The Queue: Everybody’s heading to pandaland (or maybe just me)

You know, I’m kind of excited to explore pandaland again and for the first time in WoW Classic. But more than that, I want the glowy star-serpent mount you can get by leveling a Pandaren. So let’s do this Queue so I can alt-tab to finish leveling for the promise of sweet loot, the siren song of many a gamer.

Are we really calling it ReLegix? Really?

At any rate, I’m not in this for mounts. I assume rare mounts don’t exist and then I can always be absolutely thrilled to get them instead of being disappointed to not get them. No, I’m looking to collect transmog. Though The War Within made it easier than ever to collect transmog by allowing us to learn appearances of different armor types, I haven’t spent a ton of time running old raids to pick up absolutely everything. But now my procrastination has been rewarded. I will get appearances twice as fast as if I rushed in.

Ha! Victory.

EVERYTHING.

I’ll let you imagine the expression of horror on my face. This is a busy fight to begin with and the floor moving would be a lot when it’s already a lot. But I have to agree with others in the Queue: this is a slot machine encounter, not a roulette wheel, so a spinning floor feels a little off theme.

…but there are things that spin in a slot machine. What if the spin to win mechanic here teleported someone inside the slot machine, like a hamster wheel? Perhaps from there you could manipulate something inside it to deal damage, or maybe just need to jump through the spinning slots to get back out and into the fight.

There are cool (and awful!) things you could do here. The theme of the raid, the casino setting, it really pushes off-the-wall ideas. There’s so much you can do with a giant casino that’s trying to kill you (perhaps the place could have had a roulette wheel boss!), but we’re probably done with casinos for a while.

You’ve got it right. To get the Shaohao’s Sage Serpent mount, you just need to install Classic (progression, still currently listed as Cataclysm), create a Pandaren (of any class or spec), and play through the starting zone. You should have the mount when you log into your modern WoW character.

While I do sometimes wish I could have just one more profession (alchemy, herbalism, and inscription, anybody?), two is already an awful lot of work. Trying to do more (for example, on alts) always just winds up drowning me in chores and costs — but the option to do it on alts is always there. I don’t feel like adding more professions would be of any interest to me, but…

The current work order system kind of upended any concept of balance with professions. It used to be that having a profession gave you access to certain gear you only got by leveling that profession. Now those perks are sparse and you can put in a work order to get almost anything. There’s less reason than ever to level a profession yourself because it’s so simple to buy things from other people who have taken the time to level those professions. It doesn’t feel like allowing people access to more professions gives them more perks; it just lets them spend even more time grinding out profession knowledge — and, as you say, the Artisan’s Acuity system rather prevents them from leveling everything at once.

So I don’t know that having more professions would be bad, but I also don’t know that it would be a significant value add, either. And I know I wouldn’t use it myself.

Well, not with tacos.

That’s all for today, my friends. Take care of yourselves and have a pleasant Wednesday afternoon. We’re half-way through the week! We’ve nearly made it!

I’ll see you back here next week (or maybe in pandaland).