The Queue: Celebrating America’s 2024th birthday tomorrow!

Mitch may not be currently writing the queue, but his spirit lives on!

Let’s answer some questions before a fight erupts over the title!

If I’m reading the data correctly, this is the 11th week so that’s 11 to start with. The Dragonflight Dungeon Event has happened twice in that time, so that’s an extra 4, making 15 the maximum you can get (unless I’m completely forgetting something).

However if you’re just starting now trying to get to 11 you may have issues, as while there is a catchup mechanism the medium drop rate means it’s tough to get all of them in one week even if you run every difficulty of the raid.

A combination of lavender oil and fried pork.

Playable Vrykul. While a War of the Three Hammers story implementation would be fantastic, the fact that it’s a past event means it probably wouldn’t be part of the leveling experience and therefore it’s not something that can be naturally revisited, just something to do now and again.

A playable race on the other hand is forever. So Vrykul it is.

Right now the only thing that kinda qualifies is prepatch for The War Within which everybody is expecting to arrive the week of July 23. Diablo 4 we know when its expansion is arriving (October 9, if you didn’t know) and what the new class is (even if we don’t know what it entails yet).

We’re kind of in an odd place right now news-wise, as the broad strokes are known just not all the details and there’s not much room between those lines to speculate.

I guess we could always start a rumor: the unannounced project might be revealed at the Video Game Awards in December.

I would love for us to have a female protagonist in the unannounced-but-everyone-knows-it’s-happening Persona 6. Ideally the game would give us a choice of genders and let us romance any of the options regardless of what we’re playing, but if that’s considered too complex it’d be nice to have a female protagonist once again.

While I am not opposed in the least to an adult- or college-based Persona I tend to think it won’t happen for narrative/cultural reasons. In Japan college is a more specialized experience than it is in most of the rest of the “Western World”. As such the characters would tend to more homogenous in background and personality than you get in high school — there’s a reason the protagonist is always a newcomer to the area as a way to add variety. The exception to this would of course be if you take the idea of Persona 3 with an organization dealing with the underlying phenomena of the games and upgrade it to a more research-oriented college setting, and then make the protagonist a new arrival/test subject. Then again, you lose the whole “rebellious youth” aspect that is part of the series’ popularity if you don’t set it in high school.

Third popular request that you didn’t mention but I’ll weigh in on anyway: I really hope they ditch the silent and nameless protagonist. Give us a protagonist with voice lines, please, and just give them a name.

Unlikely. I expect that once we hit level 80 in The War Within most of the bosses should be soloable, but there’s always one or two bosses that end up being unsoloable until the developer team intervenes.

Personally I don’t mind waiting because the moment Sylvanas is soloable I’ll be in there weekly on all my Hunters (and I have a lot of them) farming the Legendary bow.

Presuming you could know it’s happening, I feel like I rely enough on RNG in my everyday life that I’d start to notice results that didn’t match expectations. For example, I bought two raffle tickets in a Spy x Family merch raffle on Tuesday and got a prize from group H and I (the shop I buy them at let me choose from what’s remaining — not sure if that’s the normal scenario — so I got some new Anya stuff). I know they still have some of the rarer rewards, so I’d start to get confused when I expected to win H and I (again) and ended up winning, for example, E and the Last Prize.

Another great example from yesterday: I finally got the Midsummer Fire Festival mount armor from Ahune. I would start to experience significant dissonance just queueing — wait didn’t I already get this? — and then failing to acquire it would confuse me more.

… I feel like I should start doing even more random things, just in case.

I love pretty much all of them, but I’ll go with pie. Lemon Meringue or Pecan are fantastic.

Completely unrelated: an existential seagull

That’s all the time we have for questions this Wednesday! If you’re celebrating the world’s most popular holiday tomorrow please make sure to be careful (for some people in the US today is the last day they’ll have 10 fingers) and stay hydrated! And be sure to leave questions for Matt tomorrow!