The Queue: The Black Empire

The Black Empire is coming. Again. There’s an enormous multi-tentacled creature blotting out the sun, and he comes to bring you love. Or death, I dunno.

This is The Queue, our daily Q&A column where the only question that truly matters is: who is the best Old God?

The new Xal’atath Priest, with lots of Shadow spells and Fatigue damage, seems interesting.

Apparently the new Combo Rogue with a bunch of Larvae seems to be really strong. And I’ve been on a Rogue kick lately, thanks to Troublemaker Rogue (and VanVan skins <3), so I might just continue on my path to 500 Rogue wins (despite Rogue historically being one of my most neglected classes).

It’s funny how the second part of your question might be related to your main question: maybe performance is part of the reason Blizzard hasn’t been super liberal about increasing the amount of decor. I don’t know; I’m no server engineer and all I can do is speculate. But the housing feature is something that a subsection of players gets really excited for (and have been doing some truly amazing things with), and decor is everywhere now as part of the game’s reward structures. So it stands to reason that Blizzard is very much going to continue supporting it strongly. Which means that, eventually, they should find ways to work around whatever issues prevent them from just allowing us to truly go crazy with our outside decor — assuming that’s the case.

Though they might also just be holding it to increase it slowly on purpose, before people find ways to break the game or server performance suddenly gets real bad but the cat is already out of the bag. Who knows!

Extremely unlikely. I didn’t get Shadowmourne, I didn’t get Tarecgosa, I didn’t get Val’anyr, etc. The only legendaries of that type I did get where the ring in Mists and the cloak in Draenor (and I’m not even sure if those count) because I could get them while being an LFR hero — and LFR was actually worth running back then.

Skip skip skip skip skip. Skippety skip.

These middle patches haven’t been doing it for me, at all. I don’t find “new invasions! OMG!” to be compelling content. I don’t want to grind rep with a new faction for cosmetic rewards for the umpteenth time (I can’t remember the last time I actually bothered to finish one of these grinds — maybe Nazjatar, back in BfA?). And words like “more Omnium Folio runes to unlock!” actively sap my desire to play the game. Ugh.

On the other hand, I’m very much looking forward to race changing my Paladin into a Night Elf in 12.2. So yeah, if I could just skip ahead to that patch, I would, without a second thought.

Before the game even released, I already loved Gun Nun, I mean Anatolia, who’s not actually a nun. That still stands. And I already really liked Leda too, but I haven’t played her story yet, so I can’t say if that admiration will hold or not.

While playing the prologue, I really liked Chinese Edelgard Hong Hua. Then, as I started playing Cai’s story and she briefly showed up again, things were… decidedly different. (So much for that.)

And then, as I was fighting in the Arena alongside Theodora, the super serious queen started shouting about Cat Priest. And I saw her. Orchel. “Cat Priest.”

She inquired everyone about what the heck they were doing. Then, when people inquired her back, she refused to elaborate and left.

It’s Orchel so far. <3

Just Sombra.

We don’t need anyone else.

I can’t disagree here. Red and gold looks really, really good. And sometimes they throw some black in there too (i.e., Blood Knights), and it looks even better.

But I’m also very partial to the Draenei color scheme. Purple everywhere, I know, but that purple is often combined with white and gold, and it looks fantastic like that. Sophisticated and subtle.

To be honest, I’m not a fan of that. I prefer it when they wait more to announce the DLC than releasing the game already with the DLC on the way, or shortly after. (Sadly, a lot of my favorite companies do release games that come with day 1 or “nearly day 1” DLC these days — it’s Nintendo right now, but Atlus does it a lot too.)

I just think it’s a very clear case of “business > gameplay.” That content gets released as DLC either because the company simply wants to sell more (the most likely explanation), or because some part of the game didn’t get finished in time so it was repurposed as DLC. It’s hard to believe the developers actually thought “the experience on this game we’re making will be better if the player plays the full game and then purchases some sort of addon or update to this game in just two to three weeks.”

Gets severely injured after a climatic battle with a white-nosed clown. Passes on the mantle of Batman to some young upstart. Retires. Finally enjoys eight hours of sleep.

This has been The Queue. Do you have a second to hear the word of our lord and savior N’Zoth?