The Queue: Awfully familliar

Hey, one of these questions looks awfully familiar…

While I get out my novel writing gloves, it’s time for — The Queue!

Vanilla: I think that there’s no feeling quite like the feeling I got the first time I saw one of the units or buildings from Warcraft 3 and then got to walk around them. That sense of scale and grandeur really got its hook in me. I didn’t actually finish leveling before the release of Burning Crusade but I almost did! It was really close, of course then we got Burning Crusade and I decided to start fresh…

Best Raid Fight: N/A

Burning Crusade: I made my first true main in Burning Crusade, I loved that Draenei Paladin so very much. Enough to actually start playing from level 1 and rushing to catch up with my friends so that I could see all of those super-powered items that kept showing up in Hellfire. I eventually did get my first taste of raiding, with Karazhan and my first true epic gear and I felt like the king of the castle. I also worked my butt off to make the five thousand gold necessary for epic flight. I did get a bit burned out on it though after that and I took a break from the game entirely.

Best Raid Fight: Chess

Wrath of the Lich King: I didn’t really start playing again until halfway through Wrath. My roommate played and like a fish seeing a tasty bit of worm on a strange metal thing, I was pulled up into a boat and turned into a nice fish meal. Wrath is when I started raiding for real, rather than a few pity raids back in Burning Crusade. I had the distinct privilege to spend DKP in the last DKP run of Trial of the Crusader my guild did! I’m so lucky! I was pretty excited to get to do ten and 25-player raids in the same week though, and we had a small crack team of raiders who went back and cleared out a bunch of the Ulduar achievements while we were progressing Heroic ICC. Algalon was the most fun fight in the whole expansion and I’m extremely glad I got to do it in semi-relevant content.

Best Raid Fight: Algalon

Cataclysm: Oh boy Deathwing! This is where I started my own guild with a few people from the ten-man squad I was part of in Wrath. It took us all expansion to do it, but we actually managed to clear through Heroic Deathwing on the final raid night before the Pandaria pre-patch. Of course, the Deathwing mount went to the one PUG we had to bring with us that week. I still think there is easily room for improvement in the pair of Deathwing fights mechanic-wise, but I’ll always remember that raid as the first time I cleared a raid on the hardest content possible.

Best Raid Fight: Cho’gall

Mists of Pandaria: I think this is my high watermark for World of Warcraft. We did ten-man raiding through the whole expansion and had a blast doing it the whole time. Until we got the word that Mythic difficulty was coming and we would need 20 bodies for that. Then we went on a major recruiting spree and jumped up to a 25-man size. We got a hand full of robo scorpions from Garrosh and even managed to get him down once with alts. Sure the jump to Mythic difficulty made the last few fights super easy, I won’t complain though.

Siege of Orgrimmar was fun, but the best moment was definitely us going back into Throne of Thunder in our Siege gear to get Realm First: Ra-den! The hardcore progression guild was so mad that they missed that!

Best Raid Fight: Lei Shen

Warlords of Draenor: All of the content that we got in Warlords felt like really good content! The leveling was fun, I loved the garrisons, and the raids were super well put together. Yes, it could’ve used more content overall, and it’s still amazingly weird that we didn’t go to Shattrath at all, but I still like Warlords for its amazing zone cinematics.

Best Raid Fight: Mannoroth

Legion: Class Halls! ‘Nuff said.

Oh alright, I’ll say more, this is when I made the swap to Druid because of the Werebear appearance, and I haven’t regretted it since. We still were humming along as a guild, but we never quite got to the same heights of finishing end the Mythic difficulty raids. I don’t even want to talk about how many pulls it took us to get Heroic Kil’jaeden for the first time (212).

Best Raid Fight: Gul’dan

Battle for Azeroth: This is where my guild finally gave up the ghost. We were only barely able to clear through the Heroic Battle of Dazar’alor and the writing was on the wall. So we packed it in and went our separate ways. Of course, there were only a couple of the original ten left from Cataclysm. C’est la vie. We had a pretty great run. From there I moved into my new guild which was able to take me in as a tank (amazingly!) and we made pretty good work of the next two tiers.

I loved getting the Heart of Azeroth conduits and I still miss my giant laser beam terribly. I also still miss my giant laser beams from Corruption and wish that we’d get something that made us super powerful, as long as we were willing to take on the risks associated with it in Shadowlands.

Best Raid Fight: Azshara

Shadowlands: Hey, that’s now! I like a bunch of stuff about Shadowlands. I love my cheat death trinket that can kill melee standing near me, I like Torghast for making us temporarily powerful juggernauts of destruction, and I like season four for giving us things to do in the final doldrums of the expansion. I especially like the Venthyr’s whole thing.

I do feel weird that we didn’t see a fifth Covenant at all, which I had on my Shadowlands prediction board, alongside Arthas being the second fight in Sepulcher — which didn’t pan out like I swore it would’ve. But overall Shadowlands was a fun expansion full of things for me to do with my guild and friends.

Best Raid Fight: Sylvanas

Dragonflight: Ah c’mon it’s dragonriding. I’m sure that the raids will be fun and interesting, and I’ll continue to get up to mischief in Mythic+ so the early standout is of course dragonriding. I’m also looking forward to a second class being able to reposition me in raid. Bears are slow sometimes!

Best Raid Fight: A super-powered gnoll we fight in the final raid tier who wandered into the wrong place at the wrong time.

Clearly, because the Gnomes and Goblins haven’t gotten the idea from a theme park ride yet!

Of course, if you’re talking about a literal disc mount, there is always the Mage Class Hall mount and the Disc of the Red Flying Cloud from Pandaria.

More sinisterly, maybe the Draenei are hiding them from us! They are the only space-faring race that we’re super close with… What have they seen?! Wake up people!!

I think I’ll be gazing up at the sky in wonder and noticing just how few dragons are flying around in it. I’m thinking Tommy Lee Jones in the first Men In Black movie when he’s about to nueralize himself. Only I won’t be wiping my memory, y’all are stuck with me!

Come to think of it, there are already a buuuuuuunch of dragons that can fly around our skies! We’re being lied to people! Wake up! 

Having been involved in the running of many conventions and smaller conferences in my day job I know exactly the things to do and not do.

It’d be two days of speakers and small breakout room sessions to get to know the various staff on the site. We’d need three major speakers per day, which I think is swingable. These could be things like “Worship the Void with Mitch” and “Practicing your Intimidating Barbarian Stare” with Rossi. Of course, Rossi’s would wind up being about transmog and dinosaurs mainly, and anyone who disapproved would be subjected to the aforementioned stare.

For the food, all buffets. They are way simpler than trying to do a plated meal for I assume the hundreds (thousands?) of attendees. We’d need a tradeshow space for people to sell various goods and services, and of course, the Blizzard Watch Hot Take Dunk Tank. Where you throw balls with hot takes on them while Mitch desperately hopes you don’t have very good aim.

We can have a loud side and a quiet side for the evening entertainment so that people who just wanna hang out and talk can do one, and people who are interested in dancing can do that too. Of course having stood on the quiet side at BlizzCon, eventually with that many people all crammed in together it gets loud too.

Today’s Anna Earworm™: Love Changes Everything

Enjoy pre-patch everybody! By this time next week, I expect to have seen so many pictures of Dracthyr. Don’t get too excited anticipating your perfect Evoker that you forget to leave Anna lots of questions for tomorrow!