The Queue: Unphased by Phase Diving

When Phase Diving was first announced for patch 11.2 I figured it was going to be a sort of “Maw lite” with harder challenges and trickier navigation (no flying? in 2025?!?) but it turns out that Phase Diving not only isn’t that hard to deal with, it actually makes getting around K’aresh faster and easier. Don’t want to be phased anymore? Just click off the buff that puts in you the phase — even if you’re being dogpiled by elite mobs. Want to quickly get from Tavazesh to the Oasis? Dive into the phase and teleport over. Have a challenging treasure to get? Fly to it in normal space and quaff an Untethered Xy’bucha and you may even get an achievement for your “hard” work recovering it.

It’s like the dev team got through 90% of phase diving development and remembered that the vast majority of the playerbase hated the Maw and scrambled to remove the worst roadblocks. I’m not complaining, mind you, as the Forge knows I have precious little time to play as it is. There’s just a dissonance between the challenge that phase diving wants to be and the fact that it actually provides some quality of life benefits.

I do look good in translucent sparkly pink, at least. Speaking of phase diving …

The item you’re looking for is Untethered Xy’bucha (as mentioned in the intro) however it’s not available from vendors. Instead it spawns throughout Untethered Space predominantly (exclusively?) in the various camps that dot the map. They can also drop from the Ethereal Pocket-Storage/Broker Exchequer treasure chests in normal space however they’re likely rare enough from those that they’re not worth farming specifically for the Xy’bucha.

It’s my hope as well, that there will be one of those twinkly star flight boost paths to follow that take us through a rift in space into the Voidstorm. That would also allow flightpaths in addition to both dynamic and normal flying to get there.

I’m actually more wondering how we’ll get down to Harandar. Will there be a hole in the ground we traverse like with Zaralek Caverns? Will it be attached to the Coreway? Or will it just be a portal from Silvermoon? Although I imagine if it’s attached the Coreway we’ll still get a portal.

This is a tough one as it’s hard to guess how many skins will actually be released; it could be four like the Gundam Wing crossover or eight like the Street Fighter 6 crossover. Fortunately they don’t seem to care about how frequently a character is used so I don’t need to research previous crossovers.

Based solely on guesswork (with one exception noted) these are what I’m expecting:

Cassady/Joker: people who know Overwatch a lot better than I do think that the Joker shown in the Season 18 trailer is Cassady’s profile so I’m willing to agree with that for now.

Tracer/Violet: Violet’s outfit is 75% Joker’s anyway so your idea of mascot characters would still work.

Hammond/Morgana: I’m not sure how the wrecking ball itself will look but it makes sense to swap out a hamster for a cat Morgana.

Sombra/Oracle: Because they’re both hackers. I also considered D.Va for Futaba but I didn’t expect them to change her Mech into Necronomicon.

Genji/Fox: Fully agree with your reasoning on this one.

Juno/Panther: This is probably my least confident guess; I guess Kiriko is a possibility here too? Watch it end up being Mercy even though there’s no synergy between the two besides blonde hair.

Kiriko/Queen: I actually am more inclined to think Widowmaker but the playstyle doesn’t match. I also considered Brigitte here.

Freja/Noir: I think they’ll want to get Freja in the mix as she’s a relatively new hero and Noir makes the most sense of the Phantom Thieves to me.

Junkrat/Skull: Not quite synergistic but it works for me.

It should be noted there’s a very strong possibility that only a handful of the Phantom Thieves make it into OW2. We’ll have to see what they come up with.

I’m keeping it, because Persona 6 *will* be announced at the Tokyo Game Show next month!

This is a good question because I never really thought about whether I had a favorite ghost. Let me ruminate on this some while answering more questions — I’ll put the answer in the Outro.

I know this is a copout of an answer but I can not wait for slot-based transmog. It’ll make managing outfits so much easier and cheaper especially on the toons I play most often.

Hold that second question for a moment.

I feel like we’re jumping the gun here although honestly I can understand why people would do so — the way the content is laid out in 12.0 feels like a culmination that we’d normally see in the final patch of a tier, not at release. But there’s two more tiers after the new Sunwell raid before we get to The Last Titan and I feel like we know a lot more about the next expansion than we do the remaining patches of Midnight. We know we’re going back to Northrend, we know the Titans are stopping by, we’re expecting to finally finish off Iridikron and then have a final fight in the presence of Azeroth’s world soul. There’s enough content there that I could draw a rough outline of the story for each tier in The Last Titan and feel confident in it. I don’t feel the same about Midnight.

This is where I go back to Red’s question above: what do I still expect to see? I’m expecting that patch 12.1 and 12.2 are essentially recruitment drives for the titanic battles we’ll be seeing in The Last Titan but I don’t know how it’s going to unfold. I do think Azshara returns to the story but other than that I’m puzzled. So I’m expecting to see hints and suggestions of where the story goes in Midnight because so far it’s a giant question mark to me.

I think people die and Valeera tanks slightly better than Brann does simply because the underlying programming will get better with continued iteration. Honestly I’m not expecting the experience to be all that different from Brann regardless of chosen spec, however I do hope she’ll have more lines to say.

Does Mr. Belvedere count? I say Mr. Belvedere counts. Or maybe Tony on Who’s the Boss? Or Mrs. Garrett on Diff’rent Strokes (before she took the good and took the bad and took them both and moved over to the Facts of Life). Or maybe I should choose something that isn’t an 80s sitcom.

Oh who am I kidding? It’s obviously Alice from the Brady Bunch.

As for fictional birds I’m going to go more mythological than fictional and choose Bennu. I’m a sucker for Heron gods.

That’s all the time we have for questions! I did give the ghost question a lot of thought and I’m going to have to go with the Ghost of Christmas Present as he seems like he’d be the most fun to hang out with and you wouldn’t have to worry about having snacks on hand for him. Least favorite ghost? The one haunting this queue!

Everyone have a great weekend! Get rest, stay hydrated, and be sure to ask plenty of questions for Cory!