The Queue: A Dark Portal of our very own!

I never exactly planned to put a Dark Portal in my front yard, but now that I know I’ll be able to get one, of course I am going to put a Dark Portal in my front yard. There’s no greater status symbol than to show off to your neighbors that you have your own Dark Portal.

But then, of course, when all of my neighbors have a Dark Portal it’s not going to be cool anymore and I’ll have to find something else. But for this little slice of time, I will cherish this Dark Portal of my very own.

This is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where we answer your questions and get sentimental about pieces of Azerothian architecture. Let’s get to it!

I’ve been playing a Windwalker Monk, but I haven’t decided if I’ll stick with it in Midnight. It’s the path of least resistance, certainly, but it doesn’t feel amazing right now, both in power and in just feeling awesome to play vibes.

The core thing Blizzard did was remove Storm, Earth, and Fire, the ability that summoned a bunch of clones to attack things for you. It could be buggy and targeting was always a crapshoot, so I don’t necessarily think removing it was a bad thing… but it felt like an awesome button to press, even if it wasn’t doing much for you. It felt cool!

The ability has been replaced with a cooldown called Zenith, which I thought could be a fun one that changed your rotation up a little by reducing the chi cost of your abilities, and increasing the cooldown reduction already provided by Blackout Kick (which was free with the reduction in chi cost). You can apply additional buffs to Zenith with talents, adding a flat +10% damage buff to it and increasing your melee attack speed. But in live, it’s changing up your rotation very little, and it definitely does not feel awesome to press. When you press it, you glow green a little, and readers, it feels quite boring. (Also the green doesn’t match with my current transmog, that doesn’t help.) Even though it is a high uptime buff that makes me do more damage and makes it easier to use all of my spenders, it is not a fun button to press. I know I am doing more keeping Zenith running, but I don’t feel like I’m doing anything.

Plus they removed Xuen, my precious lightning tiger companion, from the spec tree. Xuen is now only available for Conduit of the Celestials Monks, and Shado-pan looks to be the meta for Windwalkers unless balance shifts significantly in pre-patch (which it could). I think it feels kind of bad to lose SEF but it feels completely terrible to lose Xuen.

Blizzard said they wanted to make Zenith feel as good to press as SEF or Xuen, and they have not. Turning slightly green is does not feel as good as summoning a trio of myself to attack my enemies or summoning a tiger made out of lightning that leaps to my target. Feeling as awesome as those spells was a high bar. It is not surprising that this invisible buff does not reach it, but it’s a sad nevertheless.

So, we’ll see what Midnight holds. There’s still plenty of room for balance changes, but based on the factor of just feeling awesome, this Monk isn’t doing much for me right now.

Single button rotation is indeed a thing, and people do use it. If you set it up, you can simply press the single button to rotate through what Blizzard sees as an optimal skill rotation for your class and spec, but it has some limitations. Firstly, using it adds a 25% GCD penalty to your abilities, so you can’t cast abilities as quickly as if you were doing it yourself (and were good at keeping up with it). And, perhaps more importantly, what Blizzard sees as the ideal rotation and what actually is the ideal rotation can be different things. The quality of it varies spec to spec, but it’s always a DPS loss of some amount.

But it’s a DPS loss against playing the game very well. With classes you don’t know well, or if you don’t have the mental energy to keep up with a perfect rotation, it can be great. You can just press one button and it will go through a typical rotation for you, just a little slower than you might be able to do it yourself.

Even if you use Single-Button Assistant, there are things you have to do. It won’t use trinkets, healing, or defensives. It won’t CC or stun or interrupt mobs you need to shut down. It won’t use movement abilities to get you out of the fire. It won’t cast buffs on you or your fellow players. So this will handle the basic rotation, but you still need to be there to handle the beyond-the-basics stuff.

It’s super easy to set up: just open your spellbook and find “Single-Button Assistant” in the top right corner. Drag it down to your button bar and that is now the button to press for (almost) everything.

Personally, I prefer the Assisted Highlight feature, which highlights abilities in your rotation it thinks you should use next, kind of like Hekili if you’ve used that before. To turn that on, open the options menu and navigate to Gameplay Enhancements, then click Assisted Highlight. Now its recommended next cast will light up on your button bar to tell you it’s the next thing you should probably be clicking. It’s a better tool for helping you learn a rotation or have a little extra advice while you’re out fighting.

Both of them work, depending on your  gaming goals, and are easy to set up, so there’s no reason not to try them out and see if they work for you.

I predict I’m going to be seeing a lot more Dark Portals around my neighborhood soon. (At least Blizzard has said they will be telling us how to get our own personal Dark Portal to place around our homes. And if you didn’t know that, well, soon we’ll be able to get our own personal Dark Portal to place around our homes.)

More practically, we have the Midnight launch in March. That means patch 12.0.5 in May, 12.0.7 in July, patch 12.1 in September (right around BlizzCon time), patch 12.1.5 in November. Blizzard seems to be setting up Remix as an end of expansion event, so it’s probably a 2027 thing. There you go, there’s your year in Warcraft.

But as with always, the devil is in the details. We know the broad strokes of patch cadence, but I’m more interested in the vaguely phrased roadmap notes that we’ll be speculating about for the next six months.

Let’s go!

Anything can be real if you believe in it hard enough. So just focus on sea unicorns being a really real thing today, and check Wikipedia tomorrow.

Has to be Thursday or Friday. Blizzard usually rolls them out a day or two before the next Trading Post goes live.

Maybe there will be a narwhal. A costume? An aquatic mount? A cosmetic pet? The sky (or the sea) is the limit!

Thanks for reading everyone. I hope you’re doing well, but if you aren’t hang in there because we’re half way through another week. Please leave some questions under your pillow tonight (or in the Queue comments) to help out tomorrow’s Queue-writer (currently unknown) as I expect Matt will be out sick.

I’ll see you in the comments section.