The Queue: For the light!

I admit, I don’t trust the light with everything. (It didn’t do Tirion much good in the end, after all.) But it is pleasantly glowy, and sometimes that’s all you need.

Really, Renown feels like reputation. You earn reputation, progress the Renown bar, and earn rewards with a faction as you go. In my opinion, it feels better than usual reputation because you earn rewards — even if they’re small rewards — as you go, rather than hitting breakpoints (and then having to spend mountains of gold) on available rewards.

It involves more daily and weekly quests, and I am easily tire of repetition, so I’ll have to wait and see how I feel about it.

I think it’s latency dependent insomuch as the entire game is latency dependent. With a high ping, everything is slowed down, and it’s much more difficult to raid, to do dungeons, to PVP, even to solo because of the delay between the keys you press and the action happening on the server. But I don’t feel like races are any more of a latency problem than anything else in the game.  It doesn’t feel super twitchy.

I don’t know if I’m going to be very good at it — I haven’t done much — because I’m not good at navigating in 3d. I couldn’t reliably do the much slower flying quest Magic of Flight in Legion, either, so I don’t know if I’ll be good at this, either. But I also expected to be much worse at Dragonriding than I am, so maybe it will work out in the end.

I want a Soul Shape or Ghost Wolf! A cool looking thing I can turn into and zip around with a bit of speed. As a paladin, I don’t know exactly what that form would be. Obviously I already have a magical horse I can summon, but it’s a short duration on a (relatively) long cooldown, and whenever I’m running around with a group I feel very slow as I gradually fall farther behind the pack. Maybe I could turn into a ball of golden light and zoom around. That would be pretty cool.

My hope is to have a reliable, customizable system where we can resize things, move things around, and position things as needed — something that lets you make a useable system that works for you. Customization is important, because not everyone processes information in the same way. What some see as having access to plenty of information, someone else will see as clutter. What some see as having UI in the way of your view, someone else will be glad to have key information front and center in their eyeliner. What everyone wants in a UI is a little different.

And so far I think the UI is shaping up to do a good job of that. I think it does enough for me to cut down on a number of addons, which will simplify game management a lot. And all of those people who didn’t mess around with addons will now have easy access to all the same customizations. That seems great.

Of course there will still be addons you’ll want to do for serious raiding, Mythic+, or PVP.

So in the latest beta build, Paladins have a battle rez and Evokers have a bloodlust — Blizzard is spreading cooldowns around, and making it easier for most group compositions to have access to both. As to Paladins getting access to battle rez specifically, I don’t know how I feel about it. I happen to be in guild that has good access to brez so I don’t feel like we’re lacking anything.

But it’s good. It’s good to have more access to key cooldowns. But I have to admit, I’m mostly thinking about the number of utility cooldowns I need to keep on an easily accessible hotkey that I won’t accidentally hit when I shouldn’t. Not that I’ve ever done that. Just Holy Paladin, which I play, is a very cooldown-dependent class, packed with a grab-bag of situational cooldowns. It seems likely that I’m going to have to find locations for at least three more cooldowns now, and I’m puzzling on how that will work rotationally, and practically. (There are frankly only so many hotkeys I can practically reach with one hand, and the hotkeys I might need in a rush I like to be within easy reach of my usual hand position on the keyboard.)

So if this brez sticks around, I’ll probably be a third line battle rez in our usual group. Basically, this won’t make a ton of difference to my gameplay, but I do think it’s generally good.

And that’s all for now. I hope you all have a very lovely, relaxing weekend, because we all deserve to have a lovely, relaxing weekend. Go pet a dog for me — it will make you happy and it will make the dog happy, too. Win all around!

I’ll see you back here same time next week.

Unless I forget to write the Queue and it’s late. Or unless I forget to write the Queue and it’s really late. But probably. Probably I’ll be back here this time next week. Take care everybody.