I guess I just wanted more shaman lore from shadowlands?

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I feel like shadowlands didn’t give me a whole lot of shaman lore to wrap my head around. Bwamsandi and The winter queen was I suppose all we’re getting-- but I feel like the realm of death should have touched much more upon shamanism in the respective cultures that have it. It certainly would have given thrall and baine more relevance for being here.

You’d think there would be a special after life tied to those who dedicated their lives to the elements rather than nature sprits. I know there almost certainly is one, since the shadowlands has infinite afterlives, but it’s strange to me that we just didn’t get to see any of it.

What I would have liked to see is more focus on shamanism for orcs, tauren, vulpera, trolls, Draenai, kultirans and goblins.

More emphasis on how shamanism affects the lives and societies of these cultures is I feel was a missed opportunity for worldbuilding.

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Shadowlands…

BEST chance for MASSIVE amounts of Death Knight lore…

Blizzard: “What?”

They literally missed the single BEST chance to expand on the why behind DK’s…

Not a lore DROP.

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I feel like the death knight stuff is kind of there, but you have to read between the lines to see it.

I think some interactions with the primus would have been ideal, as he was the og rune carver.

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Reading between the lines is rather hard through a 3D graphics intensive video game.

Quest text isn’t exactly seen as prose by me, let alone most players.

Blizzard on the other hand seems to think it’s poetry worthy of Shakespeare himself.

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I mean what I’m saying is that the primus connection should have and could have been more explicit. Like, there is stuff there in front of your face but the explicit dialogue of the characters just never addresses it, which is kind of a shame.

But it’s a little better than shamans who I feel got absolutely nothing to go off of, other than specific loas might have their own pockets in shadowlands.

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Blizzard considers all of the content pushed live thus far to be worthy of WoW.

Please let that sink in.

These people actually think that they’re helping the game, especially as Shadowlands was both the most bought and most unsubbed expansion to date.

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Because Shaman are tied to the elemental planes and spirit more than the plane of death.

Here, these explain better. And the second one is very important:

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Yet more proof Danuser does not know the lore that came before.

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Why, what’d he do this time?

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No, I understand that the elemental plane is not the plane of death, and that primal force is not the same as death magic.

But shamans do have connections to death and the plane of death as well-- like through the father of sleep being the loa of death.

Loas, for the most part, go to ardenweald. Some mortals do too (mostly tauren who have both ties to druidism and shamanism), but not all.

Ardenweald is the closest to a shaman afterlife that we got-- but there’s definitely a more primal afterlife we could have seen, I feel.

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This is something I’m not familiar with. Who what now?

Loa don’t have much of anything to do with Shaman, though. I’m confused.

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Spirit.

It’s right there in your post.

Basically, Shaman could, if Blizzard bought a license, get five of them together and summon some lore friendly version of Captain Planet.

Shaman literally can work with Spirit. It’s in the prior lore.

Shadowlands should be among a Shaman’s favorite places due to this fact.

The lore that’s been missed by not being worked upon in SL’s…

Let alone the fact that only four afterlives seems oddly… small…?

The Maw is basically an oversized spiritual trash can.

And that Blizzard can’t seem to tell the difference between a spirit and a soul is sad.

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Spirit/Chi is Life force, not Death magic.

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Chi IRL is split into the pair of Yin and Yang.

Yin is Death. Yang is Life.

However, that is not automatically the lore inside WoW itself.

The word Chi is far more nuanced than how the Dev’s used it in Mists.

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So, the sandfury trolls worshipped him as their god, and their souls went to him in the afterlife in the shadowlands.

It is implied but never confirmed that the darkspear also indirectly worshipped him without knowing they did (somebody can correct me on this if it’s wrong), only knowing him as the loa of death.

His servant was bwamsandi, who overthrows him as the loa of death in shadowlands. So now bwamsandi gets all of the souls of sandfury and darkspear and zandalar unless voljin contests this as loa of kings later.

That’s the troll shaman connection to the plane of death in shadowlands. We don’t have anything for orcs or tauren or vulpera or the rest of them as of yet.

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Correct. It’s not the same. Spirit in this game is more akin to the Light side of the Force.

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Mueh’zala? Sure.

Loa are a Troll culture thing, not a Shaman thing.

No, it’s just the Troll connection. It doesn’t have anything to do with Shaman in particular.

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Trolls who aren’t shamans don’t automatically go there though. Some can go to bastion or revendreth or ardenweald.

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Trolls who worship Bwonsamdi do. It’s about the Loa a Troll worships, not what class they are.

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Sort of true. It’s a bit murky. A lot of trolls who still worship rezan (now voljin) go to bwamsandi’s domain, I think, because of rastakhan’s bargain. Some clarity on this would be nice though.

But loa worship is firmly within the realm of shaman culture for trolls.

So, since we know that certain orcs can communicate with orc ancestors, the question is: are they somewhere in the shadowlands, or did they get to go to the spiritual plane instead as an afterlife?

This would be good to know.