The Queue: Enjoying that summer snowstorm

Why did we come have to come back here? Didn’t we do enough of these otherworldly invasions during Legion? That we now have to come back and do them again, just fighting the Void instead of the Burning Legion?

Apparently not, because now we’re teleporting off to Void “showdowns” in those same places, but at least this one is cool (as in temperature) and will give us a break from the Midsummer Fire Festival (starting this weekend). But still, I could have skipped this. (But I won’t, because there’s new transmog.)

This is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where we do our very best to answer your questions, but our best varies depending on the day. Let’s get to it.

I’m a little overwhelmed, to be honest — though that isn’t entirely patch 12.0.7’s fault. It’s more an accumulation of activities in the game that have become overwhelming as Midnight continues onward.

While content droughts aren’t particularly fun, the game hasn’t left us a lot of downtime, and keeps piling on new events with new rewards. I still don’t have most of the transmogs from Void Assaults/Void Incursions/Ritual Sites yet, because it’s just so expensive to collect everything. I never have a single voidlight marl to my name, because it’s going straight into buying cosmetics the moment I get it. I have a lot more grinding to do before I collect everything.

But now we also have Void Showdowns with a new set of cosmetic rewards. Plus new difficulty levels in Ritual Sites which will help me earn more currency for more rewards. Plus there are new quests to do, old quests I never finished, reputation grinds I haven’t gotten to the end of, and I’m feeling a little tired, a little paralyzed by choice. There are so many things to do, but all of them feel like they’ll take me a lot of work to get there, all while grinding away at the same old thing.

Meanwhile, my Steam queue is calling, with new, weird games and not just “let’s go fight the Void, but in the snow this time.”

Rotmire does feel like a straightforward fight, and it gives me a sort of whiplash after how difficult it was to kill L’ura. It’s nice to have a fight that doesn’t push you too hard — Rotmire seems much more a DPS and/or healing check than a mechanics fight, while L’ura was complicated mechanics all the way.

But I actually liked the L’ura encounter. It took a fair amount of work to get my head around it, and practice all the mechanics, and put the whole fight together. But it also engaged 110% of my brain during the fight. I was dead if I got distracted even for a moment. It could be exhausting, but I actually really enjoyed the way I had to commit to being fully focused on just this for a few hours on raid nights. I don’t think there’s another fight in the game that feels that way.

You’re absolutely right though; it feels like a fight practically designed for the WeakAura era, designed after the WeakAura era. But I think that may be part of what I liked about it; while you can still use addons for a lot of things, some of the cognitive load is back on my brain. I can’t just listen to what DBM tells me, because DBM is less detailed now, its warnings nonspecific. For a fight like L’ura, I really have to focus up, and that can be really satisfying.

Rotmire, on the other hand, is extremely simple. Hit the boss, kill the adds, interrupt the big add, run vines out to the edge of the room. The challenge is not in the mechanics of the fight; there’s just not much to track or remember. Instead, it leans towards perfectly executing your rotation and maximizing DPS and healing. It rewards precise performance rather than mechanical understanding, the sort of thing that WeakAuras and other addons have always helped with.

On our first boss kill, the healing requirements were getting too high as the fight dragged on, and we got the kill with only two healers left alive. (And I don’t mean they were the only healers left alive; they were the only players left alive in a field of corpses.) More DPS could have killed it before the healing got out of control, or more healing could have handled one more round of adds before everyone started dying, but in the end the fight focuses on pure performance.

Comparing the two encounters, I think I like L’ura better, but each pushes you in a different way, and it’s probably good to have fights that lean in both directions. Put some variety in your raid routine and all that.

This would certainly be a nice perk. When they were first introduced it seemed like a super useful addition, but you very quickly run out of things to upgrade, and now the system is dead to you.

I think Blizzard doesn’t want too much power creep, but this is a system whose time came and went astonishingly quickly.

I think this is really going to depend on your class, control scheme, and general dexterity.

I think I probably have a fairly typical setup, with my left hand on the keyboard and my right hand on a trackball (though I assume that’s a mouse for most of you). I move using the trackball and have a few things bound to trackball buttons (movement boosts, defensives, dispels, interrupts), but most of my abilities are keybound to buttons I can easily reach with my left hand. Limited use of my right hand would make it impossible to play, because of an inability to navigate the game world. Limited use of my left hand would make it impossible to play, because of an inability to do things in the game world. (Though, frankly, a trackball is great for limited mobility. I use it to avoid wrist pain that’s aggravated by mouse use, and you can hold your hand and wrist completely still while using it.)

But whether you can play depends. How much mobility do you have in the hand? can you move your fingers? Can you reach the keys you need? And are you playing a class with a four button rotation or a fourteen button rotation? (The latter, of course, makes it harder to reach all of those buttons.)

I would generally agree with Kalcheus on this one, that World Bosses aren’t particularly tough content and should not require much work to kill. But you still need to be able to hit at least some of your abilities without aggravating any injuries.

I’d call that a maybe, but definitely don’t sit at your computer and type away if it’s causing you pain.

That’s it for today, everyone. Take care, keep sending me your cat advice, and I’ll see you in the comments section.