Bear in mind that I have only finished the Eco Dome Primus leg of the story so if they show up later, I suppose this post is getting ahead of itself. I also want to note that I am really enjoying Karesh - it’s got the coolest TBC spliced with Legion and Shadowlands vibe and really, they had me at TBC.
But with the overabundance of Brokers - who I find interesting and found to be a high point (though baffling in presence) of Shadowlands - and most of the Ethereals shown are enemy mobs, I have to ask… where are the friendly Ethereals such as the Consortium who captured my imagination since TBC???
(By extension, are there Shadowguard who look like Brokers?)
Are there lore implications here, or is this just Blizzard throwing out the old and going with the newer, shinier toy?
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It is like 80% Brokers as far as I can tell. There are a few ethereals, but they overwhelmingly inform the villain factions.
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The “friendly” Ethereals are the Wastelanders. They seem to make the bulk of the friendly and those who side with Locus Walker.
I mean, aren’t they all technically Ethereals, just in different shells?
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Yes. Sort of. It bears repeating that K’aresh was destroyed hundreds of millenia ago. It is a little bizarre that the K’areshi that fled to the Shadowlands are taking the lead instead of the Ethereals.
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The Brokers have amassed considerable power and resources during their time separated from their other kin from K’aresh.
Are the Ethereals we interact with on Azeroth as organized or carry the same influence and power as the Brokers?
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I guarantee someone on the team was worried that players would get friendly and non-friendly Ethereals confused with one another. “Why are we killing the people we’re here to help? That don’t make no sense Blizz!”
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Yes. They are warptech space mummies operating out of the nether with a reach spanning the known universe. There are distinct factions but they are/were exceptionally organized and with a far longer reach than the Brokers in Reality (which is basically a necessary casualty of their being K’areshi by way of current retcon).
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They may be the same people lorewise but irl that’s only been the case for like a month. From a meta perspective K’aresh has been “the ethereal’s world” for 18 years so it was a really odd choice to not have ethereals be the main guys present, outside Locus Walker.
Locus Walker said the Consortium forms a chunk of the K’aresh Trust but Nexus Prince Haramad, the Consortium’s leader, isn’t even present. Phase General Ameer who was the main quest giver against Dimensius in Netherstorm is technically present but just stands outside the raid doing nothing. Really weird narrative choices on Blizzard’s part. I don’t think they should have roles on par with Locus Walker but they should be part of the story. Have Haramad be Ve’nari’s equal in Trust leadership or something.
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I feel this will tie in some way to Last Titan because Shadowlands was opened there. Like some Nerubians will be in Northrend also some brokers might
This might be a crazy theory.
I think they used the Brokers purely out of “laziness” and time constraints. The Brokers have newer assets that they only used in Shadowlands and they didn’t want those to go to waste on that dogwater expansion.
So rather than have to make completely new and updated Ethereal architecture that would take time, they just reused the Brokers and slapped on some new lore that the Brokers are actually Ethereals from K’aresh who just went to the Shadowlands because reasons?
This is my biggest issue personally. They never explain WHY or HOW the Ethereals were in the Shadowlands, what was the purpose of that? I don’t mind the added lore of Brokers being Ethereals but it just raises questions of why they were in the Shadowlands to begin with.
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That is a disappointment.
Hopefully he’ll appear in the 11.2 Epilogue or in the 11.2.5 content.
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Honestly my theory on the brokers’ presence is there’s still some stubborn desire among the devs to make SL “work” despite the backlash it received. Same reason they keep bringing up cosmic stuff in in-game books or there were Ardenweald NPCs randomly participating in the Dream patch of DF.
The brokers having newer art assets may be some of it but they did actually make new ethereal assets for this patch, they’re just mostly used by the villains.
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Might just be that it got rushed? We know plans changed for TTW once Metzen made his multi-expansion pitch well into this expacs development. This 11.2 would not have been the content they were expecting to make at that point. So bringing in the brokers, Tazavesh, a bunch of SL concepts and models etc… saves developer time?
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I remember grinding consortium rep. I would like to have them be involved in the story. But the Brokers seem to be getting the spotlight.
The brokers seemed like less interesting and goofier looking substitutions.
I guess their story is intertwined, now.
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I thought we weren’t seeing as many friendly Ethereals because a lot of them had been corrupted into serving Dimensius.
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Except as Spyrn and Kagehiro and others said upthread, the Ethereals are legion and they have been making a concerted, focused effort on this front so really there is no way they all got turned to Dimensius.
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Maybe Blizzard decided to hold back on Etherral because these guys will have a bigger role to play in Midnight itself.
What annoys me is it would be so easy to explain. Just say that Old Tazavesh fell into the In-Between of the Shadowlands when their world blew up. To survive the Miasma that was eating away their souls, the brokers developed their heavy duty containment suits. All the aesthetic drift could be explained by such an impossibly long time apart being influenced by Shadowlands natives. The city has over the millennia has been destroyed and rebuilt numerous times due to Devourer attacks and only vaguely resembles what it did originally.
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The real question is, where are the PLAYABLE Ethereals??