Explore the Fate of the Kirin Tor
Delve into the aftermath of Dalaran’s fall in The War Within epilogue questline—the Kirin Tor must confront their past mistakes and decide on the future course of their people.
Well lets see what closure we all get next patch.
It’s difficult not to be pessimistic here - Blizzard’s recent track record for conflicts like this is for everyone to kiss and make up with zero fuss and zero grudges. Even so, literally any admission of wrongdoing at all would be an improvement over the status quo.
For the long-term, I think it’d be interesting to see the Kirin Tor park themselves permanently on Dorn. Their only other options are building a new flying city, which is boring and negates the consequence of the expansion’s opening, or recolonizing a crater, which is just weird.
They have some interesting cultural synergy with the Arathi - both being human/elven cultures - so building a bridge there and intermixing the two would be neat.
This has been one of my biggest complaints. I am tired of the faction war buuuut that doesn’t mean I want to see everyone kissing and making up. It takes time to overcome all those grudges and such.
Having one quest line where opposing characters/factions work together and are then like ‘you aren’t so bad, we can work together now’ is tiring at this point. Even in a stay awhile and listen, quest dialog, or dialog we could see the characters being like ‘I see we have more in common than I realized. I won’t say it’s going to be easy but maybe we can work on putting the past behind us and moving forward for our people and azeroth’. Seeing more of that would let the pay off of ‘we’re friends now’ actually feel earned imo.
My expectations for the specifics of this story beat couldn’t be lower, but I’m glad that the Purge will get mentioned in-game again. That was always that story’s biggest failing to me - the lack of follow-up.
(Really, I think that’s a flaw in most of WoW’s story beats - a huge advantage of this game setting being a world is that single momentous events can keep echoing around the various characters and cultures, and it feels weird when they’re silent.)
I hope that plenty of blood elf PoVs are added - angry ones, that the story allows to stay angry. No “the only person expressing anger also happens to be working with the villain of thee week” (some characters doing that is fine, just don’t make it the only representation) or “all the angry characters learn to Forgive™ over the course of a 5-minute quest chain and are all friends at the end”. Characters can work towards a shared end goal without liking the other side, even without directly cooperating.
I like when the factions work together - one of my favorite stories is the classic ‘enemies have to set aside their conflict to jointly face a bigger threat’ - but I’d love for a split where 1/3 of faction characters will happily work together, 1/3 will grudgingly work together only when they have a major shared opponent, and 1/3 absolutely cannot stand the other side and will at best agree to stay out of each others’ way.
This setting has enough characters to show all those opinions. That’s the strength of this game’s huge and storied setting - lean into it!
I don’t expect this storyline to deal with the Purge at all. It just says “past mistakes,” not which mistakes those might be.
What other mistakes is there? Aside from Dalaran falling into Xal’s trap.
The Kirin Tor did not participate in the purge.
It was just Jaina, the Silver Covenant and Stormwind.
I was desperately looking for a single mage guard.
In vain.
I am very skeptical of dealing with the purge. I don’t have any faith that Blizz knew what they were playing around with back then. Nor have I seen any evidence of Blizz understanding the “upset” of Blood Elves.
They might be trying to “speed-run” the Blood Elf issues in preparation for Midnight and that may risk coming off as disrespectful at least from how I see things.
Well, for one, a pretty notable lack of pushback when Garithos imprisoned the entirety of Kael’s forces in the violet hold and scheduled them all for execution.
Jaina was the leader of the Council of Six at the time. She was literally Dalaran’s head-of-state and the leader of the Kirin Tor. The fact that she used her own sycophant militia to do the dirty work doesn’t negate that.
Honestly, my real long-term hope for the Kirin Tor is for them to back to being just a nation on the map and not… the Avengers, or whatever they’re trying to be now.
There’s also the troll wars I believe they were involved with
They were founded as a result of the Troll wars. I find it hard to imagine any denizen of Dalaran seeing the Troll Wars as a “mistake,” though.
Indeed. Jaina and Aethas are already friends again, Vereesa apparently left Dalaran behind years before the crash; and as much as I’d enjoy interacting with victims of the purge seeking closure before they commit to Dalaran 3.0 or whatever, the game’s last two revisitations of the topic don’t fill me with hope.
You make a point -
The most “Blizzard” way to handle this is to pretend Dalaran was the problem, as it is nothing but debris.
While Jaina and Vareesa get off Scott free
That rhymed - on accident. But I think it tells the tale.
Yeah that’s my hope, too. I hope that Aethas gets to make an appearance and it’s shown that any anger he has is justified. The few times he’s popped up in TWW at least seem to show that Blizzard isn’t making him a deranged lunatic.
In the Preserving Plush Pals world quest, he ends it with saying,“Every piece of Dalaran we preserve–no matter how small–is valuable. Thank you.” So at least for now, he seems to be characterized as someone who does genuinely care about others. I just hope they don’t go the Tyrande treatment where he’s portrayed as unreasonable for wanting some sort of justice for what was done, even if they don’t villain bat him.
Tbh, I’m not sure the “past mistakes” is going to involve the Purge at all. I hope it does, it’s something that really should be addressed.
I don’t think Aethas works for this. His most substantial action since the purge has been begging the Kirin Tor to let him back in. He’s had several opportunities to show anger and we haven’t gotten a single drop of it.
Having him suddenly care about the purge after a decade of cozying up to the Kirin Tor just doesn’t work. It would feel incredibly unnatural.
It needs to be someone else.
Guaranteed the first reaction post will be Erevien claiming that it’s an Alliance whitewash.
The Silver Conveant attacking the Sunreavers and vice versa was already seen in WotLK; this is nothing new.
The question remains: Where were the mage guards? Where were the other mages of the Kirin Tor? The other members of the council of six?
Jaina had authority over them. But they were not there. Why not?
You’re wildly overstating the conflict between the two prior to the Purge. They were basically political parties in Dalaran’s politics, not armies fighting each other.
The purge was not a years-long conflict, it was a single afternoon. Jaina mobilized the forces that would be the most enthusiastic in supporting her, not the ones that might have doubts or reservations. The fact that Dalaran’s regular military didn’t participate in the purge is perhaps to their credit, but it doesn’t absolve the government of culpability.
Much as I would have liked to see it, the time for Aethas to be angry has long since passed. It would make no sense for him to be angry now after giving up Felo’melorn and gifting Jaina with a music box. He’s firmly established as a doormat when it comes to Dalaran.
Depending on what they say, he won’t necessarily be wrong…
Shouldn’t the Kirin Tor be thinking about setting up a new basecamp, about Xala’Tath? Shouldn’t they be with Dagran every other week or so and looking at the new discs?
Why group therapy? Enough of the Filler Episodes! Actually advance the story a bit?
Makes me want to start up my WOW Fan Expansion Post again. I actually did like writing that, I may do that. I’ve been taking writing too seriously lately, I need a bit of a writing holiday. Hmm… This was supposed to be a break week… Okay, I’ll look back to it. I was actually planning an interesting faction questline with the Kirin Tor… OOOOooohhhh! Okay, !