I got into beta yesterday. I haven’t done any of the main story yet, I’ve just been flying around exploring the Dragon Isles and doing the occasional sidequest. There was one in particular in the centaur zone that caught my attention.
In some ruins are a bunch of lesser dragonkin (drakonids, dragonspawn, etc) excavating the area. They all have a debuff on them that says the “Locus” is calling to them. if you’re playing a dracthyr this debuff even affects you. As you work with a nightborne archaeologist you uncover that they were sent by the Sundered Flame (group of villain lesser dragonkin rebelling against the Aspects) to find “proof that the Aspects are complicit in the Destroyer’s crimes”.
All of the dragonkin are being compelled by this Locus, with some of the ones you talk to talking about how they’re trying to fight and resist it. You eventually discover that it’s something Neltharion created called the Black Locus, a black stone that controls the wills of lesser dragonkin. You gather the stone and give it to the archaeologist, then hear a whisper from the stone saying “Seek me out below”.
If you’re playing a dracthyr, the archaeologist with you says that this is a physiological addiction and you can’t outright get rid of it, but you can overwrite it with something else. He gives you a mana stone from Suramar and your debuff saying that you were called by the Locus changes to say you’re now addicted to arcane instead.
This whole thing feels like it’s setting up for a future storyline, probably in that underground patch zone that was found listed in the files for 10.1 given that the stone says to go “below”.
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The 5th Old God was the one who corrupted Deathwing eh?
So the Titans chained 5 Old Gods below the earth and killed a 6th…
One of the 5 was on a couple of Islands safely away from the Continent.
N’Zoth implied that he corrupted Deathwing during Cataclysm so he most likely was out of the running to be among the 3 who corrupted Deathwing the first time thus explaining why Deathwing was always so cunning until Cataclysm upon which he became more bombastic than N’Zoth.
As for why Arcane can substitute Old God corruption: The Arcane of the Night Elves drawn from the Well of Eternity was corrupted by the Old Gods to begin with. The Dracthyr are merely substituting one set of Old God corruption with another.
The Leylines resulted from the Well of Eternity exploding according to The Last Guardian so the Void-tainted Arcane is everywhere and has become Leylines!
Void Addiction is a Drug while Disorder Addiction is a substitute that can be sated for much longer.
Let’s not ignore the fact that the Black Locus is the same color as the Stone that allowed Thrall to tap into the Black Aspect’s power in Twilight of the Aspects so we can’t prove for certain that Khaz’goroth was infact the one who made Neltharion an Aspect of the Earth.
If the Old God beneath Dragon Isles is indeed the source of the role of Aspect of the Earth then we need to find out what the intended 5th Aspect was!
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It’s not an Old God, it’s very explicitly a stone that Neltharion made. I’m not sure how you seemed to miss that in my post.
It was probably made with Old God magic but like, you literally get the stone as a quest item. The stone is explicitly the device that was causing it and it’s explicitly something he created, not an ancient Black Empire artifact.
To me the implication, especially with the Sundered Flame saying they’re there to find evidence that the Aspects are all “complicit in the Destroyer’s crimes”, is that all of the flights have one of these stones and drakonids are actually being controlled by them without realizing it. We’ll see if that actually turns out to be the case but that was the impression I walked away from the questline having.
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