The Queue: Swoglet

Swoglet.

I’ve been on vacation for a week and just logged into to alpha for the first time, so as soon as I saw this little dude it consumed my every last brain cell.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we swoglet.

It sure does!

Though part of the reason I loved the movie Clue was because of its multiple endings, I’m excited to see the conclusion of who canonically offed Daddy Denathrius. Surely, they all had both motive and opportunity. Was Draka working undercover with the FBI the whole time? Is Ara’lon secretly a madam, blackmailing the rest of them? Did Pelagos have an affair with Mankrik’s Wife’s Husband?

There are so many ways it could play out, and I’m excited to see where it all leads.

I feel like Demon Hunter and Monk will probably be last, though it’s really a toss up. In terms of developing talent trees, based on what we’ve already seen, it seems like are a lot of similarities of the issues with Demon Hunters and Warriors, and Warlocks and Monks.

Warlocks and Monks are both very broad classes with a lot of moving parts, both flavor-wise and mechanically. The pet aspect of Warlocks alone adds a lot of stuff they have to jam into both the spec tree and the overarching general tree. Warlocks now feel very different from spec to spec, and it’ll be tough to preserve that in the space they’re given. The differences between each of the three current Monk trees, and the complexity of how you can build each Monk tree, will also be a tough tightrope to walk.

Demon Hunters and Warriors both seem to have the opposite problem. Demon Hunters haven’t been around long enough to have a whole lot of established flavor to draw from, so figuring out which abilities to put into each tree to make them interesting enough to buy into will be a challenge. Matt will probably yell at me about this tomorrow (in his kindly, but vociferous, way), but in terms of Warriors as a non-Warrior, there’s “the tank one” and “the other two.” There are lots of aspects of gameplay which closely overlap in the DPS specs, and even though there’s a different feel to how each spec plays, deciding which abilities to put in a talent tree is very tough. It’s tough with other DPS — Rogues have “The Poisony One,” “The Stabby One,” and “The Stabby One That’s A Pirate, I Guess” — but it seems particularly tricky for Warriors.

So, I’d guess we’ll see one in each of these two pairs in each set that’s released. Demon Hunters will almost certainly be last.

Though there will definitely be a few outliers, I’d conjecture mostly post-mortem. They were probably magic users and alchemists in life, who don’t necessarily have a lot of martial prowess. Lich or poisoner seems to be the default for magic users in the Necrolords.

Vashj is a good example, here — though she was no slouch with a bow, a lot of her ruthlessness surrounded her skills at planning out something like the mechanisms for draining Coilfang Reservoir. She didn’t end up as a lich, of course, but she wasn’t the same kind of fighter as a lot of the others we see in Maldraxxus. If he hadn’t taken things way too far, motivated in the end by his own thirst for power rather than protecting his people, Kael’thas would probably be a Necrolord. Heck, Putress may have ended up there, too.