The Queue: Spooky season?

I’ve always had a tendency to veer toward gothic horror and modern thrillers during the summer. Since I discovered my grocery store already started stocking pumpkin spice coffee creamer, right now it really feels like it’s almost Halloween. It’s a feeling I can really get behind. No, wait… it’s… it’s behind YOU!

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we definitely aren’t about to apologize. You should’ve seen your face.

Honestly they all seem really fun, but I’d love to go through One Night In Karazhan. This could be because I still haven’t had the pleasure of attending one of Theotar’s tea parties, but I suppose that whole event sets the stage for an absolute swinging from the chandeliers rager in Kara.

There are a few that I wouldn’t want to see, because it screws with WoW lore too much. Off the top of my head, the one where everyone was the Lich King is the obvious one, but I’m sure there are others. It was fun in Hearthstone, but given the, ahem, mostly irrevocable nature of events in WoW, not only would that be kind of an annoying storyline to play through, afterward it would be hard to move forward.

Standard buildings. It would kinda throw off their disguises if they all lived in caves or whatever, I’d think.

I’ve seen a few sit-able chairs, but most of what I’ve explored so far isn’t stuff that would need chairs. It would seem kind of odd for a whole lot of chairs to be in a tuskarr village, for instance.

But my personal pet peeve about new expansions are the areas which are traversed very circuitously on foot. You can SEE that ledge where the quest takes you, but the map intentionally routes you halfway around the zone in order to get up there. You know — you know — once you get flying it’s going to be completely trivial, and yet you also know that, given how the arcs through the various zones work, you definitely have to do this quest now if you don’t want to be grinding out levels. I understand why it’s developed that way. It makes the real estate they have feel bigger without having to populate the whole zone, like having a loft bed with a desk under it. It’s definitely a smarter way of using the space. But man does it feel bad.

I can’t be sure just now, just because I haven’t played through the intro sequence for getting us into Dragonflight, but I hope BFA stops being the default experience sooner rather than later.

To me, that’s one of the best parts of the WoW free account. The level cap means that you can feel free to try out whatever class you’d like for a short period of time before you really invest in it. I’d definitely suggest trying a ranged class like Mages, a melee class like Rogues, and  a pet class like Hunters. You won’t be able to really get a good feel for healing or tanking in the level range the free trial restricts you to, but if you liked the ranged classes and think healing sounds like it could be fun, maybe try going forward with a class that does both, like a Priest.

As to the eternal Alliance vs Horde struggle, don’t tell anyone, but I don’t find that to be a really big decision to agonize over. There’s the aesthetic split, of course — if you simply can’t abide spikes, the Horde may not be for you — but for the most part the only real difference between the two is which one your friends are currently playing. If they’re not, you’ll probably be able to find a decent social guild on either side on any server.

And of course, I should add: welcome!

I don’t! I usually don’t listen to anything at all when I’m writing, and apparently that makes me a weirdo. When I listen to music I like to make that the focus, or the mostly-focus. I can’t do something intellectually or creatively demanding and listen along to something at the same time. It’s like when everyone chips in odd bills for a pizza, and you’re trying to count it out but some guy is yelling numbers. It may just be general word choice, but somewhere there’s going to be a paragraph where someBODY once told me, etc. or I talk about how they hear oboes in the distance if I’m trying to go orchestral.

However, when it comes to fiction, there’s one thing I do nearly every time I write, and I haven’t really seen anybody say this is something they do, so I’ll fess up, just in case somebody else finds it helpful. Since like, 2010 or so, every time I start thinking about a new project, I make a pinterest board. It makes it a lot easier to visualize characters, but also makes it easier to, say, choose outfits for them, or decide what might be in their living space. I also almost always pin real places: buildings, rooms, even places like subway stations or roads. That way I always remember that Reggie would intentionally choose a small side table for the aesthetic but it’s hard to perch more than a phone on it, or Cheryl’s office is down a small hall to the left, with the receptionist on the left in an oddly small desk for the office floor plan, with an accounting firm on the other side of the hall. Otherwise I have a tendency to have to rewrite a whole lot of details in post. However, I will warn you that this will completely screw up your pinterest algorithm unless you use a burner.