The Queue: Hello!

Good afternoon, Queue! I will be your host today, and am going to be making a permanent swap to doing the Queue on Wednesday because I keep getting really busy on Thursday/Friday which has occasionally resulted in late Queues. (Definitely not just because I’m staying up to watch Critical Role, I am legitimately very busy at the end of the week, definitely.)

But enough about me. How are you all doing? Let’s answer some questions, Queue.

/nods along

Do you know any nice mountains? With good wifi so I can keep downloading the latest games? (I want to check out Blue Prince when it comes out tomorrow.)

Arakkoa: While our Arakkoa friends from Warlords couldn’t fly, I think perhaps a playable race might remember something of taking to the sky when they had proper wings, so I think they could have a glide ability like Dracthyr or Demon Hunters, using what may remain of their wings. (Of course the race could be the winged Arakkoa, but I think the Arakkoa Outcasts have a much more interesting vibe.) Innate ability with no cast time or cooldown.

For a second ability, some kind of shadow damage attack. Racial damage abilities are usually very strong at low levels but don’t scale well at high levels, so eventually you toss them off your action bars and forget they exist. But what if the Arakkoa’s racial was something you could use to modify existing spells, for example pick one spell to enhance with your inherent magic, giving it a tiny shadowy visual effect and a small perk, like a small amount of damage or crit for that particular attack. The goal being to have racial that provided some kind of value and flavor throughout your character’s career, without being overpowered or turning it into some kind of must-play race.

But I don’t keep a list of allied races I’d like in my head; I just think Arakkoa are neat!

I haven’t rushed through content in Undermine, but I haven’t felt the need to. I’ve done the main story quest and some side quests, and I earn a bit of reputation every week by doing the weekly quests and I do side quests as I feel like it. I haven’t zoomed through reputation, but I’m making steady progress (and I don’t feel like I need to rush through the rewards). I’m working through the raid at a fairly good clip too — my guild has gotten heroic One-Armed Bandit down to 1% — and I think we’ll get the last few bosses down soon.

So I haven’t run out of stuff to do. But I don’t feel like I need to have finished everything in Undermine before going into the next patch.

Even in patch 11.1.5, we just have a chain of events being added to the game, starting with Nightfall. That only means I’ll probably stop in Hallowfall to earn rep (and cosmetics) with the new faction and still keep doing all or some of the Undermine stuff.

So bring it on. I won’t finish everything in Undermine in two weeks, but I don’t feel like the patch is going to be so weighty that I’ll drown under the weight of everything that needs to be done. I am content with the pace of progress.

I fully expect patch 11.1.7 to show up in June — Blizzard has been extremely consistent about getting patches out every two months, and with the schedule on the roadmap for the year I don’t think that’s going to change.

However, as an event that isn’t specifically tied to any content (it does use an NPC we meet in Undermine, but you don’t need go to Undermine to queue up), so it really could happen any time. I think it’s a smart move to space out the content in patch 11.1.5 so we aren’t slammed with an impossible amount to do on day one, but I expect this will drag out 11.1.5 content into the next patch cycle.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and I’m happy to have new content come out at a measured pace so we aren’t overwhelmed with a deluge of new content that we absolutely have to do all at once — plus we’ll have something relatively new and interesting to do when we log on over the next few months.

Uh oh. Those are two words you really don’t want in close vicinity.

For mine, is facepalm one word or two?

It’s been nice to visit with you all in the middle of the week. I hope you have a great afternoon and make it through the rest of the week in good order. (I’ll come check in again on Friday to see that everyone is still here, so you’d better stick with us.) See you around, Queue.