The Queue: I am a hopeless creature of transmog and yelling

Yep, that’s me, doing Mythic Tomb of Sargeras for transmog. Don’t worry, not a single piece of plate dropped the whole run. I still liked that screenshot, so there it is. The Kil’Jaedan fight is still a pain but I eventually got lucky with it. He didn’t drop any loot I needed, I just wanted to kick his face in.

Gotta get more of my characters to 70. Need a farming corps for this one.

As a head’s up, the first question has spoilers for a quest in Dragonflight. It’s a necessary quest to progress the story, but regardless, I wanted to warn y’all.

You need Dragonmurloc Riding to ride a Dragon Murloc in Azmerloth, as Zuel mentioned there are no Dragons there. Even Deathwingurlugull appears as a massive murloc. He’s listed as a Dragonkin, but he’s still different enough that I expect you’d need a different kind of training to ride any of Azmerloth’s Dragonmurlocs.

I have yet, in several runs of that dungeon, seen any loot drop. I’m not convinced it has loot at all.

Okay, so this is just anecdotal based on my experience, but I feel like when I hit 70, I was actually a touch weaker than I’d been leveling up, but as my ilevel broke 340 I felt better, and now, around 360 I feel like I’m doing better damage and taking less overall.

However, my current running around, non instance/raid build has a lot of self heal and survival cooldowns in it. I have Second Wind, Inevitable Victory, Bitter Immunity, Leeching Strikes and Enraged Regeneration — that’s a fair amount of resistance to damage and/or healing I can pop when things are getting hairy. I’ve even been soloing Elites with it, although I have a 50/50 chance of dying on some pulls.

See, I have real problems with this movie, and every dinosaur movie we’ve ever gotten (yes, especially Jurassic Park and the sequels) and it’s this — they get the dinosaurs utterly, completely, contemptibly wrong. Wrong in a way that infuriates me.

Din0saurs were animals. They weren’t killing machines, they weren’t constantly, mindlessly consumption engines, and they weren’t shrink-wrapped hate conveyors. They were animals, relatives of crocodilians, the line of animals that led to modern birds, who are literally just dinosaurs themselves.

That’s right. Birds aren’t dinosaur relatives, they are dinosaurs. A Tyrannosaurus is a coelurosaur, and birds are literally in that group. So when you see yet another movie using dinosaurs as the monsters stalking and trying to kill a human, it irks me. I’m not saying that a Dakotaraptor or even a juvenile Tyrannosaur wouldn’t have hunted a human, but remember — they would have absolutely no idea what that thing is. It would smell weird. It would move in a way unlike anything those animals have ever seen.

So the dinosaurs in 65 look pitifully out of date — that T-Rex had a head like a cadaver with all the fluid sucked out, more like a mummy than a living animal. If you haven’t seen Prehistoric Planet’s amazing rendition of a T-Rex, please take a look.

It’s got muscle. It’s got featherfuzz, and the baby it’s taking care of has more, closer to actual feathers. It’s a real animal. And yes, it would be a dangerous thing to encounter, especially if it had hungry chicks to feed, but it’s still an animal.

According to my GOG launcher, I spent 924 hours playing Wrath of the Righteous with 121 of those hours coming in 2022. This year I played Baldur’s Gate 3 for 65 hours. I also played Cyberpunk 2077 on the PC for 450 hours, with around 100 of those hours taking place this year.

So, just on those three games, I played games for 286 hours this year. That doesn’t count any of my console gaming or games I played on platforms aside from GoG, like say Diablo 3 or Diablo Immortal or even World of Warcraft. I took a break from WoW during Shadowlands but I’ve been playing it pretty constantly during the Dragonflight launch. Then there’s games like all the Game Pass games I’ve tried like Octopath Traveler or Guardians of the Galaxy or Tunic to name just a few.

So all I can say for sure is that I played at least 286 hours this year, and plausibly more than that. Just my Diablo 3 time this year would likely be another 100 + hours.

1. I mean, it didn’t when you asked this, but it does when I’m writing it, because it is Thursday today. It likely will be Friday when Liz reads this Queue looking for questions to answer, though.
2. I have Anhedonia, so it’s hard for me to experience pleasure and that makes happiness a tricky thing for me. However, I think it’s fair to say that I’m happy when I get to spend time with my wife and our little menagerie of furry kids, that I generally enjoy playing video games possibly because I can be someone else when I play them, and I seem to have an endless supply of talking about dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures that buoys my mood. I also like to read.

Okay, that’s the Queue for Thursday, December 15. The Ides of December! Christmas in 10 days, if you celebrate it. If not, it’s still gonna happen in ten days, you just won’t care. Regardless, I hope your day is pleasant and filled with good things. Like this important dinosaur nose boop.