The Queue: Here’s to another great year!

I haven’t seen y’all since last year! It’s been so long, I hope everybody has had a safe and happy time of it.

We’re just getting started on 2026, and this could be a good one! We’re gonna get Midnight, a new Diablo expansion, and they’ll for sure definitely 100% announce a return to full-time development for Heroes of the Storm — I just know it!

While I go and practice my Junkrat skillshots in Heroes, it’s time for our daily question and answer column, the Queue!

I’m having a pretty good weekend, although it’s over now and I’m back at my day job and I’m pupset. Why can’t I just win the lottery so I never have to set an alarm in the morning again! Life is unfair.

There’s a joke in here about how Expedition 33 keeps winning stuff, but I’ll let you do the heavy lifting on it.

The Blizzard launcher expansion to non-mainline Blizzard games has been an interesting experiment, which I don’t think paid out the way they hoped it would. It seemed like they wanted to compete with Epic and Steam for a minute, but wanted to get there slowly and then realized that people didn’t really want that — so they stopped. I was glad to be able to buy Destiny 2 with my Warcraft gold though, that was a neat moment.

Now I’m just using the launcher for Heroes of the Storm, Diablo, Warcraft, and Hearthstone like God intended.

I do something similar, but it’s on mornings that I don’t have to be awake and out of bed. In that first moment of waking up, I’ll put on a good spooky or weird podcast and drift off while listening to it. If I’ve done it right, I’ll get some amazing dreams. Sure, I won’t really retain any of the show, but I’ll have a great time doing it. Welcome to Nightvale works really well for this, I’ve found even if their Weather segments can be a little too jarring to be half awake through the whole episode for.

Well, first off, I’d say to myself not to use the addon AtlasLoot. I had it bug out on me during Algalon progression, and I couldn’t diagnose the problem fast enough to be in for my guild’s first kill of him. I was mad.

Second, I would tell myself to get into streaming early and do it often. I feel like I could’ve had a pretty great career as a streamer by now if I’d just started early enough. I’m not trying to break into the field now. I’ve seen enough people try and fail to attract an audience while dropping money into their stream setup hand over fist to really try it now. But back in 2010, when things were just getting going…

I know that simply being amongst the first people to do it doesn’t guarantee success, but I feel like being on the frontier would help. I have some streamer friends, and they are putting in Work every day to make a livable wage, and I respect the heck out of them for it.

Without a big ol flying city hanging above it, maybe. They certainly wouldn’t have the same technical limitations there. However, I think the zone works better as a big, open, empty place. Let it be eerie in its stillness, a place where Human and Orc weren’t meant to walk.

Oh, Nighthold, definitely. Good boss variety, and you get a showdown against Gul’dan finally, after Warlords of Draenor. The Elisande fight was also really well put together with having to remember mechanics across phases in the time stream.

Tomb of Sargeras has too much samey-ness between its fights. Most involved soaking something between lots of raiders, and we started calling it Tomb of Soakgeras. Also, Kil’jaeden took my guild so many tries to get. What a bear of a fight. Luckily for me, one of my raiders at the time was a streamer and clipped all of our kills! So I can always go back and remember the 146 wipes that it took us to get him down, before watching my guild finally put the nail in the coffin. Although I’m still upset that he didn’t use a better music track for the actual Kil’jaeden kill. I really wanted him to put in Full Metal Black (nsfw) for the final intermission and last phase. A good high-energy punk song that referenced darkness to go with his darkness! This is what I get for not making sure to have creative control.

I let Bacardi sniff everything! If he didn’t, he’d be so grumpy at me, I couldn’t do that to him. How else would he know what the wider world smells like?

Also if you don’t let them investigate things, that’s when they’ll start getting all antsy about trying to, and you’ll be stuck having a cat climbing all over you trying to figure it out.

Today’s Bacardi is a little jumbled up; he had a wild and crazy NYE and is still recovering. I’m sure he’ll take the utmost care in delivering your shiny loot. No chance that your Warcraft player is going to wind up with some Diablo loot, as good as they’d look in a Harlequin Crest…

Would you rather

Get socks and underwear for Christmas

Or

Get pyjamas for Christmas

Today’s Anna Earworm™: Renegade

This is just the first week of the rest of the year, but I hope that it’s an amazing one for you!

Remember that you can help Anna have an amazing day by asking her lots of questions about stuff for tomorrow!