“The greatest are those less known” that could be even a child who dreamed this world into existence have we considered the dreamer?
Yea, those cutscenes made it so much better
“Titans bad, you betrayed us, now we’re gunna kill everyone”
Dang, such a riveting character
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All the Old Gods, among the biggest baddies in the game have been one patch wonders. You could be generous and say N’zoth’s release in Nzjatar makes him a two patch wonder. All the others? C’thun, dead in one patch. Yogg-Saron, dead in one patch. Y’sharrg, pre-dead because Amanthul hand of goded him (that needs to be a cutscenes, that’d be awesome to see). Even little wormy G’huun, the accidental Old God died in one patch (though he did have good build up (unlike some others)).
Dreadlords have at least a reason to come back, though I’m not sure if we actually killed Mal’ganis this time rounded or he houdinied on us…again. For like, the third time.
Then there’s Kel-Thu-freaking-zad! Utterly wasted in Rectum of Domination.
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That’s true. When they are defeated in WoW they should be imprisoned, and some point later, escape, rinse and repeat. Kind of like how Batman’s main villains always escape from Arkham Asylum. That’s why he never runs out of villains to defeat.
Perhaps it should be more along the lines of like - over a couple of expacs (I’m thinking two max for this strat) you introduce a villain and their command structure. We cut their forces down slowly until at the end of expac one, as we’ve taken care of all the small threats and the greater army, we face the first lieutenant. Once they fall, big bad’s gotta restrategize as this was not according to plan.
Expansion 2 they start making moves personal to us. Going after characters we love, places we love. Trying to shake us, throw us off our balance. They don’t send their command structure after us - we find them. We start hunting them. They get desperate - and then we pull in for the kill.
I feel like we gotta get a couple folks in the WoW team whose jobs are just to strategize against eachother as characters. Professional role players to make the actions taken feel alive.
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The biggest issue with that however is, well, we’re too strong at this point for a villain to perform villainy long enough to be notorious. The moment our Bad Individual Radar pings, we have the means and strength to wander over, dumpster the threat, and then go back to complaining about Client Orders in our capitals by dinner.
Remember, by this point, we’ve toppled beings arguably greater than gods; divinities can die, but we rearranged the literal afterlife. What’s some elemental-infused T-Rex got in store for us that we couldn’t handle?
And while the classic fix for this would be a world-wide power-down, well, I don’t think you need to look any farther than the stat or level squishes to see how well the playerbase would react to that.
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We have, yes - which is why folks like Gul’dan were wonderful.
To kill a god, you have to either be more powerful than one, smarter than one, or a mix of both.
You can have an underpowered military leader understand that we can carve through thousands of soldiers if we’re given incentive - so they set traps. Mana bombs. Rifts into unreality. Anything to slow us down. Killing ya is the goal obviously. They put us in situations where we can’t use swords or spells - Tie their soul to a particular beloved ally as a bargaining chip for instance.
Or,
they can aim to become more powerful than any force known now. Go the shonen route. Not in the vein of Razageth’s faith in the elements - instead fully aware that there is no force on Azeroth that we cannot overcome - so they reach elsewhere.
And Ragnaros and Onyxia and Nefarian and Kael’Thas and Kel’thuzad. Heck we’re even fighting a different version of Deathchin now.
I’d rather have one and done than to keep rehashing old villains.
They should just introduce the expansion’s big bad earlier and have all the tiers/bosses/minor villains build up to him. Works most of the time they do it that way I think, except for SL.
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Dudes gotta be involved in the story for it to work. Even Razageth had more time than the Jailer, and she was raid end boss #1 for DF.
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I’m kind of surprised they don’t do the Halls of Reflection tactic more where the BBEG shows up in a random dungeon and is just way too powerful for five of us to even attempt to take on.
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A character arc that spanned over 10 years and ended up essentially as a shaggy dog story.
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While true, you can try guerilla tactics against the superior forces of the Alliance and Horde, the problem is that all of those tactics are kind of specialized.
- Mana bombs require a huge amount of power to be worth worrying about, and anything like that will get Jaina’s attention almost immediately since she has a bit of history with those things. While she’s not entirely the loose cannon she’s been before, she’s still absolutely not someone whose wrath you incite and walk away still intact.
- Rifts into unreality isn’t really defined enough to be threatening. Is it just straight-up Into The Void style magic, is it more AU nonsense, is it the Weirdmageddon? Either way, unfortunately, again would assumably require a mammoth amount of magical power since breaking barriers between realities/the Void wouldn’t (or, rather shouldn’t) be easy. Which would invariably draw attention, which then results in a pummeling. And, while it would be funny to have the WoW equivalent of ‘I am not a very clever person’, an entity somehow Mr. Magoo-ing their way into breaking reality probably wouldn’t be very satisfying as a villain.
- Just Getting Stronger is the problematic cycle we’re currently in; every enemy has to somehow one up the others we’ve encountered because they have to justify being able to stand up against teams that were max level before they showed up and are getting +10 levels to go up against them. It’s always been a bit of a shock to me where I face down legendary or even just plain powerful enemies at 59 but the moment I ding 60, it’s back to whelps and grubs that sport the latest expansion’s version of corruption that could dumpster just about anything the Old World could throw their way.
The best way to manage this would be for WoW to learn what sidegrades are instead of making every expansion a creep of power and constant growth over the prior ones. Alas, that conflicts with the endgame-focused nature of the game as well as the efforts of the team to congest players into singular areas for maximum saturation and ‘played-in’ feel. Sidegrades means multiple villains can emerge and pursue their own agendas without necessarily invalidating the player’s power or making the Powers That Be look like buffoons for letting the threat slip under their omniscient noses. That said, this is the kind of problem you want to address before it becomes a problem, otherwise you need to approach players hat-in-hand and essentially beg them to permit a power-down so narratives that don’t threaten complete world- or reality-breaking can matter.
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True true!! I was kinda throwing spaghetti at the wall there - but the fact of the matter is that massive power gains do not trap you into a power climb grind if you’re clever about it. Almost cheekily clever about it. You gotta make people find in-universe ways to make your villains work beyond “oh they’re evil and there’s an ancient prophecy”.
I once had an idea for a south seas expansion with Matthias Shaw as the villain, this was a while ago, before MOP. He had a lil more moral flexibility before he became a genuinely likable rough around the edges dashing guy.
I really like Shaw 
.
BUT - it was all based around him running a coup. Basically he’d collected a bunch of villains right before their moment of “death”, locking them away deep in the stockades. Folks like Edwin Vancleef, Mekgineer Thermaplugg, Putress or Zalazane. Folks who fought for “freedom” for their people, regardless of how…truthful that was - the important thing being that each of them believed in their own cause. with the whole goal being to wipe out the factions entirely. How, you may ask?
Divide and conquer. Each of these characters had followers, but they all fought alone, without the support of an organization. Shaw would act the puppetmaster, making sure key figures escaped encounters before their necks met steel, creating hysteria in major cities and using his SI:7 intel to throw wrenches into faction stability. Things like ensuring the whole populace of Stormwind cared about the workers who died trying to get their just payment. Working with Zalazane to spur discontent at the Darkspears’ place in the Horde from the shadows.
The key would be to have the orchestrators of this chaos be a mystery until patch .2 - when hysteria has hit a peak and the people of the cities are crying for the heads of our leaders - the chainbreakers reveal themselves as these familiar characters pushing their narrative and succeeding - and suddenly we’re not just fighting some bad guys, we’re fighting a public turned against us.
I thought it’d be neat :3
I’m sorry but it’s nobody’s fault that you don’t know how foreshadowing works.
Yea the foreshadowing of them dying instantly
Very foreshadowy
There was literally no interaction with Zovaal. We never knew his intentions until we killed him. He should have been the greatest villain we ever had but was just a massive let down.
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this game has a storytelling problem.
It is told in fits (patches and raids). It means nothing happens for so long and then something happens immediately…
You’re not that invested.
And it’s not even just that the stories are cliche. Think about it. Would you care about any of the villain stories if you didn’t Care about their counterparts in warcraft?
Arthas is the only villain i’ve ever cared about. I have not played warcrafts. The stories in wow were never that interesting to me without warcraft context
They try to mitigate this through story behind covenant and renown. But because so much of the game play is tied behind it… You just want to rush through it anyway. As much as I hated what they did to shadow lands in terms of lore, Breaking it up like that was probably correct
Because of things like first paragraph.
Now were stuck with villains who have no back story… Nothing to prop it up like illidan, arthas, deathwing did. Who cares about the new ones? You need more time with the villains
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The same way we lived all these years without the same Titans that brought life to our World, just before we release their essences and restaure their powers in Legion.
Have Denathrius, a previous villain, take over the puppet and make a new combined Legion of the Mawsworn and Demons. All in order to try and conquer the Shadowlands and beyond like his boss Zovaal failed to do.
Use like level based phasing and Zidormi like in other places to effectively give us two versions of the Shdowlands zones like 8.3 did the Eternal Vale: one where Denathrius and sin anima have corrupted the zones, one without afterwards/the original. Also would be a good time to introduce us to small glimpses of the REST of the Shadowlands we never saw, places like: ancestral realms, the Tinker/Gnome realm, etc etc to help fill in lore plotholes SL was rife with.