The Queue: The drama! The dresses! The romance!

What could possibly be in patch 10.2.6? I’m pretty sure I know.

I think it will be the most requested storyline of Dragonflight: Lor’themar and Thalyssra’s wedding. Maybe it will be a flashback. Maybe we’ll be venturing back into the timeways to prevent something terrible. I don’t know! I don’t care! I just want to go to Lor’themar and Thalyssra’s wedding.

This was the Azerothian celebration of the millennia, and we, the greatest heroes of Azeroth, weren’t even invited. A terrible slight! We read about it but never got to experience it. Never got to chat with the guests, decorate cakes and arrange flowers, get drunk on manawine and kiss handsome wizards. There are so many story possibilities in a wedding where a whole who’s who of Azeroth is invited. The drama! The dresses! The romance! I want it all, and I have campaigned for it since I found out about it.

And since 10.2.6 is confirmed to be about a subject of player discussion, I mean, clearly it has to be the wedding.

No, don’t tell me otherwise, I want to live in this fantasy space for at least a few more weeks.

I haven’t made much time to play Diablo lately, so I’ve only just scratched the surface of the event. If there’s one thing Diablo (usually) nails, it’s the absolute joy of being wildly powerful and killing entire rooms of demons with a single click, and these buffs push that to the next level, so it looks fun.

Fun and also fast. Blizzard has already increased the event’s +50% experience buff to a +100% experience buff, and the Glyph XP buff from +10% to +20%. It’s a good time to level up!

Hero talents: What strikes me most is what a wide variety of designs these have. We’ve seen brand new active abilities, the rebirth of old abilities, and strange hybridization. The Oracle Priest has a bizarre buff system where the buff you cast cycles like a slot machine when you hit the button, and then you hit it again to select the buff you’ll be casting. It sounds like a chaotic nightmare in practice, but it’s certainly an interesting take on the idea. The trouble is it’s hard to judge one of three (or two or four) specs on its own, without the others to look at. Even with as many as we’ve seen, we continue to look at them in a vacuum.

Cinematics: Maybe. In-game cinematics have improved vastly over the years, and those cinematics let Blizzard toss your character into the middle of the action in a way that can really make the game feel more immersive. There are places where a cinematic like that is a better fit, story-wise. In the lead-in to the game, the opening cinematic, it’s a story we aren’t there for yet. But in the middle and end of the game, our characters are right in the heart of the story. It would feel weird to have lots of pre-rendered cinematics without us involved somewhere. And while the pre-rendered cenamtics are beautiful, amazing, I think I’d rather have lots of these little in-game cinematics than a couple of larger cinematics.

Inclement weather: Knife storm. You can dodge a knife. Or block a knife. Theoretically, anyway. In a thunderquake the ground is just going to fall out from under you and you’d have no chance at all.

I have not. I always think I’m definitely going to get this done before April and then I always wind up filing an extension and kicking the can down the road. And taxes are one of those weights on your shoulders that just sits, growing heavier and more worrying as the deadline looms closer.

At least that’s how it is for me. I freelance for a living, so taxes are a complicated tangle of terror that I only partially understand and I’m always worried about mucking up.

In Azeroth, I imagine Goblin tax authorities are the worst. There’s a lot of fine print to read, paperwork to file in triplicate to avoid fines, and even when you think you’re completely prepared you find out about the fine print on the opposite side of the page that you need two magnifying glasses to even discern as text.

Every race except elves, who walk around haughtily like absolutely nothing is amiss.

The Princess Bride.

It’s a perfect movie, but this could also be a perfect movie. Obviously Kermit is Westley and Piggy is Buttercup. Sweetums is Fezzik. Fozzie is Vizzini. Gonzo is Miracle Max and his wife is replaced with a flock of chickens. The Swedish Chef is the clergyman. The dungeon is staffed by Bunsen and Beaker. Inigo is still Mandy Patinkin.

And everything is perfect.

That’s all for today my friends. Take care of yourselves, hug your loved ones, and maybe eat a cookie. It’s Friday; you deserve it.

I’ll see you back here next week!