Matthew Rossi

Let's assume you have a ton of gold. Let's say you stroll by the auction house and you see that the WoW Token has dropped to around 20,000 gold (in the US it often is below this, in the EU not as of yet) and you decide hey, I've got a ton of gold, I'll buy a year's worth of tokens and so you do. You dump 240,000 gold at the AH, redeem a bunch of tokens and bam, you're paid up for a year. You just saved fifteen dollars a month (again, using US numbers, I know it's different elsewhere in the world) for a whole year, and you're feeling pretty good about it. And there's no reason you shouldn't - that's why the token exists, after all. What I find interesting is to consider all the side ramifications of this deal.

I'm on record, when we saw the introduction of pet battles, as saying 'Well, this isn't content I care about, but it's good for people who like it' because pet battles are utterly optional. The various rewards you get for pet battles only affect the pet battle minigame itself - stones and other rewards that affect the pets and how they level. There's never a reason to play pet battles if you don't enjoy the gameplay - you're never forced to do it, nor do you even feel forced to. I can say this having utterly ignored pet battles since their introduction.

Now, this is still fairly early in the patch cycle, so it's hard to make assumptions based on these notes. Big changes could pop up at any time. But as things stand right now, apparently Blizzard thinks warriors are pretty well off going into patch 6.2. And the thing is, I'd probably have to agree with them. Warriors work, for the most part.

Plate armor as we think of it really only existed for 300 or so years, from the early 1400’s to the end of the 1600’s. There were earlier experiments in armor like the lorica segmentata and some ancient Greek cuirass that were sculpted to look like idealized male chests, but for the most part the idea of head to toe metal armor was too impractical, too hot in many places (the fertile crescent area where Sumeria and Assyria lay, for example, or ancient Egypt) or too metal scarce (a full set of bronze armor like that would have been fairly expensive) to really produce. It wasn’t until very late in the Medieval period that suits of chain mail began to be superseded by suits where mail backing was worn with some plate over it, and just the cost of that was fairly onerous – you only see full plate armor rising when the medieval system of feudalism had produced rich enough landowners to bear the cost of so extravagant a set of armor. This is why some of the best preserved examples of plate armor we have today were the suits worn by kings and emperors, such as the header image, which was a suit belonging to King Henry VIII of England.

I realize that WoW is a fantasy game, and not a ‘real historically accurate simulation’ game, but I still find it interesting to compare the real thing to our fantasy version of it.

Anyway, questions and answers.

Take heart, loyal ladies and gentlemen – for once again we arrive at The Queue, where your questions may be answered.

The header image isn’t Epicyon, but rather Borophagus, another species of prehistoric North American canid. The picture was a reconstruction by Charles R. Knight, who was one of the first and best paleoartists. Considering how he worked in an era when we still had some pretty huge misconceptions about prehistoric animals like dinosaurs, Knight always gave his paintings a sense of grace and life. Just look at that Borophagus he painted, at the winsome face he gave it. I’d love to see that in game.

 

There, there’s your Beyonce joke about the legendary ring quest. Don’t say I never gave you anything.

I’m going straight into the questions this time. I kind of went nuts with the prehistoric mammals yesterday. Going to do a couple of Diablo III questions up front.

For today's Know Your Lore, we're putting on our tinfoil hat and speculating about the nephalem of Diablo 3.

So I’m permanently taking over the Tuesday Queue for Adam, and I’m also temporarily taking over Monday and Wednesday for Alex this week. What does that mean? It means I’m writing four Queue’s this week, and that means I’m going to talk about stuff that interests me in the opening of these here Queue’s. For instance, the many, many times predatory mammals developed a catlike body and saber teeth. We have the Machairodontinae of course, what would be consider the true sabre-toothed cats, with species such as Smilodon and Homotherium, but there are also animals that aren’t cats at all that developed this body plan, such as the Barbourofelid lineage, which you’d be forgiven for thinking were cats. (They’re close relatives, but not true cats.) The slightly more distantly related Nimravids also developed sabre teeth and a catlike form, such as Hoplophoneus.

But not all of the sabre-toothed mammals were part of this closely related Nimravid to Feline family grouping. There were sabre toothed creodonts, such as Machaeroides,  and marsupials such as Thylacosmilus. And of course I’ve discussed Gorgonopsids such as Inostrancevia before – Therapisds like the Gorgonopsids predate the dinosaurs, and are incredibly ancient cousins to modern mammals. Wikipedia has a decent write up of all the various sabre tooth lineages in the mammals and mammal ancestors.

I was going to go on, but we’ll move into questions now. Tomorrow I may talk about Epicyon.

One of the most interesting tidbits of the Patch 6.2 PTR notes was the one about Mythic dungeons. To replicate what it said, "Draenor Dungeons now have a new difficulty level designed to challenge even the most hardened adventurers with a befitting increase in reward. Mythic difficulty is geared towards players that enjoy tackling difficult content in smaller groups and is designed to provide an alternate progression path."

One of the constant discussions I've seen in my time covering World of Warcraft is that the game has a host of older content that is still fun and interesting and visually well designed, and all of that legacy content is sadly irrelevant as soon as the next expansion comes along. Well, one of the features of patch 6.2 that aims to change that is Timewalking. And Timewalking seems set to make us actually want to run older content again.