The Queue: What do you want, my blood?

The Coiled Isle has finally done it. I’m going to spec tank. I just can’t deal with being overwhelmed and murdered by snakes all the time, particularly in the Vaults of Atal’Utek where it is very easy to get overwhelmed and murdered by snakes.

Being surrounded by snakes is bad enough on its own without the regular need to run back to my corpse (through snakes) to get killed (by snakes) again because I’ve died somewhere inconvenient and the rest of the group has moved on. Time to spec Blood and become ungovernable, no snake will stop me.

Well, no more than usual.

But in between my own cries of terror, this is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where I make my best attempts to answer your questions. Let’s go.

Class unplayed? No. I’ve played everything, even if I haven’t played a lot. Spec unplayed? Quite a few, actually, in that I’ve never played any of the tank specs, even casually. I tend to pick one thing I like and stick with it, so I don’t usually spec swap a lot.

I’m thinking I may need to break my long “no tanks” streak for the Cursed Isle because this place is terrible, and not just because it’s full of snakes. The elite density is very high in Vaults of Atal’Utek  and it’s easy to get in over your head if you aren’t in a group (or if you fall behind your group).  I’m playing a Death Knight which is tanky even in DPS specs, but I think I just need to swap to Blood and relish in being unkillable.

There are some specs I’ve never been interested in or never put more than a half-hearted attempt in. I’ve never played a Fire Mage at all. I’ve never played a Survival Hunter (but I just don’t vibe with Hunters in general). I’ve played the tiniest bit of Shadow Priest and have never liked it; even in vanilla I leveled as Holy and only tried Shadow once or twice. I’ve never played Arms Warrior, even though right now at least it’s doing well; whenever I’ve played a Warrior Fury has just been too much fun and I’ve never looked elsewhere. Everything else I’ve at least dabbled with, though as alt averse as I am sometimes my dabbling is exceptionally brief, particularly when measured out over the lifespan of the entire game.

To answer a few questions about the extra Trader’s Tender you can get in September, you can get 200 by watching BlizzCon and 500 by logging in five days during the Winds of Mysterious Fortune event. That gives you 700 extra tendies this month, which is great because there’s plenty to buy. (And even if you’re not interested in any of it, you can bank it for next time.)

To get your BlizzCon tendies, you just need to watch two hours of the Warcraft stream. You can watch on YouTube this weekend, or watch on Twitch over the next two weeks. Make sure to link your YouTube and/or Twitch accounts to your Battle.net account to earn drops. We have all the details on this week’s Twitch Drops here.

To get your Winds of Mysterious Fortune tendies, you just have to log on to WoW for five days by September 23, when the Winds of Mysterious Fortune ends. They don’t have to be consecutive days, so this is an extremely easy way to grab some extra tendies. Look for the Winds of Particularly Mysterious Fortune achievement in your achievement panel to check your progress.

Maybe a little, but I still feel like this season is wildly up and down, or perhaps I just haven’t been having any luck. The last patch certainly helped, as I don’t always feel like I’m overwhelmed immediately if I don’t get good early draws, but the season just isn’t doing much for me — and I put a lot of that on Dark Gifts.

Dark Gifts also contribute a bit to the swinginess of games, I think, because they can be very good, or they can be kind of okay, or they can be completely useless. You’re just discovering a minion, but there’s no guarantee a minion will be offered that is even the same tribe as the board you’re building, or that its extra ability will have any synergy with what you’re doing. Then I’ve just wasted three gold on a mystery minion I’m going to immediately sell. Most of the time I just regret having clicked the Dark Gift button instead of picking something from the Tavern, or even just refreshing to fish for a card I want.

Trinkets at least always offer a couple of trinket options tuned to the warband you have, so even if you don’t get the best ones you’ll get something that will have synergy. Dark Gift is a straight-up discovery, and not getting minion synergy in your Dark Gift is kind of frustrating.

But again, maybe I’m just unlucky. I’ve really started to ignore the Dark Gift button, but it’s always there, glowing, tempting me… and disappointing me when I click it.

I don’t know what you’re referring to, but I actually have had immensely terrible luck with rings in Midnight. In the very first week of Season 1, I got a best in slot champion ring from Mythic+ and thought the season was off to a good start.

That was the last ring I got until my raid group’s very last kill of Rotmire, when I got the ring that procs off nature damage (I do not do any nature damage). I was wearing fully upgraded heroic gear with this one champion ring. (My other ring was crafted, but the crafted ring is unique-equipped so you can’t just craft two.)

Season 2 isn’t looking better right now. I’ve upgraded my crafted ring and it’s currently paired with a veteran ring. I won’t suffer forever, because there is a second craftable ring this season, but it’s an embellishment and I’ll need to move embellishments around to use it. But perhaps there’s hope yet.

It’s going to be all about our new trip back in time to attend Lor’themar and Thalyssra’s wedding, and all of the characters we’ll be seeing and mini games we’ll be playing and the shenanigans the Bronze Dragonflight has us getting into because once you involve them there are going to be shenanigans, no way around it.

Did you think I’d forgotten about that? I HAD NOT FORGOTTEN ABOUT THAT.

That’s all for today. Thanks for joining today’s Queue as our timer to BlizzCon ticks down. Take care of yourselves and I’ll see you in the comments section!