According to wowhead’s new article, these changes to the lore are in Chronicle 4:
The Sunreavers are now stated to be directly responsible for the theft of the Divine Bell, meaning there’s zero doubts Jaina was justified in the Purge, given her warning to Aethas prior to the incident.
Rastakhan pledged his fleet to the Horde right after G’huun died, meaning the attack on Dazar’alor and his death is a valid act of war. Also, apparently Genn was no longer involved in it, and it was just Jaina?
Azsuna is now canonically before Stormheim, meaning the Alliance’s message that Sylvanas is after the Vrykul/Valkyr and needs to be stopped was seen. Meaning the attack on Sylvanas’s fleet is again, a valid act to prevent her attacking innocents, and not an act of aggression as people would constantly say.
The Horde are credited entirely with all of the Crucible of Storm questline, meaning the Horde released Xal’atath by themselves, not the Alliance.
Like, I’m Alliance, but holy jeebus, this is so out there. Giving us morally questionable things we’ve done is not a bad thing. Now you’re just sanitizing the faction and trying to go back to “Alliance = Good, Horde = Evil.”
And this isn’t even touching the whole BFA timeline making zero sense now.
They’ve apparently also re-retconned/reclarified there are indeed 5 old gods, and the titans only imprisoned 4. This 100% is setting up Xal’atath to be the 5th. But still interesting regardless.
But just remember folks: over 10 years ago Blizzard hired a band that said something mean to the Alliance that hurt their fee-fees so clearly there is Horde bias.
Anyways, fine just let us go full evil. Let’s start with taking off Jaina’s head.
Aethas always knew that it happened, he let it happen, the Sunreavers always knew what was going on. But doing a purge of a city because that happened and taking civilians hostage is probably a step too high.
Meaning it was a stupid act of war as they destroyed their fleet before invading their city anyway, it only pushed the Zandalari more toward the Horde. They could stand alone before but after that a bit like modern history they felt forced to join the Horde to defend their country.
Don’t see anything bad from that, maybe I missed something?
It really fails to see how people trying too hard to do good, often end up doing the most harm. You can keep the optimistic Jaina, but who has to suffer the consequences when she has to shoulder the power. Like Arthas did.
I’ve been Alliance from the start, but the way the Horde is being treated now isn’t even giving us a level playing field to argue factional topics on. It’s just the Horde getting kicked on the daily lmao
Well, they’ve been introducing bland, one-dimensional characters since BfA. Not surprised that they’d do the same to each faction. The story can only be as smart and nuanced as the people writing it. WoW’s storytelling has never been amazing, but it seems to be on a downward trend in recent years.
Wasn’t it always? I remember people talking about doing the story in this order: Aszuna, Val’sharah, Highmountain then Stormheim.
That’s why I did them in that order. It’s what everything/everyone recommended, because it flowed that way, even though we could do the zones in whatever order.
See, this is why I tell people to ignore chronicles. It contradicts the actual events we as players experience and comes across as ham-fisted ways to try and force a narrative.
I’ll have to go dig through stuff and see if any of the old threads exist where people talk about it.
But, I guess now, Stormheim definitely wasn’t first.
Edit: well that didn’t take long! I found a Reddit post discussing where that came from:
One thing that was stated during the developer panel at PAX which I found interesting was that the original order of the zones was Azsuna, Val’Sharah, Highmountain, and then Stormheim.
The azuna warning about Sylvanas looking for an artifact is still not justification for the attack. And Genn makes it clear he is going to attack regardless of justification. This was never gray, this was always just blind vengeance which put the planet at risk for annihilation.
Chronicles is a written history, yes? That requires a person to do the writing, and even the best historians aren’t unbiased and fully informed. I spend most of my time in this game role playing, and we role-players very often ignore some of the poorly thought-out ‘official’ lore for it to make sense.
The past Chronicle books were already retconned as of the Argus patch in Legion, and this volume is already fan-fiction since it doesn’t match up with in-game events. The entire Chronicle series is just a big “What If?” scenario.
Ever since they came out and said it was canonically unreliable due to being written under a Titan-aligned PoV, it doesn’t really matter much anymore IMHO.
Maybe it was written by an Alliance Dwarf or something.