Im pretty new to all the story parts of WoW so im lookin up and thinking a lot. In regards to the Lich King…
it seems kiljaedan made nerzhul the lich king out of punishment?? And arthas just got mentally tricked by nerzhul so he may enter his body?
are there any connections between old gods and the lich king? Like, did kiljaedan do that to nerzhul because he knew eventually it could be weaponized against the old gods??
is the only purpose that their must always be a lich king is that the scourge will just uncontrollably take over the world?? Couldnt we just kill all the scourge, are is someone still making more scourge out there?? Or no isolate all the scourge to northrend??
Edit: 4) how did people find out bolvar became the lich king? Werent characters bound to secrecy?
After Strathome, Arthas let rage and vengeance consume him. It’s what lead the light to abandon him (which happened in Stathome) and pushed him further down a dark path. He went to Northrend to get a weapon to stop Mal Ganis and the scourge but it was a trick as Forstmorne was the a cursed sword and it’s what Mal Ganis and the Litch King wanted. Arthas picked up the sword, which captured his soul and he become an an agent of the Litch King (Ner’zhul).
After the attack on Silvermoon and the spell Illidan used to try to kill Nur’zhul, Arthas was told to come to Nothrend so that he could merge with Nur’zhul to become stronger. When they did merge Arthas killed Nur’zhul’s spirit becoming the Litch King all on his own.
No. The Litch King and the scourge were supposed to be weapons of The Burning Legion, until Nur’zhul turned in then for what was done to him.
Yes. The Litch King is holding them back and keeping them dormant in Northrend.
Sure, not sure who long that would take though.
Did they? I haven’t done the full Zandalari rep quest line though and I know that go there. Sylvanas knows though. She was there shortly after the final battle.
I still remember wanting to flip a table when they said the Scourge would be MORE dangerous without organization and leadership.
Yes the mindless ghouls and abominations with a toddler’s cognitive ability will be unstoppable now that they have no one to strategically command them!
Yeah, the only way that works at all is if the Lich King were holding them all back, and this was a known. I mean, I am right with you on this one, but if I had to make the argument?
Maybe the various sentient elements of the scourge, left to their own devices, would be destructive and unpredictable, and have potential access to the resources and numbers of the Scourge, if not able to command the entire thing.
Or having the Scourge uncontrolled would make them vulnerable to whatever outside force would see them as a resource, if they could harness their power.
So having them jailed up by a L.K. precludes that, because nobody has the power to override him. So rather than keeping the Scourge from rampaging about, Bolvar is keeping other people from utilizing them.
Not a perfect argument I know, but honestly, the whole “Must always be a lich king” thing is just a way to keep the scourge on the board for later use.
Honestly the only way it ever fully made sense to me is if what we’re potentially seeing with Sylvanas was the real threat in question. That without a central Lich King reigning them all in, something about the undead in particular may inevitably lead the most powerful and independent ones to eventually dominate the rest toward mass-producing more undead, leading to the living being wiped out as the whole world basically gets overrun by multiple competing Scourges popping up all over the place.
But with the bulk of the Scourge under Bolvar’s thumb, that sort of threat would be limited to the Forsaken (and potentially the Ebon Blade, though rather conveniently Bolvar seemed to be using the events of Legion to get some degree of leverage on them.)
Thing about that though is the Cult of the Damned was active after Arthas’s defeat and still seems to be (I’m presuming thats what the necromancer’s in expeditions are from). Not to mention Blizzard has more than hinted that Kel’Uthzard is still out and about.
So there are still elements of that threat running around.
As for Forsaken, those undead are supposed to be free willed. So theoretically they’d only be willing to go on a world tour if they were convinced to.
I say supposed because Blizz seems to forget the core element of the Forsaken. On one hand you’ve Voss playing therapist to the newly risen to ease their adjustment into a new existence.
And then you’ve newly risen just popping up and eagerly taking up arms against their friends and family almost if not outright immediately with little to no explanation.
Well, that’s just it though. Free will or no, the continued existence of the Forsaken, Cult of the Damned, etc. could well be the very reason Bolvar doesn’t just march the Scourge into an active volcano or something.
As long as those other Scourge-born agencies persist, he needs his own tightly controlled host of undead to forcibly take them under his control and lock them up with the rest of the Damned if they start threatening the entire world.
Ner’zhul tries to flee the Legion’s influence but is caught by KJ.
His soul is put in a suit of armor and sent to Northrend.
As the Lich King, Ner’zhul is charged with creating the Scourge to soften Azeroth for the Legion’s arrival.
Ner’zhul develops his own plans to break from the Legion namely through Arthas.
KJ realizes Ner’zhul’s betrayal and sends Illidan to destroy him.
Arthas defeats Illidan at the base of Icecrown and frees Ner’zhul from his ice prison.
Ner’zhul thinks he will overwhelm Arthas’s mind and have a new host to carry out his will. Instead, Arthas’s will drives Ner’zhul’s away and he becomes the Lich King.
I figured he didn’t because he’s still half Ner’Zhul and even then I don’t know about you but if you gave me the keys to an inexhaustible conquering army of the hungry dead my first thought would not be
‘Gonna throw this away so I can just be stuck in an ice cube forever’.
The fact that nobody bothered to dispose of his phylactery in Northrend has been noted before and he mentions this in Hearthstone or Heroes of the Storm.
Now if that’s just Blizzard making a joke about how they forgot to put in a pretty important quest objective or hinting at him still being around is anyone’s guess.
But honestly once you’ve come back from the dead once, doing it again isn’t all that surprising.
To point 3, the implication was that the Lich King has far more undead under his control than we had ever seen lying dormant and frozen in Northrend awaiting the ‘right time’ to be unleashed once he had a fitting cadre of generals to lead them across Azeroth. (Generals he intended to create from the greatest heroes of Azeroth, I.e. the player and his guldies.) this implies that the Scourge is actually so large at this point that the Lich King can’t even control all the undead he has created on his own.
Since that never panned out, all of those dead still lie dormant, restrained by the Lich Kings will, hence why he is the ‘jailer of the damned’ now. Were the Lich King to suddenly vanish, all those undead would rise and scour the world, and there would be far too many of them for us to just kill.
As to why Bolvar doesn’t just command all the Scourge into a volcano it’s also implied that fragments of the previous Lich King still war inside his mind for control, and its only his strong will that keeps him from just wiping out all life on the planet. So apparently doing that requires so much attention from him he can’t even get up from the frozen throne, let alone start directing enough of the Scourge to destroy themselves to actually make a dent in their numbers.
Likewise it’s also been shown in the Plaguelands since Cataclysm that some of the Scourge now act independently thanks to Bolvar’s distraction, and yes they are steadily making more undead with every victim that they claim.
The way I interpreted that ending was that the undead Scourge with a Lich King in control were organized and moved when the Lich King told them to (like an RTS player moving around units).
Without a LK though, the undead would just go berserk and attack everything any anything without rhyme or reason.
Take for example: an organized protest leads to peaceful demonstrations and minimal disruptions to the town/city, right? While a disorganized protest would lead to riots and destruction of property and massive disruption in traffic, pedestrian movements areas, etc.
Well that puts my question at least partially in the bin. Is there a scenario where the Lich king might re-assert his control over free willed undead (Sylvanas, Forsaken, Alonsus Faol etc.) again.
I don’t think the Lich King can reassert his control over free willed undead easily after he’s loses control of them the first time. If he could, he would have. The fact that Sylvanas and the Forsaken remained free suggests either Lich King attempted and failed to reign them back in or he never bothered to try.
The only real way for him to reassert control would be to kill the Forsaken and then raise them again (see: Forsaken Death Knights).