The Queue

Welcome back to The Queue, our daily Q&A feature! Have a question for the Blizzard Watch staff? Leave it in the comments and we may choose it for tomorrow’s edition!

For today’s Queue, I am entirely sourcing all of the questions from yesterday’s Queue. No Twitter, no emails, no nothing. Let’s see what happens. Oh, and that header image is from The Death and Return of Superman and it’s totally a Blizzard game. No, really, it is. And it was actually a pretty good game, too.

Welcome to The Queue, the Q&A column for all things Blizzard related. If you have a question for the Queue, leave a comment and you may see it answered tomorrow!

Have I mentioned how much I like Khadgar’s writing setup? I mean it’s in the middle of a swampy mushroom and sentient-fungi-riddled nightmare, but the desk itself is awfully nice.

This week’s WoW leveling stream ended on a slightly perturbing note for me — I’d played through Stonetalon Mountains plenty of times on Horde characters, and always enjoyed the zone for its big climactic conclusion and subsequent bout of orc-tossing. But I’d never seen it on Alliance side. And Alliance side is awful. I felt horrible after finishing it, and what you didn’t hear on the stream was another full five minutes or so of exclamations about it. You can catch the leveling stream on Youtube now, if you’re interested. Anyway, on to your questions!

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.

Welcome to The Queue, the Q&A column for all things Blizzard related. If you have a question for the Queue, leave a comment and you may see it answered tomorrow!

I don’t know exactly know what my elekk plushie did, but he’s currently paying the savage consequences.

Welcome to The Queue, the Q&A column for all things Blizzard related. If you have a question for the Queue, leave a comment and you may see it answered tomorrow!

This poor chicken in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. This poor, sad, bewildered little chicken got to play his guitar as the world burned behind him. He’s seen some things. And he’s never leaving that little table again. Ever.

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.

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.