The Queue: Social Anxiety

Now that white and gray transmogs are a thing, is anyone else feeling a little awkward about visiting all these lowbie NPCs in far-flung locations you haven’t even thought about in literally years? Sure, random person in Halfhill, I’d be happy to help you with all those pesky virmen decimating your crops again, just as soon as you tell me where you’re hiding your flannel shirts and pitchforks and stuff.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we’re definitely not using you as a distraction to sneak out the back.

Not if I do it first!

Seriously, heed the huge cervid and let the Darkmoon Faire do the work for you.

I don’t think it’s necessarily about having enough of them per se, and more about having a lot of very distinct “dark” zones already with their own distinct aesthetic pulled from specific themes in gothic fiction. It’s getting tougher and tougher to find something to fit that dark and mysterious vibe without starting to bite the ambiance of another zone.

With Gilneas you get the Victorian steampunk stuff, with lots of Jekyll and Hyde vibes from the Gilneans themselves. Revendreth gave us the Dracula vibe, with more Victorian themes, but more specifically toward the lavish and ornate (and the distinctly red vampire theme). Drustvar was more of the folk horror and eldritch beings a la Algernon Blackwood, but it also borrowed from Gilneas with the Order of Embers stuff. The Undercity and the Scourge have plenty of Frankenstein vibes, both in terms of the stitched together nature of the risen beings, and in the case of the Undead, the existential questions that arises from the deeper themes in the book. And of course, you can’t have Old God tentacle monsters and cultists without invoking Lovecraft. We’ve also seen some areas which are dark, but not necessarily corrupted or scary, like Ardenweald.

Really, the only set of works that hasn’t been pretty fully explored are the ones which are centered on a specific old house being haunted or mysterious, like Rebecca or Haunting of Hill House. Even then, some of that was explored in Karazhan, and the overall set dressing is pretty similar in those cases to what we’ve already seen.

I’m not discounting the possibility of darker zones in the future, but this is an expansion where we don’t necessarily need one. And hey, the benefit of pulling from Blackwood or Lovecraft in particular is that the setting starts out fairly unremarkable and then becomes horrifying over time. f̶͈̉ḙ̶̛̳̾̌a̶̩͚̓̽r̸̭̗̦̂̾̚ ̴̹̐n̶͚̔͊̓̈́o̷̦͓̎̃̆t̴̬̦̏̏͐̄

I honestly tried to win five Standard Hearthstone games to earn the grilled cheese card back this month. I truly did. I even opened all my regular and current Standard expansion card packs! I knew it was going to be a rough time going in, but I had no idea how wildly mismatched things would be at low ELO. I won one (1) game all month, and now that delicious card back will slip through my fingers forever.

Seriously, could they make it like, five games won or ten games played? Yuck.

Also, platformers in general, but jump puzzles in any game specifically. Celeste looks lovely but jump puzzles give me anxiety, and I’m also really bad at them.