I’m going to be judging tomorrow’s Reclamation of Gilneas patch directly against the BEST MUSICAL SCORE WHILE RETAKING A CITY OF ALL TIME.
If the BG theme isn’t half as iconic, we have to give Gilneas City back to the Forsaken. It’s in the contract.
Includes an event where we go back to the Shadowlands, find Godfrey, revive him, show him all the things that the ‘animals’ achieved, and then we shoot him again.
Be prepared to have “Lament of the Highborne”, the iconic song sang by the lady who sacked Gilneas City, play while reclaiming Gilneas.
I kind of hope they make a new track that sounds a little like The Banana Splits theme song to celebrate the new friendship between the Forsaken and their victims.
why must you hurt me like this 
Okay, did the quest. No epic “take that!” music, but…
Enjoyed the surprisingly heartfelt father-daughter talk. Remember to stay awhile and listen to Genn talking at Liam’s grave. Also, Tess/Voss banter is not something I thought I needed but I now feel blessed.
All hail Queen Tess!
Also spoilers: no idea how to hide them behind a little arrow tbh so gonna just do some dots.
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I felt a bit let down by the Scarlet Crusade kinda just being an arbitrary throwaway bad guy faction to facilitate the Forsaken and Gilneans to hold hands and be besties. Like we never learned anything about their motives, their goals, their plans for Gilneas. Just “Oh huh they’re in the city, let’s murder them all”. Very much lacked nuance in that sense. I miss tension between the factions, and I miss the era of the Scarlet Crusade/Onslaught where their motives were very clear and explicit, even as they were villanous. Don’t get me wrong I’m not asking for good-guy Scarlets, I’d just kind of like to know what they are actually up to aside from being a convenient plot device for cross faction cooperation.
Tess becoming Queen was a nice twist though, and it’s kind of cool seeing Greymane as a dignified but tired old statesman who admits he’s struggling to change with the times, and thus steps down with dignity, knowing that it’s time for the next generation to take over. That was actually really nice, and I find myself strangely proud of Genn, and happy that Tess finally got some recognition.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens to her ties with the Uncrowned though. Are we going to see her go fully legit, turning on the organised crime arms of society? Will Gilneas be plagued by corruption and organised crime? I’m interested to see how they’ll balance that (if they do): a Queen who is also a leading figure in what amounts to an organised crime syndicate.
That Gilneas Transmog set might be the single ugliest set I have ever seen in this game. Subjective, of course.
ETA: How can Genn have one the best mog sets in the game and what we get is just…so odd?
Yeah I feel like the Forsaken got misled in character and were probably all thinking we’re reclaiming what we took from Gilneas back from the damn Crusade. But no, we helped the Gilneans?! BOOOOOOO.
And they called Callia the title Queen in the quest text. WTH? I want a refund Blizzard.
Smash cut to Greymane and Lilian Voss playing Mario Kart to Vampire Weekend’s “A-Punk”.
If Greymane and Voss were reimagined as garbage gamers, I would be infinitely more interested in their characters.
The lady turned into a massive light ascendant. What the hell. The Light is up to some BS right now, and that almost certainly is a little bread crumb leading into War Within.
Hey, it is -my- job to call about Light up to shady things!
This said, I am too lazy to actually care about arguing that now as Dragonflight was too chill for me to care about such things. Everyone knows the Void is evil and anything touched by the void is to be contained.
Yeah but we already blew up Fyrakk and all his wretched Shadowflame Primalists before they could rebirth the world in Shadowflame so, we’re good for now.
Some more thoughts after I’ve had two days to chew through the Seeds of Renewal content. Semi-spoilery so going to hide it under summary text. I figure we’ll drop the spoiler tags in the next few days while others catch up.
I was a little let down with how simple the reclaiming of Gilneas was as a questline, but the emotional pay off of the Genn/Tess cinematic still felt good. Seeing so many of the “next generation” NPCs succeed their parents sparks a odd bit of pride in me. Perhaps it’s because we’ve known so many of them for an actual decade or longer and we know that not only has the next generation put in the work, but their parents have longsince deserved retirement.
As for the rest, all of it was a little bittersweet. It’s definitely the end of the expansion and honestly, I’ve really enjoyed the ride. Dragonflight was a much-needed palette cleanser in the ways it respected player time, revamped classes, made exploration fun, and overall reminded me why I fell in love with WoW almost two decades ago. Though the story was a little elementary at times, the gameplay is clearly in an excellent team’s hands and Retail has never been better. I really want to see that continue into The War Within plus with more developed story beats and character nuances.
Man I just wanna blow more stuff up with cool characters.
And maybe flood the Gilneas market with foxes peddling strange magical trinkets.
These threads over in the community council area are obviously worgen-specific and touch on a couple points in our thread:
But it gets to a very fundamental problem that Blizz continuously exhibits - that of having difficulty understanding and / or knowing their player base.
Warcraft as a universe, has been out in the public realm since 1994; nearly 30 years. WoW has been out now since 2004. We are celebrating the 20th anniversary later this year.
There are so many things over the years that could have been such easy wins for this game and yet TPTB who run things, continue to bungle them or fail to understand their audience so spectacularly at times that it’s mind blowing.
This is known for almost half a decade now. Midnight will be likely a Y’rel comes to main-verse VS Void storyline down the line, where we all find out that both sides are needed.
Y-yes. I’m aware.
This track goes hard.