shoulder-armor
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The Queue: Picking favorites
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Like Adam, I am most pleased that this is a new week. Things are so boring around the WoWiverse lately. Pilgrims Bounty was fun (really fun, I thought) but it was only around for a little while. I need excitement! Adventure! There is a void that needs to be filled! I guess answering your various questions will fulfill that need for now. Jason asked... "Since the Battle.net change has occurred, is it now possible for me to log on to WoW in Europe (like at an Internet café) with my American account? Or are they still separate like they were before?"
Singing the praises of shoulderpads
freelancer_bob (love that name) over on LJ has a good point: Shoulderpads seem to be the height of fashion in Azeroth. Not only do shoulder pieces call for the highest Arena rating in the game, but they're often the flashiest way to add a little flair to your character. While you can get the plainest of the plain before level 20, after level 70, they quickly and often turn into the wackiest thing your character can wear. Whether it's pure energy, lightning wolves, or even eyes (freakin' eyes!), Blizzard's artists seem to go overboard as much as possible, especially on the high end shoulder pieces.Sometimes it just gets out of hand -- how exactly are Hunters wearing Tier 1 supposed to use their peripheral vision? But just as Bob says, oversized and garish shoulders are a big part of what makes WoW Warcraft. If we walked around with realistic shoulder armor, the game would look that much more boring.So here's to the praises of huge, awesome-looking shoulders. We're looking forward to a lot of stuff in Wrath of the Lich King -- the new class, the dungeons, and the new continent to wander around on. But I'm also looking forward to seeing just how the armor designers will top having blindfolded statues of women on shoulder pieces. It'll be amazing for sure.
Overhauling the engine
The fine folks at Eurogamer noted that, during their interview with the recently ubiquitous Kaplan and Brack, some tantalizing hints were dropped about an update to the WoW graphics engine. It's not coming in Wrath, for better or for worse."That's actually something we talk about every expansion," he said. "I'm positive we'll talk about it next expansion."To a degree the World of Warcraft engine is showing its age. That doesn't really bother me very much... I enjoy the semi-cartoon look of the MMO as it seems evocative of the RTS games, especially WCIII, and stands out against a sea of very flat and sterile attempts to make hyper-realistic graphics in games. For all that I would like a bit more flexibility in my character design, I don't mind that WoW has a low polygon count or whatever. But I am very curious as to what they'd do with an updated graphics engine. I believe it was Jeff Kaplan who said, perhaps in jest, "Our designers assure me we haven't even begun to see how big shoulder armor can get."
Orc shoulders being fixed in patch 2.2
For the many Orc players unhappy about the state of their shoulder armor, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that Drysc has confirmed that the fix for the shoulder armor graphics has made it into the upcoming 2.2 patch! And the bad news? Well, no one knows quite when the 2.2 patch is going to get off the PTRs and on the live realms, so you're going to have to live with those oddly-sized shoulders for a while yet...
