The Queue: Perfect Bird Time

The fight between Gun Nun and Alucard from Castlevania is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in recent times. Look it up, it’s canon.

This is The Queue, our daily Q&A column where instead of having tea with our potential allies, we’re forced to ask ourselves the important question: “if I were a bird, how would I react to this information?”

Well, the last game I played (and pretty much the only game I’ve been playing these days) is Hearthstone, so that’s kinda cheating. But I guess I could use some character that’s in Hearthstone but not yet in WoW: Arch-Thief Rafaam.

Rafaam’s whole gimmick in Hearthstone is that he steals your stuff, because he collects magical artifacts in order to become “the supreme archeologist.” But he’s also the leader of the League of E.V.I.L, commanding other villains like Dr. Boom and Matron Hagatha (from WoW). So the fight would be mainly based around those concepts.

• Phase 1 would have a straightforward Rafaam, doing regular Ethereal stuff: void zones, arcane blasts. He would sometimes summon magical artifacts, which would briefly empower him, just to give the player a taste of later mechanics.
  • During this phase, Dr. Boom sometimes flies over the battlefield raining down Boom Bots that slowly walk toward you. You have to destroy them before they reach you or you take massive damage, but they’re pretty slow.
  • In addition to Dr. Boom, we’d also have King Togwaggle invade the battlefield and summon Kobold minions to attack you. They’d be those big beefy Kobolds we already find in Delves, and they’d need to be dealt with quickly because they have permanent aggro on you and deal a lot of damage.
  • Bring Rafaam down to 65% health and he starts Phase 2.
• Phase 2 would have Rafaam start turning your powers against you. He would briefly steal abilities from your Delve loadout! While stolen, you lose access to them, and he gains some of their effects. So choosing the right loadout would probably be part of the strategy for this fight.
  • He would also use your class abilities, while temporarily locking you out of some of your stuff. You might lose your main nuke for a few seconds, while Rafaam casts it at you twice in a row. You’d lose your movement abilities while he forces you to run away from a void zone. You’d lose your interrupt, and he’d begin casting a big spell that HAS to be interrupted, but you can run to the other side of the battlefield and destroy an artifact he summoned, like a floating staff; when you destroy it, you get an extra action button that allows you to interrupt him.
  • Besides Boom and Togwaggle, Hagatha would join the battle on this phase. She would sometimes hex you, turning you into a frog for several seconds. It would be a telegraphed ability, and you could see it coming and run away to avoid it.
  • At 35% health, Rafaam starts Phase 3.
• Phase 3 would have Rafaam summon all of his most powerful artifacts and use them all at once. He deals crazy damage with arcane blasts, summons fake clones of himself, creates big void zones, and has a huge AOE that has to be avoided by hiding behind pillars. Also, he’s invulnerable. The catch is that you can physically attack and break his artifacts on the battlefield, and each one you break shatters one of Rafaam’s shields, so he becomes briefly attackable before he restores the shield — so you have to damage him during those windows.
  • In addition to the previous villains, Madame Lazul also joins the battle, and summons some Old God tentacles to constrict you, slowing you down massively and dealing heavy damage. Since Rafaam is mostly invulnerable, you spend most of the time in this phase breaking his artifacts (to enable the windows to attack Rafaam) and attacking those tentacles, as well as the boom bots and big kobolds from the previous phases.

I feel like this could be a fun fight. Blizzard, please hire me.

Increased! Maybe increased a lot, actually.

I didn’t really expect to read things like “the scale of this game is massive” or “it feels as big as several Fire Emblem games” or “they doubled down on the social stuff from Three Houses, and it made me like it.” The game looks much more interesting from a systems standpoint now. I’m super eager to play around with the daily systems, the dungeon exploring and turn-based battles, etc.

The story still has a whole obscured layer that I’m very curious about. And there are so many characters. Most of them look so good and/or appealing, in such different ways.

Also, I’m now 100% convinced that I’ll pick Leda first. She seems to be even more awesome than I already imagined. I thought she was just like Primrose from the first Octopath Traveler — both the story and character archetype are very similar — but she seems to be far more unhinged and bloodthirsty.

It seems like most characters will be recruitable regardless of hero choice, which makes sense given that there seems to be a system where you can play their stories parallel, rather than exclusive, to each other. I’m not entirely sure how that all works yet, but if I were to speculate, I’d say that after a certain story point — probably the time skip — you’ll keep a “main army” that doesn’t change when you change protagonists, so any recruits in there are “permanent” past the point where you’re constantly changing leads.

I doubt it’s multiverses, even though from a story standpoint that might make sense (the recent Nintendo Direct did imply some sort of time travel, “redo the story” element), simply because I think that mechanically that could become needlessly complex. We probably will have to start out by managing up to four different armies, which is okay in the early stages, but could creep into “overwhelming” territory if it’s maintained for too long. Having to remember, long term, which characters and levels and classes and equipment you have on each? Having to perhaps grind on one to catch up with the others? If I were designing the game, I for sure wouldn’t do it that way, at least. So I do expect something like “start separate, eventually unite the armies.” And then any recruits are joined together too.

But who knows! Maybe they’ve found a completely different solution that I’m not thinking of.

Tower for sure. Ever since I was a kid I’ve fantasized about the idea of living in a classic tower.

I’ve used this in TTRPG games I’ve DM’d (Mage: The Ascension, in a game set in the near future, like 2030-2040 or so, one of the most powerful NPCs lived in an underground inverted wizard tower in the middle of Seattle).

For the current story I’m working on, I guess you could call the setting something like “late-industrial colonial political fantasy with magitech.” Yet when working on the epilogue for one of my three protagonists the other day, I had her decide that she wants to live in something akin to a wizard tower too.

So yeah, the setting doesn’t even matter: near future, not-so-distant past, I like wizard towers and I’ll put them there. It’s an idea that’s been with me for a long time, and certainly beats magical house for me.

Thanks for reading The Queue. We hope you have a Perfect Bird Time this weekend!