The Queue: One good spell edition

Strangely, this is one Friday where I don’t just feel tired. I got my Covid booster earlier so instead I feel just kind of off-kilter and unpleasant, but not exactly tired.

Is that better? Is it worse? I have no idea! So let’s get this Queue on the road so I can stop trying to be coherent!

A healing spell that I could reliably use from range. I’d kill for a good healing spell I could use at range.

Right now I have Word of Glory, a powerful single-target heal, and Light of Dawn, an AOE in a 15 foot cone in front of me. Both of them require Holy Power and I generate Holy Power most reliably by using Crusader Strike in melee. Outside of melee I have Holy Shock, which generates one Holy Power every 7.5 seconds, and Divine Toll — which I’ll certainly be getting in Dragonflight — which burst generates 5 Holy Power once a minute. I’ll probably also pick up Bestow Faith which generates 1 Holy Power every 12 seconds. Crusader Strike, on the other hand, generates 1 Holy Power every 6 seconds. All of my Holy Power heals cost 3 Holy Power, so being at range vs being in melee is a significant hit.

My other two ranged heals are Flash of Light (a weak, fast, very expensive heal) and Holy Light (a slow, moderate heal), neither of which are awesome. Flash of Light costs 22% of base mana, so I can’t cast it a whole lot, and it doesn’t heal for enough to ever be worth casting. Holy Light is good enough to be worth casting, but it has a 2.5 second cast time which is rough in a busy combat. And since it’s not always practical to be in melee, since sometimes you have to move around, sometimes you really need something you can do in those times.

I would love one reliable heal that doesn’t require Holy Power so it’s easy to use at range, with a mana cost I can afford, with a cast time I am able to stand still through, that heals enough to be worth casting. Blizzard has made some modest improvements to these spells in Dragonflight, but they are modest.

I would definitely trade a battle rez for one reliable heal. I’d be thrilled.

I can tell you precisely, because it’s happened to me already: in Cataclysm the game changed so much and so fast that I simply didn’t recognize it anymore. The class I’d been playing was completely different, wasn’t a class I wanted to play anymore. Everything was different, and none of it was something I wanted to play. But it wasn’t one thing, it was many things.

Of course my guild dissolving around that time too, so I was just playing alone. It was easy to walk away.

Obviously I came back. But it would be more than one thing. If one bad thing happened, well, shrug. Nothing is perfect. Things aren’t perfect now, and if they aren’t perfect in a new way… well, it’s the same but different. If I didn’t like the paladin class tree, I’d play a different class. Things change all the time and one change, one bad thing isn’t going to make me stop doing something I enjoy doing with friends.

Because, even though it sounds sappy, World of Warcraft is all about the friends. Your friends make the game worthwhile even when the game is bad. And without friends it’s harder to enjoy even if the game is great.

As long as my friends are here, I think I’ll probably be here too.

Definitely not. As any of my guild mates will attest, I am bad at moving places at any speed. Terrible. I would loose every race. It’s not even a competition.

Yes! I am done with raiding for the expansion. We got Ahead of the Curve and we just finished the Sepulcher meta-achievement to get this super rad octopus mount.

The problem with pushing keys at this point is that I haven’t been pushing keys all expansion, and, in fact, have barely run dungeons. At this point I feel too far behind to even start. And what do I get out of it? I’m not doing competitive content anymore that I need better loot for. It seems like a lot of work for nothing.

So, I suppose I’d need to have a group of players who were patient with me not knowing what I was doing and the best M+ routes and all that, and then I’d need a reason to bother. Right now I have some of the former, but none of the latter. So it’s a hard sell.

Wow, worse than LaGuardia is a pretty extreme judgment of the Venthyr.

I’ve got to say that my list would be:

• Necrolord, which is compact and well-organized. It’s a neat square, with one useful thing in each corner. One thing I particularly dislike is how far off the training dummies are — outside of that neat square and distant from everything.
• Kyrian: You can fly! Most of the time! And it’s moderately well-organized, though a bit spread out. The biggest issue I have with it is the training dummies: the only way to get out of combat with them is by jumping off the edge of the platform. There’s no amount of running or waiting that will let you drop combat, and you can’t mount or otherwise get away. You just have to jump and wait for a Kyrian to dive after you and save you from your doom. It takes a while.
• Venthyr is also pretty well organized. Though it’s on two levels, each level has the exact same design, so it’s just remembering which level is on which level. It’s also a bit spread out, which isn’t great.
• Denver International, a cursed place.
• Night Fae, where I seem to spend forever going around in circles and up and down in order to find where I want to be. It has an organic design, which is neat but awful to navigate. It makes me crazy.

Actually not all that old. Probably dating back to Mists of Pandaria — my early screenshots are long lost on old hard drives.

Though after typing that I realized that Mists was released ten years ago, so actually that is a pretty long time.

Rapid fire final questions! Let’s do this!

1. Loquacious, onomatopoeia, vex
2. Because a flying platypus would just be awesome. I imagine it would fly by flapping its tail behind it, like Appa, and that would just be perfect.
3. I don’t like chocolate, so some lucky person near me would almost certainly get all of them. Sometimes chocolate with peanut butter is okay.

And that, my friends, is all she wrote. By which I mean all that I am writing.

I hope you all have a good day and an even better weekend. Go and pet your dogs for me. Or pet someone else’s dogs. Everybody’s happy.

I’ll see you back here next week.