The Queue: Still trying to pick a spec edition

Midnight is a tough expansion for me. I refuse to play a Monk if I can’t have Xuen (p.s. Xuen is no longer baseline). I don’t love being a Paladin when I can’t live out my battle cleric fantasy by being a healer, which my guild doesn’t need. What am I supposed to do now?

Well, we’re a week from early access and I still haven’t decided. It’s probably fine. I’m sure I still have time. The answer will come to me any minute now. (Help.)

And whether I successfully decide on a class or not, this is the Queue, our daily Q&A questions where we do our best to answer your questions (but sometimes we have questions of our own). Let’s get to it.

When Hearthstone launched in 2014, it was just game, and its interface was fine.

Now Hearthstone is 20 different games in a trenchcoat, and its UI has not evolved to keep up. And Blizzard keeps adding more stuff on to the game without making any notable changes to the interface, so it just keeps getting worse. Menu placements are inconsistent. Tooltips are inconsistent. Game modes are buried. It’s unclear what’s relevant to which game mode, and quests, for example, have gotten extremely convoluted specifying things like only being able to complete it in “traditional modes” (a term the game never explains) and sometimes that you get extra rewards for playing in ranked. It’s a mess of menus that are poorly explained, poorly placed, and that bury entire game modes several menus deep.

I honestly feel like this is a side effect of Blizzard sticking to this concept of the login screen is a game box, which you click a menu option on to open the box and enter that game mode. There’s only so much room for menus here. And then there’s the fact that the game also runs on mobile platforms, and you may have to keep the UI relatively concise, with those menus nested in menus. But even so, this is rough and confusing.

I am not a developer or a UI expert, but I think there has to be a better way.

So yes, this video is completely accurate. (And it doesn’t even mention how deeply buried the game’s extremely excellent single-player modes are.)  The UI is excessively convoluted, everything is buried, and it makes it actively harder to play the game.

Good times.

Good news: the number of neighborhoods in World of Warcraft is essentially infinite. As neighborhoods start to fill up, new neighborhood instances are spawned, and you can browse neighborhoods until you find the housing plot you want. If you visit a different neighborhood to check out a plot you might like to buy, Blizzard will even reserve it for you for five minutes so no one can buy it out from under you.

However, the UI may not be entirely clear about this. To browse neighborhoods, you want to open up your housing dashboard (default hotkey h) and then click the “Open House Finder” button on the top of the window. Now you’ll see a list of neighborhoods on the left-hand side of the window, and you can click through them and see which plots in the neighborhood are taken and which aren’t.

Don’t see a neighborhood with the plot you want? Above the neighborhood list there’s a circular arrow you can click to refresh the list and look at new neighborhoods. Keep looking around and you’ll find the plot you want eventually.

These are all public neighborhoods, but if you want to dig deeper, you can also form your own private neighborhood or create a neighborhood for your guild. You’ll still have to claim your plot of choice from whoever else is part of the neighborhood, but there’s going to be less competition than in a public neighborhood.

I leveled a Demon Hunter in Legion Remix to play Devourer myself, but I just don’t find the spec very engaging. It has great vibes, but very few actual buttons. The rotation doesn’t do it for me.

But there are some things that may specifically setting you back. Devourer is an intellect-based spec. If you’ve been playing Vengeance or Havoc, you’re going to have agility weapons and trinkets. That could really set you back when you switch over to Devourer. Because of the stats each spec uses, you can’t always easily jump back and forth.

Also… Vengeance is the tank spec, and that’s always going to be, well, tanker. Devourer is a caster spec, and they always lean a little squishier. Ymmv.

For my part, I love the vibes of Devourer, but I haven’t had a lot of fun playing it.

Delves have tons of trinkets, and a vendor at the end of Delves that may sell you even more trinkets. But if you don’t want to farm for fish trinkets and you want something straightforward, you can head to Hallowfall. Flame’s Radiance has trinkets available, and while they aren’t the best trinkets, they’re a trinket. Go in and do the weekly and you can buy one straight off.

Autoloot still isn’t turned on by default.

And now let’s roll our own credits. Thanks everybody for reading today. I hope you’re making your way successfully through this rainy (at least for me) Wednesday. Hang in there, because we’re half-way through the week.

I’ll see you back here next week.