I think The Jailer Would have Been a Better Threat If We didnt Know About Him Yet

What do you think? So The story could have largely remained the same. However, we are trying to discover who is behind what is happening. We zone into the Maw and see this massive army. We see generals and commanders, but no big bad yet. All the scenes with Sylvanas and the Jailer just dont have the Jailer. Instead she talks about “Our Master”.

Oribos and the covenants, seem sure it couldnt be one of their own and must be some other force. Through the covenant campaigns we follow breadcrumbs to discover who the threat is, only to be lead astray. It could be the Drust, The Primus, The Foresworn. All the while, the Jailers forces gain in strength. The attacks increase. Anduin is corrupted. The assassination happens. Still we havent learned who is truly behind everything.

Patch 9.1 is our big Sylvanas showdown. The pre-patch video shows a vast army of the jailer’s forces. Legions of Mawsworn are shown flying these giant chains out into the ether. They dissappear, pulling the chains into the distance. Then you see the Tarragrue and other giants like him, just not as big, begin pulling the chains back. You see Sylvanas standing on a ridge shouting to “PULL!”. Then as they stall while pulling. Sylvanas looks down and says “We are not yet strong enough for this. Master we need your power.” Then Glowing chains shoot down from Torghast. They wrap around Sylvanas’s Arms and shoulders. She becomes all glowy and empowered. Then Chains shoot from her hands and attach to all the other chains attached to whatever is in the distance. She does her scream, and pulls. Big cinematic moment as Sylvans, empowered by the chains, drags a new landmass through the clouds with the aid of these chains of power around her.

The story still largely remains the same, but we still dont know who is doing this. But we are learning why. That whoever is behind this, aims to shatter the barrier and merge the realms of the living and the realms of the dead.

That leaves the Torghast Raid and end boss Sylvanas. The second to last boss, is Anduin. We fight and free him of his armor. We almost kill him. Then we fight her and all of her new powers. As she starts to falter she calls out for her master’s help. Cut to cinematic. Chains fly in from the sides of the room. They bind Sylvanas’s arms and legs. Then one of those shadow rifts opens. The cinematic shows first a foot, then arms, chest with a hole, then head. The Jailer is revealed. He raises his hand and immediately binds the whole raid in chains. He strolls over to Sylvanas. Says “You have done well. You have but one last purpose to fufil.” He touches the empty hollow in his chest. Then says " It has been milenea since my soul was split. One half destined to be imprisoned in this place. The other to sit in Oribos and cast judgement of every soul to pass. It can rot there for eternity now. I have found a better half. And one needs to be whole to rule over the realm of the living." Fear on Sylvanas’s Face as the Jailer’s chains glow. Sylvanas begins to scream in pain. The jailer tears her soul away and it flows into the hole in his chest, where it materializes into a new glowing orb/heart. Sylvanas’s body hangs there limp and grey. No longer a banchee. Just her former self. A lifeless husk.

The Jailer then turns to us. “Maw Walker. You have proven worthy become my herald to the realm of the living. Where we shall take my army, and conquer it.” Then a bright white light engulfs us. Tyrannde in full raging Night Warrior shatters our chains. She sees Sylvanas’s body hanging there. She then screams to the Jailer “You will not rob me of my revenge! As long as her soul resides within you, I will not rest until it is destroyed!” She begins to charge the Jailer, When a portal opens, Jaina, Thrall Bolvar exit. Thrall and Bolvar attempt to restrain Tyrannde. Then Anduin comes to. Does his light bubble. That stalls Tyrannde enough for Jaina to portal us and them to Oribos.

9.2 The Jailer wages war on all covenants and Oribos. The covenants merge in defense. The Jailer has pulled all the zones together with his chains around a new zone which will be his bridge into the realm of the living. (All Zones are now linked and you can fly from one to the other directly) Our raid is a final winged raid, where 3 bossesare in an area of each covenant zone. With the 13th encounter being the jailer in Oribos. Even after defeating the encounter we still lose.

So then for 9.3 we now know the extent of his plans and have failed to stop him. So in 9.2 The Jailer’s forces have Conquered Thunder Bluff, Stormwind, and several surrounding zones. So now we must use the Jailers connection to bring our Covenants and their forces into Azeroth to defeat the Jailer’s forces there. We must marshal all of Azeroth to help defeat the Jailer. Maybe we find the Primus and through him and the Runecarver we create a vessel similar to Xal’atath, that we must use to cut out the Sylvanas soul and bind the Jailer into it.

10.0 We must now destroy the vessel holding the Jailer. The opening patch of 10.0 Wrathion appears and claims to have destroyed Xal’atath in the Dragon Isles and we must go with him there to destroy the Jailer. And there is the segway into the next expac.

Just rambling, but it seems a little more engaging than the Jailer just putzing around in cut scenes.

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I kind of got the sense that someone else is behind him, but we’ll see. Honestly he doesn’t really seem all that powerful to me. The Lich King and Deathwing, those guys seemed awesome. This guy is just a big bald dude with a hole in his chest

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Bfa taught blizzard that if you don’t constantly slap OMG THIS IS BADGUY RIGHT HERE. HE IS BADGUY. THE MAIN BADGUY GUYS. HE IS THE BADGUY. People will think you’ve totally pulled the villain out of thin air.

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But they did pull the Jailer out of thin air pretty much.

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I think the best outcome for the Jailer should be him posting it the GD forum about how lame SL turned out to be and he is unsubbing forever but hanging around on the GD forum until his sub runs out.

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but he also paid 400 yrs in advance back during insert expansion he loved most so ya know, he’ll be here for awhile.

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I think he’d be more of a threat if he didn’t have such fantastic nipples. You could put an eye with those things…

Maybe… MAYBE, that will be some sort of final attack!

BLINDING NIPPPLE - Look away or be blinded and hit for 90% of your health, but gain a stacking debuff that reduces damage done by 10% since you reallly did want to look… because they are amazing.

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Then GD forum would truly be the place of eternal torment with his whining about how this game or that game is killing WoW and why can’t casuals get mythic+ gear from flappy bird etc…

We don’t need more mystery, we need less. The Jailer right now is bland and unintimidating because we have no real sense what he’s got going on and why we should fear him. He’s just some bald grey dude. I mean Blizzard literally had Thrall say we’ve defeated villains like him before, you can’t do that without subverting our expectations and having him take a meaningful W early on. And no, capturing Anduin and having him kill (and not even actually kill) a new character doesn’t count. Beating the crap out of a has-been like Thrall, Baine, or even Jaina TBH doesn’t count either.

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Technically he was being built up in legion with Sylvies greater plans beyond Helya, and then in BfA

I wouldn’t mind if he was a little shadowier, or put on a shirt, but considering he’s a new character I think it is better to just reveal him now and go full into it. This way we can visibly see and get to know him throughout the expansion, since he is ending his story here too. Like the Lich King and Deathwing and Garrosh it’s kind of nice having a face to focus on as a change of pace. Unlike Legion and BfA’s final boss secrecy.

And it makes sense from the story too regarding the other covenants. He’s the Eternal’s brother, they’re all going to know what’s going on the moment you mention the Maw. Zovaal is not unknown to this realm. It’d make less sense for them to be speculative and unsure about it with that obvious swirling vortex getting bigger by the day.

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That was a great read! My favorite parts were what you had for 9.1 and the stuff that happens before and after the raid. I’ve long suspected a situation like you described between the Jailer and the Arbiter, and the notion that Sylvanas gets over her skiis finally and undone in that very moment is very appropriate.

Its def a new way to consider things thought-experiment wise, but I also wonder what Bolvar would have said about Torghast peeking through the hole in Icecrown if he wasn’t sure what was up with that place.

I’m still wondering wtf hes doing with all those souls in that river that just endlessly winds through the sky and ends up there. We should have been able to divert them into a portal or something by now.

I also like the concept of the raid where the bosses are in the zones and we fly to them and he’s the 13th one. Like an advanced take on how Emerald Nightmare had us going to dif zones, only with more grandeur.

I think WoW could really benefit from a constant big bad. Arthas was nice for that. We knew he was out there and continued to face threats that he led through the scourge, then when we go confront him and he popped up often during the questing in Wrath.

Jailer feels like he came out of nowhere, and now he’s just ignoring us and singularly focusing on Anduin. We went straight to the Shadowlands. We didn’t really feel his threat on our world other than a cool looking sky.

I don’t know. I hope he sticks around for a few expansions. I hope his threat spills out of Shadowlands into Azeroth.

Is there a short version?

The Jailer was a threat we didn’t know about during Legion and BfA - and possibly even earlier. We just didn’t know about it.

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Which is very bad. FFXIV proved this. For spoilers I’ll put it in tags:

Summary

The true boss(es) of shadowbringer expansion were hidden until the end. Near the end of SB, you got these “whispers” then a scion ally fainted and didn’t wake up(but not dead) so we assumed this person was bad. Come SB, we find out he’s actually good and not the bad guy at all. Along the way we meet who we think is the villain due to villainous actions only to find out he was a puppet. Come 2 patches more and 2 more villains reveal themselves and you find out who was pulling the strings all along…it was never made obvious until way later on.

The true end-boss of Shadowbringers was one we never expected due to all the manipulation going on behind the scenes.

Video games need to stop revealing the big bad villains…it kills the plot knowing who your going to kill.

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That sounds less like a genius plot, and more like Chris Carter scrambling to fill in more seasons without moving things forward.

Honestly I find that the opposite is often true, that I most enjoy games where you do in fact know who the main villain is, but the context of that villain changes over the course of the game. Take the original Knights of the Old Republic - that was a game with a great twist, but it didn’t change the plain fact that yeah, the guy on the cover with the red lightsaber, you’re gonna have to beat him up.

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Eh…you see, that idea is generally best saved for an established character IMO. If they left the identity of Zovaal a big question mark, you’d have a thousand posts debating who was pulling the strings on Sylvanas. Could it be Arthas? Kel’Thuzad? Ner’zhul? Someone unexpected that went from nobody to nightmare? Someone totally out of left field (imagine if it was Hogger)?

Then when the reveal happens, you’d get a ton of posts about how Blizzard was just making up lore, people complaining that it was some new guy we never heard of, ect.

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Well I stated it very briefly and generally, once you actually play the shadowbringers storyline you’ll see how genius it is. Its a 300IQ plot with all the small details. I’m also not the best at wording things.

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ADULT RATED CONTENT HERE

/Whip Sound Effect