Phil Xavier

Stay a while and listen! Get into a comfortable position, grab a beverage of your choice to sip, kick up your legs, and hold on to your seat: 2026 is here, and we’re in this together, for a whole year!

This is The Queue, our daily Q&A column where we answer things and throw our old calendar in the bin because a brand-new calendar with different numbers in it has just been placed on our desk.

We’re still in the holiday mood for this week. We’re only shifting gears to “New Year woo!” next week. So I have decided, for no particular reason.

(Well, the reason was all the Christmas-related questions we got, and were still answering.)

Either way, This is The Queue, our daily Q&A slash discussion slash chat column, where you can ask questions (and hopefully get answers), chat with like-minded folks, or just read the words on the screen. You know it, you know it!

Speculating about which new specs the WoW classes could get is the kind of thing that really gets me going, and a lot of the community as well. Earth-based tank Shamans, “Shockadins,” Gladiator Warriors, tanking Warlocks and others are common fantasies for new specs players want to see. Today, we delve into some of those ideas.

This is The Queue, where you tell us all about why you want to play a tanking Priest wielding warglaives, and I point you at Tyrande butchering fools in Darkshore and ask you “why not?”

A brand-new Tavern Brawl arrives in Hearthstone this week: The Naughty List asks you to create the worst deck you can.

A very cool feature that players quickly discovered with Advanced Mode in World of Warcraft player housing is that you have a lot of control over the size and placement of objects, and with some careful positioning, you're able to make furniture (or any sort of "edge" really) that you can sit on.

The latest trend players have adopted with the player housing system in World of Warcraft is to make their houses float up in the air.

Player Housing has only just begun (in fact, it hasn’t even officially started yet) and I already find myself thinking “I wanna play some WoW, but I don’t wanna do anything ‘serious’ right now… guess I’ll just mess with my house for a few minutes.”

This is great. I like this.

Welcome to The Queue, where we talk about an assortment of things, and also our very very very fine houses.

This week's Tavern Brawl on Hearthstone is a Brawliseum (the "normal" one, not the super-expensive Heroic one) with a twist: you'll be using cards from two classes at the same time.

This week's Hearthstone Tavern Brawl celebrates its past World Champions.

We have a pretty good idea of where an important chunk of future WoW lore is heading, because the seeds started being planted a few years ago, and they’re still being planted now with Turalyon, Xe’ra, the Mag’har allied race, the Arathi empire, etc. The Light is being set up as an antagonistic force — one that we may or may not face as a direct threat in a future expansion, but I’d say we almost certainly will.

In one of those seeds, we’ve got an account from the Mag’har orcs that the forces of the Light have grown despotic in Alternate Draenor, and this group called the Lightbound, led by High Exarch Yrel, has had them flee that dying world, since they were being forced into a non-choice of submission or death. This made a lot of people suspect that Yrel — a pretty well-liked character overall — is being setup to return to the story in the future no longer as a hero, but as a villain.

I say: Blizzard, leave Yrel alone.

You’ve done the “good guy gone bad” story beat so many times by now. Arthas. Garrosh. Kael’thas. Sylvanas. Heck, even Neltharion into Deathwing, or Illidan flip-flopping between “good” or “bad” depending on your perspective. We get it, you enjoy showing how even heroes can become corrupted or distorted by ideals, by fanaticism, by losing sight of what truly matters, etc.

You’ve told that story. Many times. We get it. We got the message.

You don’t need to tell it yet again with Yrel.

Let Yrel be a force of reason within the Light, the Paladins, lest we start seeing them all as fanatical zealots not worth trusting. Let her be someone who sees how fanatical some of her peers are becoming, and opposes them from within. Let the stories of the Lightbound be over-exaggerated or misunderstood by the Mag’har — just their unreliable account.

Or, just leave her alone. Let her chill on some beach sipping mojitos with Velen or whatever.

#SaveYrel