Hol’ up.
If I kill and skill a Green Dragon, do I or do I not get Green Dragon Scales?
I’ve got a lot of Vanilla Leatherworking Recipes I don’t actually have the appearance for that I’m totally willing to utter break an expansion’s worth of content if it means I don’t have to keep running Blackwing’s Lair until the end of time for a paltry handful of scales from a single boss.
I think the only time in the history of ever that a one off character who made a blink of an appearance ever left me broken hearted was Karsi, from GoT, S5/E8 (Hardhome). She showed up. She was a BAMF. Things went south. She died.
I would find it incredibly difficult to name any other character in a game, tv show, movie, book or anything else.
I think that’s the main reason I despised SL so much. All of sudden I’m supposed to care about any of these fools who I don’t know and I don’t like? nah.
…so Irvine, Calif?
Ayyyy!
As soon as my internet is stable enough to log into WoW, I’ll give this a shot with my Death Knight and see if it is mechanically possible for you.
I feel like what they come up with as a main plot and final objective for an entire two-year expansion (assuming this is the model they continue to use) must be such a fine line to walk.
For instance, if looked at, say, Wrath, which was such a success, and tried to just recreate it, beat for beat (big baddie must be stopped, takes us a long time to push all the way to his front door, must train to be ready to fight, and finally rade his palace), we’d get bored and say they’re being repetitive.
When we go another direction, such as BFA where there is no ultimate big baddie, just an evolving story, bringing us to new areas and fighting different foes (Aszhara, N’zoth), we feel like its too out of the blue and too rushed.
When the big baddie comes from nowehere (Jailer) we feel uninvested and uninterested. When a popular lore character devolves into the new baddie (Sylavanas) we feel they did her wrong.
A lot of this is probably in the execution, and you’ll hear no argument from me about how they have fallen short a lot over the last few years. I’m just saying I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes. They will never please everyone, that’s just impossible.
Very few I have seen, including on these forums, have come up with actual expansion concepts I would say sounded genius. Otherwise, I think most of us (myself very much included) probably couldn’t do much better at, once again, planning the story beats of an expansion that aims to keep players invested for 2 years.
Nazgrim was the only one who felt natural going against
I feel like if they’d just stop mishandling the characters we know or ask for, it would be a huge improvement overall.
Instead of using them as a minor boss somewhere, use them in a meaningful way. Known, named characters being brought back just to pad a raid is bad use of existing lore. Ner’zhul in Shoadowmoon Burial Grounds. Kael’thas in Castle Nathria. Is that how we wanted to see those characters?
A lot of us feel like they misused other characters as well. Vol’jin, Aszhara, Sylvanas and Garrosh all come to mind. Their raid placement (when applicable) made sense, but their storylines were forced to fit a plot that could have been better written.
And then we had Shadowlands. Expectations were high that we’d see a lot of characters who’d passed on. Nope. Nothing there. No Varian, no Tirion, etc. They had Baine sit on a floor being useless. Who knows what kind of mess they’re going to make Anduin when they bring him back.
As far as actual expansion concepts, I’m betting if you put our forum writers here in a room, we’d come up with overarching stories for the next 5 expacs and would have good use of characters and stories. Heck, we could do that solely on Gentarn’s posts alone.