The Queue: Has the Ice Stone melted yet?

Summer is well upon us, and with it a heat wave that has me staying well out of the sunshine. But the Ice Stone is still here, and still needs melting, so once again I queue up to kill Frost Lord Ahune for summertime festivity (and transmog).

Fortunately I can do this while staying indoors, because I really want all of the new Midsummer Fire Festival transmog.

But for now, this is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where I do my best to answer your definitely video game related questions. Let’s get to it.

World of Warcraft has been very consistent about its patch schedule over the last few years: each patch is two months after the last, and usually has a PTR within a week of the last patch launching. I expect patch 12.1 will continue to fallow this pattern, and so far it has, with the patch announced a couple of days after patch 12.0.7 launched and the PTR coming online shortly afterwards.

Patch 12.0.7 launched on June 16, which puts patch 12.1 on track for August 11, which would be exactly eight weeks. So we still have a fair amount of time to wait, and a fair amount of time for the patch to continue to develop. As a major patch, it can probably use the lead time to shake out all the bugs before launch. (Hopefully shake out all the bugs before launch.)

I won’t argue with whatever you find fun, but personally I don’t find obsessing over stats to be fun — and it’s something Diablo 4 strongly encourages you to do, even though it barely matters until you are into the late game.

Min-maxing stats and finding gear with the perfect RNG is what you have to do to make the most of your build and push the highest-tier Pit levels, but I personally find it time consuming and tedious. You get so much gear playing the game that you can spend 20 minutes sorting through it in town when your inventory is full. This one has +crit, but this one has +overpower and overpower is always good but my build really wants crit, or this one has more +crit but less +max health and maybe I need the survivability… you can spend forever evaluating pieces of gear, but while you’re leveling, and even while you’re max level but on lower torments and Pit levels, it’s a mountain of time you could be spending playing the game. For early leveling, you’re just looking for higher item levels. For mid-game, you’re looking for the right legendary aspects to power up your build. For early 70 play, you’re looking to upgrade everything to ancestral. For late game play, you’re looking to upgrade to mythic and find pieces with the best stats.

Until you hit a wall in progression, the optimization just isn’t necessary.

But some people find the min-maxing fun. Maybe you’re one of them. But if you aren’t and just feel compelled because the game is dumping all of this loot with all of these stats… well, try to resist. Until you get later in the game the time to value ratio just isn’t there.

I am looking forward to the new Mountain Goats album coming out next month, but in the meantime there are two singles to listen to. In the meantime, I’ll have to suffice with the latest from Death Cab for Cutie.

And that’s all for today, everybody. I’ve got to head back to my music library, but I’ll see you in the comments section.