Sunday topic. What would you change in the lore?

Lore Story Forum
22

Radical refactoring of the factions. A larger number of smaller faction, each with its own coherent aesthetics, themes and objectives.

“The Alliance”
Stormwind, Stromgarde, Ironforge, Dalaran, Gnomeregan, Gilneas, Kul’Tiras.

“The Horde”
Orgrimmar, Thunder Bluff, Darkspear Trolls

“The Cenarion Pact”
Night Elves, Runetotem Tauren, Moonclaw Worgen, dryads

“The Forsaken”
Undead humans, undead elves, etc. All Death Knights.

“The Highborne Cities”
Quel’thalas, Suramar, Eldre’thalas

Etc, etc.

You have a traditional medieval faction (with some steampunk thrown in,) your noble savages faction, your natural defenders faction, your undead-fighting-for-their-right-to-exist faction, your high-fantasy magic-and-crystals faction, etc. Each one has a clear aesthetic and its own coherent goals. No Blood Elves running around in Orc Grunt armor.

Other tweaks around the edges help this. In my version, Death Knights are a faction-exclusive class, because we’re maintaining the story element of everyone else disliking undead as a rule.

Some of these factions are clearly stronger than others. That’s fine. “Balance” might be nice for game mechanics but it’s cancer for storytelling.

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23

I feel there’s a lot of skeletons in the Alliance closet when it comes to their imperialism and cruelty towards non-alliance races.

It’d be interesting to explore that.

4 Likes
24

Forsaken joining the Horde, and Night Elves joining the Alliance. Neither really made sense joining either faction.

In WC3, the Night Elves were their own faction of equal standing to the Horde and Alliance, and they had to be defanged for WoW, losing a lot of their original appeal. We were told they’d tell us how the Night Elves joined at some point, but we’re still waiting.

As for the Forsaken, it’s kind of a situation where the Horde and Forsaken are bad for each other. The Forsaken really were the catalyst that helped drag the Horde back to villain status. At the same time, the Forsaken had to be neutered down from just how cruel and vile they could be, in order to fit into the Horde at least a tiny bit. Also, I’ll never get over the fact that Thrall allowed a Dreadlord into the Horde.

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25

Right off the top of my head… Magatha immediately tries to betray the Farseer and Earthen Ring by stealing the Doomstone, and she naturally dies during the attempt. Muln tells Nobundo I told you so for suggesting that they work with her and then we recruit someone more trustworthy our 7.2 champion.

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26

Alliance as a broad organization ends after WC3 events. Races aren’t tied to factions at all.

Nature faction, Horde, a faction lead by O.G. Jaina, faction lead by Sylvanas, a tech/industry faction, etc.

Faction interactions exist, but players aren’t utterly bound to said interactions. “My faction did thus, and so that is the next two years of my play experience” no longer a thing.

That is one aspect of other MMO’s, to a greater or lesser extent, that I enjoy. GW2, ESO to some extent- my play experience is not defined by the colored flag I picked when I started.

The lore implications of this are stupidly expansive, so not gonna bore anyone with my make’em ups.

Oh, also Amber doesn’t get offed in Legion.

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27

It’s even more annoying because on the flip side, the current timeline expects us to believe that every expansion is a year long.

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28

I like your way of thinking my friend. Especially with a lot of early expansion were truly weak writing

The writers of Chronicles were so dumb they made this mistake a lot of times just for the rule of cool. Another example is a 300 reference with a small group of humans holding in some bottle-neck place against big armies of forest Trolls which ignores the fact Trolls are double in both size and strenght to humans and that tactic will never work at any other fictional universe.

Ugh remembering this stuff makes me poke from both bad writing and for the stupidity from Blizzard that are more fanboys of human potential than GW with their Ultrasmurfs.

3 Likes
29

I’ll remove everything since TBC, Kaelthas was such a waste of character just to fill a raid spot, Illidan and Vashj too.

I allways want blizz to make alternate warcraft story where the story dont have to fit just for gameplay reasons, kinda like Marvel 616 universe and Ultimate universe.

Even Wotlk is bad storywise, it doesnt make any sense.

30

Honestly…

Keep Kael’thas alive and changing his direction from suddenly being unhinged evil for no reason (like seriously, we only got an explanation a decade later).
Keep Illidan dead and out of Legion.
Make Thrall story in cata less prominently up front above everyone else (him helping the aspects is fine, but not the way it was handled as we know it).
Instead of having Garrosh turn evil, make so someone under him undermined his authority and took control of the Horde in order to take it back to what it used to be (for them). It could have been Malkorok.
Keep Varian alive.
Make Nightborne neutral.
Ditch the entire Sylvanas… whatever the hell we have now in favor of Helya being in this role instead (even fighting Bolvar in her original form).
Actually making bfa a plot around the Naga and N’zoth.

That’s it :man_shrugging:

Oh and kill off Grom in WoD before THAT ending.

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31

writers

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32

This is an easy answer. I’d take every writer from the last 11 years that had a hand in flushing the Warcraft 3 era Shamanistic Revival arc down the toilet and I’d fire them. Outright.

No Garrosh turned villain. No Heart of Yshaar’j garbage. No Mag’har idly standing by while Garrosh did the exact same thing Grommash did just with a different color evil juice. No Garrosh vs Cairne mak’gora. No Warlords of Draenor retconning the Orcs into bloodthirsty morons even before the Blood Pact with Mannoroth. No Vol’jin being a useless chairwarmer to transition between Garrosh and Sylvanas. No Sylvanas warchief EVER (if anything I’d have her be more akin to a mix between Lillian Voss and Calia Menethil.)

I’d also completely nix the World Shaman Go’el arc for Thrall. Sabellian from Outland or even Wrathion could have served in that capacity. If you want Thrall out of the picture that badly… kill him and Varian at the same time. Metzen was retiring at that point anyway… send both of them out in a blaze of glory side-by-side against Gul’dan. Let Garrosh take the helm from that point on with Saurfang, Eitrigg, Nazgrim, Jorin Deadeye (representing the Mag’har), Zaela and Cairne as his chief advisors until Cairne passes from old age (if any character in Warcraft earned a peaceful death it was Cairne) and then Baine takes his place. Hell you could even still have Garrosh bring the Blackrocks in under Malkorok… or even have Saurfang challenge whoever took over after Rend & Maim were dead for leadership of the clan he was second in command of under Doomhammer and then bring them into the fold. (Note: This isn’t headcanon, it’s been confirmed that not only was Saurfang #2 under Doomhammer, he’s also actually who ‘you’ played as in Warcraft 2, just as Doomhammer was in Warcraft 1.)

…basically redo everything from Ulduar onward for the Horde. That was really the start of it all going downhill.

6 Likes
33

Oh pretty please Blizz do this:

This:

This:

And this:

But not this: :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I really wish you guys were writers at Blizzard.

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34

P.S. My own change would be to have worgen lore go back to pre-cata lore. The Book of Ur and Velinde Starsong’s journel being the example.

35

Sylvanas dies by suicide in Icecrown.

The Forsaken begin building their own identity beyond her, with some division between those who want to reclaim their humanity and those who vehemently reject it.

In order to replenish their numbers, they begin freeing undead from the grip of the scourge and other necromancers.

Garrosh tries to use them as cannon fodder, so they just kick him and the Horde out. They become neutral and isolationist.

Garrosh comes after them, and they turn to the Blood Elves for help. Seeing Garrosh’s madness grow and not wanting to tie themselves to allies on the other side of the world over the ones on their doorstep, Lor’themar sides with the Forsaken. By the end of Cataclysim, neither faction is considered a member of the Horde (Players of those races are still mercenaries so their alignment doesn’t have to match their capital’s)

Over the course of Mists, other factions in the Horde start leaving. Starting with the Tauren, until in the end even the orcs are split. Anduin convinces his father to reach out to these ex horde, arguing that they’re leaving the horde specifically because they’re better than the monsters who’ve been attacking the Alliance.

During the war against Garrosh, the Alliance builds ties with the various ex horde factions, and when Garrosh is defeated Varian invites them to join the Alliance.

They reject the notion, saying there’s still too much bad blood between the common folk of their factions, but the leaders at least no longer consider the Alliance an enemy.

The faction conflict officially ends here, and we can finally move on to more interesting stories.

36

Nooo, this sucks. I know you said they’d reject, but it still sucks, because once again, the red faction is defied by the villain.

37

The other option is they keep pointlessly trying to kill each other for eternity and the plot is never resolved.

I’m sure the Horde players wouldn’t die because the option of joining the Alliance was on the table for a whole 30 seconds.

38

No, it’s more about having to “leave the Horde” because it’s bad. Maybe instead have Garrosh leave with his own faction.

39

I mean, if the horde absolutely had to be villain-batted, I’d prefer it that way in a one-and-done “rip off the band-aid” moment so the story would move on. I wouldn’t like it, but if it meant not having another faction war, I’d rather eat double-reheated food than triple.

Sucks to have Sylvanas killed off but it probably would have been a kinder end to her character than what the game ended up doing to her.

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40

I’m pretty happy with basically everything as-is, but one certain thing always bugged me: the idea of sharing souls across alternate universes. This first came up with the Burning Legion in Warlords of Draenor, and has come up again with the Shadowlands. I think it causes a lot of problems, like making all the noble and heroic Alternate Garroshes be punished in Revendreth for the Main Garrosh’s crimes.

It doesn’t make a lot of sense, so I just pretend it isn’t a thing. In my head, there’s a very finite amount of alternate universes. We fought Alternate Archimonde on Draenor. There are several nice Garroshes in various afterlives, and it doesn’t cause any conflict. That’s my headcanon, and I’m very happy with it! I think it’d be an easy change for the lore ^.^

41

We wake up in a bottom chamber of Ulduar. Everything from mid-wrath through SLands was a fevered nightmare induced by Yog Saron.

The argent crusade holding a renaissance faire prior to battling the Lich King should have been our first clue something wasn’t right.

1 Like