How many years in-game since World of Warcraft 1?

It is bizarre if only because the ‘default’ timeline would be game time proceeding at pace with real world time. That it doesn’t means Blizzard has made a conscious choice to condense the game timeline… but for what purpose? The young characters act well above their age and the ‘old’ characters are all immortal or have some magical aspect that could conceivably keep them from dying.

Doesn’t Cata last for 2 years? I think it is the only one that does in universe that is.

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Not even teenage. He was hatched in Cata, so that would make him preteen.

Warcraft 1 is our starting point, Warcraft 2 takes place 6 years after the first one, Warcraft 3 takes place 20 years after Warcraft 2, and Vanilla WoW takes place 4 years after Warcraft 3, with each expansion after that being like a year.

I always considered the ‘drake’ stage of a dragon as the ‘teenage’ stage.

If you count undead… Calia and Bolvar

The timeline/years gone by has felt pretty ridiculous for a while. I feels like we’ve been stuck around 32-34 since MOP. It’s hard to accept the 1 expansion = 1 year cycle. It seems unbelievable when we were dealing with stuff like the Legion invasion. On top of it, it makes those enemies look like total pushovers.

I remember back in the day reading something about the war in Northrend lasting 5 years. To me that sounds realistic when you’re trying to picture the type of conflict it was. Somewhere between 3-5 years. Anything less than that just feels pretty “meh”

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It’s especially weird when one considers that the events of the WoW and Ashbringer comics essentially created several points of overlap between the end of Vanilla, the events of TBC, and the start of WotLK. Varian basically got home from killing Onyxia right when the Scourge showed up to attack and kick off the war in Northrend. It created a sense that TBC basically happened in tandem with the tail end of Vanilla WoW, and WotLK began when the factions’ standing armies were still mobilized and in the process of returning from Outland.

Suggesting that the Alliance and Horde armies might have gone straight from Ahn’Qiraj to invading Outland, and the events of Upper Blackrock Spire, Onyxia’s Lair, Kel’thuzad’s Scourge invasion and possibly Blackrock Depths/Molten Core were all handled by Varian, the Argent Dawn and a smattering of heroes who stayed behind while the bulk of the armies and heroes were off fighting the battles of TBC, only for Arthas to instigate the war against the Scourge just in time for both factions’ armies to be coming back to Azeroth.

Though in fairness, while that’s a rather ridiculously tight timeline, it does create the potential for Arthas finally awakening when he did to have been perhaps in part instigated by him sensing Kil’jaeden almost successfully invading Azeroth during the Sunwell raid, since the Scourge was present on Quel’danas and attacking the Legion there.

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Oh my goodness, yes. I haven’t read all the WoW comics, but the Death Knight manga drives me to distraction with some of the narration comments on how much time has passed between scenes. I’m sorry, no, I don’t believe that the time gap between Koltira’s death and the death knights arriving in Northrend to an already-substantially-developed Icecrown Citadel was “several days,” unless “several” means several hundred. The Ashbringer comic is at least more vague about how much time passes between scenes, so I assume that there’s a ton of time between scenes that isn’t accounted for since the Mograine boys visibly age several years over the course of the comic’s story.

The beginning of Wrath overlapping with the end of Burning Crusade would actually line up with In the Shadows of the Sun, since Kael’thas seems to have only been very recently killed in that story, and Lor’themar’s reasoning to Sylvanas for not being able to send troops to Northrend is that most of the Sin’dorei forces are still exhausted and recovering from their injuries and losses after fighting in the civil war with Kael’thas.

Yes and yes, just checked the timeline, you’re correct.

I believe the Magni comic, where he woke up, also states it has been 4 years since Magni was turned to diamond; and that comic took place just before/at the start of legion.

So that could help with figuring stuff out maybe

I am bothered by that too, and so I have decided to assume that Azeroth just has longer years than Earth does. It is the only explanation I can come up with that is somewhat satisfying. I mean, it is not explicitly stated that Azeroth’s rotational period is the same as Earths right?

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So Magni’s turned to diamond at the start of Cataclysm (Year 28). Two years pass until we hit Pandaria (Year 30). We spend a year in Pandaria before going to Draenor (Year 31). Then a year after that the Burning Legion invades (Year 32).

So yeah, four years. That’s consistent with the theorized timeline. The UVG one stopped at Draenor, so that’s good (at least for the sake of knowing) to know that Legion IS in fact Year 32.

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