The Queue: Coming home

There’s a lot going on in WoW right now, so it’s no surprise that we got a lot of questions about things that are currently going on in the game. Welcome back weekend! Housing! More housing! Midnight questing! Midnight catch up event!

This our daily Q&A column, and it’s called The Queue. You ask the questions, we provide the answers. Let’s boogie, players.

When you first try to login to one of your characters, you might be offered a “welcome back” experience, which will take you to Arathi Highlands with a short questline to relearn the game (and learn to interrupt!). This quest should also offer you some gear rewards to take you up to speed.

You might also get a free teleport to your capital city (Stormwind or Orgrimmar), and be prompted to empty your quest long and start fresh. The game should lead you to an appropriate NPC that offers you a campaign quest that suits your current level.

If you decide to start a new low level character, you should be taken to the new Exile’s Reach experience, also designed as a tutorial of sorts, but considerably longer and more involved than the Arathi “welcome back” experience. This one really teaches you (or reminds you of) the basics of the game, from quests and looting and gearing up to using vendors, adding spells to your bar, interacting with objects, and even queuing for group activities.

The game should also show you a popup to get you started on your Housing experience, so if you’re interested in that new aspect of WoW, it’s very quick and easy to get there, and the system is incredibly intuitive to learn.

Now is actually a great time to give WoW a try again, since patch 12.0 has just been released, giving it a major shake up. Talents, abilities, and rotations have all been changed, so everyone is in a learning/adaptation stage. It’s also a great time to not really care too much about addons and just try the basic UI — while it’s far from perfect, it’s decent enough to let you play the game with a lot of necessary functionality.

I have to applaud the writers for how they handled Sylvanas after being dealt the absolute worst possible hand.

From Cataclysm to Shadowlands, Sylvanas became increasingly hard to defend, moving from “morally questionable” to “outright genocidal” and willing to turn even on her own “allies” — if the word even applied anymore. Her actions escalated to such a point that it could argued that she became worse than Arthas, the one who jumpstarted her entire vengeance arc in the first place.

So having her “redeem herself” was out of the question.

Instead, we have a very self-conscious Sylvanas who isn’t trying to convince anyone that she was “right” or “justified” — quite the opposite. With her newfound awareness, she acknowledges all the evil she caused without asking for forgiveness or even understanding. It’s mature writing. It doesn’t exactly create empathy, but it does create some sympathy.

I’m with you: despite hating Sylvanas with all my strength from Cataclysm to Shadowlands (and I actually really liked her in BC and Wrath), I was left mostly satisfied with the new questline. I think it was as well done as could be with how the story had shaped up to this point. And I hope they don’t decide to change the tone of her current story with a sudden “and then, at the eleventh hour, she came back to save Silvermoon from the Void.” Cause let me tell you, that would be beyond insulting. But I trust it won’t happen.

Yogg, I hope so. My main wish for the Housing system is exactly that kind of thing.

I want it to become a living, breathing “achievement pane.” I want to be able to reflect everything I’ve accomplished or collected in the game in there, whether it’s mounts, pets, toys, Pepes, raid clears, events, or anything else. I’m less interested in finding random vendors around the world and designing cool stuff (thought that part is also fun), and more interested in making it a reflection of my account, and my history in WoW. A “home base” of sorts where everything I’ve worked towards is on display.

So yeah, although the community is probably more excited about creating cool and visually impressive things — and, again, that part is super cool and I also dabble in it — my main interest for Housing is in the “display your stuff” part, and I hope Blizzard does more with that aspect of the system.

I’ve reached a point where I’m satisfied enough with my decor, but not really motivated to keep working on it. I don’t know, I wish there were better ways to showcase what I’m doing to other people, to get visitors, to make it a more social place (the house itself, not the neighborhood).

For me, personally, Housing feels like it’s a feature that is on the cusp of being something I can see myself devoting quite a lot of time and energy to, but not quite there yet. It’s missing that little something that has to do with “hey, random person and/or friend, check out this cool thing I just built” instead of being something I enjoy completely by myself.

This Midnight pre-expansion event has been quite flawed as far as a being a good way to obtain catch up gear. After a couple of rounds of hotfixes, things have gotten better, that’s for sure, but there are still some structural mistakes. The event still revolves around “kill a rare, wait for the next rare” and not much else, since the World Quests expire quite fast, and there are no real ways to grind currency (things like camps of enemies, “fill a bar” map objectives, gathering turn ins, etc).

“No trinkets” is just another symptom of a pre-expansion event that was, frankly, quite undercooked. (I do wonder if Blizzard simply wants people to spend more of their time working on Endeavors — and has more people dedicated to that than to this event.)

Thanks for reading The Queue, and we hope you have a cozy weekend like this random blood elf from the cinematic. May you get all your enemies’ crowns and make whatever you want with them!