The Queue: I don’t think this guy is going to sprout wings

New mounts are neat and all, but does it have wings? Can it take to the sky? In the case of this guy, I think not. He’s too loaded down. All that gold has downgraded his buoyancy. So I’m sorry, crocolisk, but you aren’t going to make it into my coveted list of favorite mounts.

What about you, Queue? Let’s chat.

I think Nerub-ar Palace has been a really good race.

Though the first few bosses fell over immediately, each of the next four have all been a unique challenge. Ovi’nax required huge add management and guilds cut down on healers and swapped to Blood DK tanks to get more DPS in. Then came Ky’veza, a tough single-target fight and/or void geometry lesson that many guilds solo-tanked with a specific battle rez strategy to keep the tank up. Then Silken Court took an already complicated two-boss fight and added a color-coded debuff that required players to soak appropriately colored orbs, and if the dot the orb applied killed you, dying didn’t remove it — players couldn’t battle rez. That’s a crazy amount of variety across three fights.

Now four guilds are on to Queen Ansurek, which seems to have really amped up the adds. They drop orbs on death you have to grab and take through a portal so they don’t get hit by an ability, but the orbs apply a hefty dot, and you can’t get rid of the dot on Mythic — it has to run its full 15 second duration. Liquid is currently getting to the point where they barely have the players to grab all of the orbs, since players can only grab one and the number of adds has been increased. And that’s on top of a mess of other mechanics that either do more damage or show up more frequently. For example, one of her abilities is a poison bubble that you have to stand in and pop which knocks you up and over a ring of AOE damage that comes out. In Mythic there are two of them and you have to pop them sequentially because they do too much damage to pop at the same time, but you have to do it in time to send everyone over the AOE as it comes out.

Basically, it’s complicated. It’s just complicated. But also these guilds have not done a ridiculous amount of pulls on these bosses… yet. Liquid is just over 200, Echo is just under 200, Method and Huoguo are just over 100.

There are a lot of interesting mechanics, and I enjoy watching these guilds learn and overcome them.

This is also a highly competitive race. For most of the race it’s been Liquid, Echo, and Method, in that order. But Echo and Liquid have swapped places a few times, Method and Echo have swapped places a few times, and Chinese guilds have been keeping pace with the rest of the pack despite having an extremely delayed raid launch. The guild Huoguo Hero has pulled into fourth place and is fighting for third: Huoguo is less than a percentage behind Method.

I think it’s been a very interesting one with a lot more competition than we usually see, and a more international board with Chinese guilds really working to get that top spot. After the game was closed in China for all of Dragonflight, NetEase is offering cash to any Chinese guild that wins world first. I’m not sure if Huoguo will get there, but they’re fighting hard.

There’s a notable problem with the game’s cool mounts: not all of them can fly. Even though Blizzard has added flying to a lot of older mounts, a lot of them still can’t. And that means you can collect all sorts of neat mounts you’ll just never use.

So I’d love a hippo mount — there was one as a PVP reward, but it’s gone now. But even if I got a hippo mount, if it didn’t fly, I’d never use it! I would not be able to enjoy this mount. It’s a shame. So would we get a flying capybara? A flying walrus? Probably not, and that’s the true tragedy of our massive mount collections.

Are we talking food transmog? I hadn’t considered food transmog before, but I approve all transmog.

Delves are one of those things I thought I’d do a ton of, but I’ve found myself struggling after a certain level and just haven’t had the time to progress… and honestly, spider legs sound terrifying. I don’t know if that’s a selling point…

But did you get enough to share with the rest of the Queue?

And that’s all for now my friends. Have a good weekend and I’ll see you in the next Queue!