The Queue: Lazy Wednesday

Look, it had been a long day of running Mythic dungeons to complete the Taivan meta and I was tired. I was about to hit the final one I needed and decided to take a break while we recruited people. The fact I could summon via the summoning stone without getting up was a surprise but a welcome one and I took full advantage of it.

Speaking of Taivan it appears that RNG is against me and a couple of the quests I need to complete it won’t be up until next reset at the earliest. Since he’s a good boy, though, I’m sure he’ll patiently wait for me.

While I figure out how to attach rockets to Taivan to make him a flying mount too, let’s answer some questions!

Oooh, this is an interesting question. I remember back in the day not being impressed with most of the models. If I started at the same time (Wrath) I probably would’ve gone with female Draenei, but if I started with original I think I would’ve ended up rolling a Tauren first.

Huh, there’s an AU where Chrth is a Tauren Hunter. That might be interesting to explore at some point.

Beasts are frankly not as bad as they had been, but I still kinda hate playing against them — the turns take so long. The devs must think they’re in a good place in terms of win rate and such to not touch them but short of removing a couple of the more annoying cards I’m not sure what else they could do anyway.

Bream Counter’s nerf has me terrified, as Hand Drop Murloc (my name) is my second favorite gamestyle to play. It’s going to depend on what they do to her, with moving her to Rank 5 being worse case scenario. The other possibility is nerfing the gain per played Murloc (to +2/+2) which wouldn’t hurt as much but still be annoying. Fingers crossed they’re just adjusting her base stats.

‘Awakened’ is the Dragonflight rename for the final Season’s ‘Fated’ raids, which frankly annoys me because it’s going to be harder to convey the information in our articles. I wish they would stick to one name for these sorts of things, especially with evergreen features. I’m already planning on having to use “it’s like the Revival Catalyst from DF, which was like the Creation Catalyst in Zereth Mortis” a thousand times during The War Within.

I have it on good authority that she is addicted to Settlers of Catan. When she claimed in Battle for Azeroth that “The true throne of power beckons, and I intend to claim it” she was referring to the Catan World Championship.

Ooooh, this is a tough one. While films like Commando and Running Man are great I think it’s going to come down to a battle between True Lies and Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The latter is a superior film, yes, but True Lies is pretty dang funny (it made Tom Arnold humorous. Tom Arnold!) and it holds up well. If you forced me to choose one I’d probably go with True Lies, but it’s so close.

Fun fact: I had completely forgotten the song “You Should Be Mine” existed until I saw it in Arnold’s IMDB listing. Still a great song and it deserves more discussion when talking about Guns N’ Roses’ best songs.

Having gotten Fyrakk’s axe to finally drop for me yesterday (for those keeping statistics, I got it after 1 Heroic kill and 16 LFR kills) and working on actually being able to use it I have lots of thoughts, so buckle in.

Let’s start off with the drop rate — it’s horrible. I get that you don’t want every eligible character to be wielding a Legendary after week one of a raid opening but farms that can last longer than two months when Seasons tend to only be six months long is excessive. The drop rate of the Evoker Legenary Nasz’uro was so bad that players were literally rolling new Evokers continuously in the hopes of getting it. The addition of bad luck protection in patch 10.1.5 ended this practice, but any grind that forces such behavior in my mind is too excessive.

The other issue I have with Fyr’alath’s creation is the mat cost, I don’t feel that Legendaries are the place to have massive gold sinks. While I’m sure the prominent Mythic guilds had no problem dropping all the gold needed to get the Legendary asap, I feel bad for players in smaller guilds; those are the ones who would benefit most from adding a Legendary to their repertoire but they’re not necessarily going to have the resources to start using it. It can’t feel good to be sidelined or for progression to go slower simply because you don’t have enough Resonant Crystals on hand.

So how would I solve these problems? Thanks for asking! First off I would ditch the Dragonflight Legendary systems entirely. Just bury the code in the sand and never look at it again. Then I’d build a new process that had the following criteria:

• Near-immediate acquisition of a usable base item
• Meaningful quest chain to give empowerment
• Final acquisition of Legendary via resources acquired from activity completion, not from the AH

Using Fyr’alath as an example, here’s how I’d do it:

• Your first kill of Fyrakk on an eligible character automatically drops the base epic weapon for the Legendary. Congrats, you killed Fyrakk, here’s a weapon that’ll be a Legendary. Doesn’t matter if it’s Mythic or LFR, you killed Fyrakk have a weapon and a quest chain to empower it.
  • The base stats of the weapon would be based on equivalent drops in that level of difficulty — if you have the base non-Legendary weapon and defeat Fyrakk on a higher difficulty level you’ll get an upgrade item similar to what dropped from Sylvanas for Rae’shalare, but the main difference is that it’s a guaranteed drop.
• Getting the weapon starts you on a quest chain through current content after completion of which your base weapon gets empowered — think of it as becoming max upgraded for that difficulty level.
• You’ll also start collecting a random macguffin off the current raid bosses (the higher the difficulty, the more macguffins drops). After you’ve killed enough of other bosses, you can do a final empowerment quest that brings it to Legendary status with commensurate ilvl (no longer difficulty-dependent) and abilities. As long as you’re killing bosses you’re getting closer to completion.

With this framework in place, the idea would be that after a Mythic Fyrakk kill you’d probably need about 2 weeks of Mythic boss kills to get the Legendary, while if you’re only doing LFR it would probably take closer to 8 weeks, although you’d also be starting later. But this would pretty much guarantee that anyone who wanted the Legendary would have it around the midpoint of the Season and would encourage players to try more difficult content to speed up the process.

Would players buy carries and such to speed up the acquisition process? Of course. But that’s already happening only now players wouldn’t feel as compelled to do it because they’d see progress happening.

Anyway that’s my dream. Devs, call me, we’ll work out something.

That’s all the time we have for questions today. Hopefully everyone is having a good week, and be sure to leave plenty of questions for Matt!