The Queue: Weekend ready edition

It’s the weekend, which means it’s time to hike up to the top of Icecrown Citadel to listen to Arthas monologuing in order to not get a mount or any transmog. Frankly, it’s a pretty distressing way to spend a weekend, unsuccessfully hunting transmog, but the only way to guarantee I don’t get any new looks is not to try.

So let’s do some questions and then it’s off for some fruitless weekly transmog runs. Let’s Queue.

We all want what we don’t have. The point of talent trees is having more gameplay choices, so we want the things we don’t have. Holy Paladins don’t have good ranged options, so that’s what we want more of. Mistweavers’ melee options have been weak for quite a few expansions now. We both want options to do what we want to do within our own class fantasy.

Personally, I think Monk talents look fantastic. I mean, they’re weirdly arranged, like someone made a talent tree and put it in a blender and went with whatever came out, but that’s a solvable problem. What I like about it is there’s a whole bunch of talents focused on melee and a whole bunch of talents focused on ranged and you pick which direction you want to do. You could spec ranged healer without ever picking up Rising Sun Kick, and just laser focusing on ranged gameplay. Or you can pick up a lot of different abilities that buff combat and mix in with healing. It’s a choice.

Holy Paladin doesn’t have a choice that’s very defined right now. There are a handful of talents that work with Flash of Light and Holy Light for more ranged healing, they’re scattered all over the talent tree, and some of them you have to take whether you’ll ever cast them or not. You also can’t make a build fully focused on ranged healing: you can only pick up a piece here and there. If you’re at range, you’re still going to have less Holy Power available to cast your powerful heals,  and the added synergies to Flash of Light and Holy Light don’t match up.

Not to mention that Flash of Light and Holy Light are expensive heals — 22% of base mana and 15% of base mana, respectively. Compare that to Mistweavers: their basic heal, Vivify, costs 3.8% of base mana, plus they have access to Mana Tea and Lifecycles for mana regeneration and mana efficiency. Paladins don’t have things like that, and to make ranged healing feasible, our mana-based healing needs a significant balance adjustment so we can use it to fill the gaps when we don’t have the Holy Power to use our big heals. So far, the alpha hasn’t really opened up that option for Holydins, but I think there are some really interesting things for Mistweavers to lean in or out of melee as much as they like.

It’s about making the choice.

I think Blizzard has starting to come around, recognizing that a lot of the roadblocks in early Shadowlands were a mistake. They’ve backtracked on a lot — anima drops are huge, making the ridiculous anima costs of things much less restrictive. The cost of switching Conduits is gone. The penalties for switching Covenants are gone. The restrictions on Covenant transmog are gone. There’s a place to turn in Anima and switch Conduits right in Zereth Mortis.

And Zereth Mortis itself is much more accessible. There’s lots of “for fun” content and not much required content, so anyone who grinds like crazy doesn’t get well ahead. You can fly in Zereth Mortis. You can buy gear with anima or with Sandworm Relics. You can convert any piece of recent gear into tier pieces with set bonuses.

I feel like throughout Shadowlands, the game has made a significant turn towards being more accessible for casual players. Not perfect, mind you — limiting the jellycat mount to normal and up seems odd — but more so than before. And I think this is an intentional shift, and that we can expect more of it moving forward.

Just because WoW has had some anti-casual ethos in the past doesn’t mean it will in the future. Not forever. Change is coming. Change has already come.

I don’t have any particular thoughts on remakes, but I do have good news for you: the Knights of the Old Republic remake wasn’t canceled, but it’s almost certainly been delayed because the development has changed hands. How that will turn out is up in the the air.

It’s a tie between Kyrian and Venthyr. While Venthyr are decidedly more stylish, sometimes you have to mix it up and switch color schemes. Right now I have a mostly Kyrian look, which is a very good match with the base model Silver Hand Holy Paladin weapon. It’s a good look, being an angelic looking creature in the purest white, carrying a hammer as big as you are and ready to smash something with it. It’s a good look.

Definitely UI customization. That’s going to make gameplay so much simpler, without any fidgety addons, things to download, customize, re-customize, and so on. I’ll be glad to have things built in and simplified — and so far the setup looks pretty good. Eager to see how it keeps developing.

Yes, but also my current guild tabard is a frog and I’m pretty okay with that.

Except also every guild tabard looks weird on female models so I can’t wear a frog myself. Hm. Win/lose here.

And that’s all for now, friends. Hug your loved ones. Pet your dogs. Have a good weekend and get some relaxing in.