The Queue: We’re all talking about pandas and cats

I know that’s a picture of a panda and a turtle, but just use your imagination, okay? Today is all about pandas, but you have to bring your own cats.

Obviously!

I don’t know how to change the title of the site to tell you that, though, so it’s really exactly like old times.

I think it’s brilliant. It’s a great downtime activity until the next expansion. It sends us back to some great content in the game’s history but without the weight of that end-of-expansion lull that dragged the whole expansion down in our memories.

A speedy leveling experience giving us a way to easily level alts pre-expansion, with familiar content but also interesting new abilities, I think it will be a good time.

As to whether we need more of these, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure we won’t need one immediately, because I imagine the Remix will be ending shortly before War Within launches, and it will be a while before we’ll have a good downtime in which we might need something to do. And when you have these “limited time events” all the time, they become tiresome, exhausting. Even now, having the Mists remix and Dragonflight Season 4 hit around the same time is going to be taxing on my time, and if Blizzard rolls these out rapidly it will become impossible to enjoy.

I wouldn’t mind going back to Burning Crusade, though.

Remix will run on existing WoW servers, but you’ll play Remix-specific characters with access to Remix content. You can even join your existing guild.

You can play any race and any class available in modern WoW, excepting the fact you can only have one Evoker per server.

This isn’t WoW Classic: we’ll be playing in Pandaria but on modern retail servers with modern retail classes. Though you’ll get some new abilities via gems, your class, talents, and abilities will otherwise be the same as they are on retail.

So there’s nothing to relearn, nothing to figure out: if you play retail WoW now, you’ll be playing the same thing in Remix. Only the location has changed.

The “don’t you guys have phones?” meme.

The poor dev on stage — Wyatt Cheng, I think — wasn’t prepared for the vast wave of negativity being thrown at him. I don’t think anyone on stage was. (This may have been a wild miscalculation of how much their core audience was interested in mobile games, and the community team overhyped the level of announcement that went out, but that can’t all be put on the heads of the people who program the game.)

They were in a crowd of Blizzard’s biggest fans and being asked if a game they’d put a ton of work into, a game I’m sure they thought was really good — because it is a really good game — was a joke. Everyone on stage was doing the best they could in a bad situation, and one of them made a comment that wasn’t exactly helpful to anyone, and for that, the entire gaming world has been making fun of him for half a decade. This is a me give the guy a break.

(Sorry Arthonos, I don’t have a meme I’d revive.)

I think this is something that can go either way. It can prove devs are paying attention and listening to players, trying to bring stuff we like to the game. Or it can be wild pandering in which they flail around to bring us what they think we want, without having the substance to back it up. We see a heck of a lot of this in TV and movies, in which writers are chasing what the audience responds to.

Sometimes it’s great. Sometimes it’s less great. And sometimes the definition of “great” differs wildly from person to person. I could have happily lived without ever hearing from Denathrius again, but maybe it’s not so bad for Blizzard to keep its options open. It’s better than killing him off and deciding later that he really has a role to play.

I really don’t know. I have a couple alts in Dragonflight levels I work on here and there, including a Vulpera Warrior that’s really fun. I have a bunch of other alts at or close to 60, too, but nothing I’m really drawn to which is why they’re all sitting at 60. (I leveled most of them during the last pre-expansion event so I’d have options on what to play if I wanted to switch.) But I don’t really I want to start over with my Warrior, and I can’t think what else I’d feel like playing.

A friend of mine, Cynwise, offered this advice: Roll 2d12. The die on the left is your modifier – 1-6 = 0, 7-12 = +1. The die on your right is your class selector: list alphabetically, number from 1-13, add modifier, there’s your class. Pick the most elf-like race possible.

So I rolled the dice and got Hunter.

I don’t know if I want to play a Hunter. It would be a very easy for leveling, but possibly harder for group content if we all play Hunters for easy leveling.

It’s a tough call. Maybe I’ll play a Hunter. It’s definitely going to be a Void Elf because of that overpowered racial that reduces transmog costs by 50%.

What about the rest of you?

And that’s all for today my friends. I’ll probably see some of you soon on the Mists PTR which will theoretically be coming online as soon as this goes live. Let’s get ready to timerun, or whatever it is we call playing the game these days.

Take care and have a good weekend, everybody.