Thoughts on Harandar (Heavy Spoilers)

Lore Story Forum
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So I finished Harandar yesterday, and I’ve gotta say that I’m somewhat mixed on it.

Compared to Zul’Aman and Eversong (even though it’s basically just a continuation of Eversong’s Lightbloom plotline), it was a good bit weaker.

When I was doing the “memories” quests and fighting kobolds, nerubians, and a titan construct, I couldn’t help but feel the fact that this was originally TWW content, but reworked for Midnight - in the same way that you could feel that the Siren Isle was BfA content reworked for TWW.

That said, I do like the Haranir. Honestly, seeing some people’s comments on the story here before playing, I was kind of dreading it, expecting it to be kinda ridiculous… but having only done Harandar’s main campaign so far, I thought it justified itself fairly well for the most part.

For example, their whole reverence of the World Trees and them tending to the roots was something I expected to be just outright bizarre, but when it was explained that the roots comprise the cradle of their missing goddess (who is OBVIOUSLY Azeroth) - the same goddess whose song originally led their group underground to try to find her - it makes sense why they’d revere the roots of even a newer tree such as Darnassus.

The Rift of Aln was pretty interesting as well, was wondering about that whole part of the Emerald Nightmare for a while now; that being said, I really wished we could’ve just interjected and just asked “Alndust? You mean Azerite?” because at this point the bigger twist would be that Aln’Hara isn’t Azeroth. Even the echoes we killed to get the small amounts of “Alndust” were exact matches for the echoes we’d been fighting in TWW’s pre-event and during the Radiant Echos.

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I’m confused as heck by the opener.

Everything leading up to and including meeting the council made me feel unwanted and like they were gonna attack us, then Zur’ashar Kassemeh was like “let me tell you all of our secrets RQ, outsider,” after legit giving me an item called “unwelcome visitor’s sash.”

What did I miss in-between the opening hostility and being given their secret histories?

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THe issue is that’s a “retcon” of sorts

Originally they only protected the roots of Elun’ahir, the world tree that Elune slapped on Azeroth concurrent the Ordering in that one book in TWW

But then they changed it, for reasons I cannot fathom, to every world tree roots ends up there. And Elun’ahir is nowhere in the zone’s quests.

Which I personally think is a mistake.

In Dragonflight, we got confirmed via Nymue’s boss description that Eonar/Freya didn’t make the Emerald Dream but rather “ordered” it.

Similarly, this zone confirms that the Rift of Aln, which we know as the core of the Nightmare, actually has always been there and is the location where the world soul was ripped from her cradle (by the Titans), which also retcons Nightmare lore.

If the Haranir had been centered on Elun’ahir, guarding the “True Dream”, guarding the “True Nightmare”, that would’ve been fine

But as they stand, not only do we have three different timelines presented in the lore (MSQ vision timeline, Side Quest timeline, Art Book/Elun’ahir timeline), but their themes now steal from Night Elves aggressively.

I worry they intend to make a metaphysical point that is beyond their depth.

That Azeroth became Azeroth when she was “Ordered”. That her name when she was Life was Aln’hara. That her name when she was Shadow was Nyalotha.

I suspect they plan a twist: it will appear as if the World Soul changed over and over again between Dreams and Nightmares and Order and more because of the “gods”: the pantheons, their servants, etc.

But it will be revealed, or at least I hope so, that the World Soul is shaped by the total sum of the souls of its inhabitants. The World Soul is merely a reflection of the collective will of the mortal peoples on its surface, no matter how much the pantheons tried to force other dynamics.

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All I remember about Harandar is the cute quest with the kid collecting glass to summon a cloud serpent everyone says isn’t real and general confusion about all the Totally Not Azerite stuff.

OH! The part of the storyline where Halduron (and Rommath) are going to torch Quel’thalas’ forests to stop the Lightbloom was pretty cool.

“We’ve rebuilt from ashes before” I came out of that part of the zone story a Halduron fan when before that I was “yep, he sure exists” about him.

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The problem is, they don’t care what happens to the tree itself unless the ‘roots’ are affected. As in they don’t won’t lift a finger until it is a threat to themselves and only themselves. This is evidenced when you bring up how Shaladrassil was corrupted by the Nightmare before the Lightbloom stuff and the guy you are talking to basically says, “so what? The roots were fine so why should we care?”. Or how they didn’t give a damn about the Lightbloom until it reached their doorstep and even then, only a small number of them returned to the surface to help us.

This is a problem because you couldn’t bring up Andrassil / Vordrassil. You know a World Tree who’s roots were corrupted by Yogg-saron and where were the Haradar? Doing F all. This is even more stupid as this is how Yogg-saron created the Nightmare. Which used the Rift of Aln as its base. It is why we face Xavius, the Nightmare Lord appointed by N’zoth (whom took over the Nightmare from Yogg-saron) in said Rift. Therefore it is strange that they couldn’t give a damn about the Emerald Nightmare… that was using a section of their very home as its base because reasons.

Side note: Clearly they know about Vordrassil as one of them goes to it and is part of an achievement to interact with several Hananir that journeyed to the world trees.

It is clear that they were only going to be protecting Elun’ahir, the world tree that was allegedly ripped out by Aman’thul according to a book in the Emerald Dream in 10.2. By allegedly I am referring to how said book is referred to as an unreliable narrator on the cover. And the main threat to said roots was going to be the Black Blood. However for some reason they replaced Elun’ahir with every world tree (minus Andrassil / Vordrassil, not even a mention of it) and the Black Blood with the Lightbloom.

It is just messy writing in their attempt of moving the zone from TWW to Midnight. And we know this is the case because they literally said it was AND the fact that early datamining for TWW had a zone called ‘The Rootlands’ that was placed next to Azj-Kahet and Hallowfall. Not to mention there is a passageway through the roots we see in Azj-kahet that lead up to said ‘rootlands’ (if it was implaneted). Currently you get a black screen and appear in a nearby Haranir outpost. The fact that said passageway does not lead you to Harandar says a lot. Even though it is obvious that is where the Haranir we encountered in TWW came from.

Which is funny as you can see some of them mining what is obviously Azerite in The Den by the JC trainer.

Which honestly brings up an important question. Where the hell were they during BFA where their Goddess was LITERALLY BLEEDING TO DEATH?

Oh right, that was only a thing that happened on the surface… so they didn’t give a damn.

Old Gods corrupting World Trees? I sleep
Emerald Nightmare? I sleep
Burning Legion seeking to destroy Nordrassil? I sleep
Ragnaros wanting to burn Nordrassil? I sleep
Azeroth bleeding to death? I sleep
Lightbloom corrupting the very roots of one of their so called ‘sacred world trees’? I sleep, for most of the population anyway.

Seriously, Andrassil / Vordrassil should have been a wake up call for them because there are no roots to protect if the bloody tree gets destroyed.

At the very least you can give them the benefit of the doubt when it came to Teldrassil as it was sudden and Sylvanas kept her intentions close to her chest. Not even Nathanos knew I believe. And Amirdrassil in DF was in the Emerald Dream when it was being sieged by Fyrakk.

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If they were reskinned dark trolls who are culturally called haranir it would make them canon in Nordrassil. Dark troll did help save Nordrassil from Archimonde with the horde even after the Night elves did a drive by. The dark trolls (haranir) near the surface that got killed by the twilight blade in Cata would explain why they weren’t there. Dark troll even worship the quilboar loa, which would explain their spikes.

They fit into the lore spot of dark trolls but got sucked into the world tree story of the night elves. The problem is the cradle and the roots being retonned.

They don’t quite take from the night elves in their visual themes. Monster hunters of mega fauna. Work with mushrooms and roots. They were proto druids just like old dark troll items from archeology.

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Harming a tree can harm the roots, especially in the case of Shaladrassil and Vordrasil. They didn’t care that “their goddess’ cradle” was GETTING INFUSED WITH VOID THAT COULD HARM HER TOO!?

HOW COULD THE HARANIR (OR THE WRITERS) NOT KNOW THAT!?

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“dO yOu ThInK tHe WoRlD iS eNdInG eVeRy TiMe It RaInS!?!???111”

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This is less “rain” and more “hurricane that somehow also reshapes the coastline”.

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Sorry, I was mocking an actual in-game response to pointing out that a tree is corrupted.

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All good, I misread the intent.

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It was absolutely meant for TWW – and tbh, I’m kinda bitter we didn’t get this as a final patch zone in place of K’aresh. It would have made TWW feel way more cohesive.

I’m only a few campaign quests in (finished Eversong and couldn’t wait to check out Harandar). It’s gorgeous. I love the zone. Yeah, it may feel a bit like Temu Pandora, but I dig the overall aesthetic. I’m really into Emerald Dream / Druid stuff, so for me it’s awesome.

Even this soundtrack melody introduced in TWW is heard throughout Harandar lol. It’s pretty amazing how clear it was intended for that xpac.

Going to K’aresh to stop Dimensius feels way more like a Midnight arc. I’m curious to see how this will all feel in context once TLT is behind us.

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The funny thing to me? It’s night and day if you compare how blizz wrote Zul’Aman vs how they wrote the Haranir. I was initially excited for them, but it just ended up feeling tedious and didn’t really add anything of substance to the overall lore. Outside of forced inclusion of a race that didn’t need to exist.

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Was anyone else really disappointed by the “shame” of the Haranir? When she mentioned this going through the memories and it was something Orweyna didn’t know about I was expecting a big lore drop. Instead it was just “when everyone else was fighting each other we did too.” Like who gives a crap.

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The shame was indeed a very poor reason to impose cultural isolation onto their people for all time and masking it as valuing tradition to hide from them that their founders believed them too dangerous to be allowed back up to the surface.

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Honestly, there are a few things from TWW that felt obviously set up as later patches that I’m disappointed we didn’t get.

With all the talks of how bod Dornic was, and that he was sealed away after being defeated, I thought that sloped part at the top of the coreway (where the broken section leads directly to a door) was perfectly set up for some kind of Dorn dungeon or raid.

There were talks about how the city of Azj’kahet has layers, and the deeper you go, the further back in their history you’ll go, with the Bronze Time Keeper for one of the races in the zone warning us to not go too deep. Cross that with the murals of the large Old-God-eque creature, and I thought we’d be doing more down there.

And most notably of all, the Undersea. It felt like a good chunk Hallowfall was building towards a future Arathi expansion and an Undersea patch in TWW, but now it’s just this place that’s been namedropped a ton of times, and yet it never went anywhere.

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Imo the weakest zone of the bunch we got. It also felt the most disjointed…Just from a level design standpoint? I was flying all over the place.

Super pretty zone, mind, but it just fell flat for me. Maybe I am biased against Haranir because I think they shouldn’t be here at all and are probably just some writer’s special creature they shoved into the game instead of giving the playerbase something they’ve been asking for for years already.

Maybe it would have come across better in a vacuum, but I think another poster somewhere said it pretty well. In the Troll zone were not trusted! So we gotta go through the local people’s trials to gain their trust…But! In the Haranir zone we’re not trusted, so we gotta go through their trials to gain their trust…

They’re just not very well written, imo, and the excuse for nobody having ever seen them before and why none of the Haranir ever did anything outside their own immediate area is extra bad. Stop trying to re-invent the wheel with new races nobody has ever seen but have totally been here all along, Blizz, and just give us the gosh darn fangled Naga or something. Good lord.

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I feel the exact same way at the end of the campaign I was like HUH???

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No doubt the entrance to Harandar was the part of Azj-Kahet that sends you to sleep where the Roots come from.

Khaz Algar likely was intended to have Worldcore, Harandar and Ara-Kara City of Echoes but Metzen talked the Devs into expanding the Expansion into the World Soul Saga and shoved Undermine in the story(because Metzen wanted the World Soul Saga to have everything) and since they weren’t doing an 11.3 they moved Harandar to Midnight.

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isnt that the whole point of the story, that they should care?