Matthew Rossi

Will they announce a new Diablo III expansion at gamescom, at PAX, or even at BlizzCon? Are they working on one? What will it be? Will it have a new class and if so, what should it be? (My argument on this week's podcast was that it should be some variation on the Diablo II druid.) But the more I think about a Diablo III expansion, the more I wonder if what we really, ultimately want, is Diablo IV or perhaps even something else entirely set in the Diablo universe.

What can I tell you? I like Diablo III’s barbarian class.

This is the Queue, Blizzard Watch’s place for questions and discussion of all the various colors on the Blizzard rainbow of games. Let us do that.

I’m really sad that they killed Alpha Prime (Ralaar Fangfire) off in the Curse of the Worgen comic, because I think he’d make a great Alliance-centric end of tier raid boss. One of the things we got in original World of Warcraft that we haven’t seen as much in expansions was that the raids often had nothing at all to do with each other – each was a menace to Azeroth that needed to be stopped, but they weren’t necessarily related at all (although Molten Core did lead into Blackwing Lair).

So I’d love to see Alpha Prime come back and start up the Wolf Cult again. Maybe we could get playable Night Elf Worgen – that would be a pretty sweet customization option for worgen players. And with some worgen bosses, we could get cool new worgen forms, like enormous Epicyon–inspired forms that ran around on all fours and crunched bones with one huge bite and an updated level 100+ Son of Arugal.

Okay, let’s look at some questions.

I wrote a post about the WoW Token, and the comments had some interesting ideas. One of them was that we could expand what the token does - you could extend the token or make a new token for things like character transfers, race changes, faction transfers and so on. Allowing people to use their in-game gold more flexibly and allowing people to select the kind of services they spent their real life money to trade in, especially after the initial burst of token activity is over and most people that are going to do it have bought game time.

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.