The Blue Dragonflight questline in DF was so boring to me. It was a slog to finish and I only felt relief when it was over. Don’t get me wrong it was well done but my gold standard for this type of quest will be be Tirion Fording’s quests in Classic. I love that quest chain to this day and hate I could not reunite him with his son. That left me feeling bitter.
That boils down to preference. I really liked the Blue Dragonflight questline because after years of seeing it in a sorry state you meet new and old friends and reunite them all, and then give redemption and a happy ending to two former raid bosses that suffered a lot in their lives, and in the end also say goodbye to a favorite character from Legion. There was so much care and references there, and it was so emotional, I can’t not put it among the best lore-heavy questlines.
But the Blue DF quest has a lot of talking and little action, it’s not meant to be a thrilling story, just an emotional one, so it can feel slow and uneventful for some, especially if one has little experience with the characters involved.
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You kinda have been.
No one agrees with how Jaina handled the situation, not even Jaina herself in hindsight. But the reality is that unless someone chose to fight, they were taken to the Violet Hold. Still a war crime and what would be fairly described as ethnic cleansing, but civilians weren’t hunted down or anything like that. In a circumstance like that, if you are a combatant you have chosen to join the war effectively - at least in terms of how it would appear like at the moment in time, even if historically it definitely could be seen in other ways.
Point is that Jaina took extreme measures, but only against those who chose to fight back and kept fighting back.
Don’t take it as a personal attack, just see it as a cool bit of lore to go back and learn more about again. Jaina did engage in ethnic cleansing but she didn’t attack civilians - only combatants.
The long and short of it is largely because most of these events don’t play the storyline role that you describe them as having.
- Garithos using Dalaran as a prison is in part of the reason why the Kirin Tor distanced themselves and became independent. So mentioning this would mostly just bring up the question of “Should the Kirin Tor officially join the Alliance again?” Which they clearly don’t want to do, because it is a faction of people studying or in the market of magic.
- Because the Purge has been addressed twice already. On the Isle of Thunder and when Jaina left the council back during Legion. The Purge has more to do with Jaina than with the Kirin Tor, and the way to address tragedy is probably not to drag up another tragedy that has been largely resolved for years at that point.
At the end of the day, this would be a thing for Aethas to bring up if he chose to. Not so much the rest of the Kirin Tor. - This is just a mischaracterization of what the Kirin Tor does. They didn’t “teleport into a warzone” with the city. They travel via teleportation and it is for all intents and purposes a floating fortress city. Describing it merely as a city or just as a fortress misses the point completely.
They teleported to the Broken Isles, not on purpose to a frontline. Same thing happened in Northrend where they teleported the city to a location to set up.
Most of the stuff above is on some level not really relevant in my opinion, because one can always opt for “but they could’ve done X” and one can do that until cows start to fly. What is interesting is what they did focus on and I don’t think you quite understood what the point was to bring up Kel’Thuzad or the mana bombs were.
If the Kirin Tor is the home of mages to study and explore magic, and every experiment is prevented because of ethics - you also at that point can’t bring it up either. Kel’Thuzad was always going to turn into the guy who wanted to become immortal, and would go to any lengths to do so. He went too far, but he did bring up a valid implicit point of what happens when you cannot even theorize about a subject matter either. Because at that point you’d be treated the same regardless.
Again I need to stress that Kel’Thuzad went too far, so it is important to have rules of what’s allowed or not. But the point is that one has to be able to question what the purpose of the Kirin Tor was or is. If it is a school aimed to studying magic to understand it, then Kel’Thuzad’s perspective is valid. But if it isn’t and it is meant to be this powerful force and organisation policing magic then Kel’Thuzad overstepped the bounderies long before he even did anything. As it stands, he overstepped them when he did act on them.
Which brings us onto the mana bomb, namely is it the Kirin Tor’s position to police magic and implicitly allow the use or have as a purpose the means and tools to create countermeasures and thus justify keeping dangerous artifacts and weapons at hand? If it is a school, why the hell would they have any of these things beyond as tools of studying and if so … why study the creation of it? There are valid reasons for it, but to be able to make it and thus keep plans to such things? Not necessarily so.
By and large, the questline is good and it addresses one question that has been an ongoing thing ever since Dalaran started teleporting all over the place:
The hell is Dalaran’s actual purpose in-universe? Is it going to be the ever-teleporting-city-and-staging-ground-for-exploration-and-conflict management, or is it going to be an organisation related to diplomacy, magic, and study?
As it stands, we don’t know what they want to do with the Kirin Tor at this point. There’s still Kirin Tor outposts of relevance around Azeroth, Outlands, and Draenor (not sure if this one is still available in-universe or just in-game); but the point of the Kirin Tor has largely been lost. So now they are figuring out who or what the Kirin Tor is supposed to be moving forward, as they have lost their main seat and teleportation-purpose right now.
From the angle, the storyline was quite good. Closed enough doors to be elegant, but left enough doors open (and partially sneak-peaked inside of) to be a live storytelling point.
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I have played since BC so I am familiar with the characters and the lore. It just was not touching to me. When we had to kill their son, I felt touched. When we find the little lore snippets about their love, touched. This quest it did not hit the right notes for me. It just tried a little too hard to feel meaningful and poignant. I felt more emotion finally getting Dog as a pet this xpac.
It does boil down to preference.
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The Kirin Tor was created to policy magic. High elves were practicing magic within their wards and barriers until they taugh humans, and unpoliced magic was causing all kinds of trouble including acting as a beacon attracting demons to Azeroth. That’s why the Kirin Tor was formed, to create parameters for safe magic. And that’s not a bad purpose, considering a single mage opening a portal the wrong way can cause widespread destruction.
The Kirin Tor wasn’t just a school, it was a regulatory institution and a government system. One can choose to operate under it to have its protections and access to its resources, or one can choose to operate outside of it and have to deal with the consequences of their own actions.
Kel’thuzad’s point is absurd because the guy weas clearly throwing away any ethics to achieve self-serving results. He’s no better than a Mengele, and he tried to both use the system and backstab the system for his own benefit. When someone is raging because the Kirin Tor would forbid him from kidnapping people for experimentation, any criticism he has has long lost any value.
They do teleport to warzones. They teleported to Northrend to fight Malygos and the Lich King. They teleported to the Broken Isles to fight the Legion. And when they teleported to Khaz Algar they expected it to be “on fire” as per Magni’s visions.
The point of this criticism is that they were arrogant and throwing everything they had, including civilians, libraries, dangerous artifacts and students into the lines of fire. Sure, they expected it to be safe, but Khaz Algar proved they were too overconfident and blindsided to the point they lost everything.
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Just a point they teleported to fight Malygos because he was trying to remove magic from the lesser races. The Kirin Tor had a few dogs in that fight so it was for self interest.
I mean, all the times they teleported the city was to fight worldwide threats. The problem was not joining or leading the fight, it was placing a bet on everything they had on each of those fights. When their defenses finally faultered, they lost Dalaran and everything in it, which is why we are mourning in the first place.
It would be ok if Dalaran was just a mobile fortress, but it was not. It had civilians, merchants, children, libraries, artifact vaults. Dalaran’s tendency to move to hot spots was incredibly reckless. Its destruction was a matter of time.
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Each one of those fight were world ending threats so Dalaran really did not have a choice. If we failed to stop Malygos and the Lich King what would have happened to Dalaran? If we failed to stop the Legion what would have happen to Dalaran? What choice did they have? At this point they had been infiltered for years and the threat came to them. They did not go to it this time. Do you really think Dalaran would just be left to float around as the world burns?
The choice to decentralize Dalaran and focus on getting back to basics is a good one. They can take the hard lessons they have learned and apply them for better results while reducing the chance of being wiped out completely.
How dare you criticize company. Consoom!
Kel’thuzad didn’t really bring up an interesting point. If anything some magic shouldn’t really be publicly supported and thats fine(Necromancy). I don’t mean from a gameplay perspective though.
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Again, choosing to fight is one thing. Putting their whole heritage in danger is reckless. It would eventually cause its destruction, and it did.
That was a lot of effort to say it wasn’t murder when people under attack were gunned down by a Mary Sue demigod. That was murder. She’s a murderess. In a just world she’d be your new Garrosh, instead of the Horde getting thrown under the bus a second time with Sylvanas. Instead she’s just another time bomb getting a free pass because Thrall has an endless parade of other cheeks to turn.
Pretty sure she’s in Silvermoon.
That Jaina is a character whose story has taken several different turns and people, such as yourself, like to boil down characters to a single line of text, meme, or something else that’s snappy but categorically wrong and is only said to parrot popular memes.
Just grow up and don’t comment on lore or characterization when you have no interest in either.
This is like the 4th time Dalaran has gotten destroyed and has to be rebuilt. Used to be on cross island before it was ransacked by the horde twice in Warcraft 2 , then Arthas went and destroyed it again. Two of these times were for the same reason , steal magical artifacts (eye of Dalaran and book of medivh).lol think they should have learned these lessons already
I think canonically the Horde didn’t destroy Dalaran back then. Yes, it did that in the WC2 orc campaigns, but not everything in WC2 is canon due to the campaigns telling opposing outcomes.
I’m not even sure if the first attack on Dalaran happen, as the Tides of Darkness novel and Chronicle books have nothing on it. Besides, in WC2 it was against Dalaran that the Horde unleashed dragons for the first time, while in canon it actually happened in the invasion of Quel’thalas. The second attack (to steal the book of Medivh) did happen in canon for sure, but it was more like a small raid to recover the relic rather than a city-wide invasion.
So, canonically Dalaran was destroyed by Archimonde in Warcraft 3, and now in TWW, but in WC3 the city was evacuated before the Scourge siege, and since it was not yet flying it still retained some buildings, its foundations and its underground catacombs.
In TWW the city exploded mid air above the ocean after a surprise attack, so the damage is presumably far greater.
WOAH. I forgot all about the Blue Dragonflight Questline; You know what that… that was a gem! DF sucked but that Questline was amazing!
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Aw, did I dare to speak up against your dreadlord waifu? Tell you what, you work on finding new ways to try and tell other people to shut up, I’ll do absolutely nothing and still have a better grasp on lore than some puling little void elf who can’t accept facts. Nobody said Jaina wasn’t a character with a long history full of turns, and even I never claimed that the murdering Mary Sue wasn’t an enjoyable read, but she would have been better used as a villain two expansions ago as opposed to pretending she’s innocent.
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Think my biggest issue was that it didn’t really put focus on any of the characters. Instead it put a focus on ‘Wow, the Kirin Tor are really, really bad at their job’.
If the entirely of Azeroth is threatened due to Dalaran being destroyed, which it was twice before this third time, maybe there shouldn’t be a Dalaran or a Kirin Tor. Almost a fourth if you count the Legion’s attack during, well, Legion.
I didn’t really end up caring who ends up leading them after Khadgar goes or steps down, because if their solution to storing world-threatening objects into a vault that isn’t secure should their flying city be destroyed is to wait for the Champion™ to not be busy so they can clean up the mess, they shouldn’t be claiming to be the protectors of magic and whatnot.
Maybe Malygos had a point trying to shut magic away from mortals: They don’t know how to handle it. Likely never will.
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I’m guessing we will see these other events brought up in the future. If not, then it would be a missed opportunity for the narrative.
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