The Queue: Trying to fit in (but not very well)

When we returned to Silvermoon City, my Blood Elf Death Knight felt like she needed to fit in. All dressed in red and gold, looking like a perfectly normal Blood Elf. You might mistake her for a Paladin, even, if you didn’t pay attention to the pale skin and glowing blue eyes.

But of course the Silvermoon City guards saw right through that. I get constant insults from guards asking me about my “dark master” and in general barely tolerating my presence. Well, I tried.

Of course these days I’m not fitting in in all new ways. For one, I don’t think I’m tall enough to be mistaken for a Nightborne, but also my transmog needs a lot of work. We’ll see how it goes.

But for now, this is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where I answer your gaming questions and then we all get to hang out in the comments section. Let’s get to it.

If you’ve done Solwin Brightstitch’s quests, you know just how much work goes into perfectly tailored garments. Fighting mana wyrms, fighting ghosts, weaving your own silk… you don’t find a crafter who can do such fine work just everywhere. So not everything will have perfect stitching.

And some people would say the imperfections are part of the charm. It’s an essential part of the style of the piece, whether it’s done intentionally or simply the result of rushed work. (I’m not one of those people, but to each their own.)

I just say that if this month’s Trading Post options don’t delight me, it will be easier to save tendies for next month.

That really depends on what part of the game most sparks joy for you. If progression is what you love, spend your extra hours chasing it. If story is what you love, dig into all the little lore tidbits and work on Sojourner. You’ve gotta do you.

But if it were me, I’d work on Sojourner. Midnight seems especially packed with interesting little stories hidden off the beaten path in every zone, and I think in an entertainment-per-hour calculation, working your way through zone quests has a very high return on time spent. Running Mythic+ or getting in raid groups can have a lot of downtime waiting for groups to come together, wiping, deciding who to blame and vote kick after wiping… but for questing, there’s always something ahead of you to work on.

I agree with you that the story feels more coherent than The War Within’s initial story, but part of this is in the nature of the story being told. Khaz Algar introduced us to a place we had never been before, and a new race we had never met before. There’s a lot of heavy narrative lifting in going somewhere wholly new. And past the Isle of Dorn, you jumped into very different places with very different stories: The Ringing Deeps and its Kobolds and Goblins, Hallowfall with the Arathi, Azj’kahet with the Nerubians, Undermine with yet more Goblins, K’aresh with Brokers and Ethereals. Every zone was vastly different, with vastly different peoples, cultures, and quests.

Not to say that Midnight’s zones are all the same thing, but we have more familiarity with most of the places we’re visiting. We’ve been to Eversong Woods. We’ve been to Zul’Aman. They looked very different the last time we saw them, but we know the places and the people. We have the background lore already in our heads. Voidstorm and Harandar are both something new and different, but that’s half of the expansion zones that are new and different, not all of them. (And we also knew about the existence of Harandar, and something of its people, from The War Within, so it wasn’t a complete mystery when we went there for the first time.) So we’re starting with more familiarity with the content, which makes it easier to jump right into storytelling without having to spend extra time introducing the place and the people.

After that, Midnight’s narrative picks a focus point and sticks to it: in this case, it’s what the heck is going on with the Sunwell. And while we visit Zul’Aman and Harandar and Voidstorm, we actually don’t focus much on what’s going on in those places as part of the main narrative: we visit them as part of finding out what the heck is going on with the Sunwell. There’s a lot more to each zone to dig into, but as far as the main story quest goes, every one of them is an aside to the Sunwell story.

In The War Within, we’re ostensibly trekking across Khaz Algar chasing Xal’atath, which is the only thread leading us from Nerub-ar Palace to Liberation of Undermine to Manaforge Omega. They don’t themselves have close ties or a coherent narrative, but they’re stops along the way. That means a more scattered story, as we pass through many places and do many things that don’t play a part in the central narrative. Did we need to overthrow Gallywix on our way to find Xal’atath? Not really, but he was there and so we did. The whole narrative was like that.

By being laser focused on the Sunwell for the main narrative, Midnight has presented a much more coherent story. However, we’re saying this looking back at The War Within, and there’s a chance that by the end of Midnight we’ll feel the narrative was just as disjointed, starting with the Sunwell, then leaping into an Amani story that’s unlikely to have strong Sunwell ties, then who knows what in the end. We’re always chasing the next big adventure, which isn’t always a neat narrative connection.

Honestly, the system works better and is less expensive than it initially seemed to be. But I’m honestly using it less — in part because I set a nice transmog before the expansion launched and I’m still happy with it. (And also it’s really convenient to not have to switch things around just because of a gear upgrade.)

However some of that’s because it’s buggy. My monk continually wears the wrong chest piece on the login screen (it’s fine in-game, but no amount of changing things up seems to fix it on the login screen). When I change weapons — notably going from a 2-hander to two 1-handers — I’ll have a hodgepodge of all weapons at the same time, and frequently my off-hand weapon won’t appear in the transmog preview at all to even tell what changing it would look like before paying to set the look. Sometimes switching between looks in the transmog menu doesn’t show me the changed look, or just shows part of it mixed in with what I was wearing before. I’m feeling more often that if I have something that looks good I shouldn’t touch it for fear of breaking it. It also means I’m not using situations as often as I could, because swapping between them isn’t fully reliable — and it’s situations that largely drive buying mountains of outfit slots.

Transmog 2.0 is overall a good system, and the costs have been wrangled down to reasonability (unless you’re trying to unlock every outfit slot, which is wildly expensive, but largely unnecessary). Some of its issues have prevented me from making full use of it.

But, actually, another thing that’s stopped me from changing transmog as frequently as I used to is that I don’t have to. Because my transmog sticks no matter what I equip, I don’t go into the transmog window as often and look around and think “oh, this might look neat with that.” I don’t see new pieces of gear when I equip them, so I don’t think about how they might look cool with something else I know I have. The fact that I no longer need to go into the transmog menu as often means I think about it less, an odd side effect of the convenience of not having to change appearances like we used to.

I can’t decide if that’s good or bad, but the end result is I’m spending less because I’m not using it as often as I did before. I’m just not using it as a creative endeavor like I used to.

The whole point of video games is to make a character who looks as cool as possible, and cosmetic hearthstones mean you can look as cool as possible while also teleporting away from people. Though as far as I know, there is not yet a hearthstone that just shows your character putting on sunglasses (you’ve gotta look cool) before using a hearthstone. This would obviously be the perfect hearthstone.

And now I’m going to hearth on out of here. Take care everybody and I’ll see you in the comments section.