As we rapidly approach the end of BFA, Something has been bothering me… we didn’t really seem to save Azeroth, and/or the writers forgot about her.
In summary, the story begins with the Titan Sargeras stabbing a giant sword into Azeroth. This (obviously) hurts the planet and then causes wounds to begin opening up and releasing, what we call, Azerite. (Presumably ‘in-lore’ the wounds as they spread from Silithus start to open up all over the world and not just the BFA zones). Magni, Hamuul and others like the Earthern Ring, then begin trying to find ways to heal the planet. We are granted the Heart of Azeroth as a means with which to do just that.
Fast forward to the end suddenly the focus becomes using the Heart of Azeroth and Chamber of Heart to stop N’Zoth. Well, N’Zoth only took advantage of the situation that Sargeras created. Once N’Zoth is out of the way, there is still a giant sword stuck in the planet and the wounds are opening up all over the place (and are ‘corrupting’/tormenting various elementals, animals etc).
My confusion is that the writers seem to have forgotten the saving Azeroth part and turned things into a stop N’Zoth story. Unless I missed some quests somewhere, Azeroth is still in trouble and is bleeding out…
Something similar happened at the end of Legion. Sargeras was imprisoned and everyone seemed to think that the threat was over. The Legion ravaged thousands of worlds under the control of the annihilan and Nathrezim long before Sargeras ever found them and now that Sargeras is imprisoned, those same demons can have a power struggle for a bit then go back to ravaging. Argus and all the Broken there have been abandoned and for some reason the Army of the Light after 10,000 years of war decided to give up, walk away and fight the Horde.
I very rarely post anything on the forums as it can be a very hostile place, but hopefully I’ve explained myself clearly enough.
So, in Nighthold when we face Gul’Dan, he says to the alliance:
Your pathetic Alliance will fall to dust. Your new boy King will bow down and serve me, as will all of you!
Which does not mean that we will meet literally him, but have a sertain hint at the Legion.
Now, the power of the Jailer is described as something way stronger than titans. Whether it accounts for him using anima or not is still not clear, but he is a strong serious threat. Which, coupled with the hinted idea that so far we only win and it’s not interesting, can have a peculiar consequences.
The Jailer uses souls. Souls that are so broken that they can’t be restored anyway. Who else uses souls? That’s right. Burning Legion used them as a fuel. So, if things go badly this time… we might seek the remains of the Legion as our future allies.
I’m still wondering what the hell happened to all that Azerite. You know the wonder resource the war was ostensibly over that could super charge anything and was being saught by everyone from the Cult of the Damned to the Venture Co to Elemental Lords?
Did we just hoover up enough of it with our deicide bling? Should we not be worried a bunch of nefarious organizations got their hands on what’s basically magical yellow cake uranium?
According to Magni, yes, Azeroth has been saved. There’s no explanation given for how, other than defeating N’Zoth, but that’s where we’re at.
My best guess is that we were slowly healing Azeroth’s wounds via our collection of azerite throughout the expansion. That was ostensibly the whole point of the Heart of Azeroth: using it to collect azerite to heal Azeroth. Which always seemed a bit weird to me, since azerite is Azeroth’s blood. So what we’re doing is collecting her blood and injecting it back into her. How that heals her wounds, I don’t know. Especially since Sargeras’ sword is still there plunged into her.
I used to think WoD had the most nonsensical story, but it at least made some narrative sense when looked at in a vacuum. BfA is just an incoherent mess.
Yeah, but we depowered it at the end of Legion. So it’s less of a malevolent demon blade and more like a fancy mountain at this point. And the planet is made of rock, so I dunno how much damage it’s actually still doing now that it’s inert.
It’s made of rock, but remember that it almost bled to death when Y’shaarj was ripped off. So there’s still some sort of physical component to her injuries. In the Heart of Azeroth intro quest you use it to physically repair the floor in the Heart chamber, because if it shattered Azeroth would’ve died then and there.
Possibly. Maybe not though. Sargaras’s sword and Y’Shaarj were both highly magical. So it’s possible the damage being done wasn’t just physical.
Anyway, I think Blizzard said they have plans for the sword. So I’m sure something really big is gonna swing it around at some point. Maybe even Azeroth herself.
Azerite is not just Azeroth’s blood, because we know what is the colour of ley line energy. So, there is something else. That may or may not have something to do with the strange state of her world soul and the crystal that Illidan asked to bring to the Well of Eternity 2.0
Well, he think that it does.
Il’gynoth:
The king of diamonds has been made a pawn.
While some of that is going around, the Sword/Azerite plotline in particular did kind of fall apart about halfway through, and there are numerous gaping holes in the N’zoth stuff that feel like it was parsed down into a cure-all for everything afflicting the world in BfA when it wasn’t originally meant to be that. Mainly because as the final raid patch, it “had to” solve everything whether it made sense or not for it to do so.
Just the 8.3 quests to access Horrific Visions have a number of weird situations where characters say they’re doing one thing, then they just don’t do it, or a questline leads into specific reasons for proceeding, only for that reason to never materialize or be mentioned again and get replaced with a generalized “go loot the boss” justification. Suggesting there may have been more in-between quests and scenarios intended to address other story angles that got canceled or removed for time.
Rather notably, the final quests that end with fending off N’zoth’s forces in the Chamber of Heart provide rescuing Ra as the next big step in the plan, complete with a two-second quest specifically asking MOTHER to isolate his location so we can find him, but then we’re handed a generic “time to go raid N’zoth now” quest by Magni and Ra never gets meaningfully mentioned again, just appearing as an already-corrupted raid boss in Ny’alotha without any actual effort made to try to save him.
Then after N’zoth’s defeat, the imminent threat to the planet’s survival that literally kicked off the whole expansion gets written off as arbitrarily solved off-screen by N’zoth’s defeat, after Azerite and the wound hadn’t even been directly referenced since a quest back in Nazjatar about the naga forging Azerite weapons, itself tied to the weirdly disjointed portrayal of everything involving Ashvane after her escape from prison. An entire story angle that, as it turns out, didn’t really go anywhere or amount to anything either. Ashvane could have stayed locked in Tol Dagor for the rest of her life and been replaced by some random sea giant in the raid and nothing of relevance in the story would have really changed.
Not unlike Argus in Legion, the second half of BfA felt a lot like two or three entire expansion concepts crammed into two patches and consequently, none of it felt properly developed and paid off by the end. The faction war, Nazjatar, N’zoth, Azerite, the wound; they all just sort of slammed into the wall of presumably needing to finish the expansion and prep for Shadowlands before they could properly be steered into their own respective conclusions.
I appreciate these replies very much, thank you. It’s helpful to see that there doesn’t seem to be an answer and it is ever more likely the writers forgot about the thing that started the entire story.
N’Zoth didn’t really have anything to do with Azerite, or the wound or any of that. He just took advantage of the situation.
And the points raised about where is all this Azerite going since anyone can mine it… are interesting. And ‘cleansed’ or not, there is still a giant sword sticking in the planet, that can’t be good.
I fear we put more thought into the story than the writers.
This is sort of how I feel about it. It seems like one of those things that “just is” because Blizz said so.
I can imagine Magni telling me we saved Azeroth… and I would glance towards the sword, like… “that still looks bad… but you are the speaker of Azeroth…”
I was under the impression that Magni and MOTHER essentially told us that while Azeroth was in a barely-stable state at the start of BfA, she would eventually be okay as long as no agents were actively trying to destabilize her further—as N’Zoth was doing.
N’Zoth is gone, Gorribal is no longer infectious thanks to our artifacts, and all the Azerite scooping world quests are presumably like any other quest: completed and dealt with lore-wise after the first completion of it. So all Azerite leaks have been plugged. The Heart of Azeroth collected all loose Azerite, which was either spent on N’Zoth or given back to Azeroth. Azerite weapons are now no longer possible.