The implications of the Ysera thing are far-reaching and wide.
We now have access to the Shadowlands, the souls in it, and are close friends with the rulers thereof.
Are we trading the living and the dead like Pokémon cards now or something?
“I’ll trade you one Topper McNabb for a Thoras Trollbane.”
“What?! Thoras Trollbane is evolving from Death Knight to Paladin!”
I think lore has been broken for a long time
Yes, but at the very least you couldn’t trade souls like they’re collectibles.
I mean, unless you were a Warlock with soul gems, but that’s another story.
That’s quite an exaggeration. It was a special favour from the winter queen to her counterparts in the green dragonflight, not us. And one that came at a massive cost, and was for a critically important reason. It’s hardly the kind of thing she’ll do for us willy nilly. It’s also not something any other leader of the shadowlands could facilitate as only ardenweald has that connection to the emerald dream and the cycle of rebirth.
Change is needed and necessary.
this is something that actually bugged me a little bit about it… -was- it actually a ‘massive cost’?
I mean, sure they tried to make it seem like it was, but it felt kinda flat.
first because the trade was implied to only be temporary, with malfurion being able to return once ysera is done with her business in azeroth and goes back.
granted that might be quite some time, but its still not permanent.
secondly, while they say that its getting more difficult to access the shadowlands thats not the same as ‘impossible’ so tyranda could still pop in and visit him from time to time. so its not even like they are even really being seperated from each other in the meantime.
thirdly, yeah they say that malfurion will need to ‘sleep for a long time’ while his body adjusts to the energies or whatever… but he already spent like 7 thousand years sleeping. him spending a couple hundred years more is basically nothing in the grand scheme of things, if anything its basically just going back to the status quo for those two.
so as far as ‘sacrifices’ go, its basically ‘yeah i’m gonna go take a nap, be back in a bit.’
The full harm that Shadow Lands has done to the setting is only now starting to dawn on people.
Ok yeah, I don’t disagree with you. But the idea is still that it was theoretically a massive cost. All other points remain though. This isn’t a deal that can be made on a whim. We don’t have another Malfurion as collateral.
Well… just get a team of gnomes, goblins and maybe mechagnomes and recommission one of those harvesters in Westfall. They should have enough hay and branches sticking out of them to fool the the winter queen and her lot. Not like Malf has unique antlers. Penty of stags running about, and boom. A fair trade, and less time dealing with SL.
As long as you remember it’s Danuser, not the Winter Queen, who comes up with the motivations. The Winter Queen will act willy nilly if Dan needs her to and Dan has repeatedly shown he has contempt for both lore and logic which is why we’re in this situation to begin with.
whats broken. souls have always gone to another place. “we” have consistently dealt with death being “merely a set back”
how many times must we kill the same enemy?
something something, about souls not being able to truely die unless you manage to kill them in their point of origin or something. which is why the only real way to defeat the legion was to take the fight to them. 
The hilarious thing is since it is possible to swap out characters because Blizz said so, it’s given themselves a way to bring back other important NPCs when needed.
Need Uther for next expansion. It’s swapping time!
You’ll know they’ve truly jumped the shark when they bring back Ursoc.
At least we know Arthas and Garrosh won’t be back.
Until time traveling shenanigans happens again. It happened once, it’ll happen again.
That’s true. Souls have basically always been a commodity. That’s Bwonsamdi’s whole thing. And Odyn’s for that matter.
is that really that big of a loss though? like they make him out to be a big important character, but he hasn’t actually -done- all that much since the war of the ancients.
yeah he was pretty instrumental in the whole hyjall thing during the third war. but since then he’s just sorta been ‘there’
like the most important and relevant thing he’s done since then was to help deal with the emerald nightmare issue, but even then most of that was done with yseras help, and he wasn’t even able to confront xavius.
so not only is it temporary, and basically just a return to the status quo of the relationship between him and tyranda, but as far as trades go. we really aren’t loosing all that much in the meanwhile, especially when compared to getting ysera back.
as I said, the whole thing just felt overdramatic considering what it actually was.
The Bronze Flight and their wonky time travel still exists. So don’t give up hope of a time displaced version popping up when needed. Or at tops the murloc version. They still owe us for helping them.
Insert the Thor: “Was it really, though?”