The Queue: No, really, why did it have to be snakes?

I’d rather be fishing.

In a nice sunny spot on the coast. Maybe I could bring my umbrella. Not a snake or pool of venom in sight. It would be glorious.

But no, instead I’m on the Coiled Isle, having a panic attack while a dozen snakes twisted into a single mega-snake comes at me. This is the life of a hero of Azeroth, apparently.

This is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where I’d rather not talk about snakes but somehow keep coming back to them, because they’re everywhere and I can’t get them out of my mind.

I can’t answer all of these questions, because I gotta say I am struggling this patch. I an absolutely terrified of snakes.

This isn’t usually an issue. Warcraft snakes are frequently cartoony little guys, and species like the Sethrak aren’t snake-like enough to really bother me. The python-like snakes on the Timeless Isles bothered me a bit, because they were more snake-like than usual and had a slithering motion that I found upsetting, but there weren’t tons of them and I could skip past them entirely if I wanted.

Everything on the Coiled Isle is a snake. And not a cartoony snake. They are very snake-like, not at all cartoony, and some of them are multiple snakes coiled together in this horrifying writhing mass. It makes something very terrifying (a snake) multiplicatively more terrifying (multiple snakes). There’s an arachnophobia mode, but nothing to fix this. Everything on my screen is a snake.

I’m spending a lot more time staring at my button bars than I am at the rest of my screen, and playing less new content than I usually would. Some of this stuff I just can’t stand to look at. There was that early quest where you had to save Trolls who were being squeezed to death by a writhing mass of snakes and I was desperately close to just turning off the computer and not coming back; I was only watching my character’s feet while I walked around hitting the interact key. If this were anything other than World of Warcraft which is a game I play in large part to hang out with my friends, I wouldn’t be playing at all.

Honestly, I think it went pretty well. It’s a weird raid tier for us, as we have some players who have burned out on the relentless patch cycle and some who have been enjoying Mythic+ more than raiding, so our group is smaller than it has been in a while. I was a little worried about things coming together, and I myself am admittedly out of practice and am not sure how I’m supposed to change to roll with the latest wave of the buff/nerf cycle. A number of people swapped classes. (And, in some groups situation where CC was needed, I was wondering if I should swap back to my Monk purely for Ring of Peace… but I’m playing a DK and was making myself useful with Death Grip and brez on multiple occasions, so I’m as useful as I am, too. Probably more useful than that one CC.) I was feeling rusty (and also I had my fishing hotkey on my button bars where I usually have a major cooldown and didn’t realize it until halfway through our first pull which wasn’t ideal), and probably others were too.

But I think we had fun, and we killed three bosses on normal and tried a fourth. I got a new weapon that a guildmate traded me when she realized that it was a 10 ilevel upgrade for me and just a better stat arrangement for her. I’m always of the opinion that we’ll all get gear eventually and it’s not a big deal to not win a roll. I don’t hassle people about things like this, but … it’s nice that friends are looking out for me, even if it is fine either way.

A nice night with friends is a good raid night.

It’s a little weird to be here without a single Mythic kill on Thursday. (I know this is not what you asked, but this is where I’m starting.) Usually a guild or two has gone in and taken out the first boss on Mythic to get a world first kill on their resume, and then go back to doing lower tier content to gear up to tackle more Mythic.

But here… the raid is definitely high complexity, tuned pretty hard, and also buggy. A trifecta We’re also continuing to get class changes. There was a big balance patch on Tuesday, and Blizzard plans another balance patch this coming Tuesday. I wonder if the changes and uncertainty also has an impact… obviously the big guilds can overcome it, but if balance changes drastically, that will be hard for us little guys.

Regardless, it’s shaping up to be an interesting race to watch.

I don’t hate it but I don’t love it. Dark Gifts feel so hit and miss that I’m close to completely ignoring them. Trinkets are at least influenced by your war band so you always have something relevant to your current board, even if it’s not great, but Dark Gifts can be anything, and you can spend your gold to get nothing that works with anything you have on the board.

Maybe I’m just not having a very lucky season. Maybe I just need to keep trying and get good.

I think we’re going back to purple void-y color schemes. The void isn’t done with us yet; it’s just taking a break while waiting for round 2.

Last week you asked about making a cozy Blizzard game; and I feel like cozy is also the best answer to this question. A lot of games go all in on the chaos and destruction and then the credits roll. But what happens next? Who fixes everything that’s been destroyed in the chaos?

And it’s here that we have room for all sorts of little cozy games about rebuilding and repairing and creating new from the ashes of the old. If you’ve played Mass Effect 1, you know that it ends with the Citadel wrecked, and you climb out of the rubble in the final scene. But when you return in subsequent games, it’s been rebuilt.

Well, why don’t you get a chance to rebuild it? Make a citybuilder that’s about clearing away the rubble, restoring the infrastructure, and creating new communities with the survivors in the aftermath.

Sometimes you have to give up hope, for your own sanity. Let it go.

And maybe you’ll be pleasantly surprised later.

That’s all for today, my friends. Take care of yourselves, and I’ll see you in the comment section.