The Queue: Eight Crazy Years

It’s my eight-year Blizzard Watch anniversary! This very day! It’s hard to believe that it’s been so long. Surely it was just yesterday; now let me take a big sip of water and take a look at a calendar…

Way back when I got hired, I’d basically never written anything outside of school. Now I have 700 articles to my name according to the tracker on WordPress. This is also apparently my 700th article, which is pretty cool! I still remember when I started Anne introducing herself and saying, “Don’t be scared, but I have notes!” Amazingly, she’s as nice as you expect her to be, and she helped me to be a better writer. As well as literally everyone else that Blizzard Watch has gotten to write or edit any of our articles. Special shout-outs to Anna and Liz for keeping everything running and putting up with my overuse of the exclamation point. Even though if they’re reading this right now, they’re shaking their head at how many I’ve already used. It’s been eight years — I’m allowed to be excited!

My first article about Daughter of the Sea still even remains cool! I’m glad it was about something really fun, and not just a patch note roundup. Maybe someday Blizzard will give us another sea-shanty to obsess over.

So here’s to you all for reading my words, and here’s to Blizzard Watch for giving me a place to put those words. Thanks to them, I’ve gotten to do a bunch of really cool things, and I can’t wait to see what else I can do in the future.

While I daydream about that, it’s time for our daily question and answer column — The Queue!

I don’t! I just saw one for sale at a nerd pop-up for 165 Canuck dollarydoos. Which is way too many dollarydoos to spend on a Funko, even a limited edition one from my favorite game. The only one that was ever specifically for Heroes of the Storm! Sadly, the owner of the shop wasn’t around, so I couldn’t even try to talk them down to 50 bucks. I would’ve taken such good care of it, and taken it out of its box and everything! I don’t want it to sit in a box on a shelf somewhere; I want it to be on a desk or table for all to see!

So I guess this is me passing the question on to you all. So… What’s up? Anyone wanna sell me a rare Funko for way less than everyone else is selling it for?

Well, yeah, I’m only human. Plus, usually if there is romance in the game, you’ve got to bring them along more so you get more interaction opportunities. My Commander Sheppard was a big biotic badass; I didn’t really need Jack in my party at the same time, yet I always brought her along.

Sometimes the aesthetic outweighs the min-maxxing.

I played that way in Warcraft too. I was Venthyr for so long before it became the meta faction to be a part of. Did I miss not having Convoke the Spirits? Of course! Was I much happier with my vampire buddies in red spiky armor? You better believe it, bud.

I get it. Mythic Raiding is a big commitment and can be hard. Especially since you need so many other people who want to do it in order to make it work. It’s a lot harder to say that you feel like doing some successful Mythic raiding on a whim and then just bug a couple of friends to make it happen. That being said, when everything was going mostly right, it was extremely cool. There’s nothing quite like seeing what 20 people working together can achieve in a video game. Sure, there were rough nights, but I feel like there were way more good than bad. So if I were playing right now, I’d still want to be trying my hand at the biggest bosses, with the most intricate mechanics. M+ just doesn’t have that same kind of thrill; the danger usually comes from throughput issues rather than any mountain of abilities all hitting you at once from seven different angles.

I’d go back to Enhancement Shaman, probably. They were always pretty cool when I played them, and I loved being a Tauren with big totems on my back swinging giant axes or claws around. It’s been a long time since I played one, but surely enough of that flavor has stayed in place that it wouldn’t take me too long to get back up to speed.

Favorite raid is probably Throne of Thunder. There are a lot of fun fights in there, including Lei Shen, who was a great last boss. Lots of moving pieces, lightning, tanks getting decapitated, what’s not to like! You could also change things up based on what your raid was better at, which is some quality design. Plus it had dinosaurs and Trolls everywhere!  I wanted to say Ulduar, because it’s just so cool through and through and clearly the raid that had the most effort put into its achievements and design. I understand why we didn’t see hard mode criteria added to everything later, because it’s just so much work, and we’d have been on our tenth “Big Red Button” by now — still, it would’ve been cool for ICC to have that system at least!

My favorite dungeon is Zul’Farrak; that’s where I saw my first-ever Epic item. I didn’t win it, but I saw one drop! It was big while not being too big, had lots of bosses and a Godzilla reference, and a cool event in the zombie stairs. More recently, I think I’d have to give it to one of the Venthyr dungeons for aesthetics.

It’s a toss-up for favorite expansion between Mists of Pandaria and Legion. Pandaria had my favorite raid moments, and my guild’s Realm-First! Ra-Den, which we got during an off night in Siege of Orgrimmar. Legion was just when I changed to Bear, and that was a big step, and then I got my Mage Tower skin and wrote a giant guide to getting it, which helped me get this gig here at Blizzard Watch!

Maybe the real treasure was the friends we made along the way.

Trolls!

They have mohawks. There might be other reasons, but that’s the one that’s coming to mind first. Undead are cool too; Tauren and Orcs didn’t do too much for me on the first pass. Dwarves are alright too, I guess. I did make my first character a Dwarf Hunter, but that’s because he had a bear in the cinematic, and that was pretty dope.

I do! The patch cadence has increased in the last year, and each patch has seen a piece of new content added to the game. As well as some pretty big tweaks to heroes and their abilities. Abathur just got a rework that included a new talent called “Slapathur!” Now he won’t be winning the one-on-one duel with the Butcher, but he’d at least leave a good mark.

I know that these could just be things that a small Classic Teams balance squad could be taking care of. That, at the end of the day, Heroes will stay alive, but it won’t ever really thrive.

However, I choose to live in hope. That even one big event a year and a new hero once a year is possible, and could lead to more. I see how many people are passionate about the game out there, and it’s way more than dozens. We have faced the monsters of budgets and sales targets on the doorstep, and we have told them no! Not today — today we are cancelling the apocalypse!

I’d want a big werebear statue at one of the locations that Highlord Kruul spawned during the Dark Portal events. Then anyone who wandered by could see just how cool I was and learn about how a bear stopped the big-bad demon commander of the Burning Legion forces on Azeroth. Sure, the timeline gets a little weird if you think about it being a statue of my werebear, since that didn’t unlock until the Mage Tower came online much after the Dark Portal events, but that’s just semantics. It can be a paradox; Chromie said it was allowed just this once.

Today’s Bacardi is stuck here just like me. Good luck getting rid of either one of us! We’ll be on Warcraft 7 before I stop here.

Would you rather

Get a sword for a long service award

Or

Get a shield with a custom crest of arms for a long service award

Today’s Anna Red Earworm™: Here’s To Us

That’s it for me today. I’ll see you in a little bit for more Queue fun! In the meantime, make sure to leave lots of questions for all of your other intrepid writers.