The Queue: People die and Mistress Nagmara serves drinks

This is Mistress Nagmara, a barmaid at the Grim Guzzler tavern in Shadowforge City, Blackrock Mountain (home of the Dark Iron Dwarves). In WoW, she used to start and end a quest that has since been removed from the game, making her a rare Succubus character that players could interact with. In Hearthstone, she’s just been added as both a Warlock skin and a bartender in Battlegrounds. She’s my current bartender of choice, in fact. I really like her voice lines. She’s very good at her job of encouraging you in a way that sounds much more “friendly barmaid” than “saucy succubus,” to be honest.

Also, “Nagmara” is an anagram of “anagram.”

This is The Queue, our daily Q&A column where sometimes we like to highlight random things because we just think they’re neat.

Twist had been dooomed for a while now; it was only a matter of time. Blizzard themselves refused to support the game mode, leaving it locked for over a year. They already knew it hadn’t worked out, and were just… waiting before killing it, for some reason.

The truth is that Hearthstone has always been a heavily experimental game. They throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks. Tavern Brawls worked. Battlegrounds worked. Wild worked. And Arena, despite all the complaints people have had through the years, worked.

But Mercenaries didn’t work. Duels didn’t work. And Twist didn’t work. It’s hard to say what makes a mode work or not; I’m sure even Blizzard themselves don’t know, so they just try things and hope for the best.

As for what’s coming next? To replace Twist, they might just restore Classic mode (if the numbers say it makes sense). I don’t foresee a new type of Constructed popping up. In fact, if I had to guess, I’d say they’re more likely to reduce Constructed to just two ladders (Standard and Wild) than bringing Classic back, but we’ll see.

I expect them to keep trying out new modes, but what I really hope for — and I’ve already talked about this quite a few times — is some sort of robust single player mode. A roguelike deckbuilder. Give me the Balatro, Slay the Spire, Monster Train experience inside Hearthstone. You already have the successful Dungeon Run as a huge springboard! It’s the thing that has the biggest chance of being a hit, in my humble opinion. Make people able to collect / purchase cosmetics within it, or what-have-you, so you can monetize it, yadda yadda. But just do it.

(Heck, Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors released three days ago to “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on Steam. People crave this type of gameplay! A lot!)

Yes, I do. This current situation with 12.0.5 being released while plagued by bugs reeks of a dilapidated QA team combined with unrealistic deadlines for the devs to meet. But even if you ignore the fact that quality isn’t being assured as it should (and they acknowledge it), the pacing still feels too fast: I, for one, do not feel ready to tackle new content yet. I would have gladly taken at least a couple more weeks of 12.0 content before getting new stuff.

However, it’s hard to speak for the playerbase as a whole. Players interact with WoW on very different levels of commitment, from those fully dedicated to hardcore raiding groups to those who just wanna chill and do things at a very relaxed pace. And even within those subgroups, you might find that some are already “over” the original content and bored, while others are still tackling it. In the end of the day, it’s impossible for Blizzard to please the entire playerbase, so they just have to pick some kind of content release schedule and go for it. And if complaints grow too loud, it’s time to adapt, perhaps.

Given all the (very legitimate) complaints we’re getting about bugs, I think it’s pretty safe to say that this one, 12.0.5, could have taken a bit more time to cook. Would have been good for the playerbase, and would have been good for the devs. Not sure if it would have been good for the execs, but they’re the part that matters the least in this, even though they hold the most power by far. (Such is the way of the world. Read Cloud Atlas.)

I was legitimately very satisfied with the story of the original D4. While things were left open-ended after the campaign ended, we already knew we would be getting more story content with seasons, and eventually with expansions. So what I can say is that I get where you’re coming from with “no payoff” because things weren’t resolved in the end, but I don’t share the same sentiment.

But that’s the way Diablo storytelling works*, I guess. It’s not an epic world with heroic things happening like WoW. It’s considerably more grim, something much closer to dark fantasy with light horror touches. You can’t really go in expecting sunshine and rainbows and a story where evil is defeated in the end and we live happily ever after. Diablo is often about our insignificance before literal demons from hell; our struggle to just survive for one more day, grasping whatever faint glimmer of hope we can find. If that kind of thing vibes with you, great! But if you feel that’s too dark or too depressing, I can’t really say that the new expansion — or any future Diablo 4 content for that matter — will suddenly work for you.

(*The exception to this was Diablo 3 before the Reaper of Souls expansion, where our character was a superhero Nephalem facing extremely dumb villains who would disclose their plans in advance and then fly away with purple butterfly wings, so you just knew things would work out in the end, comic book style.)

I don’t think we’ll see Azshara, because nothing in the story so far seems to indicate it. I feel like we would have gotten some hints by now — unless Blizzard is planning a full “surprise!!!” moment, which seems unlikely.

We have a lot of threads, with the world soul, Xal’atath, Alleria and Turalyon, Arator, Harandar, the Coreway, the Titans, Sylvanas Ex Machina starting the Shadowlands retcon and making things good for everyone, etc. It’s more likely that we’ll follow some of those instead.

…then again, we did get the Undermine patch during The War Within…

Keys, wallet, etc. live inside a nightstand drawer.

Why, are you planning to rob me.

Frost Donkey Kong, IMO. Especially since it just got some nice changes that have made it the preferred spec over Unholy Donkey Kong, apparently.

And your chances of falling asleep while playing it are considerably smaller than with BM Hunter.

This has been The Queue. Be like the Kong, and stay frosty, friends.