The Queue: Progress!

We did it! After a couple of long nights getting blasted to teensy pieces in hellish fires, we’ve finally started our journey into Mythic Aberrus.

The kill didn’t even really seem that bad and even without the nerfs — I think it would’ve been the one that got her. We finally had all of our members working in sync and calling out things properly to ensure the fires didn’t overlap. It was beautiful.

After dousing Kezzara we moved on to the Zaqali assault, and let them blast us into teensy pieces for a while. We got into the final door phase a few times, but the damage there was more significant than we were expecting, and each time we were left strewn about the area in smoldering piles.

While I see about putting myself back together, it’s time for — The Queue!

Well, I know that Warcraft could benefit from the Town Portal system like in Diablo. Sure most of the time my hundred bag slots are enough to keep me going for a while, but for times when those are full and I can’t mount it sure would be nice to make a quick jaunt back to town.

As for going the other way I don’t know what I want Diablo to pick up from Warcraft. Bigger bags? I would like to be able to kill things longer without stopping, but then I could just use the aforementioned Town Portal and clean out my stuff…

Raids? I don’t think that scaling up past four people is really what I want out of Diablo.

I guess I do miss having non-combat pets out and about, even if it was a little silly in Diablo 3 seeing my grim fantasy character followed around by a little Battlecruiser. I did really appreciate it picking up my gold though!

Not really, sometimes I do play other classes! The only time I would really shy away from that would be if I was playing something like Shadow Priest or Balance Druid — the ones that have a really big hole in their general kit.

Of course, I’m talking about interrupting, nothing is more annoying than when you’re in a run with a couple of those and have to interrupt several high-priority spells in a row. Like that pair of casters right before the mushroom boss in Underrot, if you miss the Withering Curse or the Shadow Bolt Volley on a fortified week you’re definitely about to be feeling a certain kind of way (bad).

Otherwise sure you’re not as robust as a group, but maybe you’re both different builds or specs. As long as you have a Bloodlust and a Battle Rez I think that you’re sitting pretty no matter what else the group looks like.

Learning a new raid is the best part of raiding! Sure addons can take a lot of the guessing out of things, but figuring out just how you need to interact with each ability alongside your friends is why I love raiding. I don’t look at a new raid full of abilities as ugh I gotta learn all of these — it’s more of a puzzle to be teased apart and conquered.

But also yes, interrupts are good, most things shouldn’t be stood in, and dragons will always have some combination of breath and tail attacks. The worst offenders I can see for bosses overloading players are the ones with four phases and each phase has a new batch of abilities. I get it, that’s a big wall of text, and all of those have to be important right? But there are always things that you can ignore because they won’t be your problem if you’re getting glassy-eyed staring at them. It’s just a matter of ability triage and focusing on things that directly apply to you, while listening to your addons and raid leader.

As for Keystones — with how good M+ has become for gearing characters I don’t think it’s that big of an imposition to learn a handful of new dungeon abilities for each season. This is also coming from a tank keep in mind, if anything my job is considered to be harder because on top of the new abilities to pay attention to, I’m also usually expected to know the route and then be able to adjust pulls on the fly. Can my group handle a second pull right now or a third pull? Is it worth going out of my normal route here to get monster X for count because my group has two Boomkin and can’t handle the interrupts in a later pack so we’ll skip that.

I am very happy that I can collect multiple transmog appearances off of one piece of gear by upgrading it. I’m even happier in this tier that it’s fairly cheap to upgrade things once you’ve had an item of a higher level in that slot. Would I pay 140 Flightstones to upgrade a normal piece of gear twice to get its heroic appearance? Yes in a heartbeat!

I’m not the most thrilled about the naming system and bag space requirements of the new system though. I’d rather we didn’t have to convert to the Crests and the upgrades were just based on getting enough fragments. I also wish that they hadn’t gone with the names they did and instead had gone with the Common/Magic/Rare/Epic names that we were used to. I think that falling back on names that the player base has been trained on since their first steps in Azeroth would’ve gone a long way to ease us into the new system.

I’m still basically where I was last week, I don’t think I managed to get on and play Diablo at all this week! Longer hours at work and lots of fun things to do out and about meant that my gaming time was limited, and what I did have was spent mostly in Warcraft raiding and doing Keystones with my friends.

So I’m still in Act 3, level 51 and I just got my butt absolutely trampled by the Cannibal King. I haven’t had a chance to go back in on the lower World Tier yet, but I gotta be close to the end of the act and getting my mount I figure. I’m sure that’ll be a nice boost to my drive to keep going.

Bacardi is covered in toys here and definitely loves every second of it. Give him a boop for some good vault luck that is also covered in your shiniest toys.

Today’s Anna Earworm™: Wait A Minute My Girl

Have a great week everyone, try to save the world if you can, or at least kill some dragons. Don’t forget to leave Anna with plenty of great questions for tomorrow!