Maybe they should hate Golden instead and her toadie Danguser or what’s his name.
Anyway I’m not sure. On one hand she’s been twisted so much that I kind of hope I never see her again.
On the other hand the Horde could use some more of their old characters because it’s pretty much out.
Not everybody did. But at least MoP made it possible to opt out of the faction conflict if you didn’t want to do it, so that’s probably why you didn’t hear so many complaints. BfA, on the other hand, gated absolutely everything behind the faction war campaigns. By design, it was literally unplayable without participating in the war.
Still kinda amazes me that people still largely fail to understand that people loved MoP for a variety of reasons. The faction war being only one of many reasons to like that expansion
Most everybody understands this. I already pointed out that it is revisited today for leveling so obviously the questing was enjoyable. The zones were designed to be explored from astride your flying mounts. Monk’s were awesome. The aesthetic was great. The comic relief was side splitting.
But “The faction conflict” was part of the recipe and it’s not like walnuts and if you don’t like it you can just leave it out. The faction conflict was a huge part of the whole leveling campaign.
In MoP you spend literally half of your leveling doing faction war focused story quests. The whole story of why you are there is the faction war. Riko’s whirlwind romance with Kiryn is set on the backdrop of the faction war. Practically every other Battleground you will do on random is likely an MoP BG, because there is plot to justify and explain the addition of those BGs. What did we get in BfA? One?
So, they gave us a couple warzones. So what? I really think people over state the faction conflict in BfA and under state it in every expansion they liked, in order to retroactively justify their hate for BfA.
People bought BFA like hotcakes when they thought it was going to be a faction war focused expansion. They were mad when they showed up and were like “Where’s all the faction war I was promised?”
Faction war: good
Horde automatically and always evil/wrong/weak: bad
One way they could bring back the banshee Queen would be to villain bat calia in this light/void stuff. Have calia start purging the Undercity of shadow and have the banshee queen manifest as a personification of Sylvanas’ hatred. When her hatred and vengeance overshadows her guilt, the ranger general disappears and the banshee queen returns.
That would be kind of neat.
Okay, I just don’t want her in a leadership position.
Not necessarily. The only mandatory AvH stuff in the leveling zones is the stuff in Jade Forest. After that, you can go walkabout with Chen and Li Li, raise a cloud serpent, meet the mantid, deal with sha incursions, build up your farm in HalfHill, train with the Hidden Master, etc. etc., until you hit max level. And after you hit max level, you can hang out on the Timeless Isle away from the faction war. Maybe occasionally contribute some vegetables for rep with your faction army, but even that’s not mandatory.
Ask me how I know this.
All of which is in Jade Forest. And even then, you don’t go to Jade Forest for the purpose of fighting the other faction; you go there to claim/secure the new territory before the other faction gets there first, and it brings you into conflict. Not the same thing as directly invading each other’s territory, as in BfA.
Not everybody does or cares about battlegrounds.
You could fly in MoP without doing the faction war (beyond Jade Forest). You couldn’t in BfA.
You also couldn’t make characters of the allied races in BfA without doing the faction war.
I’m sure there are other examples, but those two things right there make a huge difference to the expansion experience.
I can only speak for this forum here, but that really wasn’t a complaint that I heard often.
Every argument you have about MoP not being faction war focused has an equivalent in BfA except perhaps flying, and even then that was a problem with flying in legion and BFA and SL, not “faction war” as a story concept.
And many of this forum’s anti-faction war people were on this forum every day acting out the faction war in Internet debate PvP every day. The faction war isn’t a problem. But there was bad writing. It’s just that the offense was so nebulous that it was hard to pin down. The “faction war” and how it “didn’t make sense” became a convenient scapegoat.
Worth pointing out that the Throne of Thunder patch involved two hostile faction excursions (Sunreaver Onslaught and the Kirin Tor Offensive), and the Siege of Orgrimmar patch was literally about sieging Orgrimmar to overthrow the Warchief.
It doesn’t seem reasonable to disregard the content when they were current because you can just do Timeless Isle stuff now in passing. That would be like saying BFA wasn’t faction war content because you can just spend all your time in Mechagon.
This
The other one is what they are. There was never a reason to give them the spotlight because “ranger general” isn’t interesting or specific enough.
Alleria is doing alright because of void. Void is her undeath. But it doesn’t have enough visual weight and kind of only pops up narratively as a plot device.
Neither of them were half the character Sylvanas was. In part because she was the dark lady, with all the trappings of that distinction.
I think you’ve both misunderstood my point. I’m not saying MoP wasn’t faction-war focused or that the faction war content wasn’t important in that expansion. I’m saying the faction war stuff was easier to avoid in MoP if you didn’t feel like engaging with it. In BfA, you couldn’t even unlock the other island without setting up war bases.
Okay. That’s technically true, I think, but you’re basically sitting out of the major story beats to do that.
That’s pretty basic. Jade forest equally was in the way of your progress. And if you want the Grand Griffon mount, you gotta go through a bunch of war content and dailies just to unlock quests that show you how cool anduin is and how monstrous the warchief is
Edit: Also, setting up the warbases to gain access to kul Tiras was far less overtly targeting the alliance than anything in MoP. You were basically gaining a foothold in an area the alliance was trying to secure by fighting mobs in that zone. It’s not like MoP where you’re literally bombing alliance bases.
Yes, that’s the point. You can sit out those story beats.
Purely optional. The things that MoP gates behind faction war accomplishments are things you might want, not basic quality of life stuff. You conceded my point about flight in BfA, and that’s pretty huge.
But the warbases are on top of the required Battle for Lordaeron, which is much more directly fighting the other side than anything in Jade Forest. In MoP, you could hop off the faction war track after the opening stuff, but BfA kept making you go back to it. You had the BfL, and then the warbases, and then they kept shunting you back to the war campaign for other things, etc. etc.
I mean, no offense, but I don’t think you have the most accurate perspective on how easy it was to avoid the faction war in either expansion because you clearly had no wish to even try avoiding it. In fact, you were actively looking for more.
Not unlike Darkshore transmogs?
You didn’t even have to go get alll those warbases unless you wanted to unlock flying. Which I already conceded was dumb, but also the zones weren’t designed to be flown over. It wasn’t necessary. Flying wasn’t a basic quality of life thing in Legion, BFA nor SL. I leveled multiple characters through BFA without completing almost any of that. Heck… I’m not even sure how it goes on my Allies because I’m only interested in that on Horde.
We can all agree that Calia sucks.
Calia has no business being in the Horde, much less the Forsaken. She’s not a proper Forsaken and she’s done nothing for the Forsaken to even justify her position on their council.
What’s funny is that they lied to us saying she won’t be the leader of the Forsaken but when it came down to it, when she did the Worgen a “solid” it wasn’t shown as a decision made by the council. It was her telling the Forsaken to abandon Gilneas and Voss running around trying to get Graymane’s girl to be her buddy. The other members of the council were, well not anywhere. And not to mention that Belmont was one of the guys who fought the mother of all battles to take that kingdom, but he’s not there. That was so stupid.
Just to be clear for myself, this discussion has basically been that MoP story/quests were rife with faction conflict stuff, that people showed up for BFA launch in droves despite being pitched as faction conflict stuff, but you’re saying that people didn’t complain about it as much in MoP because they could sit out basically every major content patch except for the Timeless Isle?
There were other things to do in MoP. Like your farm in Half-Hill, etc. That’s his point. It was less intrusive in MoP because it wasn’t as in your face compared to BfA
It was also way less insulting to the playerbase in general