I supremely doubt Domination Magic was even uttered a single time during Legion’s development.
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I mean. It’s the helm of domination and the lantern (soul cage) was used to dominate Eyir. Domination was a theme. Odyn dominated Helya to force her to make Valkyr in the first place. The moral greying of Order insists on domination being the apparatus. The clear connection to the realm of death through Helya AND Odyn (and Muehzala who people predicted was the shadow that Odyn gave his eye to for some power before BfA and then predicted was Bwonsamdi’s boss before Shadowlands) seems to suggest that there was some magic involved with domination. It’s very likely that domination magic was always a huge part of the Shadowlands narrative and downplaying the Primus’ role in these events was the detour we took from the original narrative.
Edit: “What are we but slaves to this torment?”. Chain imagery. It goes without saying that “domination” by magical means is a huge part of death as a force in the universe (and shadow when they were the same). Someone doesn’t have to say “The domination magic of the Shadowlands!” In so many words during a demon focused expansion for it to be clear that “domination magic” has existed as a concept for the entirety of the franchise.
The helm of domination has existed since warcraft 3.
if you think that means Domination 
has existed this entire time, or that it has existed since Legion, I’ve got bad news for you.
They developed one expansion at a time until the World Soul Saga.
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That’s a gross oversimplification. They were certainly working on developing dragon flight while also making changes to the narrative for SL.
The plot is brainstormed and graphed and storyboarded. They hire their cinematic voice actors and other talent to make multiple cinematics at once and don’t just say “it would be more cost effective to do it now but we haven’t even started writing for the next expansion which will come out in 3 years. We probably don’t need time to polish and edit the trailer…”
Do they do the bulk of the systems development and game design for the next expansion after the current expansion is already well underway? Maybe. More likely they are always about 2 expansions out. And we complain that they reuse unpopular systems for two expansions before “blizzard finally listened to us!” When in reality they were already invested in that mechanic too much to redo the whole next expansion by the time people actually got to see it in the expansion that it debuted in.
And we see this in art assets that make it into the game shop and in hearthstone seasons. They were dropping completely polished pirate assets in the shop and having pirate themed Hearthstone stuff with complete narratives leading up to their “Let’s go to the south seas to recruit a navy!” expansion. They had been working on those assets and designing that hearthstone stuff well before it came out, and that was significantly prior to BFA was announced. But those assets were part of the whole project they brought to the art team and contractors like Laurel Austin and said “make us a bunch of nautical concept art” and that came after at least some of the writing was finished.
Edit: Specifically, concerning Shadowland’s plot and Sylvanas, it is most likely they started writing the entire narrative during Cataclysm development, but couldn’t set the wheels moving until after WoD because it takes time to do all this. It has been speculated that this is when interest in Muehzala began to ferment in the dev team, when they specifically chose to keep the reference to Muehzala in ZF during the base zone rework. You may recall that theories during BFA that Bwonsamdi’s master was Muehzala, were met with a healthy amount of skepticism because up until BFA’s announcement, Muehzala was just a mysterious name in the flavor text of a tablet in a vanilla dungeon. Then in 2018, Travellers part 2 was published and people were still like “Oh it’s just a children’s book. It’s not canon”. It’s also one of the reasons I believe SL was rewritten in a last minute scramble. They had to scrap a lot of the content around the character they foreshadowed the most. But they did foreshadow him. They knew for multiple expansions we were going to the Shadowlands. Who we were going to meet when we got there and what that was going to mean for the narrative.
My son.
Bolvar is hella active in Legion.
Where was his domination magic?
Why didn’t he simply dominate the red dragons into telling us where the corpse was?
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Wasn’t it because he was just more “sane” than Arthas. Like, he wasn’t totally evil. He was morally grey unlike Arthas’s just Lawful Evil.
No?
He doesn’t give a single ish if you render the red dragonflight incapable of reproduction for the rest of time (until dragonflight retconned it.)
This is the flight that saved him from being a mindless undead.
Um… Keeping the scourge at bay? I mean… They talk about how hard he was working to do this in the novella leading up to the BfA prepatch event.
The Lich King has been keeping the scourge at bay since Arthas was around.*
You’re making up bull ish to imply “”“DOMINATION HAS BEEN AROUND ALL ALONG!!”“”
No, it hasn’t.
They made it brand new for Shadowlands.
*Citations:
Mathias Lerner
Lich King Arthas wanting you to become demigods before he tries to kill you and raise you as undead champions.
The helm of domination granted the lich king the magical power to keep the scourge dominated.
Why are you pretending this isn’t a thing?
Edit: The only thing that was new was the Nathrezim and the helm being native to the Shadowlands And not some demon related thing.
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All necromancers control their undead, typically.
The helm of domination only controlled the undead.
He couldn’t control Illidan, for example.
the Jailer could’ve, though.
Cause the Helm of Domination just used Fel/necromancy magic, not Domination.
It wasn’t conceptualized then.
It was retconned later.
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I think the Domination stuff as a central theme was retroactively added, much like Zovaal and the Dreadlords. Legion/Stormheim was pretty straightforward to me in that the lantern was Helya trying to stick it to Odyn via Sylvanas, who at this point was still desperate to find a reliable method of fending off true death.
I think it is not terribly difficult to reverse engineer Domination as a thing due to how often it shows up (charms, binding demons, controlling elementals, at least half of the “I’m corrupted by Old Gods oh noooo” threads).
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The answer of course will be how it’s handled.
Not everyone is going to be happy no matter how it’s done.
Had to use 3 of them actually.
Okay. I see where the sticking point is.
Certainly, they had not yet come up with the term “Domination Magic” yet. I’m not claiming there was a secret napkin in a vault, upon which Metzen had scribbled the words.
What I am saying is that Necromancy, as a force has ALWAYS had a motif of control and domination. So much so that the highest artifact of that force has “domination” in the name. Therefore domination as a concept (not a magical school) has always underpinned both Necromancy in WoW, the story of the Forsaken, and the dark side of the Titans.
Liv Octavius?
Okay but having two items named for Domination, that dominate the undead as the Crown has always done, is not evidence that Shadowlands Domination magic was already conceptualized or planned.
It’s ALL retroactive.
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Not the week before the patch.
I’ll bet dollars to donuts they already had the idea by Legion and Stormheim, which is where this thread started. They were fermenting it during development for Cataclsym.
If it’s written well, it’ll be good. Them putting her away for a long while without outright killing her was probably the best way to handle her given that she’s still uber popular, but also had very bad writing leading up to Shadowlands that tainted whatever story they were trying to do there.
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And they shouldn’t have bothered. Nu-Syvlanas is damaged goods. Nothing short of a major retcon of Legion, BfA and SL’s can fix it, so its best if she’s forgotten about in the Maw.
100% this. When you have to add asterisks to to your new-fangled magic school for your silly plot to work, it’s not a good story. Or a narrative patch-job.
The hastily added Domination Magic and Mournblades are the kind derivative tripe that makes me hold stuff like the comics and expanded universes in contempt.
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