secret Liz, I’m always ready for a nap.

While I go and find the best place for a quick snooze, it’s time for — The Queue.

I have been watching the race! When I have time that is, I’ve mostly been keeping up through Raider.io updates and guilds posting their progress through Twitter. But I do like multiple questions!!

Also, I just love the RWF in general, if that hasn’t been clear from me being the primary writer about them for the last two expansions. I like raiding a bunch, but I also know that I’m not really interested in the super involved Mythic pushing like these guilds do so it’s always interesting to me to see what kind of shenanigans they get up to. Like how Echo ran so many melee to get their first Lords of Dread kill or how guilds have just been rooting the Automa that look like Rock Elementals on Lihuvim so they can just focus on the boss more. That last one reminded me of Mages using Ring of Frost on Will of the Emperor back in Mogu’shan Vaults to trap all of the small adds.

Good fun!

1. The main streams for the guilds are great, and getting better each time the race happens, but I think my favorite stream is the Liquid guild leader Max doing the 21st man run from outside of the raid itself. I love watching a raid leader of that caliber work his mojo and lead his team to victory. I bet he could land airplanes at London’s Heathrow airport in the middle of an alien invasion.
2. I gotta go with Kexman. Mitch and I talked with him during the Shadowlands PTR and he was a super nice guy, and he puts in a lot of effort to his streams and casting. Just an all-around great dude and I’m glad that he’s getting all of this work casting the races.
3. I don’t care what the casters talk about. I know that the race is a pretty unique event in that you can spend a bunch of time on one boss with very little progress, and that doesn’t make for the most interesting thing in the world, and there’s no way that they want to spend 300 pulls mentioning all of the mechanics with each pull. Everybody would get bored of hearing Halondrus launches missiles out that explode, and leave dangerous zones on the ground that players can’t stand on by the 50th pull. Their job in my mind is to be as entertaining as possible, and that just doesn’t involve going into the mechanics on the 150th pull of a boss, that is keeping spirits up and cracking jokes, and playing fun games. When it’s time to get “serious” and talk about the boss they will.

Favorite: Mists of Pandaria

Sure we had a bit of a “Tune in next time, same bat channel. Same bat time.” ending but I still really liked stopping Garrosh and wrapping things up on Pandaria. There are a few threads and things that were used to bring us forward, and for things that still haven’t changed. Cleaning up the Vale is much harder now that all those Mogu and Mantids and N’zoth forces keep invading it for example. But it doesn’t leave us on a note like there’s a giant sword sticking out of the planet, or all of the faction leaders just got kidnapped by Val’kyr.

Least Favorite: Cataclysm

Deathwing was a bit of a letdown for a big villain. The fight wasn’t as cool as it could’ve been — yes, I’m still bitter about it after all these years! It was also a bit of a fractured expansion as a whole with the story as spread out as it was, and I think that didn’t work as well for a big finale since the story threads never got wrapped together as well.

Undead Paladin or maybe a Nightborne Paladin.

The Undead one would be cool narratively for that whole “even in death I still serve the Light” vibe. While I just really dig Nightborne aesthetic and think it’d be a cool combo.

Maybe this has been done before, but I’d love to see a DM run a campaign with Groundhog Day rules in place. Your characters could only investigate for so long and try and figure out things to do differently in their loop for a certain amount of time before everything gets snapped back to the beginning.

How would you explain it to the NPCs you meet, how would you improve your skills with such limited time per day? You’d have to put one of those bigger ticking clocks on it so you were semi-limited on how many rotations you could do and couldn’t say something like “I spend the next 1000 rotations working on all of my main stats so I’m super buff and smart.”

My main when he isn’t snacking on Surprisingly Palatable Feasts is always chowing down on the Steak a la Mode. Steak and ice cream, together at last!

Speaking of ice cream, that’s basically what I had for dinner tonight too. My friends and I went to a cafe that does Korean bingsu and I had an Oreo™ topped one that was delicious.

That’s understandable, it does feel like a pretty well-crafted zone, especially when you start to get the hang of navigating around its different biomes. It doesn’t feel like it’s prohibitively big either so if you’re all the way across the map when a rare you want spawns, you do have a chance to make it before it’s dead assuming that not a ton of people go ham on it.

On the other hand, knowing that flying was coming so soon definitely made me a little less likely to engage with some of the rares and treasures that were high up on ledges. I could just wait a week and knew that I was going to get them with no sweat.

Today’s Anna Earworm™: Happy

Happy Spring everyone! Leave Anna lots of questions for tomorrow so she can enjoy her Spring days too!