Edit: During the course of this thread, several plot elements I did not experience myself were mentioned. These including her entire existence as a dagger, a quest chain in BFA which I mostly skipped and Dawn of the Infinite. The dungeon and knowledge of the dark heart was critical to understanding why she is so outrageously strong. Without that context I came to the conclusions I did below. I stand by them from the perspective of someone whose fist experience with Xala was literally the harbinger questline. There was buildup for her, it just ran in the background and could be easily missed.
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We have a big bad that, by Blizz’s own admission is only relevant because S Priests liked her as a dagger(Watcher interview linked on WoWhead).
Now she’s offing legendary heroes like they’re nothing and we’re told they learned their lessons from the jailer?
I contend she is actually worse because they openly admitted her entire existence is a retcon and/or fan service write in.
Not remotely enough buildup for her to be this much of a threat IMO.
We’re on expansion 10, we’ve burned through all of the known villains for the most part, even going back in time or to other realities to fight some of them again. Most big bads are going to be relatively unknown. Having a new villain kill a known character to set their power level is fairly common in storytelling. When it’s done poorly it sucks, but it can be done well. Personally, I really like Xal’atath. She’s a cooler villain than most of those we’ve dealt with recently.
But Blizz does seem to realize that creating mostly self-contained stories each expansion isn’t working all that well, which is why we have the TWW/Midnight/Last Titan trilogy. I’m not so sure we’re going to kill Xal’atath this expansion.
I see her more like a tool of whatever is actually the “big threat” and we will defeat it but like… that’s the plan we don’t see. I think iridikron knows a lot more than we do about the titans and there is a reason he wants them to come back to Azeroth.
I think xal isn’t much more than a pawn to start off the saga. That said, I enjoy her as a villain so far.
That’s the big bad in a nutshell in almost any rpg game.
Can easily tank extremely powerful hits early in the story until later on the game reveals a means to defeat them.
And keep in mind that in lore Xal’s body is that of a dead high elf that she possessed and there’s a mural behind the final boss of city of threads the shows a monstrous void monster which i assume is Xal in her true form.
Sure, but all of them until jailer had explanations for that power. She was so weak they stuffed her into a dagger she could not get out of without help and is now basically stronger than an aspect.
She was my sassy dagger for all of Legion and now she’s the most powerful threat Azeroth has ever seen? Definitely a big glow up for little Xally. Is Aluneth next? lol
We have killed off most of the long running characters. At this point to have a story you need to start building up new or relatively under utilized characters. We are basically out of WC3 characters to kill.
The Dark Heart. That artifact she was using to absorb the power of Dalaran when Khadgar walked in on her. It also holds the power of Galakrond already and who knows what else. With that kind of power she could easily withstand an attack from Khadgar.
You must not like exploratory writing then? Some people can only do their best work using the exploratory method, basically allowing the writing to form itself without a plan ahead of time. And no this does not mean things don’t make sense it means when they find an interesting plot point that they hadn’t thought of, then they add onto it even if that wasn’t in the original idea. (DM’s have to do this all the time btw, because sometimes player behavior takes an unexpected turn)
Xal’atath hasn’t broken any game consistencies and was introduced as a void/old god being. Everything so far has been in character.
