The Queue: A long year
Without going into specifics, this has been a very long year already. The upside(?) is that that hopefully means the rest of the year only gets better. I’m going to hold onto that belief and give extra offerings to Yogg to help make that happen.
In the meantime, here’s a Queue.
Now that I’ve leveled a warlock and spriest back to back I gotta say I vastly prefer spriest. It’s like the cooler affliction warlock but with the bonus that you can sell your soul to 2 different malevolent entities
One of us! One of us!
For real, though, I do love Warlocks but Shadow has always felt like it had a more diverse toolkit in its standard rotation. It’s certainly been a minute since I’ve played other classes extensively, but especially with Shadow in Dragonflight, Shadow has so many unique spell types as part of our normal gameplay — long DOTs, a short DOT, short-cooldown nuke, execute, two major DPS cooldowns, two fillers, an AOE, and several procs, plus utility with spells like Mass Dispel — it’s hard to feel like I need to find greener grass.
Q4tQ: The sense of danger is overwhelming. Are you certain you wish to proceed?
Q4tQ: What are your thoughts on parallel reward paths? Does putting the same cosmetic reward for two totally different activities give players more options about how they spend their in game time, or does it devalue whichever activity is deemed more difficult / time consuming?
Nah.
As always, the specific scenario might change the answer, but broadly speaking I think it gives players more options on how they spend their time. Especially in terms of cosmetics, who cares if there are multiple ways to obtain something? As long as it’s relatively balanced — the time commitment should, I think, fall within a certain range — so that players aren’t funneling into activities they don’t enjoy, I don’t see an issue with it. (To be clear, funneling into unfun activities is different from encouraging players to try new playstyles, imo.)
D3 Altar of Rites on WOW, please! Stuff like + 5% damage outdoor, 20% rep with x faction, etc.
Unblocking with Valor points, farm stuff, etc.
What do you think?
All I needed to see was the above tree going past Z to know it’s more complicated an addition than I want in WoW.
I’m sure there is an audience for it in WoW — there is for almost every aspect of the game — but I’d much prefer those sorts of buffs come from a different form of gameplay that didn’t involve grinding, currency, or a tree.
Q4tQ: So I just noticed Archelogy is at 800/950 and I have 2 undiscovered races? Did I miss an update? I thought it maxed out in Legion and had zero updates. Where do I start because WoWhead only shows a guide to 800..
I’m not speaking from firsthand experience here, but apparently BFA changed/added things for Archaeology. According to this guide, the final stretch from ~750-950 is not only slow but must be done in Zandalar or Kul Tiras. Hope that helps!
Q4tQ: tier set bonuses have been announced, so how are you feeling about yours? (As always, this is the PTR and things are subject to change.)
For fire mage, the two-piece one seems simple and good; I can’t complain about a small damage bonus from a spell I use all the time. The four-piece one has me a little concerned. Unless that count stacks independently of individual enemies, it’s only going to come into effect on elites and bosses of various types. Your average mob doesn’t live long enough to receive thirty direct attacks.
Well, this is actually the first time I’m seeing them, but on first look, I’m of two minds:
- I like the Shadow bonuses! There might be a degree of min/maxing involved that I’m not seeing, but they largely feel like solid bonuses that encourage proper rotational play.
- I do not think it achieves Blizzard’s stated goal for this tier.
To elaborate on the latter, here’s their quote on class set design:
Set armor bonuses in Season 1 had relatively low impact on gameplay and rotations, because we wanted to give the new talent system room to shine. In Embers of Neltharion, set bonuses can have more impact on your resources, cooldowns, and talents. Some bonuses are enhanced by playing certain talents, and some build on popular talents in the middle sections of trees. Throughout these designs, we intend for players to feel able to play the overall build or strategy they prefer.
Again, I like the bonuses precisely because they do not do that. And while I would normally prefer tier bonuses to follow the above philosophy more, I spent a good portion of this patch adjusting my gameplay around a tier bonus when I, in fact, was losing DPS by doing so (i.e., do not hold on Devouring Plague casts even for b00fs). So I’m fine with not worrying about that kinda thing.
That’s all for today! I hope you have great weeks and get lots of sleep. Oh, and please leave questions for tomorrow’s writer.
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