The Queue: do it for the gram

Sometimes, you’ll take the motivation to do stuff from any corner, no matter how silly it may seem otherwise. Sometimes the motivation comes from little treats, like “if you finish this, you can go to the cafe for an almond croissant.” And sometimes, the motivation is there because you’re going to post something on Instagram, so it may as well look cute.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us questions and we’ll get through answering because if we’re good we’ll get 15 minutes of video game time.

Blizzard says a lot of things. Pepperidge Farms remembers stuff like PVP vehicle combat and the Dance Studio and quivers and You Think You Do But You Don’t (which, for the record, at the time I agreed with). I don’t expect a fully-fledged high seas adventure, either in The War Within or this little barely-announced interstitial patch. And knowing Blizzard, considering the memes and how the devs tend to love them, I would absolutely expect an NPC wearing a pirate hat in a rowboat in some far-flung corner in The War Within as a joke.

Do it for the memes, Arthonos.

You are correct. The last time there was a new Archaeology set added was back in BfA. I have to say, when I’m playing my Hunter, I really miss it. It’s a very low-impact activity. Unlike some other low-impact activities it isn’t even affected if you have to leave — with pet battles, for instance, if your queue pops, you lose the battle, which means you lose tamed pets and just kinda waste the time. Sometimes I fish, but my bag space is always at a premium, and it’s a total drag entering an instance with bags that are already almost full. Archaeology is by far my favorite way to spend those long DPS queues.

However, when I play my Monk, who is a dedicated Healer with that juicy Healer LFG queue, I rarely even remember Archaeology exists. So I’m not really surprised, on balance, that they’d backed off it a bit. I do like the little lore snippets, regardless, but I feel like there might be a better way to get those across, too.

It’s a catch-22, because I am so excited for the new little upgradeable companion dude, and yet every time I have to spell check “seneschal” it kills a tiny piece of my psyche. Did I spell it right just then? I honest to god could not tell you. They could have named it literally anything. They could’ve just named him Greg. After last season’s (deep sigh) Abattoir of Zir, it feels intentional, like the whole point of the Diablo series is to psychologically wound its participants on every possible level, including grammatically.

Privately, I’ve been calling him ‘Mr Red Squiggle Underline.”

In terms of WoW, the worth of every tiny bit of content is subjective. Some people find it compelling to reroll a Death Knight every other expansion, since there always seems to be some kind of “whoops, didn’t mean to kill your loved one” easter egg interaction. For me, I’d rather just read about how Alexstrazsa is mean to them or whatever on Wowhead. But, throw in a battle pet, and I’ll probably reroll about it.

The Evoker intro is relatively short, and contains a good amount of lore, but I don’t think you’ll be out to lunch if you skip it before doing the rest of the story on your main.