The Queue: Friday… why is it always Friday? Somehow it’s always Friday.

How does this keep happening? It’s Friday, then it’s Friday, then it’s Friday again! These weeks just won’t quit.

Yeah. Sometimes when I’m at my computer right at Queue time I hop in and just wait. Did I do something wrong? Did I say something wrong?! Does everyone hate me?? What’s even happening??

I suspect all writers are balls of anxiety with imposter syndrome at heart, so this is just my natural response to a lack of immediate positive feedback. Just writer things, y’know?

Of course I know it’s never anything (probably). There are only so many people hitting reload at the stroke of lunchtime in order to get in the very first comment. Or that’s what I’m going to keep telling myself.

Almost everything. I have my Ahead of the Curve achievements, I’ve done all of the Fated raids I intended to in order to get achievements and upgrades. I’m about to finish the meta achievement for Sepulcher of the First Ones, which my guild put off until we finished everything else.

There’s more I could do, but that’s all that was really on my agenda. There’s another raid group I could jump into, do some more raiding, collect even better gear, but I’m feeling pretty done on the gear treadmill for now. There are lots of mounts I could work on collecting, but I don’t feel any particular need to get them right now.

I suppose all I have left is collecting transmog and spending my Dinar — which will probably go to transmog, but I haven’t decided what to get yet. I might do more LFR to collect alternate color sets of gear, but again, I don’t feel a big drive to do it urgently. In fact, the thing I most want to accomplish is from Battle for Azeroth: I really want that crown transmog from Opulence, but it’s not an easy boss to solo, even on LFR.

I guess that’s a roundabout way of saying I’m pretty done with Shadowlands. I’ll keep running mission tables for gold, I might level some alts, and I’m likely to carry on transmog farming, but all of the real goals are complete and I’m waiting for the next big thing to come around.

For all that Blizzard has played Overwatch 2 up as a sequel, it’s much more like an expansion pack. Overwatch isn’t going anywhere, it’s just getting an update patch which has some balance changes, new heroes, new maps. It’s much more like going from Shadowlands to Dragonflight (or Wrath to Cataclysm) than it is like going from Diablo 2 to Diablo 3. Nothing is going to close: you’ll simply download the latest game version and get right to playing the updated Overwatch, which is the same game but different. Overwatch is dead, long live Overwatch, because the game isn’t going anywhere.

I think the experiment with Fated raids has worked. There’s lot of hype around them, and I’m certainly glad to have new thongs to do this late in the expansion cycle. And considering this has been reasonably popular, I think we’ll almost certainly see something like it in Dragonflight, whether it’s another end-of-expansion event or gets thrown in during some patch cycle. But regardless of when, I’m looking forward to seeing how Blizzard further refines the Fated system.

I think gear progression is up and down. Early in the expansion, the best gear for getting ready to jump into raids was PVP gear. For me, weapons are another thing: I’d be better off getting a weapon from M+ than getting anything from the dungeons, because Paladins don’t have access to top-level weapons from the last few bosses — instead we only have the healer mace, which has an unimpressive special ability that triggers off a spell I don’t use, and has a low stat budget because of that special ability. There aren’t any weapons a Holy Paladin can use from the last bosses in Sepulcher — though now in Season 4 I have the option to get a Fated weapon from anywhere… I just haven’t yet and I’m not going to bother fishing around for one, which would be a lot of work without very much reward.

I suppose for the most part you can gear up doing whatever you want… but there are always at least a couple of pain points where the best way to gear up won’t be the content you want to run… but we’ll see where Dragonflight leaves us.

It’s Intercession, but if it makes you feel better we’re always judging you. :)

And that’s all for now, friends. I hope you have a good weekend, full of rainbows and cats and also dogs. I’ll be quietly stalking the comment section (unless I’m distracted by something shiny and forget to), but I’ll be back in all of my question-answering glory next week.

Talk to you later, folks. ❤️