It’s sounding like the Shadowguard Ethereals might turn out to be a result of the Ethereum’s efforts to harness Void in TBC resulting in them getting subverted and controlled by it instead. Like they were attempting a demon hunter-ish “fight fire with fire” thing and ended up succumbing the way some demon hunters defected to the Legion.
Which would be in keeping with how Locus-Walker has seemed to treat them like “these guys who’ve, unlike me, failed to remain in control of the power.”
no interest. looks like a less stupid version of Zerith Mortis, which was part of SL, and therefore sucked. I was hoping for the Arathi Empire to be honest. I didn’t run the broker city when it was new content, I can’t imagine myself bothering with a new version of it.
If this came out as a patch in Midnight, I could actually feel it’s alright though.
I’v seen the dialogue and why we are working with xal’atath and its very fun
I am a bit hype for 2 reasons… that were ever mention briefly:
We meat a “Mysterious council of Demon Hunter who found their way on Karesh” and they are talking about Cosmic Energy finally as part of a plot and it’s not just as a unique Damage Type?!
The Archive Assault taking place in the Azure Vaults in Dragon Isle???
(joking but you get an idea of my excitement as unlikely as this can be! lol)
They seem excited but not sure if they will come back since they hook with other online game… better keep my hype in check and just gather the lore around this and integrate it in the homebrew RPGs we play offline.
Thanks for the post Zerde! 
https://x.com/TheRedShirtGuy/status/1935502114681246188?t=yMPVtHTI-BCagCtxtqRzvQ&s=19
Looks like some quests are up.
Also he’s being pretty vague.
https://x.com/TheRedShirtGuy/status/1935468291369185577?t=BmPi8coJSoEBRYvd6fPUHA&s=19
So why are we?
Essentially we need her to get to dimensius, its not some “boohoo woe is me” thing where they pretend xal is innocent, Its simply the fact that we need each other or we will all die.
Adding on to that, a lot of cutscenes aren’t implemented yet, but Xal’atath is/was the harbinger of Dimensius specifically. But when she arrived on K’aresh to herald his coming, she claims to have seen the power of the “Reshii Ribbons” that transformed the harsh wastes of the planet into gardens. She claims that she betrayed Dimensius, using the power of the Ribbons, and now that he’s coming back, she needs to destroy him before he destroys her.
Interesting…
Here’s some more info as I kept playing:
Merely being in the presence of Dimensius warps and degrades mortal flesh. When Xal’atath decided to betray Dimensius, she went in secret to a powerful order of K’arash sorcerers called the Ravel - including Locus-Walker and Ve’nari. By that point, they had determined that the planet was already doomed. The only way for anyone to survive the coming of Dimensius was for Xal’atath to use the power of the Ribbons to convert the entire population into energy beings, immune to Dimensius’s consuming power. And (Locus-Walker claims) there was no time to tell anyone about this plan, so they had to implement it immediately, and then just… never told the people of K’aresh the real reason they were transformed.
So uh … they did the thing I was worried they were going to do. The timelines don’t add up.
i mean karesh was destroyed long before she was even on azeroth
What did the timeline say before? All the new content says that K’aresh exploded “hundreds of thousands of years ago.”
Less than 2,000 years in TBC.
One of T’uure’s shards (the naaru that banished Dimensius) went to the eredar in the ballpark of 20,000ish years ago.
It’s probably technically possible to set up events without it being literally impossible, but the time table for ethereal activity is … kinda ludicrous.
I know time doesn’t work the same way in the Shadowlands, but this means the Brokers must be a pretty recent addition compared to the other races.
And the revelations just keep coming:
Bear in mind that a lot of this comes from Xal’atath, and of course can’t be trusted. But not all of it does, and it mostly adds up.
It seems (this part is unclear) that King Salhadaar had been working with the void for a very long time. He welcomed the arrival of Dimensius, and the Ravel stood against him.
Dimensius didn’t destroy K’aresh. The Ravel - Locus-Walker, Ve’nari, and others - struck a deal with Xal’atath. The Ravel would shatter the planet, killing Dimensius and setting Xal’atath free from her master, and she in return would use her void knowledge to convert the population into energy beings that could survive the destruction of the planet and the overwhelming amount of Void energy it would spawn.
And in the end, it still wasn’t enough, because (according to Xal’atath) the Ravel choked and shattered the planet too early, which did not kill Dimensius but instead shattered him into a vast number of small fragments - including one that we fought on Outland. Salhadaar and his Shadowguard ethereals used all that time to try to piece him back together, and they are finally close to success.
blink Back in the Burning Crusade, we were told that King Salhadaar was striving to defeat Dimensius and in the process and he and the Ethereum had become a threat of their own. The dungeon journal even admits that prior to agreeing with some deal with Dimensius, that Salhadaar was trying to defeat the Void Lord.
So unless defeating him was merely about destroying the fragments, so that he could reform as one… I’m lost.
So Xala’tath betrayed Dimensius to be free?
This is addressed briefly, and I didn’t think to write it down at the time, but Salhadaar claiming that he wanted to defeat Dimensius was ALL A RUSE. He only wanted to collect as many fragments of Dimensius as possible in order to resurrect him.
So it’s another BC retcon, basically.
As for Xal’atath and Dimensius, I don’t know. It’s what Xal’atath tells us, but there’s too many missing pieces of the puzzle. The full truth probably won’t come out until we get the unencrypted cutscenes when the raid releases.
Gotcha… I wonder if us killing the Nexus King Salhadaar was a retcon or if his deal with Dimensius allowed him to survive his presumed death.
So is Nexus-Prince Haramad and the Consortium amongst the Ethereals we interact with in Ghosts of K’aresh?
Side note: Does anyone else feel that Ghosts of K’aresh would have been a cool expansion name?
Salhadaar appears to be very much dead, thought I’m still progressing through the questline. [EDIT: nevermind, he’s alive as a raid boss, but I’m not sure how.]
No real sign of the Consortium yet, aside from a few odd NPCs. With Tazavesh airdropped in, most of the friendlies are brokers, not ethereals.
As an aside, the most hilarious part of the patch so far is the absolute terror that everyone in Tazavesh has about anyone ransacking it again. They say “Maw Walker” like it’s the boogeyman.