I hate retcons a lot. They hurt the lore which is the core part of this game for me. I’m curious which retcons in the past have been the most grievous offenses in your eyes? I thought the this forum would have the best insight.
#endretcons
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changing doomhammer from his original characterization of a cunning warlord w/ no qualms about playing dirty in his rise to warchief/in the war against the humans has always been 1 of the retcons that frustrated me the most
one of the most interesting orcs gets completely white-washed in all of his post-wc2 portrayals so we can have another honor-obsessed nutjob to make the early horde look Noble or something lol
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I am 100% okay with retcons as long as the new canon is better than the old one.
I have no patience for slavish devotion to canon when the old one is bad.
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The Pantheon, Burning Legion and Old Gods.
Not only did they change Sargeras’ backstory and what drove him, they also added the void lords into it. The man had noble aspirations but a morally wrong way of carrying his goal out.
He seen the most down right, hellacious things while fighting demons for countless millennia. The Eredar played a huge role in his stance of Order/Chaos. He had conflict with what the Pantheon envisioned and what reality was showing. He tried to consult the Pantheon about it and they disagreed. He then stormed off to create the Burning Legion and release every demon he ever slayed. He wanted to undo the Titans work because it was flawed.
He now fears a Void corrupted Titan Soul. He also single-handedly annihilated the Pantheon but gets imprisoned by a glowy beam. The Legion also spans across all timelines now.
No one knew where the Pantheon were or what they were doing before. Not even their own creations knew where they were. The Pantheon now, were obliterated by Sargeras and somehow their souls ended up in Antorus.
The Old Gods used to be the evil in the universe. Now, they are just peasantry, parasitic subjects to the Void Lords.
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Probably the one that hurt the continuity the most was the portrayal of the orcs in Warlords. Before that, their actions could be pinned on the demon blood’s frenzy. Sure, they were warlike to begin with, but not outright monstrous.
Warlords took that away by showing us that they could do everything they did in the main timeline and more WITHOUT the demon blood. So it doesn’t exactly paint them as a race in a great light.
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The most egregious was probably Warcraft 3. Warcraft was already a 10 year old franchise with a edit: dozen four spin off novels and even it’s own Tabletop setting by then.
But then here comes Warcraft 3.
It radically changed how several races’ societies worked, namely Orcs an Goblins. It introduce a race of elves that in the lore were described as evil degenerates, but are now noble people whose history is intertwined with all the major events of the setting. The Burning Legion, Pandaren, Tauren, Gnomes, Scourge, Centaur, Naga, etc. All introduced in Warcraft 3.
Also, Azeroth used to be the name of the lands that currently comprise the Eastern Kingdoms, not the whole planet.
Which isn’t to say which retcons were good/bad. I like some. Don’t care as much for others.
It did, however, change stuff so much that people came to consider it the ‘truest’ representation of Warcraft, largely throwing out much of a decade’s worth of previously established lore while simultaneously deeming any later changes in the following decade (or beyond) as retcons that are bad for the sake of deviating from what was in Warcraft 3. I do find that fact kind of annoying.
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For me, it’s the Chronicles retcon to the boss clears for TK and SWP. Both were given to the Sha’tar and Shattered Sun Offensive respectively in the Wrath manual, but Chronicles changed this to the Horde killing Kael’thas twice and the Alliance clearing the Sunwell. Both of these retcons were not only unnecessary, but damaging to the story.
Kael’thas 1.0 was always the Alliance’s villain. His dialogue is very clearly written for Alliance players; he doesn’t need to explain his race’s backstory or cite Garithos to Horde ones. His raid cathedral – seized naaru tech – is much more Alliance-y than it is Horde. Perhaps most importantly, Silvermoon was still nominally on his side until he attacked it and stole M’uru.
This new story they cooked up about the Horde and all of Silvermoon learning about Kael’s insanity two patches earlier causes the whole timeline to fall apart, especially concerning Liadrin. Her eyes were opened to Kael’s betrayal when he attacked his homeland… only not really, because apparently she and everyone else already knew he’d gone crazy and evil. It doesn’t add up.
The Alliance clearing SWP is more straightforward in its… not-good-ness. The Horde taking out TK was stupid, but they at least retconned in a reason for it. Not so here, it’s just generically mentioned that the raid happened to be an Alliance one for parity’s sake. Going into the heart of blood elf culture and ending the expansion on a note of hope and redemption for the Horde’s blood elves is clearly more significant to… the Alliance? Such rubbish.
Most of the boss clears were fair enough (if completely unnecessary), but these two clearly weren’t given much thought. Or maybe I’m giving it too much thought… No, that’s unthinkable…
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Really? I’ve always thought his Chronicles portrayal was exactly what you mentioned. A cunning warlord with no qualms about playing dirty.
The Horde had no magic, no navy, no mounts, and were losing Orcs to attrition everyday. So what did he do? He allowed Gul’dan to create DKs, got the Ogres to build him transports, enslaved the red dragonflight, and beelines towards Lordaeron in the hopes of a quick siege
To answer the OP. I didn’t like the overwhelmingly one sided portrayal of the Horde during the WC1 and WC2 portion of Chronicles. It really paints a picture of a flaccid Horde that was never a match for the Alliance, let alone Lordaeron, and questions the legitimacy of the Bronze Dragonflight’s claim of the Horde being a threat that needed the EK to unite to save the world.
See, that’s one of the retcons I like. Where before, he was apparently corrupted by creatures much weaker than him like Dreadlords and Eredar, now he was corrupted by staring too long into the abyss. Which makes a lot more sense.
Three. There were three Warcraft novels when WC3 was released.
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I’m honestly not even sure where folks get the former version. None of Sargeras’ backstories had the demons or anything else knowingly corrupting him. All of them were existential crises born from the titan observing the horror of his foes’ actions and being unable to reconcile it with any feasible future in which the titans’ design could succeed.
For as long as Sargeras was a fallen titan rather than just some really powerful demon lord (i.e. since WC3 gave him a backstory), his fall always came from “staring too long into the abyss.” Chronicle just made it the purple abyss of the Void Lords instead of the fel green abyss of the demons. Either way, any theories about the demons or the Void Lords knowing what their behavior was doing to Sargeras were and still remain just that - theoretical.
Yep. Additionally the first WarCraft tabletop RPG (i.e. the non-World of Warcraft one) came out one year after WC3.
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There were 4 novels, which with the RPG I mistakenly attributed to pre-Warcraft 3 lore would have made a half dozen novels and books. 
I edit my posts so much and yet still manage to miss stuff…
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Yeah, that pretty much was ‘Psyche! The Orcs were always monsters to begin with after all and all that honor stuff was rubbish.’
It makes it worse that they do that and then still push the noble savage rhetoric which just ends up making the whole thing feel nonsensical at best and hypocritical at worse.
They should just settle on making the Horde monsters or not because they suck at getting anything close to a complex middle ground.
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The way they killed off Vol’jin’s kid, Yenniku.
They retcon the way a soul gem works…
The dev team lost so many plot lines that I doubt we’ll see Vol’jin’s family in Shadowlands. 
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Retconing Trolls being before the titans arrived and how they made the fundation of Stromgarde being just a stomp fighting at favor of the human despite being less strong, intelligent than the Trolls which is arbitrary giving a victory to a race in a shameless way
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What is the most grievous retcon?
Blizzard: Hey, you remember that one short story we came out with about Sylvanas all those years ago?
Playerbase: Edge of Night?
Blizzard: Yeah, that’s it! So, you can just go ahead and pretend that Sylvanas first met the Jailer during that story.
Playerbase: But…but it never says that anywhere in the story…?
Blizzard: It happened.
Playerbase: But there’s literally no indication anywhere–
Blizzard: The Blizzard has spoken! Accept the retcon as canon!
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Knack’s version of War of the Ancients.
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The worst part is, the story is hosted on their website. They could edit it at any time to include that part, but they don’t.
It’s a retcon that hurts even newcomers to the story. We have a story about the time that incident would have happened, but if someone wants to go back and read when it happened they can’t because the story don’t actually include that part.
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It’s almost as if they expect players to blindly accept that whatever they come up with at the moment is the established canon…
But no, that’s silly, there’s no way Blizzard would ever devalue their own storyline and top-selling RPG like that…
…right?
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That wasn’t a retcon.
You’re right, a proper retcon would actually make sense.
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