The Queue: Let’s teach Brann how to tank

I have to say, I am loving The War Within like I haven’t loved any expansion since Legion.

This expansion has allowed me to play my alts without feeling like I’m “wasting time” instead of working on my main. It made gearing them up much easier, and it made their work towards things like reputations, currency, and transmog benefit me — the player — directly.

This expansion has allowed me to keep playing in a sorta casual manner but still having a clear progression path to push towards.

This expansion has allowed me to benefit from my Tank specs without having to go into dungeons with strangers and rush like mad to the end, pulling everything (which sadly is the norm these days). I can just do Delves with them, and frankly I’m having a lot more fun delving as a tank than as DPS. (Brewmaster is so much fun, you guys.)

I’m bappy.

But you know what would make this expansion even better? If they added a Tank spec for Brann. Classes like Mage and Rogue, and specs like Balance would benefit immensely from it.

While we don’t get Brann to invest in that Tank training like his brothers did, let’s just do The Queue.

I’m glad you asked, hypothetical Brann Bronzebeard. When players picked the Tank role for you, their damage in combat would directly contribute to your survivability — every few seconds, some of their damage would be converted into a buff to your maximum health and armor (up to a certain cap). So if players did what’s considered to be “enough” damage for that Delve tier, you’d keep getting health and armor buffs, and things would go peachy. (Perhaps you could also throw some potions on the ground that players could walk over to heal you every now and then.)

But if players were unable to reach the required damage threshold for that particular Delve difficulty, you wouldn’t get enough of those health and armor buffs — and you’d be tuned to be a very weak tank without them, ensuring your timely demise, and thus making sure that the mobs walked over your corpse and started eating the player’s face for their incompetence.

Picking a tanking Brann would probably require the player to bring their ‘A’ game in terms of damage, lest it became the “default” option. But I don’t know; I don’t get paid to balance the game, and there are people in the development team who are much smarter than me and would be able to figure this out.

Probably the five required for the weekly. I’ve only been running them on my main for now (trying to avoid burnout by not feeling like I have to do activities on any characters other than my Monk).

Anteater.

I dunno, I just think it would look funny. It would pounce at you like a lion, and then lick you with its big tongue.

I don’t, simply because it would ruin too many mogs, and transmog is the true reason I play this game.

I think it’s super neat that there’s special dialogue now where Xal’atath acknowledges that you’re loyal to her if you still have the Eye. But I would feel weird about it. I’m not a role player by any means, but I do sort of think about who my characters are in the world, how they’d behave, etc. — and none of them are Old God cultists or harbingers of the Void. (No, not even the Shadow Priest or the other Void Elves.)

Either way, I have the toy and I keep it on my action bars, because I do like to use it sometimes — just for funsies. Not because I’m plotting to launch Azeroth into an era of nothingness or anything.

Patch 11.2.5? Iunno. I don’t think anyone knows at this point. But it was Patch 10.2.5 in Dragonflight — hence my educated-yet-flimsy guess!

Metaphor: ReFantazio. Super excited for it, I think it could be a GOTY contender for me.

If you’re reading this and have no idea what this weirdly-named game is about: it’s a JRPG by Atlus, creators of the Persona and Shin Megami Tensei series of games — games that often touch upon counter-cultural themes and question society and human behavior. It takes place in a very, very strange medieval setting, but features philosophical, thought-provoking discussions about our own modern world, somehow — as Atlus games often do.

This video by Jesse Cox does a better job at selling it than anything else I’ve found so far.

Go out and play some The War Within, people. Also, leave lots of questions for Matt. Take care, and have fun!