The Queue: The return of the Wednesday

Wednesday keeps coming around my dudes. Let’s Queue.

Holy #$!@% it’s so good. What else can I say? It’s so good.

This system is just so big. You can put so many things in your house, and arrange it however you like. You can resize things, rotate them, make them hover in the air. It’s as customizable as you want it to be. You can make jumping puzzles or plant gardens inside your home. You can find decor items everywhere, across every expansion. This system is all-encompassing.

It’s just so much.

I’m not one of those people who plays a ton of alts actively, so I don’t have enough familiarity with many classes to do good testing or make good commentary on them. I’ve been playing a Windwalker Monk because that’s what I know best.

There’s a lot of worry out there about how much classes are being simplified, but from my particular little corner of knowledge I think Windwalker is doing okay.

We’re losing Storm, Earth, and Fire, a really iconic ability that split your character into three clones, all of which would mimic your actions. It always feels bad to lose something that feels so representative of your class, but the ability was also fairly buggy. I can hit Spinning Crane Kick with SEF up but I can’t make my clones be in a good position to use it. Your own damage is reduced when you cast SEF, but because of your clones it always comes out as more damage, even if play isn’t optimal (and it never is). It’s a button you press and hope for the best, mostly. But it’s not just being removed and left at that, it’s being replaced by something called Weapons of Order, a 90s cooldown with two charges (just like SEF). It cuts your Chi costs when active, and causes Blackout Kick to further reduce the cooldown of Rising Sun Kick and Fists of Fury. If you don’t play a Windwalker, that’s a lot of words to say it’s a sort of mini-Bloodlust that will speed up your gameplay loop, and with the cooldown you should be able to run it at close to 50% uptime. It’s different, but it’s not bad, and unlike SEF it keeps the choices about doing damage in my hands rather than outsourcing them to my clones (rarely a good idea, but it looks so cool).

I’ll be losing a couple of buttons from my toolbars when the expansion comes out, one ability is becoming a sort of combo with another, the other is going on a choice node with something else I want more. I think it will play out okay. The class overall is losing a couple of defensives, but that’s going to hurt Brewmaster more than it hurts me.

The stat squish in Midnight is something of a sticker shock (my agility went from 88k to 484), but I do not feel any weaker. Playing the game feels fine, I’m not dying any more than usual, and I don’t feel weak. I haven’t had trouble soloing old content or doing current content — though there are only so many hours in the day and I haven’t tested everything extensively.

I think it’s feeling good, but now is the perfect time to leave feedback if you’re concerned about class changes and how the alpha is shaping up — because it is still shaping up.

Lumber! You can find it over the world (but not in your neighborhood): anywhere you see trees in game probably has tons of lumber. Everyone can collect it, and you don’t need any kind of additional profession skill. In the alpha right now you are given an axe which you click on to be able to see lumber nodes on the map, which show up exactly like other profession materials. It seems a bit like collecting mana in Suramar: click an item in your inventory) to show it on the map, then you can see it and pick it up.

Lumber is used in every crafted piece of decor (every profession has at least a couple of crafted pieces of decor they can make for each expansion), even decor that doesn’t seem like it would require a lot of woodworking, like plush toys that tailors can make. But if you want to collect all the things you will need a lot of lumber: it seems to range between 10 to 50 per item (though these numbers may be tuned later).

There is a different type of lumber for each expansion, which is used for that expansion’s crafting recipes. But it’s not scarce or limited to a single zone, and you should be able to collect plenty just hitting up the expansion and zooming to tree-filled areas.

I have found one piece of food-based decor so far: some corn that’s meant as a wall hanging, which I got from the Highmountain reputation quartermaster. However, in my house, I spun it around, shrunk it a little, tucked it in a basket and set it in a room I have set up as a kitchen, so it just looks like a little bushel of corn. (I’d share a screenshot, but the alpha servers have been down.)

I assume we’ll see other food items, but that’s what I’ve found so far.

You’ve done more planning than I have, which is to say that my only thinking is that I’ll play something I guess. I’ve rolled a demon hunter and that’s all I’ve done so far.

This is a game that takes all sorts. Every time I load up YouTube I’m bombarded with videos that say YOU MUST DO THIS FIRST IN REMIX! and I’m trying to resist falling into optimizing my time so I can just play the game.

Trying, but we’ll see how it goes.

I hate the idea of running out of Murderbot books to read, a problem that I have solved by not reading the most recent one but going back and re-reading the first one instead, repeat.

But that kind of thing really depends on the book. Some books are worth revisiting, some I read once and I’m happy with that.

p.s. if anyone has book recommendations that will tide me over waiting for the new Murderbot book, please comment.

Okay everybody, I need to stop writing now because I’m frankly pushing my luck on how much the Queue will allow me to say before the ghosts come out and make all of us disappear.

We’ve made it to another Wednesday, so take care of yourselves and let’s make it to another, eh? I’ll try to answer any more alpha questions in the comments if you’ve got them.