Things that irk me with WoW, and things I wish were in the game

Wyrmrest Accord
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Couple of personal bug-bears for me in Fantasy as a rule, and I just want to vent.

1) No limits to Magic, or Anime :cow::poop: Nojutsu Syndrome:

Blep We have stretched and strained the limits of our knowledge of magic, and the rules of magic, as far as we can go, yet somehow, as soon as the plot needs us to do so, we can reach a level even further beyond ~~Super Saiyan~~ ~~Super D Super Saiyan~~ that limit with no consequences and nothing bad happening to us, the people around us, the landscape around us or the world at large.

Now, fair enough, research happens and break-throughs are made, but it always seems to be a complete and utter :peach:-pull of total nonsense. Magic should have firmly established rules and conditions, and violating or breaking those rules and conditions should have equally disastrous consequences. Like being unable to normally house two or more types of magical energy within the body, or having hard limits as to how much a body can hold and channel that magical energy, hence why the Titans are the size of planets and thus are capable of shaping entire continents on their own, and when coupled with their Titan facilities, can reshape whole solar systems, why the Old Gods were such a threat because their physical bodies covered entire state-sized areas and dug deep into the earth, seeking the ley-lines and eventually the World Soul itself.

Instead we have absolute nonsense and NPCs capable of going toe-to-toe with Demi-Gods and Avatars one-on-one and somehow overpowering these entities with no lingering side effects, and it just irks me.

Where’s the shortening of their lifespan, the partial turning to stone, mana-sickness, requiring powerful relics to pull it off which shatter and break from the strain of compensating for all of this, something to make going above and beyond, and not just a little bit, but entire weight-classes of magical nonsense, and we just shrug it off and go back into the Hypertonic Liontamer training montage and never mention how bloody impossible it was in the first place?

Bah!

2) Swords and Sorcery and Nuclear Weapons:

BLEHThis is a less controversial one, but it irks me that we've gone from muskets and steam-tank technology to literal miniguns mounted on biplanes capable of shredding whole armies in a strafing run and somehow your basic grunt or soldier with a sharp piece of metal on a stick is still the staple of the armies of Azeroth.

Now, obviously, game mechanics and all that, but it irks me. It makes no sense and nobody seems to talk about how this somehow just doesn’t completely invalidate getting up close and personal with your opponent. By all rights, Gnomish and Dwarven troops should have decimated the Horde by this point by simple dint of their technological edge, and the only Lore-compliant reason they haven’t is because, without Gnomeragon, every single Steam-Tank and rifle made is a custom one-of-a-kind creation, because the Alliance lacks the technological base to mass-produce them.

No, seriously, go research the kind of tech we needed to start mass-producing, and realise how absolutely pants-on-head stupid the Alliance was for refusing to go recapture Gnomeragon. With the Gnomish city recovered and its vast underground construction and designing facilities restored and purged of the irradiated clouds and beasts within, the Alliance would have been able to start mass-producing repeating, armor-penetrating firearms, steam tanks, gyrocopters, biplanes and flying ships.

The Horde can have soldiers twice or three times as strong as a Human if they want, but that just makes them bigger targets, and the amount of metal required to fully enclose and protect all that mass would not only be hideously heavy and cumbersome, but depending on the bullet type, and material it is made from, you’re either going to drown to death in your own blood with your shattered ribs flensing your internal organs into a chunky soup because a bullet caved your breastplate into your torso, or you’re going to be lying on the ground in absolute agony because the armor might have bled off most of the kinetic force, but now fragments of bullets and armor have gone into your body and potentially ruptured or shredded a major artery or organ.

Then we get to the absolutely bonkers super-weapons, the Blight, Mana-Bombs, the Legion’s actual literal star-ships, the Draenei’s inter-galactic Kinder Surprise ships with lasers capable of glassing whole villages. The only reason those aren’t whipped out like Ye Olde Plastic Fantastic on November 1st is because A) there’s whole treaties about using them and B) they’re so fantastically rare and hard to reproduce effectively (in the case of the space-ships) that nobody has yet made one that works and isn’t immediately shoved into the Lore Hole.

Like, seriously, five minutes of the Vindicaar just sending down a flight of Warframes with transponder devices to triangulate the Horde’s main forces and NUKE THEM FROM HIGH ORBIT, and Sylvanas gets fried like a mosquito in a bug-zapper and we never have to deal with the Shadowlands? But noooooooooooooo, they’re ‘busy’ 


And it never shows up once during the Battle for Azeroth. Literally we had transponder thingies that allowed us to call down a short-lived single-shot version of the ORBITAL DEATH LASER, why couldn’t the Light Forged just affix a few of those to the Alliance vessels and carve Richardbutt into the side of the Zandalari Capital’s obnoxious pyramid/castle?

We seem to swing between them being too expensive to mass produce and then we throw them away on suicide missions because lol, “Get me closer, I want to hit them with my axe!” memes?

Bleh

3) Where is my Fantasy Ecologies, X-Insert name of favourite Deity/Pantheon here-X! :

BLARGH This is far more personal, but I miss when WoW was more fantastical and less shark-jumping. I wish Kalimdor had more mega-fauna, like ground-sloths and saber-toothed tigers and dinosaurs and stuff wandering around and not just different coloured versions of Eastern Kingdom animals. This is just the Paleo-Nerd in me, but this is the continent lost to time and separated from the other half (or is it?) of the planet for 10,000 years and saturated in magic. Having entirely different ecosystems where convergent evolution plays its part would have been absolutely majetic.

Imagine herds of Mastodons slowly meandering through the colder forests, watched patiently by feathered raptors perched in the tree branches for the weak or the young to wander away from the herd, for a mixed herd of Stegodons and Bison ambling across the plains of the Barrens to the next watering hole, while overhead, buzzards, dimorphodons and wyverns squabble for the best vantage point to watch for carrion, or ride the thermal currents high in the air.

I just 
 I love that. I love the mingling of fantastical, modern and prehistoric ecologies and ecosystems mingling and finding equilibrium. Flocks of small birds that adapted to live on the backs of brutosaurs because the lumbering behemoths are not only host to a variety of parasites that the birds will happily eat, but they’re so massive no predator is dumb enough to go anywhere near an adult, and small nests affixed to the Brutosaur’s dorsal crests hold the eggs and chicks of the birds. Or colonies of prehistoric giant sea-otters living alongside and within the giant sea-creatures we encountered in Cataclysm, treating the gigantic crab-mollusc-thing as both a home and a territory, foraging for fish and clams around it, attacking anything that came near their ‘territory’ and cleansing the inside of the creature of parasites and unwanted visitors.

Pandaria would have been an amazing homeland for some of the weirder ancient creatures, like Glyptodonts, Paraceratheriidae (think a hybrid of hornless rhinos and giraffes) and the Indian Rhino, along with giant turtles and serpents and insects, trapped and kept safe and without needing to evolve by the Mist barrier that kept the island-continent contained for 10,000 years. The Waters of Life from the Golden Vale would have been an amazing example of creating true freaks of nature and wonders of the natural world, but alas, we got giant veggies instead.

Could easily have had Gigantopithicus fighting Saurok in the tropical jungles of Pandaria as a Godzilla vs King Kong running joke as well as how the Mogu’s reckless and cruel flesh-warping experiments had dramatically thrown off the natural balance, although we could easily argue the giant apes of Stranglethorn Jungle could be classified as such, given their huge size, but alas.

Imagining micro-raptors running rampant through Orgrimmar, taking the place of pigeons and rats from Stormwind, while dimetrodons and capybara from the shores of the Southfury River became staple pets and, in times of hardship, food for the Orcs and Trolls who had come to live in the area.

Just feels like a missed opportunity to me. A land 10,000 years old and separated by a massive ocean from the rest of the world 
 and it’s ecosystems are a palette-swap for the Eastern Kingdoms with a rare few exceptions.

BLEH!

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  1. No limits to magic/anime: This is a problem for me as well. When Khadgar combined all 3 magic families in WoD or when Jaina summoned a ship to blow up UC, they should have been knocked out for days. Big magic, even when used by a strong and proficient magic user, should have some kind of limitations. The limits shouldn’t be only for peon users. It should be for every user ICly (I wouldn’t have this be a thing for game mechanics - we already run out of mana, energy, etc.).

  2. I feel like magic should blow basic technology out of the water. A fire mage should be able to cook the metal in a gun, for instance. A magic shield should be able to repel bullets or bombs. Honestly, a land where swords, firearms and magic all are viable against each other wouldn’t really work unless you’re suspending belief, which we are. When we get to larger weapons like space ships, repelling that would be making entire cities invisible or shielded, or floating like Dalaran where they could be transported.

  3. I entirely hate seeing the same critters with just a recolor showing up in so many zones. Sometimes it makes sense from a realistic POV, though.

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This is more or less why I’m ambivalent about Rule of Cool, which the setting seems to be almost if not entirely fueled by. While perhaps not the sole culprit of problems like this the nature of the trope also does little to discourage it. One could argue, intentionally or otherwise, that it does the opposite.

Man, I’m so glad I share this disposition with someone. Just what I need to feel a little saner. For a time, I’ve tried to configure a decent justification, however I find that there really isn’t one. Most would simply blame it on ‘magic’ which often feels like such a copout it’s sometimes infuriating. In truth the answer seems more meta; because this is a fantasy setting that does what its creators think is cool while damning the consequences until they’re convenient to address.

I imagine this is largely an issue whose likely cause can be traced to a bunch of different things. I’m most inclined to blame the general problem with the High Fantasy genre, in that I feel it’s plagued by excessive derivativeness. I fear I can be somewhat pessimistic about matters like this, however.

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I know WoW goes with a cartoon aesthetic, but can you imagine how stuff looks like under a realistic filter?

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To your second point I actually really hate the tech creep in from Warcraft 3 to current WoW. Zeppelins were cool as a raggedy and explosive goblin thing, but the mega airships are dumb. Cata has probably three dozen quests where you man a full-auto machine gun and the objective is to kill a thousand guys.

I’m fine with tech in my fantasy if it’s suitably alien or, I don’t know, fantastical. Draenei tech is great for this. But little things like humans in Redridge using walkie talkies just rips me out of the fantasy.

At this point, everyone in the setting ought to be putting on tacticool vests and sneaking around with rifles and thermal vision and I hate it

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If they’d kept Steampunk/Dieselpunk/Biopunk vibes going (Goblin/Gnome/Dwarf for the first two and the latter for the Forsaken) for the purely mechanical, and the ethereal magi-tech of the Sin’dorei and Draenei, I think there’d be a lot more fantasy in the game still.

Steampunk was a long tradition in WoW, and was made effective beyond normal levels by a material known as ‘Pholigoston’, an alchemical mixture that combined oil and water, along with a few other ingredients, that dramatically increased the effectiveness of steam-powered technology by inducing a massive increase in steam-pressure from a water source, almost unnaturally so. It was clean-burning, very cheap, and was responsible for the Dwarves and Gnomes being able to field entire fleets of flying steam tanks, biplanes and gyrocopters in the field for long periods of time with little maintenance and low costs beyond the originally steep creation fee.

Dieselpunk has also been a long-running tradition in WoW, but generally revolved around the highly unstable but undeniably effective Goblin engineering. It was messy, chaotic and prone to exploding into super-heated shrapnel and firestorms if poked the wrong way, but damn did it surpass most modern steam-based technology with ease. Of course, with the decline of Kajamite, Goblins had to turn back to Steampunk technology since it was more reliable and didn’t require ingesting Kagamite for short-lived bursts of absurd brilliance and intellect.

Biopunk involves both the replacement of machinery with bio components, and biological ‘technology’, something that the Forsaken embraced whole-heartedly after breaking free from the Scourge’s control. The Blight, Abominations and the ability to train and enslave the Blight- and Fel-warped creatures of the world, and later tame Undead creatures, all are hallmarks of a very dark and gothic tweak of the Biopunk genre.

I do think the reason not everyone is toting around miniguns and Reinhart-type shields is because, for the time being, neither the Horde nor the Alliance have the time, the money, the personnel or the knowledge to bring the kind of mass-production facilities to bear that could produce high-quality mass-produced machinery that could in turn be assembled into more focused factories and facilities to produce the highly-specialised parts required for mass-produced military-grade firearms, war-machines and armor.

Every gun, every bullet, every breastplate and every part of a Steam Tank’s inner workings is hand-made by skilled and irreplaceable teams of artisans and craftsfolk. Certainly, they have found ways to speed up the creation process and no doubt casting takes place in a large amount of ways to further speed up the creation of bulk items, but metals especially need to be treated differently.

The type of hardness within steel you’d need for a sword is very different to that of an axe-head, and orders of magnitude different from what would be required for a heavy breastplate. Working metal to remove impurities is also required, and periodic cleaning of crucibles, molds and casting tools is absolutely imperative to ensure contaminants don’t end up in the mix. Molds also tend to break down under constant use quite quickly, and a cast sword is going to shatter way too quickly compared to a sword made traditionally, with a twisted and forged core and one or two edges made from a separate piece of metal and forged specifically for that purpose as it is joined to the ‘core’ of the blade, ensuring the blade had flexibility and strength from the ‘core’, and hardness and a reliable edge from the ‘edges’. While a blade could be forged from a single piece of iron or steel, unless a master smith was involved, this could result in a blade that would bend and not flex back, or simply shatter once it reached a certain amount of stress. With the grinding cost of the endless Wars that Azeroth has endured over the past decade, the loss of technical and technological knowledge alone has probably set both Megafactions back decades, if not more, since those who picked up after the loss of the bulk of the experienced craftsfolk and artisans might be able to fake it enough to keep up the supply chains, the true masters are either dead or too busy pumping out bulk items to truly pass on the mastery required to make the leap from a cheap and effective weapon to a true masterful piece of work.

This, I think, in turn also makes the Artisan Collective we’re working with in the Dragon Isles so gorram important, because they’re actively working to not only encourage more people to take up the trades rather than just eke out a living, but they’re gathering, codifying and stockpiling lore on all forms of production for not just one faction or race, but to all sides, working to slow down and reverse the loss of knowledge and traditional skills that the conflicts between the Alliance, Horde and whatever Villain of the week got between them over the past decade +.

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