War of the Thorns killed the Warcraft franchise

Seriously.

It remains immensely frustrating to me that I have played several RPPVP camoaigns that were more mature and morally nuanced than any of the official faction fights Blizz has pumped out.

Purely by virtue of having a lot of different characters. And naturally some people are going to want to RP as heartless mercenaries or outright cold blooded villains regardless of what side they’re on.

Seriously I’ve mentioned it before but I had this delightful little subplot on this toon with a Priestess of Elune. They became friends during the events of Legion in the Conclave and were obviously horrified to see eachother’s people massacaring eachother. So conspired to try to apply harm reduction theory to various conflicts.

They knew they couldn’t stop it but they could prevent unnecessary suffering and death at least.

And yeah I’m obviously bias but that’s way more interesting to me than anything Blizz did with the Blood War. Unironically their friendship was better written than Andy’s and Saurfang’s.

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I didn’t. There is no fun in a story where you are the loser by default no matter how hard you try. The Zandalar story was the death blow to the Horde.

that stuff was actually fun though; for me at least. I do wonder if maybe they should have made the afterlives look/feel even more alien? Make it more obvious that our mortal morals of ‘good vs evil’ actually don’t matter as much as ‘picking useful pieces to keep the Machine of Death running correctly’?

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Unfortunately Blizzard proved too terrible of a company that my friend that I role played with in WoW since the game launched unsubscribed and quit WoW after Shadowlands and is even dismayed that I still give any support at all to Blizzard’s games, so I don’t even have role playing any more to keep me interested in the game.

I also hate PvP and only ever do it to get very specific cosmetics when they catch my eye. I almost felt like gearing up and doing some arenas for the Vicious Sabertooth last season, but I couldn’t bring myself enough motivation to even go for that.

Sorry to hear that hun. That’s terrible. Is there anything besides pure nostalgia that keeps you playing?

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From a gameplay standpoint, I actually found Torghast to be more fun.

Horrific visions were about making it harder for yourself every time: “Okay, you can clear this map with a time limit? Well, now clear it with just one hand. Mastered that? Now do it blindfolded. Now do all that and add hopping on one leg the whole time.”

Torghast, on the other hand, was all about about giving you more—“What crazy OP combo can I stack up and play with now?” And I could set my own pace. It felt way more liberating and fun, to me.

I think it’s just individual preference as to which one is more enjoyable.

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I hated horrific visions. I orignally hated Torghast, but once I got geared and was able to solo clear the place with little issue, the different combinations of power ups you could use were a lot of fun.

To me, it’s just something fun to do and to see how quick you can clear it and beat your personal best time

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Tbh I keep coming back to WoW because I think it has the best PvP in the buisness. It’s one of the few games where you can tangibly feel yourself improving. Everytime I lose I’m usually either acutely aware of how I slipped up. Or better yet I’m not and have to now figure out WTF happened.

Genuinely my only real grievance with DF has been PvP being a balancing roller coaster. Which I accepted was probably going to be the case with the new talent system which on the whole I adore.

But like I outright haven’t played Shadow in PvP this season as after not having the time to play for a few months I came back to find it completely reworked again. And I just can’t be assed to figure it out for like the seventh time.

Not when I can play Disc in my sleep at this point at any rate. Which imho is in the best place it’s been since Legion.

I think it’s all about finding the right class / spec. I really didn’t expect to fall in love with Priest. I used to main Rogue and usually default to offensive wizard type characters in fantasy games.

But decided to play Priest just on a lark and fell madly in love with it the first time I personally turned the tide in an Arathi Basin match.

PvP healing is basically just tanking, it turns out.

Night Elves are one of my favorite fantasy races, so I’ve stuck around to see their lore. I don’t mind when things go badly for them - I bought the A Good War / Elegy book off of eBay (I didn’t want to pay Blizzard for the rest of the BfA collector’s edition) and was able to get Exploring Azeroth: Kalimdor for free (literally $0) from a crazy Amazon deal, and even own the The World of Warcraft Pop-Up Book that has a full pull out of Teldrassil burning - as long as there are good things for the Night Elves and they are shown recovering from the hits they took like is possible to level through from all of the Night Elf involved zones that were redone in Cataclysm (Teldrassil, Darkshore, Ashenvale, [a little less so in] Stonetalon Mountains, Feralas, Felwood, Mount Hyjal, the Molten Front and Firelands), or Val’sharah and cleansing the Emerald Nightmare in Legion.

That last caveat has been harder and harder to see, though. I still love “Terror of Darkshore” and I’m glad canonically the Night Elves won the Darkshore Warfront. I’m glad Alliance side we got playable Dark Ranger Night Elves after the fiasco of the Jailer’s Val’kyr raising them. I am glad we got to save so many of the Night Elf souls, including named ones, from Torghast and the Maw.

But I’m getting tired. Tired from some of the Night Elf souls in Torghast getting amalgamed and having to be obliterated. Tired from Ursoc being seemingly killed off for the pathos of a new character that (I’m glad we) also got killed off. Tired from the Park getting burned down and left unrestored for years only to be turned into a second monument for Varian. Tired from the Night Elves being shuffled off into a Stormwind bumpkin patch.

… So really what’s keeping me here is making alts and dressing them up in transmogs and figuring out which titles and mounts and pets would match best with them.

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And if that what makes you happy, or playing, that’s all that counts. With the direction things are going lately. I can only hope things get better going forward

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Yeah I’m still kinda shocked the Nelves have been left as hanging as they are.

Tirisfal is objectively still in shambles. Seriously it’s a mess. I’ve tried on multiple occasions to RP and asking every single participant to completely a lengthy questline as a prerequisite is kinda an ask.

And on top of that even when all the participants have done so, ish still barely works. We wound up having to stand on a very particular stretch of road near the Calston Estate to stop people from sliding through timelines like they’re drunk driving a Delorean.

Only to eventually figure out we were somehow in the Cata version when a fresh undead toon came zooming by with the chauffeur sorta mount.

But at the very least they moved the plot forward. I do try to keep my own characters stories tangentially at best connected to the main storyline. But it’s kinda hard to ignore your characters house being destroyed and then just - zero updates on that situation for literal years.

Well thank God it was all for such a tremendous and genre redefining story. How else were we going to get to the eels?

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Idk it just did nothing for me. Maybe because the Shadow buffs just weren’t terribly interesting. I always wound up getting that one that gave you an extra free Shadow Word: Kills for every zapped Mawrat.

Then I just saved up a bajillion of those to nuke the final boss with.

Do vaguely recall enjoying it on Hunter once. But genuinely the place was just too boring for me to get invested.

What I liked about Horrific Visions was how, well, horrific they were. Stuff like Rexar using Mischa as a living bug buffet and those faceless ones posessing orphans in SW genuinely creeped me out. Plus obviously we have a pretty tangible emotional investment in these cities.

With Torghast I had to check if they were actually randomly generated because the environments were so interchangeable that I legitimately couldn’t tell. Plus the enemies were just, egregiously boring imo.

About the time I was fighting black blobs with frowny faces on them I wondered if they were even trying anymore. Then I got to the final boss - which was just a rock. And that confirmed to me that no. No thet weren’t.

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Not just Tirisifal. Silverpine and Hillsbrad too. Alliance forces are there permanently because the council is weak.

Erevien we’ve been over this.

WoW logistics don’t make any god damn sense. And the Alliance is occupying but two things right now; jack and ish, and jack left town.

Silverpine is still stuck in 2010. And Hillsbrad is actually like the one zone that isn’t a complete phasing nightmare.

Until they actually change the map in game I really don’t care what a coffee table book claims. Because Gilneas went from an uninhabitable wasteland to being occupied by the Forsaken from one story beat to the other.

This isnt like a legitimate thing to care about. I can say actually Silverpine is now home to the an army of were-chickens and it’s just as relevant to both the game and story as anything else.

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I hate pvp. I can pvp successfully, that is no problem. I have the Justicar title and Master of Warsong Gulch meta achievement. And while getting Vicious Warsaber mounts I even got the Rival arena title, for whatever that’s worth. My last foray into pvp was Ranked Battlegrounds for the purple Mage Tower Cat Form that I use now.

But I don’t enjoy competitive, well, anything, so pvp just irritates me on a fundamental level. Especially world pvp. When I first started playing WoW after launch I first played a Feral Druid Tauren on my friends PvP realm. I despised it. When that friend got bored of WoW I deleted that character and started this Feral Druid Night Elf on my other friend’s Normal server, and have been maining it ever since.

I could not be happier about no longer having to race against Horde players to tag mobs, and am glad to help them kill whatever they’re after if we’re playing in the same area.

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Ivar and his pack have half of it under control. We are back to pre Catclysm and the Thrall era where he allowed the alliance to harrass the Horde with no reaction. Krenna and Garrosh were right.

See I’m on the opposite spectrum. World PvP is my favorite aspect of the game bar none. Because it’s so completely unpredictable and chaotic. I really find the game kinda boring when there isn’t that constant background radiation of danger.

But I will say I think Warmode kinda screwed up world PvP pretty severely. Because it now means the devs just don’t have to account for it when designing areas.

Seriously ish was borderline unplayable in SL. The Maw was just a directionless blood bath and early on it was just insane what an edge druids and worgen had. I threw a guy off a cliff four god damn times but he just kept coming back till he won. Since he could sprint over there and my rear had to waddle over when I got dropped.

Plus it’s really just ruined the decorum of PvP. Yeah you’d always have some guys looking to start a fight and it wasn’t uncommon for outright battles to break out. But the inescapable nature of it meant people had to be careful. Because if you really got people mad you’d have an army making camp on your corpse.

Now though? People will just turn it off instead of marshaling a response. Which usually just leads to one side completely dominating.

I do think DF remedied this fairly well though. As dragon riding allows for quick escapes. And I’ve dive bombed people off their dragons more times than I can count because it literally never stops being fun.

I thrive off of predictability and schedules. The only praise beyond the aesthetics of the Vicious Warsaber mounts I can give them is that I knew I was going to get them and when instead of having to rely in RNG.

I am as traumatized as Farondis’ court by how many years I had to stay in Azsuna before getting the Cloudwing Hippogryph.

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Honestly after getting the Vicious Black Bonesteed I’m kinda done with mounts. If nothing else because I’ll never tire of all the completely juvenile bone jokes I can make about it.

Plus fundamentally I’m just never going to love anything as much as my Undercity Plaguebat Heidi. Because of course I named her.

Last mount stuff I really put in the time to get was the Argent Hippogryph but I got all the Argent stuff in the process of getting the Crusader title. Which I needed for this toon’s RP background.

Because it’ll never stop being funny having newcomer MHPs giving me the “Die monster, you don’t belong in this world” shtick only to have an experienced one saunter up and go;

“Ah Crusader Lord Benedikt. Pleasure to see you here”.

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I make sure my alts don’t share any armor slots with the same transmog piece, nor that they share titles, pets, ground mounts, or flying mounts.

So I need a lot of Night Elf themed mounts.

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