The Queue: Yogg-Saron, god of pastries

I am the sugary dream…

The muffin in your midnight cravings…

The cake of a thousand layers!

Cower before my buttery form!

BOW DOWN BEFORE THE GOD OF PASTRIES!

This is The Queue, a daily Q&A column where we would like to consume the flesh and blood of an ancient godlike being, as long as it tastes like lava cake.

Our friend Pidia aka Roxxii aka Faradai suggested this deck, which I affectionately “Cannon BS Warrior” but might have another official name, and well. He’s right. This is a very strong deck at the moment that is pretty easy to play and doesn’t require a lot of investment (this particular version):

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For someone who’s just bought the class set specifically and doesn’t have a lot of dust, I can see no better option in the game at the moment.

The boring-but-basic answer is simply “finish all your daily and weekly quests every week.” That way you’ll make progress on the rewards track, which is honestly quite generous these days for players who are able to do just that. If you’re diligent with those dailies and weeklies, you’ll easily get to level 100 every season and nab all the rewards.

Other than that, you might want to manually disenchant your golden cards if you don’t care for the extra shininess they have. It’s basically free dust at the cost of your game looking slightly less cool.

I wonder if “Grummle” came from “grumble.” The world may never now.

It might be the hopium I inhaled earlier, but I legitimately think we’ll get the announcement of a Warcraft animated series.

I don’t think these animated shorts were a coincidence. I think Blizzard might have been testing the waters — and reactions to these were overwhelmingly positive.

A Warcraft animated series being announced at Blizzcon would make me very happy. And if all the rumors about The Last Titan ending with a “reset” to WoW are true, there’s no better time for an animated series to start. It could even run parallel to the new story of the game.

I’m gonna go with the werewolf.

I tend to prefer stories and lore about things that are related or pertinent to the human condition. I like the idea of dragons much more when they’re clear allegories: Smaug, in the Hobbit, is about greed and pollution. The dragons in A Song of Ice and Fire are akin to weapons of mass destruction that certain nations control, and the effect that has in the geopolitics of that world. That kind of thing is cool for me. Godzilla is not a “dragon” but is still a walking allegory about nuclear danger.

Dragons are pretty neat, but I like werewolves even better. Rather than a big symbol of some external concept, they’re more about “man at war with himself.” Losing control. Rage, fury, vengeance, or just craving, lust, instinct. The gentlemanly façade hiding an uncontrollable beast. Plus the super cool aesthetic of wolves, claws, blood, shadows.

Worgen would probably be my favorite race in WoW if the models and animations were better and they had better transmog options.

It’s funny how so many JRPGs have your party end up fighting god as the final boss. Persona, being an offshoot of Shin Megami Tensei, a game series that has always dealt with demons, angels, and all sorts of mythical beings, would, of course, be no exception. And the selection is wide: Yaldabaoth comes from Gnosticism, while Persona 4 had Izanami, from Japanese mythos; Persona 3 and Persona 1 had, respectively, Nyx and Pandora, from Greek mythology (though the latter is not exactly a “god” strictly), and Persona 2 had perhaps the most powerful of them all, Nyarlathotep, taken not from real world beliefs, but from Lovecraftian mythos — much like the Old Gods in WoW.

The coolest of them all might be YHVH, from the main SMT series, who’s basically just “God,” with no other variations or qualifiers. And he is so powerful that not only is his name spelled in all caps, but it’s never actually pronounced in the game. Whenever a character would say YHVH out loud, the game censors it. They basically take the idea of “do not say God’s name in vain” quite literally, turning it into an in-game thing to illustrate how powerful the being is in that universe.

Some of the explanation for it is that it’s basically an allegory. The playable characters are often fighting for freedom, for change, to escape control or authority. And there is no power more controlling or all-encompassing than the power of a ruling deity. As you keep escalating that very concept, you can’t reach anything else.

But the truth is that it’s not just JRPGs that do that. WoW, of course, has the Old Gods, but our characters aren’t exactly fighting the Old Gods as figures of authority that control their lives, trying to break free from it. Those Old Gods are more like immensely corrupting forces, so fighting them is not really rebellion or liberation.

With the Titans, on the other hand, that might be closer to the truth. Perhaps the Titans are the WoW version of the JRPG concept of a god as a final boss. Maybe that’s going to be what The Last Titan is all about, who knows?

This has been The Queue.

Praise Yogg.