The Queue: It’s been a week

Seriously. What a week. And it’s actually Friday, so I get to say this without having some funny person tell me “Red, it’s Wednesday” or whatever.

This is The Queue, our daily Q&A column where sometimes things are just moving too fast and we’re exhausted, man.

Bubble Paladin is OP and feels worse to play against than Imbue Druid ever did. And I’ve been able to have some small amount of success with it (though still less than I wished), so I’ve been playing it — not like I really want to, but it’s the best I’ve got at the moment.

The other one is Spell Demon Hunter. It’s… alright. Alright in terms of fun, alright in terms of power.

Other than that, I haven’t really stuck to anything else. When I did decide to try to play with Herald and the other exciting new features of the expansion, it (Onyxia DK) sucked bad. So this expansion, which looked so promising to me on paper, has been a dud so far, sadly. I hope they buff those Herald decks (other than Shaman and Warrior, which are already good enough).

It’s very hard to pick just one, lol. But the games that I always take with me everywhere, and are great to play on the Deck when I’m traveling or similar, are games that don’t require you to invest too much thought and are “infinitely repeatable,” so to speak. Things like Vampire Survivors, Balatro, Slay the Spire, Monster Train, and perhaps Hades/Hades 2. I’ve devoted hundreds of hours to those titles in particular, and I’m always looking for more games of those genres (bullet heavens, deckbuilders, roguelikes).

And then there’s Civ 5, which I purposefully avoid playing because I want to continue being a functioning member of society.

Mage.

I don’t know why. I just think you should go Mage.

Go Mage.

I use Excel, since I already pay for a Microsoft 365 subscription anyway, for several reasons. I if I didn’t have that, I guess I’d use a free alternative like LibreOffice or OpenOffice, or I’d just make do with Google Sheets for quicker/smaller stuff.

1) I’m looking forward to the new transmog feature that lets you customize how you sheathe weapon (or if it sheathes at all). A lot of my mogs will definitely be improved by not having a visible weapon.

…to be frank, that’s mostly it. None of the other announced features like the spear fishing thing or the decor thing sound very exciting to me — though that could always change when I get to actually experience them. The void invasions are probably something I’ll do, but it’s honestly a bit hard to get excited about that kind of event because they tend to all be largely the same (go to an area, kill a ton of mobs, grind a currency). I don’t know how you could innovate a lot in those, but I’m sure there are ways.

2) I’m splitting my time between my main and my alts. I just want to get at least five alts to level 90 as soon as possible for that Warband mentor XP, so that I can then start dabbling into my other alts more freely (with the full XP bonus, and without feeling like I have to get them to max level before I move on to the next one). Three down, two to go!

And to be frank once again, I enjoyed the heck out of the leveling zones and all the main story quests and sidequests while leveling to 90, but I didn’t enjoy the max level campaign (or the associated cinematics) nearly as much. Quite the opposite, in fact. I have some serious issues with some of the things that happened, and with what some specific characters are doing or saying. I’m weird in that story engagement can often have a big impact in how much I want to dedicate myself to playing a game, or an expansion, and Midnight started out super strong for me but let me down with the post-90 story stuff — which, in turn, made me feel a little less motivated to keep working on my main this last couple of weeks. So dedicating myself to alts is a way to avoid burning out, and hopefully picking things back up again in the near future.

I think I’d pick a superpower that I could reasonably use in the real world without making people suspicious or ending up in jail or in a lab to be studied. Which means that things like flying or super strength are probably out. It comes down to two: invisibility or healing.

Invisibility would mean being able to go anywhere, at any time, without fear or danger. It would be extremely liberating. If a wild animal attacks you, you can just go poof! You could disperse yourself in a crowd.

Meanwhile, healing would also be extremely useful, for obvious reasons. No risk of disease. No broken bones. No feeling sick, ever. It might be the best one, even if it doesn’t have the same endless possibilities as invisibility does.

So yeah, one of those two. I’m tempted to pick invisibility, but in the end of the day, I think the most sensible choice would be healing.

…teleportation, though. Teleportation would be awesome. Dang, this is hard!

I think that, primarily, they’re exactly what has been established in lore about them so far: lines of magic energy that flow throughout the world, and that “gather” more strongly in certain specific locations. Why do those lines exist, though, is where things might get interesting.

We know that Xal’atath is probably trying to reach the world soul of Azeroth at this moment — otherwise, the trilogy wouldn’t be called the Worldsoul Saga (and we’re about to reach the midpoint of the middle expansion, so this kinda has to be the apex of the narrative). It also seems that this world soul can be influenced, or changed, by any of the primordial forces of the cosmos — hence a race to influence it for some reason. It’s very much possible, then, that the leylines are like the veins and arteries of the world, from whence its “lifeblood” flows. Perhaps what flows there normally is just the essence of Azeroth — pure, raw magic, or perhaps whatever it is that becomes Azerite — but that essence can also mutate if something or someone pumps one of the primordial forces into it. The Titans came, and they used Arcane magic, and maybe that’s why it feels like the most “default” or “basic” kind of magic on Azeroth is Arcane — perhaps it wasn’t that way naturally, it simply became that way because the Titans worked to make it so.

It would explain why Xal’atath is pumping Void into the leylines. It’s like she’s pumping a Void “medicine” into the circulatory system of Azeroth, with the intention of transforming it from within. Just like every other force on the cosmos.

This has been The Queue. I think you should grab your Artifact Weapon and go fight the Scourge this weekend. I’m afraid it’s just that kind of weekend. Still, have a good one, and take care!