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Matthew Rossi

Matthew Rossi @MatthewWRossi — Matthew Rossi is a synapsid, perhaps descended from Cynognathus. He was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and grew up there before leaving to see the world and be mistaken for a sasquatch and/or minor singing celebrity in various locales. He currently lives and writes in Edmonton alongside his amazing and beautiful wife and their cats. He’s written three collections of speculative fiction, Things That Never Were, Bottled Demon and At Last, Atlantis. He loves playing warriors in World of Warcraft, barbarians in Diablo III, and he’s beginning to notice a pattern here.


Know Your Lore: The Future of the Draenei

One of the things I've loved this expansion is playing a draenei in it. Getting to see what Draenor looked like before the orcs committed genocide on the draenei has been awesome, and the draenei story in Shadowmoon Valley and Talador (including Auchindoun) was one of my favorite parts of any expansion. In fact, some of my disappointment with the game's max level content has been a lack of continuation of that very story. We got to see Yrel become an Exarch, and that I was happy about, but aside from that I've really felt like we've missed out. I wanted a raid where I helped the Sha'tar retake Shattrath, for example. I wanted to get to see what's going on up at Farahlon. I'm hopeful we'll still get to see this stuff, because for me all the quality story beats in Warlords of Draenor have been the draenei

The Queue: Super Strength

Hi, and welcome to The Queue, Blizzard Watch’s daily column answering your questions.

Every so often I wonder just how strong the various races of the Warcraft setting actually are. I mean, relative to each other. Draenei and orcs are probably around the same (Draenei are a bit bigger and beefier, so they might be a touch stronger, with the orcs making up for it with frenzied rage), but are tauren the strongest? I mean, they’re big. What about worgen, or ogres, or… it’s kind of hard to compare strength when you have a three foot tall race that can use swords twice their own size, one in each hand (seriously, watch a gnome fury warrior sometime) vs. a nine foot tall race. But I do think that, proportionately, gnomes might well be the strongest race on Azeroth.

Either that or I’m just saying it to drive the gnome haters in the audience into a frenzy. Anyway! Let’s talk some Blizzard games!


Know Your Lore: The Burning Hells

From this whirling nightmare, this bloated ruin of the first evil's corpse crawled the demons. The Burning Hells could in a real sense be said to be the blackened corpse of Tathemet itself, and at the center of the Hells lies the Black Abyss, from which rose the Great Evils. Essentially birthed from the seven heads of Tathemet, there were the three Primes -- Mephisto, Baal and Diablo -- and the four Lessers.

Breakfast Topic: Sometimes I like to be alone

World of Warcraft is by definition a game that demands a certain level of socialization to get certain content - if you want to run dungeons or raid, you're going to need to be able to get along with groups of people. Even LFR or random battlegrounds, you queue alone, but you play with people. So for me, this expansion, I've done a lot more alt leveling than I ever did before, because there are times that I just want to be alone

Breakfast Topic: The community still surprises me

I've met people via World of Warcraft that I consider my friends, even years after we played together. People who I've shared with and had them share with me, because that's the secret of WoW - it's the people. It's always been, and will always be, the people you meet and play with that make the game worth playing - all the content in the world won't make you happy without people to play through it with.

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