Dumb Thought: Shadowmourne still exists and why does this not freak more people out

Wyrmrest Accord
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Uh, running around touching up some transmogs on my legion of Alts and I noticed something.

Shadowmourne. The axe we forged waaaaaay back in the Wrath of the Lich King, a weapon built to match and counter the dread blade Frostmourne, engraved with the same runes of control and power that were on Arthas’s own Runeblade.

And we just kinda stashed it in the bank after Wrath and went back to using other weapons.

Uhm … wasn’t Quel’sera’sera Quel’delar, the real Prismatic Blade, was also made from saronite, the fossilised blood of an Old God, and then ‘purified’ by sticking it in the Sunwell … which kinda tracks considering the energy of Azeroth, Azerite in an energy form, was able to completely erase N’Zoth and his Black Empire, so a blade forged from dead blood would probably be the same when tossed into the Sunwell? But Quel’delar is also engraved with runes, although if those are Draconic (the blade was supposedly forged and blessed by all five Dragonflights) or if they are the same Words of Domination that adorn all Death Knight Runeblades.

The longer I think about it, the more I am concerned. We’ve got dozens of super-powerful and dangerous weapons just lying around in the banks of Dalaran and the vaults of our Mega-Factions, and we’ve already seen Dalaran, one of the most notoriously heavily guarded locations on the blanket, is protected by jobbers who couldn’t even keep the Naga from stealing the Tidestone.

Which is the Relic we needed to keep the Legion out of Azeroth for good.

Did we ever return the Tidestone to Dalaran? Uh … I have questions?

If the Dread Blade Xal’atath could recover and be restored after supposedly absorbing a ‘lethal’ amount of the energies from Gorribal in Silithus, then there’s no reason that the rest of the Artifact Weapons likewise could not be restored, or be reforged to use the entropic energies contained within them now.

How could the Naga make an illusion of the Sharas’dal, Scepter of Tides? Admittedly, Azshara herself once wielded the weapon, but 10,000 years to faithfully recreate a 1:1 illusion that could fool Lor’themar, Thalyssa and the Player Character?

Maybe its just the manic episode but I’m looking at the precedents and the plot holes and just going “Oh. Oh no.” with how Blizzard could swing our own Legendary Weapons against us, especially given how the Primalist movement has cropped up out of nowhere, from our own peoples, and how many of them may have worked for the same Class-Factions we once led during the Legion Invasion?

Erk.

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Meanwhile, at Blizzard HQ:

“What sword in Silithus? Wait… what the hell is a ‘silithus’, anyway?”

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A part of me wants the job there of remind Blizzard about their own lore.

The rest of me knows it would be the shortest career in history because I’d be bodying the ‘Rule of Kool’ Devs for trying to make a ‘genocide is fun!’ expansion so they can sod off and play C.O.D. again for 2 years.

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I have similar conversations with my guild over random little things like this that don’t add up lore-wise. It sadly boils down to Blizzard worldbuilds for the moment, not for the long-term. If it doesn’t concern ‘current thing’ it disappears - the world many of us adore is largely just smoke and mirrors.

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I don’t know, and it’s probably mostly forgotten about. But this thread made me imagine how cool a heist of some great Dalaran vault of weapons. Just you mentioning them laying around in the banks and such. Similar to how they have prisoners locked up that are too dangerous it would make sense they have the same for weapons. Imagine if some group pulled off some heist and got their hands on some weapons with dangerous mojo.

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“What axe?”

-Blizzard

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Don’t worry, they’re just keeping Shadowmourne in reserve until we inevitably have to revive the Jailer to help us fight the current Evil Big Bad he was 100% totes trying to fight against the whole time and we just misunderstood his motivations and he is his scars and Xe’ra will yell at us for just NOT UNDERSTANDING HOW COOL HE’S ALWAYS BEEN!

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I coughed up blood reading this, but accurate.

Edit:

Actually, :poop: , his core is still just in his shell in Zerith Mortis, all it needs is more anima and we could conceivably see Zovaal revived, or at least re-activated enough to gain access to his memories.

AFAIK, we never removed the robot-like ‘core’ of Zovaal, its just left there to rust next to the very machinery that could re-write reality. Unless the Zerith installation was resealed and we somehow managed to remove all Mawsworn and Dreadlords from the zone, and somehow convinced the weird Brokers that lived there to stop messing with Creator Tech, bad things could happen in the future …

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I mean

Considering the sheer volume of legendary items, weapons, suits of armor, rings, necklaces etcetc we have in our banks, and considering some of those banks are run by Ethereals, having a heist occur and a bunch of nobody bandits and thieves suddenly running around with weapons capable of smacking an Old God back into the timeout corner or drawing upon the power of a Wild God or even the aspects of a Titan could be a hilarious .05 kind of patch.

I keep the Heart of Azeroth in my bags, at all time, because I quite literally don’t trust the WoW banks after the mess that was Battle for Azeroth and the absolute jobbers therein allowing the Naga to make off with a Pillar of Creation, and somehow deciding to not tell anyone was the smart money in this situation.

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if the weapons are still powerful, then the original wielders probably still have them.

Id use shadowmourne if the stats were inline with DF window

most likely blizz is gonna tell us that they were all used in silithus

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We’ve seen a bunch of small Hearthstone cameos in the Dragon Isles, I really hope they borrow from the Hearthstone stories as well. Rise of Shadows is the perfect .5 content, defending Dalaran from a bunch of goons while they thought our backs were turned and they could plunder the banks.

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I forgot about Shadowmourne since I never played a class that could use SO WHO CARES ABT DUMB AXE I SURE DONT

Anyway I’m surprised this didn’t turn up in Legion as a class hall artifact weapon or part of a quest to obtain one yknow? Also I feel like this would have been canonically owned by a Death Knight, either as one from the start or the Paladin/Warrior that used it would eventually become corrupted. Which the Ebon Knights were prepared for and would put down the corrupted owner and storing the cursed Axe away in Arcturus.

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After spending so long to forge Shadowmourne, I think about its implications a lot and wonder how my paladin is doing mentally after I put her through all of that.

I think it’s a lot of screaming. A lot. of screaming.

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Something something, Adventurers are Azerothian Florida Man, something something.

Imagining my characters coming back home during the timeskip and going “… Oh. Oh crapola.” when they realise they’re hanging weapons made of fossilised Old God blood, condensed elemental energy packed so tightly it has assumed a solid state, Daemonic sentient daggers and soul-consuming tomes around their house and they now have children that don’t understand the concept of ‘don’t touch that’ fills me with both glee and anxiety.

Both as a writer going “Yessssssssssssssssssssssss more trauma!” and as the player going “Please, they’ve gone through enough.”

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I, uh.

I never actually found out what Shadowmourne is.

Like an axe, right? Or some kind of dessert.

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Shockingly, it holds up quite well, graphically speaking, with most modern weapon skins.

The more I think about it, the more I want a crazy adventure of players having to go out into the world and recover weapons they have collected and/or associated with their Class.

For example? A Rogue has to set off to get their shizzle back after some two-bit thief with a big hole in their backpack has made off with your collection of swords, daggers and clubs and a random assortment of folks have gotten hold of them in the chaos trying to escape from the bank and leaving your loot scattered across the world when they teleported away.

A kid running around with Anguish and Sorrow killing rats in Stormwind’s sewers for the bounty paid for each vermin slain, and has no idea what kind of evil weapons they’re playing with.

A would-be adventurer who has gotten their hands on Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker, and is hellbent on carving their name into history, but lacks the willpower and strength of character to control the blade, and is causing random air-related chaos as they struggle against the blade’s chaotic energies.

A pair of dueling Old God Cults have divided up the legendary daggers used to slay Deathwing and are attempting to revive their respective ‘Gods’ with one dagger a piece, but the ritual requires both daggers, resulting in a gestalt monstrosity of the essence of C’Thun and Yogg’Saron as the rituals only revive a portion of each Old God and fuse them together, and its up to the player to slay the loathsome hybrid as it rages and tears at itself, and the Cultists who have gone completely insane and begun to mutate into void monstrosities.

Hell, make it all the Legendaries we’ve collected. An aspiring thief has gotten their hands on Fen-Yu, the Fury of Xuen and is using the power of the cloak to become absurdly fast and able to deliver absurdly deadly strikes with their weapons, but the influence of Xuen on the thief is making them bold, relentless and, against their will, heroic, much to their disgust and Xuen’s amusement.

The more legendary weapons you’ve collected, account-wide at least, the more questlines you can pursue. Make it entirely optional and reward transmog, titles, maybe a mount or three and use it to explore the fact that Azeroth’s adventurers are considered absurdly wealthy by the standards of the common people and how we’ve become so inured to the power we wield, we think nothing of discarding or selling items of staggering power that could turn an ordinary person into a shocking power-house … or a powder-keg just waiting to go off in the worst possible way.

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Shadowmourne and Darion forging it always felt like such a missed opportunity to me in SL. Here we have Frostmourne, all powerful mourneblade created by the runecrafter/primus, sent to Azeroth specifically to corrupt someone and eventually open the way for the Jailer to invade or do whatever he was doing in the Sepulcher. Also some kid who got killed at 19 and resurrected made (with our help) a mourneblade equally as powerful. He’s also actively here with us, but just walks in circles around Oribos and gets beat up a little by us near the end. This plot thread is not mentioned even one time.