The Queue: You have 43 unspent talents

In case you’re wondering, this is what it looks like when you’re playing a class that hasn’t had its talent update put into the Dragonflight alpha yet.

So, I asked for podcast questions yesterday and then the podcast ran long and we only got to a couple, so some of them I’m gonna answer here because they’re good questions, Brant.

Honestly, this sounds kind of similar to the way Dragon Age Inquisition added a patch that allowed you to turn on very specific difficulty modes for one of the most granular difficulties I’ve ever seen in a game, coupled with the Trials mechanic.

But thinking about it, I’d like to see something like this for Cyberpunk 2077, because the recent update that made the game stable for Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 fixed a lot of issues, but also kind of erased some of the charm of some of the weirder bugs and also rebalanced stats and itemization in a way that makes it a lot less ridiculously broken. I still enjoy playing the game a lot, but I do miss being able to come up with gear builds that utterly maximized crit to the point of absurdity.

Yes, I actually want to play the game when it was objectively not as good.

Let me just put the map you used up here.

So one thing I noticed when I was running the Dracthyr intro zone last night was that the Tuskarr show up. It’s a small appearance, but it gets me thinking — we’re told that the Dragon Isles were islands before the original Sundering, so when we look at this map, the Dragon Isles should be outside the Great Sea area entirely. Considering the presence of Coldarra and the Dragonblight including Wyrmrest Temple in Northrend (and Ulduar, where the Titanic Watchers who empowered the Aspects were beased) I started to remember a specific quest from Legion.

The Death Knight mount quest takes players north of Northrend itself to find the resting place of Kyranastraz, a mighty ancient Red Dragon that perished on what’s called the Lost Glacier. We are told that he fought a mysterious darkness, but not much else. It feels like the line up of locations at least implies that the original home of the Dragons, the Dragon Isles, is to the north of Northrend and that Kyranastraz would have been protecting it when he fell.

As for why the Tuskarr go to those specific locations?  The Grizzly Hills are in Northrend and there’s a destroyed World Tree in that zone, while Azsuna is home to the remnants of a once powerful Night Elf city from before the Sundering. Similarly, Drustvar is where the Drust — descendants of the Vrykul who reside in Thros, a strange realm where dead souls exist outside the Shadowlands — once ruled.

At least three of these stops — AQ, Vol’dun and Kun’lai Summit — have ancient structures tied to the Titans. AQ itself used to be a Titan prison facility holding C’thun. Vol’dun has one of the ancient Titan locks that held Ghuun. Kun’lai has the Mogushan Vaults. And Vashj’ir is where the Titanforged Helya and Ra’den imprisoned Neptulon when they created the Elemental Planes.

I am curious to see how this all shakes out, to be sure.

I’m not sure if you were making a pun there, Flan, so I’m leaving the potential typo in place in case it was a groaner.

Honestly, I want Warriors to get something for once. We keep seeing Priests getting to pal around with Old Gods, Shaman being cozy with the Elemental Lords, Paladins letting a Dreadlord walk around their home base and be all chummy with their greatest heroes because a bossy chandelier told them he was cool, Death Knights running around raising the dead and making them new Death Knights.

One of the ideas that they didn’t really develop much in Legion was the idea that Odyn didn’t like the idea of there being Dragonflights or Dragon Aspects in the first place, and a lot of what we just went through in Shadowlands is tied to the fact that he went pretty overboard in his response to it.

The whole deal with the creation of the Val’kyr — the trading away of Odyn’s eye to Mueh’zala, the Jailer getting the Eye and using it to help cement his power in the Maw and thus potentially making all of Zovaal’s later plans possible, the murder of Helya and the forcing her to become the first Val’kyr which definitely made her much more likely to team up with the Jailer — is because Odyn threw a fit at Tyr’s actions and his bypassing of Odyn himself to ask the Titans to empower the Aspects. If not for the creation of the original Dragonflights, we wouldn’t have ended up in the Maw in the first place.

So it would make sense, with Warriors being tied to Odyn’s Halls of Valor, if there were specific talents that were based in the negation of various Dragon powers and abilites. Like one could argue that Shield Wall could have a talent that buffed it to negate big attacks like a Dragon’s breath weapon.

I mean, that fight didn’t look like we walked in, shanked him in the kidneys and walked out to me. Zovaal was incredibly powerful, yes, but a great deal of that power was tied up in the Domination rune magic he used to utterly suppress and control the very beings of others. With the Helm of Domination reforged into the Crown of Wills and the appointment of Pelagos as the new Arbiter, the Jailer no longer had the ability to force us to his will nor the power he stole from the Arbiter.

In essence, Zovaal was as vulnerable in the Sepulcher of the First Ones as he had ever been throughout our long conflict with him. Still terrifyingly powerful, yes. But his biggest ace in the hole was gone and his attempt to steal Azeroth’s life essence left him exposed, while our appointment of a new Arbiter meant that the essence he’d stolen from his own replacement was no longer singular.

That’s the Queue for today. And Mitch? Cory wanted you to have this earworm.