Matthew Rossi

This week, former Blizzard Senior Vice President of Story & Franchise Development Chris Metzen announced the formation of Warchief Gaming -- previously a gaming club and now a development studio for tabletop games -- and on the same day, Critical Role announced the formation of Darrington Press, which will also be focusing on tabletop game development.

World of Warcraft Shadowlands is currently in beta, and now has a release date of November 23, 2020.

It has been a week, y’all. Let’s just say that in order to use the only working bathroom in my house, I have to wedge an umbrella into the area above the toilet, and it sounds like a heavy rain just breaks out from time to time for no discernible reason. I haven’t slept more than two hours at a stretch since Sunday.

Anyway, here’s the Queue.

The system-wide leveling changes for Shadowlands are live in World of Warcraft as of patch 9.0.1 and it's a major overhaul.

The way leveling in Shadowlands works, you do 1 to 10 in Exile's Reach or some other starting zone, then from 10 to 50 you either do Battle for Azeroth content or one of the other expansions, from Cataclysm's revamp of Azeroth to Outland, or Northrend, or Pandaria, or even alternate Draenor or the Broken Isles.

One of the things I love about playtest content in Dungeons and Dragons is when it gets weird.

I've recently discovered the Party Sync functionality in World of Warcraft while helping my wife get her legendary cloak (she took off most of Battle for Azeroth due to the burning of Teldrassil, since, as a 16-year Night Elf Hunter, it messed up her character too much) and I have to say, this is a feature I'd have loved for WoW to have years ago.

I'm not entirely convinced that Ten Candles is horror, exactly.

World of Warcraft has weapon restrictions and I don't really get why anymore.

Since the Shadowlands pre-patch I’ve been working on my fist weapon transmogs, farming up The Bladefist from Highmaul, Fist of the Deity from Gundrak, and the Abomination’s Knuckles from ICC. I’m annoyed that I didn’t already have the Abom Knucks, cause I used to tank ICC with them back in the day. But apparently I forgot to keep them, which is irritating because I kept literally everything else. Luckily, they dropped for me.

The new customization options mean that I’m basically spending gold to make my characters match their outfits, so I don’t think I’ll have any money in Shadowlands but regardless I do enjoy fisting. I know the horrible connotations of that, and I don’t care, I enjoy my new fist weapon playstyle just that much.

This is the Queue. I’m filling in for Liz. Let’s do this.