I know this isn’t news anymore but why was this never addressed beyond a vague “oh they left it unguarded” handwave? Why was it left unguarded? What does that mean for the other Pillars? What does that mean for the massive portal the Pillars were keeping closed? Why do none of the characters even bat an eye when they see it, nor ask any of these questions? And what happened to it afterward?
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You don’t get it.
It’s a water thing, and she’s a water boss. So she has it. The water boss has the water thing. It’s hers. Because water.
This really couldn’t be simpler.
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She got her people in the first time, she probably just sent them back in after that idiot Khadgar left them unattended.
I don’t think the legion (or what’s left of it) is trying to open any portals.
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You ever played WC3? Imagine it like a Naga campaign. They crawled out of the ocean, built up a base and slaughtered the weaksauce defence left behind and took it. Doesn’t seem like it needs that much explanation. We were really stupid.
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That patch gave rise to a lot of questions. Like the Tidestone just…being there; Nazjatar’s location now being unknown; why didn’t the Old Gods just poof themselves away before being imprisoned since that’s apparently something they can do, etc. I doubt any of them will ever be answered.
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Considering our history… i think we just kinda… left it… unguarded… again…
No way that’ll come back to bite us.
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Nazjatar was kind of BfA’s Broken Shore patch, so similarly a lot of things started falling apart in the story and ceased bothering to make any sense as they summarily ignored much of what had come before and started trying to tell a different story with new protagonists and entirely different goals halfway through an expansion without properly transitioning or concluding what had come before.
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“That’s a good story for another time.”
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Ok. This is really super simple. Like, it is so obvious that it obviously is obvious.
Ok. So how did Azshara get the Tidestone? Ok. So here’s the answer.
So, ok. The Tidestone. See, it all started when
Making sure that the Tomb of Sargeras stays sealed is presumably the Kirin Tor’s job at this point, yes? They don’t have the best record of keeping important artifacts secure, despite it being one of their primary missions. In addition to that, Azshara sent her forces after the Tidestone twice in Legion, so I think it’s not too surprising that she tried again once there were fewer meddlesome heroes in the area to interfere.
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“It’s not the story we wanted to tell.”
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Khadgar gave it to her because he saw the future and she was a loyal alliance leader for the Night Elves.
Azshara sent her most elite into the Tomb of Sargeras to steal it while we were all busy on Argus would be my guess. Maybe she event went with them to do it herself.
And seeing as how Azshara is a better mage than the entire Kirin Tor put together, their wards were probably child’s play for her.
(Commentary): I mean… why did the Priest PC just drop Xal’atath somewhere? This expansion had no respect for the prior expansion’s lore.
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Can you speak more about this? What was lore-breaking about the Broken Shore?
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FINE.
Look, I am BAD AT BACKPACK MANAGEMENT. I admit it already. I only have so many slots, and the freaking Tidestone is just a souvenir quest item from old content.
So I ditched it.
I’m sorry.
Can we please move on now?
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This is something I do not understand about Blizzard’s creative writing process. Supposedly it is collaborative, iterative, and done well in advance. So why are there so many logic holes?
They need a designated devil’s advocate for every story decision whose only job is to criticize and poke holes in the logic of the story point so they can at least know to throw in some quick, hand-wavy throwaway dialogue. Maybe not every little thing needs this, but how your major villain attains the big mcguffin should be properly explained and logic-ed out. Especially since this is a setting where something as easy as “Magic and Wizards!” explains things.
Just strange logic holes everywhere
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Look alright the third movie wasn’t as good as Empire.
Not lore-breaking, but rather narrative-breaking.
We spent the whole expansion building up our respective Class Halls and Artifact weapons, only for the latter to become an afterthought and the former to be homogenized into some random “Legionfall” faction with its own tabards and units while our Class Halls became interchangeable window dressing for the quest hub. The only “sendoff” they got were mount quests, which felt empty. These were supposed to be armies amassed to fight the Burning Legion, not random neutral reps whose only purpose was to hand out cosmetic rewards.
Things went smoothly through 7.0-7.1 with the buildup of Class Halls, local rep factions and the Suramar arc concluding with the Nighthold. Then we went into 7.3 and everything got shrank down to facilitate redundant time sinks and cosmetic rewards instead of pushing things forward in the world. The Tomb of Sargeras was a continuation, but the Broken Shore itself was just a bunch of repetetive mechanics with minimal story to them. Mage Tower grinding, Sentinax grinding; no story arc with an identifiable antagonist upon whom to focus; a half-hearted attempt is made with Mephistroth being in the Cathedral dungeon, but it’s impersonal and detached from the zone itself.
The logical, satisfying followthrough would have been for Gul’dan to survive the Nighthold and be finished off in the Tomb of Sargeras. A rounded narrative conclusion to taking down Gul’dan in the place where he delivered us our greatest defeat, instead of killing him off as the only relevant warlock in a raid full of elves where he didn’t really thematically fit in. Save his “demon form” for a final confrontation in the Tomb of Sargeras, rather than erasing him just in time to make that place just an impersonal, largely storiless zone to grind.
Broken Shore also started the phasing out of established Legion allies being central to the story to make room for the Army of the Light to replace them in Argus. The lore characters we’d been with throughout the expansion took backseats so Velen, Maiev, Khadgar and Illidan could take over the story.
Which naturally was followed by even Maiev and Khadgar becoming spectators so everything could be about Illidan, Velen and Turalyon on Argus, while everything we’d built up back on the Broken Isles was completely chopped off so a bunch of draenei we’d never met before could become the new protagonists.
The biggest issue was that the Broken Shore was plagued with symptoms of it being a grinding slowdown in preparation for the hard turn (and resultant narrative whiplash) that Argus would be causing by in effect turning into a different expansion stapled onto the end of the one already in progress.
A circumstance exacerbated by the fact that based on the pacing, story beats and overall arc the Tomb of Sargeras should have been the conclusion of the story. Yet instead it was just a speed bump along the way to the players not only leaving the expansion behind to start another one, but the players for all intents and purposes turning the battle to drive out the Burning Legion into accidentally falling headfirst into destroying the Burning Legion outright. The gargantuan, universe-altering outcome of Argus didn’t feel earned by the buildup preceding it, and thanks to the clumsy and abrupt transition of the Broken Shore and ToS in-between, the preceding buildups lacked proper payoffs.
A problem further worsened when all of it got shrugged off so we could go into BfA and play faction Yankees vs. Red Sox again while pretending none of Legion really mattered.
To be fair, part of the problem is that the Broken Shore should have been a massive battlefield where the Class Halls engaged the demons to drive them back to the gates of the Tomb. And unfortunately, as I’ve said in the past, despite the second “W”, WoW is a fundamentally poor platform for representing actual war. As a result, there wasn’t so much as an in-game cinematic of the Class Halls making their joint offensive. It was just one more static “battlefield” zone where no battle is really happening and the Class Halls just sort of petered out from being armies into being nothing more than occasional World Questgivers.
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Interesting points. Are you saying Legion the expansion should have ended at the Tomb?
I had not considered the Army of Legionfall to be a more varied body; now that I think about it, that would have definitely been a more epic and fitting depiction than what we got in-game.