The Queue: Old Paladin yells at cloud

Sometimes you’ve just gotta yell at those clouds. Sometimes the clouds are dragons. Sometimes the clouds are Old Gods. And sometimes the clouds are patch notes.

None of them take much notice of your yelling, but what else is there to do but shake your fist at the sky?

Anyway, this is not a cloud, it is the Queue. Let’s answer some questions.

I would open the portal in Blackwing Lair, right at the end, directly over Nefarian’s head where he’s sitting on his throne and waiting to make his dramatic speech to the next group of adventurers that comes through.

I can picture the scene perfectly. Nefarian is sitting there, in the quiet heart of his sanctum, composing his next dramatic speech in his head while he waits. It’s so important to get the right air of superiority and menace into these things, and it takes a lot of care. He is deep in thought. And then a portal opens over his head.

LET THE GAMES BEGIN, AND THE GAMES ARE SPIDERS FALLING ON YOUR HEAD.

Sure, Nefarian is a super powerful dragon, but also a bunch of spiders just unexpectedly fell from the sky on top of him. It doesn’t matter how powerful he is; he’s going to jump up and emit a high-pitched shriek because that’s how you respond to spiders falling on your head. Probably he would follow up by shifting into dragon form and burning them to a crisp, but it will always leave a little note of anxiety in his mind. Where did they come from? Are there more of them?

It’s the kind of thing that could really throw off your game when it comes to writing your supervillain monologue in your head. Particularly when it happens again the next time someone completes the same quest.

It paints a beautiful picture.

Blizzard has moved forward on allowing factions to intermingle a lot faster than I expected. Cross-faction guilds are something I honestly didn’t expect to see in Dragonflight at all, and while they’re a little basic, they’ve opened up a lot of options for players — a good portion of my raid team swapped races to play what they wanted to play rather than what they had to play due to faction limitations.

But I’m not sure we can expect Blizzard to keep moving this quickly in terms of cross-faction features, and I don’t know if I want them to. Not because I don’t think it would be cool for my Blood Elf to visit Ironforge, but because I’d like to see Blizzard put some more time into ironing out the flaws of existing cross-faction play before taking the next step. Cross faction groups still have their snags — for example, while we can run a raid with guild members of both factions, we can’t do Timewalking with guild members of both factions. That’s a real shame when you have Timewalking raids or when Turbulent Timeways comes up (it starts on the 26th) and you want to run dungeons with guildies.

So will we be strolling through Orgrimmar and Stormwind (respectively) next expansion? I think it will be later in the expansion, if so, because Blizzard still has some technical kinks to iron out with cross-faction gameplay, and we would need a story story bridging factions to that level of cooperation and trust. I think that will take a little more time… but also, Blizzard has been surprising me with cross-faction content, so maybe I’m wrong and we’ll all be walking together on the streets of Stormwind in patch 10.3.

We, the peoples of Azeroth, seem to be highly inclined to ignore our problems until they go away. The fact that this hasn’t worked yet only means we haven’t ignored them for long enough, so maybe if we just ignore them harder they’ll go away. We have to keep trying! We can’t give up!

At least not until the problem explodes in our faces and we literally cannot ignore it anymore. But until then we can gosh-darn try our best.

But Gnomeregan is the longest-lived problem of World of Warcraft. We saw it when we logged in on launch day, and it’s persisted in much the same state since. We can tell that all of the waste venting from the city has negative effects. When Gnomeregan was lost, nearly 80% of the Gnomish population went with it, killed or turned into mindless leper Gnomes. And if you venture into the city, you can see the damage that’s been done.

I think it’s fair to worry that toxic gas and sludge has been venting from the city for the past twenty years… and the proximity to Ironforge seems exceptionally worrying. Shouldn’t we do something about that? But I suppose Gnomeregan is far enough away that you don’t see the toxic fumes the moment you walk out of the gates, so perhaps it can be ignored a little longer.

But really, I think it’s time for a clean-up crew. I think it’s time to bring all of our magic, all of our technology to the task of cleaning up Gnomeregan. Reclaim the city, rid it of contamination, and rebuild it into a modern Gnomish capital. It’s time.

In the meanwhile, I suppose we can ignore that sword for a little bit longer.

I’m going to second the well rested thing. One of the most unlikely things about gaming — and particularly TTRPGs — is the idea of players needing to be rested to perform at their best. Well, okay, maybe, but when was the last time anyone reading these words got a full eight hours of sleep a night, much less two nights in a row. Out of everything in gaming, “well rested” is the least realistic… and most wanted… of all things.

Keep the dragons: I’d just like a good night’s sleep.

I don’t actually see a question here, but I can’t find fault in your statement so I present this information unedited for our fellow readers.

And that is all for this Friday, my friends. Take care and have a great weekend — I’ll see you again next week.