Never really bothered to play it but hearing about this Sabellian fella yeah sounds like people only enjoy it because nostalgia.
Like Sabellian is not only a Black Dragon, he’s a Black Dragon that is supposed to be effected by the old god corruption and helped Deathwing and like after he fools everyone for his own benefit pretending to be Baron Sablemane for some reason the player just believes they’re good now and doesn’t finish them off
Honestly the only problem I have with Dragonflight so far is him supposedly returning and the other dragon’s especially Wrathion not straight up finishing him off themselves
Stop suggesting a time reset. That’s literally the worst possible thing that could happen, worse than even Danuser lore. The one of the biggest reason we hate Zovaal is that he undid lore. Erasing even more doesn’t fix the problem and just adds more questions.
You want to fix the Shadowlands? Just close up the Veil permanently. Only the Kyrian and the Nathrezim can cross the veil as was the previous status quo. New Deathknights are created when a Kyrian delivers a Primus-forged Runeblade to a mortal upon their death rather than ferrying them to the Shadowlands, sort of mirroring the creation of Death Knights via Valkyr. Deathknights are now agents of a dark and mysterious once-again-inaccessible realm, and they’re no longer tied to any one Lich King so they’re a bit more evergreen from a lore perspective. Deathknights act to keep the scales of life and death in balance while the Dreadlords seek to pervert it, giving them an evergreen lore-purpose as well, as there will always be more Dreadlords to hunt down.
And then we just… move on. It’s that simple. Nobody can go back to the Shadowlands unless they’re a corpse, death is a largely one-way trip again, we’ve moved the story of the Deathknights forward, incorporated bits of Shadowlands lore into Deathknights… and then we can just move forward. We don’t need to think about Zovaal. We don’t need to think about the First Ones. Denathrius can be a villain who is plotting and scheming his resurrection on the mortal plane (as the Brokers in the Shadowlands have put a bounty on his head, as we’ve seen in Season 4 with the hunt for his Dreadlords), giving us that good Castlevania Dracula “once again given flesh by mortals who wish to pay him tribute” type vibe. And then that’s it. We got some character development for Anduin, we got rid of Sylvanas by putting her in the “place where dead people are” without “technically” killing her so the Sylvanas simps are happy she’s still alive, yada yada. And they can even write spin-off novels of Sylvanas in the afterlife without us having to worry about that lore rippling back into Azeroth as it would be completely contained.
Yup.“It was a dream” or a time-reset are both totally lazy and also really, really, REALLY bad.
We joke about consequences meaning nothing in Warcraft, imagine how little they mean if you can literally just pull the plug on an entire expansion or multiple expansions. At any point a new writer could just delete things? Maybe a new writer comes along and he prefers Afrasabi’s style of writing so he deletes Danuser’s DF and subsequent expansions because he didn’t like them.
Gross. Big gross. People think they’re superior to Danuser and then suggest lore with even worse ripples than anything Danuser has written.
Personally I think a better solution would be to just retcon the SL retcon, namely Zovaal. Have him be a puppet of Denathrius, who makes far more sense to be the one pulling the strings. This also gives them a chance to flesh out the Shadowlands more than what they were allowed to with so much cut from the expansion.
It wouldn’t even have to be a major retcon either. Zovaal presumably came across some set of evidence that a cosmic war was coming… all we need is for Denathrius to have been the one who had that evidence fall into Zovaal’s lap. Denatharius floating the idea of using his Dreadlords when Zovaal asked for help to enact his plan is also not much of a lore stretch.
My impression, or at least my copium/hopium, is that Denathrius will have a larger part to play going forward, and I think that such a “retcon” as you call it would make the Shadowlands “work” better in the grand scheme of things. Not even a major change, it would just be us learning more information.
Because Danuser is a hack who’s put his personal waifu fanfiction about Sylvanas into the central narrative for the last two expansions, and then was apparently salty about the player backlash for how terrible they were.
Christie Golden also has been fairly terrible lately. The Sylvanas novel was full of fluff nonsense, and had ZERO actual flipping backstory or lore pertaining to SL or the Jailer. Could have had insight into Zorvaal’s fall as Arbiter, the schemes and drama behind the Covenants, more history about the Primus and his capture, etc.
Instead, we had Sylvanas/Nathanos tropes, and her comparing Anduin to her dead brother as an excuse for genocide, and leading up to them both banished to the Maw.
No surprise they are essentially glossing over SL for future players when leveling. The entire expansion was a complete mess.
I like the ‘BfA and Shadowlands were all a N’zothian dreamscape, or rather nightmarescape’ because it still happens, it is not erased, it just happened in N’zothian created dimension so:
the deaths (ie Saurfang) would still be real and permanent
the allied races would still have become allies within the nightmarescape so that would still stand
what was collected there was real so keeping all the gear, mounts, pets makes sense
restores N’zoth as a significant ‘big bad’
restores the mystery of the afterlife and Elune
restores Sylvanas’s agency,
restores Teldrassil and Undercity
removes the abomination that is Calia
stops the turn of Auduin into another reluctant-leader-like-Thall type
removes the really flat ending of Arthas
saves the Night Warrior thing to used in a stronger, more power-positive way
turning the afterlife into ‘same old, same old’
removes the mess of Zol-something as master puppeteer all this time
And others I can’t remember right now.
The only thing I can think of that would be sad to lose is Garrosh going out like a boss since his spirit would not be in the nightmarescape since we are not actually in the afterlife.
I just want to see how bad the Dragonlands lore ends up being.
People were CONVINCED that Shadowlands could not be worse narrative-wise than BFA, and then that steamer drops and makes BFA look like a Final Fantasy expansion story.
There’s no way they make it worse again, right? At this point, it would have to be intentional.
It won’t be worse but it won’t be good. DF lore is basically nothing. Danuser erasing the Catacylsm hitting a big ol reset on the Aspects while adding a villain which is Diet Mr. Pibb compared to Deathwing’s Coca-Cola.
Oh boy! The lore can be confusing enough as it is for people who don’t follow Bellular lore videos, now we’re talking about Schrodinger’s Expansion where we don’t know what did or didn’t actually happen.
N’Zoth is a chump. He was always the “Pulling the Strings” type Old God but he was never a true powerhouse like Sargy. I mean, let’s be honest here, he lost to the Titans. He was never going to be a Sargeras level threat and I feel propping him up as one is just not a good look.
If we want more Void stuff, we can always have new Old Gods, start pulling in the actual Void Lords, etc.
We’ve seen visions of completely Void-infested planets, why not do one of those guys as a villain instead of creating a giant confusing mess just to bring back N’Zoth? I also feel that having beaten N’Zoth, players are going to feel scammed if he’s back as an expansion-level villain.
One would argue the fact we’re wasting our time on more dragon nonsense instead of pursuing the light vs void narrative Blizzard keeps setting up. I’m not super into dragons even as a fantasy element. I have a guildie who quit WoW initially because he felt MoP going “kung fu panda” was nonsense and clearly aimed at kids. Plenty of people don’t like dealing with cosmic and different realities stuff.
I care far more that their narrative keeps to their own established rules and makes logical sense within the context of the world/universe they built. For me, the thread really starts to unravel in Legion namely with the forced Horde vs Alliance antagonism that led to BfA and the entire stupid war narrative. From the very foundation, the Alliance would have logically known the Horde didn’t abandon them on the Broken Shore. Both from pratical means like spies gathering info to magical means like Jaina’s mind/memory scrying powers, there is PLENTY of ways to know the Horde got overran and forced to retreat.
Ergo the whole Stormheim narrative wouldn’t have happened the way it did. Sylvanas could still be the BBEG and SHOULD have gotten away with her plan to enslave Eyir (sp) and replenish her army of Valks…and she ABSOLUTELY should have died in Sanctum with her final realizations that she was every bit the puppet to the jailer as she was when enslaved to the LK.
Even over SL, I’d much prefer to wipe BfA from the lore.
I see DF as nothing but another stall tactic for Light vs Void and I HOPE Blizzard is doing that to really shake things up and use that expansion as the great narrative reset. Let the void “win” and consume us and we go to an alternate void reality where we’re no longer god slayers and such…that the Horde vs Alliance isn’t even a thing. We’re refugees on our own world banded together to simply survive. Horde vs Alliance full on integration and an actual world where everywhere is an actual threat.
I’m tired of resets. We got a reset with WoD bringing back the Legion and all of the Legion baddies we already beat, we’re getting yet another reset with DF with all of the Catacylsm lore being done and getting Deathwing Jr., we really don’t need more resets.
We can’t keep our canonical power and then justify lesser threats as credible threats. We’re literal god slayers and just now have finished saving the universe and the whole life and death cycle. Heck at this point I could probably take Superman, Goku, and One Punch Man at the same time. What’s next? Well we got a being that can potentially end time itself…that may trump Life and Death. What’s after that? The very threads of reality itself?
I don’t see DF as undoing Cataclysm but rather the next chapter in that story. What I questions is how it’ll end up being a narrative worthy of heroes of our caliber and it being a threat that’ll actually challenge us.
But it would be better and solve a lot of problems and missteps.
Everything that happened, did happen, just in an alternate dimension.
And it isn’t as if WoW hasn’t dabbled in alternate realities before.
It’s a better look than Zol-something was.
This isn’t about wanting more void stuff, it is about cleaning up two expansions of missteps.
He would not ‘be back’.
His death could be a fake out like Kael’thas Sunstrider’s death. Or it was actually a shadow puppet of him to test our powers or fool us so we don’t catch on.
Also I don’t think the players could feel any more scammed than they do now due to the missteps.
I am not saying it is a perfect solution, I am saying I (as in me! me! me!) like it because it solves the majority of the greatest missteps of BfA and Shadowlands while still having a way to keep the impact of the decisions made within that dimension, the allied races, collectables, the few good story beats, ect.
There ya go. Murozond is hinted as being the actual villain.
The problem of course is that Razageth is such a small-scale threat to start the expansion. People say the first patch villain is always small-scale, but in Legion we had Xavius threatening to corrupt the entire world via the Nightmare, in Shadowlands we had Denatharius bleeding the Shadowlands dry which by itself threatening to unravel the cosmic balance… these guys were smaller scale than the big threat but a lot still was on the line.
I know. I expect we’ll be dealing with Murazond “for real” this time. I doubt Blizzard wants to say this precisely for the eye rolls it is sure to generate. If there is anything more contested in the nerd community than alternate realities, it is time travel nonsense/shenegians but really they got little else going for them at this point.
Like what, are we going to finish with DF and the next expansion be the rise of the Defias whose been secretly rebuilding…again…and have somehow formed a super advanced full on mastermind mafia who somehow manages to upend the Horde and Alliance and prove themselves to be a threat? No…maybe this can be the rise of the gnolls or kobolds…or gnolls AND kobolds! Wooo…so spooky and scary.
Well, the bar is set pretty low, you don’t need to be a master of a craft to criticize someone who engages in it, Danuser has a history, and the problem is that I’ve read fan fiction that’s better than this.
Shadowlands is objectively worse than BfA because it made it clear they had zero intention of deviating from such lessons as, “Seeking retribution in the face of genocide makes you almost as bad as the people you fight!” and “Seeking retribution from those who have abused you makes you the abuser!”
That and that whole thing in BfA where Danuser wrote a side plot for Nathanos that had fans convinced Nathanos was a self-insert for Danuser.
They’re attempting to retcon Cataclysm by having the dragonflights attempt to reclaim the Titan imbued powers they had sacrificed to put Deathwing down. The problem with modern WoW is the team completely misunderstand what made Old WoW’s narrative so clunky.
