The Queue: Sometimes you just want to see the world stop burning

Right now the two games I’m playing are World of Warcraft: Dragonflight and Fallout 4. I enjoy Dragonflight quite a bit, and I really think of Fallout 4 as less of a post apocalyptic RPG — if I want that kind of feel I’d still be playing Cyberpunk 2077 — and more of a post apocalyptic version of Stardew Valley.

Granted, one wherein I build settlements, plant crops, recruit people to come live on the land and tend to said crops while I build increasingly more and more elaborate defenses involving dozens of automatic laser turrets and massive concrete fortifications that funnel any raiders or super mutants that dare attack us into kill zones for said dozens of automatic laser turrets to cook them like meat.

Okay, sometimes I cook them like meat myself with my gigantic terrifying laser gatling cannon, but it’s much of a sameness. Piles of ashes, a lot of cackling. I get Dragons a lot more now. My hoard just happens to consist of suits of power armor.

Since I primarily play Warriors now — I have four 70’s, two I play regularly and two I use for Transmog farm runs — I can really only speak to that class. But I do have thoughts.

Previous attempts to write this answer were ending up with a novel, so instead, here’s a TLDR of what I’ve been thinking.

• Warriors should be about one thing — unstoppable inner furnaces of raw hatred and anger. This can be expressed in various ways — the explosive fury of a Kratos or Hulk, the tightly leashed tactical mastermind (think Batman) or what have you.
• This anger has three main forms of expression — hitting your enemies, yelling at everything, and using weapons to get the p0int across to whatever is in your way. Each specialization should have its own unique approach to this.
  • Arms Warriors should be about being masters of all kinds of weapons. Borrowing from the Arsenal system, Arms Warriors would have a 2h weapon, 1h weapon, and a shield always equipped. They’d switch between the 2h for big attacks like Mortal Strike/Colossus Smash, the 1h for Overpower/Rend set-up attacks, and the shield for defensive cooldowns.
  • Fury Warriors are about using two weapons at once. All Fury Warriors would have 2 one hand and 2 two hand weapons equipped at all times and switch between them whenever it benefitted them.
  • Protection Warriors aren’t just about shields and heavy armor, they’re about defending other people. They’re the friend who steps between you and your bully and says if you want to get to her you have to go through me, and means it. They can choose between a Gladiator Stance that tanks with a 2h weapon (classically a polearm or other spear type, but it can be any 2h weapon) and a shield, a purely Defensive stance that uses a 1h and shield, or bring out a second shield for a Total Defense move like Shield Wall or Shield Block.
• Bring back the old Warrior weapon specializations, but make them baseline and allow Warriors to attune their current weapons to those specializations. So an Arms Warrior with a polearm could still go for a heavy stun build with that polearm, then get a 2h axe that’s an upgrade and use the new axe, but keep their stun build.

As long as this is now, you should have seen the last few tries, they were like five times as long.

Seriously I built a fortress at the Red Rocket and it’s like a porcupine if porcupines had laser cannons instead of quills. It literally can’t go higher than that, I hit the limit of the game to go up with constructed buildings.

Yes.

Look, not every question needs a novel to answer it. Yes, they should absolutely do that. I personally could not care less about pet battling, but a lot of players love it and that content is something they could definitely use.

Oh man, those guys. Me and a Warlock two-manned one of them down in the Elemental Stork near the Obsidian Citadel and it was awful. That guy was just frankly a nightmare of whittling down his HP bar while trying to just hit every stun and interrupt I could find and wait for more people to finally show up and make it doable.

When they didn’t, we ended up spending close to 10 minutes on this one guy. That’s a raid boss level of time investment.

Welcome to Sanctuary Hills. Yes, that is a concrete bunker cover in guns blocking the main road into the settlement, why do you ask?

Thanks, Kal, now I’m terrified they’ll do it and I’ll have to level two more characters to 70.

Okay, that’s the Queue for Thursday, January 12. See y’all soon.