The Queue: I really did not see this coming

I’ve been writing on the internet for a long time now, but Orca obsession is a content curveball you just don’t see coming.

After yesterday’s Queue, I think we’re basically Orca Watch already.

The problem is that makes us sound like we’re some kind of whale watching tour company. But of course Blizzard Watch makes us sound like we’re tracking storms, so that’s just six to one, half dozen the other.

But if we’re ever in the market for a new name, I now know just who to ask.

Survival is seeing a resurgence lately, though I don’t know that it’s really “accepted” yet. And with raids full of annoyances targeted particularly at melee players… why would a good ranged class choose to be melee?

Well, apparently because they’re just that good.

I first noticed something was off when Team Liquid brought two Survival Hunters on the World First kill of Lihuvim in Sepulcher of the First Ones, leveraging their CC to keep adds out of the fight. I thought maybe it was a bizarre one-off, but then Echo brought five Survival Hunters on their World First kill of Mal’ganis. Five!

When you see World First guilds class stacking like that, you know you’ve got a powerhouse of a class. This isn’t some shabby second-rate spec anymore: Survival Hunters are in the game, and this tier’s set bonuses gave them enough of a boost to see a quarter of some Mythic raiding groups made up of Survival Hunters.

And this isn’t just from looking at a few raid groups. Icy Veins rates Survival Hunters as S-tier DPS for Mythic+, coming in second place just below Demon Hunters. Wowhead has similar data.

But has the community fully embraced the spec? That I’m not sure of. “Melee Hunter” has been a punchline for a decade or more now, and it may take more than one good tier to genuinely start to overcome it. However, if anyone gives you flak for playing Survival, you can point them to the facts. At least in PVE, Survival is outperforming almost every other melee spec right now… at least in the hands of skilled players. If it keeps up this way, maybe Survival will eventually break free of the stigma.

Karazhan always feels like it’s it’s the middle of the night, and I’m sitting up playing games instead of, you know, getting a good night’s sleep. I have lots of great memories of going through Karazhan with friends when it was current content, And in late Burning Crusade or early Wrath, a small group of friends and I went to try to tear down the raid on our own.

There were three of us, and we were all Paladins, which gave us one tank, one healer, and one DPS. We didn’t do a ton of damage, but we had real staying power and even bosses had trouble taking out a Paladin tank.

And we made a lot of progress! In the end we got as far as the Chess event, which really needed numbers to compete at the time. (It’s easy to solo it Chess now, but at the time it really felt balanced around a full party.) We started late in the evening, and with every passing hour we thought “We’re making progress! Let’s just do one more boss!” and kept going. It was around 4am when we got to the Chess event and finally decided to call it after just a few attempts.

The power of memory, the power of nostalgia is strong. Whenever I go to Karazhan now, I inevitably think of that late-night raid, so many years ago.

Easy: there just won’t be a faction language barrier. Done! When you chat in a cross-faction party or raid, your text will be clear to everyone in the group. It’s really the only elegant solution here.

Perhaps it isn’t a memory of the past but a prognostication of the future, when you (or someone else) will leave candy there. But now you know to skip the chicken. Dreams can be so useful sometimes! Now you have a candy stash!

And that’s all for now my friends. I hope you’re all having a good day and continue on to a good long weekend. Take care of yourselves, folks, because it can be rough out there. I’ll see you back here next week!