The Queue: And just how are we feeling today?

This is Ocktomos, and I’m pretty sure he’s feeling a sense of accomplishment at having beat out the RNG gods and acquired Fyr’alath. Perhaps relief to have finally collected all the crafting materials and finished all the Superblooms. The feeling of climbing the highest mountain in the game to say, yeah, I did that.

So grats Ocktomos on the axe, and let’s get on to the Queue, where we’re going to spend an above-average amount of time talking about our feelings.

Doing my best over here, which is all any of us can do. I hope you are also doing okay, and that everyone is hanging in there this Friday.

I like the concept of building out unique class fantasies with these specializations. Each one has an interesting concept driving it, and some have pretty significant lore connotations, like Farseer Shaman and Dark Ranger Hunters. They let you fine-tune your build in interesting ways and I think they have a lot of potential.

I also think they look like a balancing nightmare. What strikes me most about them is that they seem to have unique concepts. They’re all extremely different — and some specs, like Lightsmith and Oracle, are a bit off the wall — which will make it difficult to make apples-to-apples comparisons and consider how different combinations might come together in unintended ways. That could mean an expansion with a lot of swinging for the fences, as balance patches constantly dole out nerfs and buffs in a quest for equity between classes and specs.

I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays out though.

Honestly WoW has done so many different types of environment already that it’s hard to say what it needs more of. Zereth Mortis was the first zone I really vibed with in quite a long time. Despite how Blizzard oddly hyped the zone up as new because you could walk on water and there were floating islands (okay, sure, never seen those before), it was a zone that felt different. It had a unique color palette and a very broad set of biomes of its own, all crammed into a single contained zone. I liked to just hang out there: the colors, the music, I just liked the place. Which is saying something for an expansion that pushed you to spend most of your time in Azeroth’s literal version of hell. Though perhaps that’s part of why Zereth Mortis felt like such a breath of fresh air.

I don’t dislike Dragonflight’s zones, but nothing quiet hit me the same way. And what I liked about ZM isn’t so much a biome as a feeling. I’d love to see new zones that tackle familiar environments in new ways. Color palettes and art styles that turn a familiar swamp or mountain or field into something new. Because at 20 years of WoW, I think we’re all chasing what’s novel, what feels new and interesting in this familiar world. I’m just not sure what that is.

INTJ. Personality tests can be silly, and the science is a bit of a mixed bag. MBTI in particular makes pretty big promises as to what it can do — let personality insights guide your success! a positive framework for life-long people development! — but the descriptions of INTJ are pretty spot on to how I am. Of course I am also a Virgo, a much less reasoned indicator that I also conform to, at least in ways.

But you opened the door, now we’ve all gotta take internet personality tests. (But not the official MBTI, because they charge $60 for it. Gotta go for even less scientific versions.)

Ain’t that the question. Life is a big experiment in taking what comes — which is rarely predictable —  and rolling with it as best we can.

Hanging in there. Some days are good, some days are less good, some days are downright bad, and you do what you can with all of them.

Social media is tricky. I have a lot of trouble keeping up with Twitter without apps that let me easily check my timeline and be alerted if anyone’s trying to talk to me. The website is a mess that keeps resetting to a non-chronological timeline that shows me stuff people I don’t follow said a week ago, and it’s increasingly full of suspicious-to-scammy advertisements. I just don’t check in regularly, and when I do it’s almost always on the Blizzard Watch account. It’s been hard to connect on other networks because everyone I know have scattered to different places or dropped social media entirely. I’m on Bluesky (which has a similar no app problem), which feels like where a lot of the Twitter community has wound up. I’m also on Mastodon, where a subset of my friends are active, but there’s a lot less (nearly none) larger media content. But I don’t consistently post on either (even though there are some good Mastodon apps). It’s hard to keep up with my friends all over the place, and it’s impossible to make time to check in on Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Facebook. Keeping up has become a full-time job that I’ve mostly opted out of, unfortunately, and I do miss it.

But what we have is what we have, for better and for worse. I have a mediation app on my phone that keeps reminding me I’d feel better if I’d just drink water and stop to breathe occasionally, and there’s a good chance it’s right.

So let’s end the Queue on a high note. This question spawned from Blizzard Watch Discord in a conversation that aggressively eschewed the metric system for alternate, more descriptive means of measurement.

The Deepen Tram is 2600 yards long according to science done by someone who’s more patient than I am. That’s 93600 inches. A Ford F250 is about 250″ in length, and if we leave a bit of space between them, that’s about 350 F250s. Each one full of flamingos, though the number of flamingos that you can fit into an F250 is up for debate.

Though I think the bigger problem would be the width of the F250s. Those tram lanes are pretty narrow and it would probably be a construction project to make an F250 lane.

And that, my friends, is the Queue. Take care of yourself, be kind, and have a good weekend!