I’d love to go back and see Legion’s Class stories for other classes. The problem is even marching into the year 2025, you have to run that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Mission Table to progress the plot and by the time I get to the ones that run for 10+ hours, I don’t care any more.
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And unfortunately you can’t do it on the companion app anymore which helped a bit.
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Class stories would be nice to have! I’m not against revitalizing the class halls and making class identity more important to WoW, even just for Hero classes like Evoker, Death Knight, and Demon Hunter; i am down to keep the base classes a little more “identity flexible” just because that seems to be how people like them, and that can be a compromise.
I think it’s more the endless AP grind and daily world quests and the constant treadmill of progression that creates a horrendous psychological effect. It was fine in Legion b/c the things I was grinding for were at least COOL. But I honestly… I look back at Legion less fondly because it turned WoW into something I very deeply hated, for a very long time.
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I have never been more offended by something I agree with 100%.
It does make me wonder, if the whole thing about the Chronicles is that they actively deny the existence of the other Pantheons and the First Ones, and lionize the Titans at all costs, then what did Aggramar do to Draenor when he made Grond?
Was Draenor really going to collapse under its own weight, which seems absurd considering how Life wants, well, life to thrive on every possible level, no matter the cost, when the Sporemounds would have utterly consumed all of the Spirit Energy of the planet? Or was he just undermining a rival Pantheon and ensuring that he could create a agent that could reliably content with the Sporemounds and could be argued to have been a ‘native elemental creature’ that arose to contest the dominance of the plant-based Super-Colonies that were the Sporemounds, if the Pantheon of life showed up asking who shot their dawgs?
What if there was a World Soul on Draenor? But we’ve seen the Titans turn into gigantic Constellars, with the implication that that form, ‘Stars’ connected by solid beams of light, is their true forms, while the Eternal Ones are robotic shells containing a World Soul in the orb-like structure that forms their ‘stomach’.
What if that’s why Draenor is doomed to collapse, no matter what is done? Aggramar steals away the World Soul, which is very small and weak compared to examples like Argus and especially Azeroth, and turns it over to the Pantheon, who either convert it into more Constellars, or hand it over to their masters?
We’re told that the Titans are World Souls, but that rings false when we consider how easily they are defeated by any reasonable countering force and their swarms of semi-autonomous forces cannot overwhelm the opponents.
Why are the Titans in our level of reality, and not the Realm of Arcane? Are the Titans themselves synthetic avatars of the real Titans who, like all the Pantheons, are either banished to or confined to these alternate levels of reality? Much like Dimensius was attempting to manifest into Outland during the Burning Crusade Expansion?
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The bigger and more interesting unanswered question here is…why did the Titans go to war with the Old Gods to “order” Azeroth in the first place? From all the lore that’s been established, if a world is discovered with significant Void infestation (and Old Gods are considered signs of that), it’s simply scoured from the cosmos. The Nighthold showcases a glimpse at a world with an Old God protruding out of it.
Azeroth had four. And the Titans couldn’t even kill more than one of them.
What the bloody hell is so special about our World Soul?
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My theory is that Azeroth’s World Soul is the original one, from which all others either split off or were cultivated from, like branches from a tree carefully cared for until they became trees of their own, lesser in scale and scope but still brimming with potential all their own.
Hence why we needed 4-5 Old Gods for it, the Void Lords knew one single Old God would burn out before it could finish the job, but 4-5 all fighting each other and forcing them to adapt and evolve constantly to survive would inevitably result in at least one of the Old Gods becoming capable of possessing and corrupting the World Soul into a capable servant for the Void Lords, something brimming with enough raw potential and pure cosmic power to tear open the veil between the Void and the Mundane World to let them through.
We might also be, considering our information comes from the Chronicles/Titanic Propaganda, that the Void Lords might actually be victims in this whole situation, and are desperately trying to claw their way out of the Void because it is a realm intimately hostile to all forms of life, including Deities. And in that desperation, they don’t, or no longer, care about the collateral damage, just get me outta here.
It’s cool how fighting even an avatar of Sargeras felt like an insurmountably dire encounter and fighting one of the literal creators of the cosmos felt like a really long episode of Inspector Gadget.
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lmao yah
I am a humongous shadowlands hater but there was definitely some things in it that I thought where pretty cool ideas and concepts. The problem is that, they would start to touch on something neat and then it’s immediately pulled away by an inserted boring Azeroth character whining about honor or something.
Basically I’m still salty we got thrown into Maldraxxus and it’s like GLADIATOR BATTLES LETS GOOO and then Draka kidnaps you from the fun party only to whine at you about honor. Imagine the Maldraxxus story line is just GLADIATOR BATTLES and you have to fight your way up the ladder until you get to meet the leaders. That would have been a fun dumb warcraft time.
Anyway, there was a lot of things they could have done better but it’s such a mess of a narrative and a dump on the established setting that it’s honestly entertaining in a way. It was also a strange shared community experience, every patch update that moved the story forward my discords would blow up with chatter and endless number of forum threads from folks breaking down how they messed it up AGAIN haha.
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I found this pretty innocuous. It was annoying something, but it matched the gameplay they were going for.
I didn’t like Revendreth, so I can’t really agree this. I just think all of the zones were very boring / too disconnected from other WoW stuff.
I would’ve liked to have seen different settings, if this were the case. Seeing more lore characters crammed into the covenants would’ve just seen like fan service. As opposed to seeing various characters in more proper afterlives (which is what the lore supports, the four zones were just the purgatory zone)
Who?
I think it had burnout just from it was kind of bland and the same. Kinda the same thing with WoD being boring after a while because it was just different colours of the same orc set pieces. The game is at its most successful when there’s a lot of variety.
I’ll agree with this. With how the Jailer’s identity was teased, I thought it was going to be. And then it was just some guy named Vorzaal (I refuse to look it up, so if that’s wrong that maybe proves a point), and no one cares about Vorzaal.
1000% this. This should’ve been the paladin and shaman xpac, considering how much those classes focus on afterlife and spirits. And both were pretty well ignored. In fact, pretty much the entirety of existing WoW lore on the afterlife was ignored or retconned.
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I can’t really come up with bullet-point suggestions for making Shadowlands enjoyable, because it just isn’t worth it. There was no good core to Shadowlands to salvage. I would have enjoyed it if it was a completely different better game in every respect, I guess?
My biggest regret about the whole thing is how it changed leveling, if I had to name one thing to change. The bad story could be swept under the rug and forgotten, the focus on unfun “systems” was abandoned, but the leveling changes which made leveling characters perfunctory and empty-feeling seems to be permanent.
Maybe I’m weird for caring about this because most people don’t seem to mind the post-Shadowlands ultra fast ultra easy leveling, but up through BfA leveling alts was sort of a fun activity for me and filling up my character roster felt meaningful in some way, and now it just doesn’t. And that wound up being SL’s most lasting legacy, since all the other story and gameplay threads of that expansion have been forgotten.
The level squish was an opportunity to do some work on the leveling system and improve it. Yeah, even pre-Shadowlands leveling had issues with being too easy to feel meaningful, and it needed some attention. But instead of being improved it was just made irrelevant, and that has done more to make me not really wanna play the game in the long run than a bunch of stories about shirtless bald man.
I’m still interested when WoW takes swings at making leveling/open world content fresh and interesting. MoP Remix was cool! The various classic leveling modes like SoD and permadeath are cool! But those are all either temporary or shunted off into classic and there’s no way to just have fun leveling in retail normally.
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I think it would have been better minus the 4 (5, 6, 7?) super-hells we had to play through. The blizzard afterlife stole an old 90’s concept from the World of Darkness RPGs; souls as currency. One of Wraith the Oblivion’s core concepts was the shameful afterlife practice of hammering souls into coins and objects to bolster the Stygian empire.
Blizzard basically said the afterlives of all of the beloved lore characters (as well as our own!) was a destiny of getting mutilated into frankenstien-gladiators, tortured by goths, painted blue and given amnesia or eaten by purple grubs.
Sounds like a pretty s**t afterlife to me.
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I hated this. I didn’t want any of it for any of my characters. Finding out that was what was waiting for them was depressing. Who wants their character’s souls going to feed some kind of afterlife to keep it going or losing their memories?
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I think I speak for all the old playerbase when I say this:
WHERE IS CARINE?!
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He’s probably a memory-wiped, blue guy 
On another note, I was just out on another forum and posting something made me think that Blizzard wasted a huge opportunity in SL.
Imagine if we would have gotten to the point in SL to find out who was pulling all the strings, and we found out it was Diablo. They could have slipped hints about this in places. Torgast looking more like a Diablo-esque crawler, little hints in gear appearances, etc. And then at the end, surprise!
And then for the next expac, we had World of Warcraft: Sanctuary.
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I expected to see him. Then when I got there I was glad I didn’t see him. I hope he is where he should be - in the Emerald Dream with the rest of the ancestors.
But as I have said many times, Blizz doesn’t care about tauren characters, tauren lore, or those of us who like the tauren race and most play tauren characters.
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Who where all the dead afterlife characters we actually saw in SL?
- Draka
- Morgaine
- Vashj
- Kael’thas
- Uther
- Ysera
- Garrosh
And that’s it right?
Draka and Morganie are the worse, blah blah honor blah blah who cares.
Ysera cries when you do the play mocking Teldrassil burning lmao.
Kael we help but then he gets kidnapped and it’s not clear to me the order in which events occur.
Stupid sexy Bluther just murders a buncha blue people and we forgive him because his soul is all jacked up or something and that’s why he’s evil and we learn through that, that’s what happened to Sylvannas but we don’t forgive her because it’s different???
Arthas is a fart in the wind.
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Strictly speaking there’s also Kel’Thuzad (Whom got spoiled for me because I unlocked the Maldraxxus World Quests before advancing that far in the Undying Army narrative so…just great design), Ner’zhul, and the SI:7 Sniper Lady who was apparently killed in the Rogue’s Legion chain of quests and who shows up in Maldraxxus as one of the not-Nerubians, so it’s easy to miss her if you don’t have detailed knowledge of every NPC from Mists of Pandaria.
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Couldn’t agree more. Alts in retail feel like they hit a big ol’ brick wall. They feel like empty husks after 30 or so levels. Maybe I’m just getting too old and set in my ways. Lol!
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I actually find the leveling slough in classic fun but I have a totally different mindset playing it since I don’t intend to do end game stuff.
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I’m leveling in Classic. Started off as a time waster for my vacation time, but I’m mostly enjoying it. I also started getting good gear for other classes, so now I have a pally, a priest and a druid. For some reason, I feel the most excitement over the druid. I didn’t play one in Vanilla, so it feels new.