The Queue: Videogame Worlds

I’m going on a vacation trip soon and I hope I get isekai’d into some videogame world. Some of those locations you see in games look so realistic that one might think they could actually exist in real life!

This is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where sometimes we wonder what it would be like to visit Azeroth, or Hyrule, or Planet Zebes, and then we decide to play some Assassin’s Creed. (I wish Florence was real.)

I gave Shadow Blade C’Thun Priest a good try, since I opened the Signature Blade of the Black Empire and that deck is just fun to play. But it’s not strong enough. I’ve had very little success with it.

C’Thun Zee Shaman has been much better. Not nearly as fun, no, but much stronger. C’Thun Demon Hunter seems strong as well, and I’m seeing it everywhere, so I might try it next.

I want to try some sort of Rogue, but I’m still missing a lot of cards, and I’m not gonna craft them yet — gotta wait for the meta to settle some more. I also gave Zoo Warlock a try, but it sucked. Other board-based decks (like the aforementioned Shaman and Demon Hunter, that were everywhere) just seemed much more efficient at the same strategy.

As for the bans:

• I don’t think Bat Mask is returning the way it used to be, at all. I have a feeling that’s just a design that is constantly asking for trouble, and if I had to bet, Blizzard will redesign the card.
• Reincarnate was being used for similar “lol, I play tons of Old Gods on the same turn” shenanigans as Bat Mask, though I guess that one is not as egregious. I feel like Blizzard might try something else instead: perhaps a hard limit on how many times you can activate the same Old Gods effects, or something like that. Like “if you use an Old God power, it gets disabled for you from that same source,” maybe. That would also solve the issue with Divergence, probably.
• Apparently, the main reason the Priest Quest got banned was that, with all the cheap Shadow spells they added, it was completing the quest too quickly. For this one, they might simply increase the requirement to more than 4 Shadow spells (maybe 6 or something?); that might suffice.

Whatever they end up doing, I feel like they will re-enable those cards eventually, either nerfed or redesigned, not keep them banned.

As of the latest beta builds, weapons work the same way, yes, and ranged Hunters will still have pure stat sticks on their melee slots. But the Survival tree is getting a few “legitimate” melee options. For now, at least, you probably won’t be able to fully specialize your Hunter into melee, but who knows what the future holds!

Honolulu, I guess! Should be fun, and have nice weather that time of the year.

I’m not an endurance gamer. Never been one. I very rarely play anything for longer than two hours in a row; three seems to be my absolute limit. I start getting tired, losing focus, etc. This is certainly part of why I take a long time to finish most games. And why my /played numbers in WoW are probably not that high compared to most people here, if we’re being honest.

That said, there are exceptions sometimes. A game might get me totally engrossed, like FFR has just done to you. But for me, at least, this usually happens near the end, as I’m reaching the climax of a story or what-have-you, or if I’m trying to tackle some good challenge that’s demanding me to improve my skills and repeat it until I can beat it.

This has been The Queue. Have a great weekend, friends! See you in three weeks. (Vacation, woo!)