The Queue: Midnight looms

The expansion itself is still a few weeks away, but the prepatch for said expansion is almost here, and we’re about to be hit with the brunt of the changes. Addons going kaput! Simplified rotations! Far fewer buttons on your action bars! Feral Druids and Worgen living together! Psychic Scream!

It’s simultaneously scary and exciting — which is weirdly appropriate with an expansion about the Void coming into our world, making the sky go dark. So welcome to The Queue, our daily Q&A column where we panic about upcoming things (while also being fired up about them).

I feel like your time would be well spent doing things that will be useful for you during the upcoming prepatch, and into Midnight.

1) If you’re at all interested in unlocking Void Elf Demon Hunters, you can get started on that right now. The short questline to unlock them comes in two parts, and while the second part will only be available with the prepatch, the first part is already doable, in K’aresh: you need to accept the A Common Cause quest in northern K’aresh from Magister Umbric. You can follow a series of eight quests, ending with Hunger of the Void, which will get you ready to immediately accept the next step of this questline once prepatch is out.

2) You could also check out some of the questlines that will lead into Midnight content. The main one is, for sure, the Arator questline, which you should easily find in Dornogal or your Adventure Guide.

3) If you’ve already pre-ordered any edition of Midnight, you have early access to the Player Housing system! You should definitely give it a try. Even if you’re not interested in actually doing anything with Housing long term, it’s still worth it to just check it out. The system is so intricate and robust that it might just change your mind about it.

4) And if you’ve pre-ordered Midnight on its Epic edition, you have beta access! You could do something like trying out the Haranir customizations so you can plan ahead if you’re thinking about rolling a character of that race. You could also check out how your favorite class or spec plays at level 90, with all of their Midnight abilities, including things like Apex Talents.

5) You could simply do some cleanup! Take your main (and/or your main alts) and clean up their bags, banks, quest logs. Disable any addons you feel you won’t be using now that the addoncalypse is coming, and make sure to get updated versions of the ones that you will keep using.

I wouldn’t worry about increasing your ilevel at all, since the pre-expansion event is coming next week, and it’ll feature Champion Track catchup gear. If you do feel like you could do something useful to get you a boost of power outside of that catchup gear, though, you could get your Reshii Wraps, which should last you well into Midnight leveling, but I wouldn’t stress too hard about it. You’ll probably still be fine without it.

Best of luck, and welcome back!

No, and I’m not ready to do it. 😭😭😭

There have been rumors that the main target of Blizzard’s addoncalypse was always WeakAuras. If it was going to kill any addon, it wanted to kill that one in particular, even if it killed nothing else. We don’t know if those rumors are true, but they do make sense: WeakAuras was “solving” raid encounters in ways that go far beyond just our beloved spell alerts. Entire raid mechanics could be bypassed through this powerful addon, and a real arms race existed between Blizzard and addon developers with one side always trying to “outsmart” the other, and raid mechanics getting more and more complex and punishing as a result.

However, it could be argued that this is also a case of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.” WeakAuras performed many functions beyond solving raid mechanics. It functioned as a fantastic tool for assisting with rotations, customizing UIs, helping with accessibility, and adding useful information that had nothing to do with combat. We’re going to need several new addons to replace all of that.

And speaking for myself, prepatch is going to be a time of setup. I have a very large collection of auras. I literally play every spec in the game (to some extent), and I had auras for every rotational ability and major cooldown, as well as several talent variations, for every spec, that I crafted myself because I liked to customize things my way. All of that painstaking work of years and years is going down the drain, and I’ll have to make do with Blizzard’s default cooldown manager — which, after the most recent updates is not bad, but it’s no WeakAuras either, obviously.

I’ve mostly made peace with this. I’ve been through the five stages of grief and I’ve just landed on “Acceptance,” I believe. What helps is that Blizzard has been clear with their stated goals for this enormous change to the addon scenario, and their reasoning is sound, even if it’s a pretty bitter pill to swallow. We’ll get through this shaky stage and adapt, one way or another.

Now here’s a topic I’m pretty passionate about, and have already talked at length about: my dream move for Hearthstone to make would be to add a very robust single-player mode.

They already had the foundation for this with Dungeon Run — which was fantastic and well-loved, but they’ve abandoned for some reason. They could create a game mode using the foundation laid out by Dungeon Run, and that game mode would be well-positioned to potentially attract a considerable playerbase of people who don’t care for PVP or competitive ladders in general. Those players would have their single-player, low stress roguelike runs — and we know there’s an enthusiastic audience for this already: games like Slay the Spire, Monster Train, and more recently, Balatro, among others, have been big hits.

This new game mode would attract new players who would also have a reason to collect skins, coins, card backs, pets, and what-have-you. New content for the mode likely wouldn’t be incredibly costly to develop, but it could potentially attract fans of the Warcraft games looking for something new to play, as well as people who’ve already given Hearthstone a try in the past, or enthusiasts of roguelikes and deckbuilders. I can’t think of too many drawbacks to this idea, in all honesty.

Amalgam of Rage. I just think it would look super dope. Scroll up to the header pic I chose for this article and imagine it with fel wings instead!

In this order: Tank Shaman, then Lightning Monk (to cover your 12.1 and then 12.12 slots).

Following that, if I could add more: Lich DK, then Radiant Priest, then Tank Warlock, then Tank Rogue, then Healer Mage.

I wouldn’t add the Support ones (unless Blizzard strongly reworked how Support specs worked) or Healer Hunter (cause the idea sounds silly).

Picture yourself in a boat on a river. With many dead trees and fel-tinted skies.

Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly. A man with fel fire for eyes.

Illidan in the sky. With Sargeras.

Illidan in the sky. With Sargeras.

Illidan in the sky. With Sargeras.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

This Queue hath been done! Prepare yourself, mortals, for the Void is coming! (And leave lots of questions about the Void, and other things.)