Apparently someone on Twitter has pointed out that, during the Mal’Ganis/Kintessa fight in the Sepulcher, the Dreadlords reveal they’ve been disguising themselves as dungeon bosses dating all the way back to vanilla.
After a quick scan over the recent topics I couldn’t find a thread on this so figured I’d share.
Here’s the Tweet in question, listing the bosses they reveal as Dreadlords:
Dreadlords Posing as Dungeon Bosses
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As always, leave your thoughts and opinions, but keep it civil.
- Aspiring Loremaster Wickham
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Or you know the dreadlord is just messing with you. Purely from a meta prespective, this is just basically a way for Blizzard to give callback nodes to old bosses.
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I dont get the vibe they were these people, more they are messing with our perception of who is real and who is fake. Getting people to doubt one another and ultimately destroy themselves is the deadliest weapon the Dreadlords have at their disposal. They already play with this in the 9.2 quest line when we have them pretending to be us and giving conflicting orders to the troops.
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That could be. Though based on the plethora of retcons Danuser has implored to give the story of Shadowlands relevancy and the track record for the current writing team, I don’t think you can give them that much credit. It seems to be yet another unnecessary attempt to tie Zovaal to the previously established characters/events.
P.S. It’s good to see another Story Forum veteran, glad to see you’re still around Zerde. 
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I’d argue at least the other attempts, while heavy handed and ill conceived, are actually things that helped Zovaal. Half of the bosses they change into aren’t even tangentially related to Zovaal’s plans.
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I am of two minds on this.
On the one hand, I could believe that Blizzard, looking to add some “cunning trickery” to the dreadlords encounter, decided to have them mess with us by arbitrarily having them transform into a pile of old and largely forgotten dungeon bosses for no valid reason except to say they were those guys. It’s sloppy and undefined enough to absolutely be Blizzard.
But on the other hand? It would absolutely be 100% on-brand lately for Blizzard to randomly pick a list of dungeon bosses, retcon them as always being dreadlords, and say “see how amaze these dreadlords are??? Can’t you wait for them to come back in the future to be major baddies???”
So I see both sides of the argument.
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I’m going with a hard “just raid flavor” stance because there’s zero evidence they were secretly these bosses all along.
It’s basically just Blizzard joking that “everyone is secretly a dreadlord” like we’ve been memeing about for literal years.
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I’m of the opinion that the dreadlords disguised themselves as these bosses at various points to access places for the benefit of Zovaal’s plan but weren’t disguising themselves as the bosses when they were defeated.
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I think the Dreadlords are just messing with us by turning into those bosses, especially when it came to Talixae Flamewreath since you know Talixae is an Eredar. After all the Dreadlords appearing as other people during the Legion’s war is their MO and used for their benefit. However a Nathrezim posing as a fellow Legion demon would raise questions and attention from the leadership.
The last thing the dreadlords would want is for Kil’jaeden, Archimonde, and Sargeras to pause and question them.
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It’d bring attention if they were caught.
If the boss was just trying to mess with us wouldn’t it make more sense to turn into big characters, stuff like Jaina and Thrall? I don’t see a reason for them to turn into random forgettable guys like the last boss of Stone Core unless the intent is implying they were those people (which is incredibly stupid).
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Considering that one of the people they turn into was only fought by horde players. That being the male Kul Tiran that is part of the horde version of the Jadefire Masters. I doubt it was the first reason.
Since Alliance players who never did BoD on horde would have no context about him.
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Apparently one of the lead encounter developers contests this as being canonical.
if taken seriously I would see this as yet another extremely poorly thought-out attempt to make Zovaal look like the Ultra Mega Super Big Bad Guy Behind Everything that only succeeds in ruining everything instead.
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It’s Dreadlords all the way down.
You get a Dreadlord, your get and Dreadlord, everyone gets a Dreadlord!
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I still think Blizz originally intended to make Daddy D and his dreadlords the ultimate bad guys of the expansion with Zooval being a side character who simply manipulated Sylvanas into joining in on the conspiracy.
I do wonder what made them pivot last minute. 
Denona, I want you to ask yourself this:
Does lacking context for half the player base actually matter to Blizzard anymore? In a game world where context has gone out the window for cool Jailer stories, would Blizzard actually stop themselves just because some players would ask who this one guy is?
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I think not only that, but blizz is just generally terrible at making us CARE about why we’re defeating a raid boss. And no, that hasn’t stopped them in the past and sure won’t stop them in the future.
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This is my take too. Like it makes sense for a Dreadlord to temporarily pose as many people to achieve their ends, we’ve just only ever seen the big ones who permanently take an identity or make one up.
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They forgot Jaina in End Time and later in Battle for Dazar’alor.
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