The Queue: A Queue arrives precisely when it means to

Me, late? Never.

I love it. I really enjoy Battlegrounds but I always eventually get the feeling that gameplay is very “samey” after a while and I drift off. Hopefully having a regular cycle of Seasons and shakeups will help beyond just adding new heroes and minions on a semi-random schedule. That way even if we’re bored with the current meta, at least we know there’s a new season soon. Hopefully this will keep the mode feeling lively!

Bards are an interesting potential class because they can be so many different things, depending on how you interpret them. A bard can be a singer or storyteller who inspires people to greatness, or soothes aches and pains with the power of a song. A bard might be a spy, someone who uses their musical skills and silver tongue to learn information or put a dagger through someone’s back. Or a bard can cast spells fueled by music.

I like the idea of a bard as a support class, focusing purely on buffs and debuffs. Perhaps a song inspires your tank to better defend themselves, giving them damage reduction for a time. Or perhaps a song disorients an enemy, making them more vulnerable to attack. A bard could weave songs that have different effects to bolster allies and hinder enemies. It would be a strongly hybrid class, which could lean more into helpful buffs and healing, or more into harmful debuffs and magical damage. It would be a class with strong CC and high utility value, and I think a heavy focus on buffs/debuffs would make it play differently than other classes. (The closest thing would be an Affliction Warlock but I think you could give bards a pretty different feel.)

And as Rowsdowa mentioned, we’ve seen an entire musical language in Zereth Mortis which fuels the power of creation. Perhaps it’s the perfect time to add a bard class, now that we’ve learned this language. Bards could tap into musical magic like this to power their abilities. (Hopefully with all the same pleasant sound effects you get in Zereth Mortis.)

Regardless of whether we get a Bard class or not, I think the concept has a lot of potential. And perhaps the best thing about it is that it can be anything. There are so many possibilities with a Bard class and Blizzard could take it in a lot of different and interesting directions.

There are two questions here: one about gameplay and one about narrative.

Gameplay-wise? We didn’t need Sylvanas. We don’t need any of the NPCs who came to “help” us, because they rarely do anything useful. When fighting Sylvanas in Sanctum of Domination, Bolvar would stand there with his hammer ready, but never swing it — very common NPC behavior. Meanwhile Thrall and Jaina helped by building bridges that were full of holes you could fall through. These NPCs never help us kill trash, but they show up for the post-fight cinematic so they can get the killing blow, when they’ve been sitting at the back of the group playing Bejeweled for the past three hours.

So let’s look at the narrative. Did we need Sylvanas?

The game never showed what conversations she had with everyone, or what information she shared. And that’s okay. We don’t need to see every moment of the game, and it’s very easy to assume that Sylvanas knows about the Jailer’s plans — or can at least tell us what he’s been doing to this point — and offer insight into how he’s using Domination magic. It would be shortsighted to ignore the aid Sylvanas might be able to offer.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if we needed Sylvanas. Most NPCs who come to help us do very little, and this is no different. And narratively, whether she knew anything or not, it made sense to try to find out what she knew Uther decided to reach out. Uther decided to trust her. And at that point, whether she’s useful or not, she’s along for the ride.

The game has been streamlined quite a bit over the years. Sometimes that feels good, and sometimes that feels bad, but it comes back to what you, personally, enjoy. Some people will have fun tracking down that weapon trainer. Some people will be frustrated they can’t just use the cool new piece of gear they found. Which one any of us are on any given day is a coin toss.

There’s one very important thing to think about when talking about how the game’s design has developed over the years: those of us who have been playing since the beginning are 17 years older than we were. We have jobs and families and responsibilities. Our time availability and our relationship with games is different than it was. And that does, I think, impact both how the game is designed and how we interact with the game.

Even Blizzard seems to recognize the shift. Last year, Ion Hazzikostas talked about game design that respected players’ time:

9.1.5 reflects a shift toward more alt accessibility, more catchup, more sensitivity and respect for players’ time, trying to look at what sorts of activities are going to be interesting once or twice, but maybe less interesting when you have to do them more than that. Let’s not make you do them more than that. Versus which activities are part of that core repeatable loop, like running dungeons or PvP at max level, things people want to get into without as many hurdles they have to clear on the way. That sort of approach is going to motivate how we approach our next patch in Shadowlands.

Vanilla WoW didn’t respect your time — it demanded your time. Every level you had to trek back to your class trainers and buy skills… and because gold was scarce and you might have a lot of skills, you might not even be able to buy all of your abilities. It was a lot of work to climb the ladder of levels. At the time I enjoyed it. But I’ve gone back to Classic, and the grind weighs on me. I don’t have the time or energy to go through it again. That doesn’t mean Classic is bad or Shadowlands is good — the two just have different design philosophies.

Weapon skills were interesting, and added a lot of flavor. Just because you’re good with a sword doesn’t mean you know how to wield an axe with any skill, much less a polearm. It makes sense that you would train to use other weapons, and it similarly makes sense to have different trainers for different weapons.

Is that fun, though? Is weapon training where you want to spend your time? Is it interesting to track down a weapon trainer once, or will you find it just as much fun to do a second time when you get another new weapon drop? WoW has put a lot of effort into paring down things that are complicated for the sake of being complicated, like weapon skills and like class trainers. It’s removed some hassle from the game and just lets you play. 

But you’re right, this has cost the game a great deal of color. And those poor class trainers have to be lonely, just standing around without anyone to come visit them. I think it’s possible that the game has discarded a little too, but I’m not sure how you would re-add things like this without re-adding all of the hassle.

Yeah, I’ve had this problem too. I’m in a very pretty world where I can… die. A lot. All the time. But I come right back and it’s very pretty. Until wolves spawn right on top of me and I die again. And… well, you already know what I’m talking about.

And that is all, my friends. Have a good day and a good weekend. Pet your pets, tell your loved ones you love them, and tell your healers how much you appreciate their hard work. (All of those are important, but especially that last one.) I’ll see you next week, everybody.