Your Lore Hot-Takes

Lore Story Forum
21

The Horde versus Alliance bit is infinitely more interesting and enjoyable than the Cosmic War. Solely on the fact that it is more grounded. Doubly that if written well it can create way more interesting characters and relationships than what the Cosmic War can and did provide, with the majority of its characters (in Shadowlands ) being nigh forgettable.

There needs to be a focused shift away from Elves, Humans, and Orcs, and a shifting to Gnomes, Tauren, Dwarves, and other less-appreciated races to flesh them out and have interesting characters. As it currently stands the Trolls (Darkspear) have had their most interesting character wiped and Rokhan doesn’t really have anything that can make me appreciate him as I did Vol’Jin.

The Scarlet Crusade is an interesting villain that’s still survived in some fashion, evolving as the story has gone on. Having them be villains is still a plus. I would like to see more of them and more time built on fleshing out the new Scarlet Crusade.

A lot of players suffer from genre blindness and poor literacy when viewing and interacting with World of Warcraft and its community. People get into juvenile slap fights over things that don’t really matter outside of personal feeling. Eg: Players being Tyrande is ‘unhinged’ after Teldrassil, the back-and-forth demands and debates concerning anything Night Elf. And how the Horde is ‘Vile’ and ‘Horrific’, etc. The correlating of real life terms such as genocide and other hard-handed terminology is also poor form as it detracts from real life actions and should specifically be reserved for real life.

9 Likes
22

The concept of a ‘High Naaru’ or Naaru having a strict human-like ladder of command ruins their initial concept of being abstract incredibly alien creatures.

Them talking like regular humans like Xe’ra did in Legion instead of mystical vague psychic noises ruins this too.

Everything they’ve explored/done with the Draenei has been dumb, uninteresting, 2-dimensional nothing writing. Blizz doesn’t know how to write a spiritual/religious people.

Velen should’ve been a long dead character, some Draenei being old enough to have lived on Argus is dumb.

This.

Blood Elves were at their best when they played on the idea of having a Drow-inspired society but it looked High Elven. Where instead of worshipping an evil god they explored themes of fascism and corruption. Instead of living underground they live on a crumbling alien world that they’re slowly taking over.

7 Likes
23

Ion was right about the redundancy of high elves, and the void elves were a valid compromise… or rather, they would have been, had they been story progression for the Alliance’s high elves instead of a Horde blood elf void cult. Abysmal execution is where that quote-unquote race really fell down.

The Sunwell’s restoration was a good story development; a fel-crazy villain race was never going to sustain itself in Thrall’s Horde.

5 Likes
24

(dunno if some of these are hot takes or not)

Odyn isn’t a villain, he’s at worst morally grey and Helya has become far worse than Odyn could ever be.

While the praise of TBC Blood Elves is warranted, the modern-day Blood Elves don’t get enough credit. The Blood Elves also are underrated in loyalty; they have no reason to betray the Horde.

Trolls are overhated and underrated. No tribe in specific, all of them in general.

Orcs (and the Horde) aren’t evil.

Shadowlands is also overhated and underrated.

Amirdrassil being on the Dragon Isles is not anywhere -NEAR- as big of a deal as people are making it out to be (I refer specifically to the claims that the writers “hate” Night Elves and that Kalimdor is totally and in it’s entirety being abandoned to the Horde.)

WoD is underrated, and tbh we should have lost to the Iron Horde. (Either Grom’s version or Gul’dan’s.)

The Argus Broken are while based, nowhere near in the same ballpark as the OG Ashtongue.

In a rush, so i’ll edit this later.

Edit:

Lor’themar, if ever given the title could have been the Horde’s best Warchief without any doubt, likewise if Vol’jin wasn’t wasted he could have been the best Warchief the Horde ever had.

The Draenei, Gnomes, Worgen and Tushui Pandaren are out of the main playable factions in the Alliance the most underrated. The Tauren, Goblins and Huojin Pandaren are the most underrated playable factions in the Horde.

One of the Orc’s (both universes) biggest strengths is the diversity of their clans, and I hope Blizzard continues to differentiate their culture, their way of life, so on and so forth (Thunderlord big game hunting, Bleeding Hollow ritualism, etc); on the opposite faction one of the Human’s biggest strengths is the diversity of their kingdoms and I hope the Kingdoms become more diverse and separate also. (Stromgarde’s extreme militaristic culture, Kul Tiras’s way of life around the sea, etc.)

3 Likes
25

Kinda plays into the biggest controversial take I’ve got.

Being forced to play either Horde or Alliance, and having that chosen for you based on race is terrible and dumb game design.

Makes the lore worse too in that once a group affiliates with one of the main factions they can never leave, and weird hive mind mentality within the factions.

I’d way prefer if you just played as an independent agent/unaffiliated mercenary or adventurer.

1 Like
26

Elves in this setting are not, and never have been interesting.

Giving the seat of Warchief to anyone that isn’t an orc is a joke. Yes, this includes Vol’jin.

Allied races are generally low-effort from both a lore and design standpoint. Worst offers are Lightforged, Highmountain and Void Elf.

Garrosh turning heel in the second act of Mists of Pandaria was a horrible mistake. Lei Shen was more than capable of carring the villain role of Mists of Pandaria.

The Scatlet Crusade should never have neen ostracized from The Alliance. It should have been The Alliance’s analog to The Warsong Clan. I would go so far as to have replaced The Leage of Arathor with the Scarlets in Arathi Basin. Which would, of course, have been renamed.

The unaffected draenei probably should have been a neutral NPC race, if they had to exist at all. The Broken needed to be The Alliance TBC race. This one cuts me deep, since draenei are basically all I play on The Alliance.

6 Likes
27

Realistically the unaffected Draenei should’ve either never been shown or be incredibly rare. Making them playable definitely devalues that ‘race on the brink of extinction’ that the Draenei in TBC were portrayed as being.

I also hate how Blizz went with a completely uncreative route with Draenei shamanism. Could’ve created an entirely unique faith system wherein Draenei have a mix between shamanistic practices which center around the light, but instead they opted for Draenei having little to no connection with shamanism.

Feel that the way the Horde works is still steeped in that original idea that the Horde was made up of people (largely Orcs and Trolls) that came to build a civilization on Kalimdor.

The Horde becoming a global superpower makes it so that random nations giving up all autonomy to bow down to a ‘Warchief’ position makes no real sense.

1 Like
28

Mine is a weird one. Just hear me out. Playing on rp servers, female Draenei have a certain… appendage. To the point that a ton of them, in rp, have one. That gif me thinking many years ago. What if the male resending are the genetically female ones? Think about it. The females are too tiny to carry children. The males tho, look at their chest. You could carry a child to full term in said chest without showing, and with extra protection. Best part? There is no lore to disprove it and it is a hill o will gladly die on. Lol

29

I’m feelinig very “He’s out of line but he’s Right” with this one honesty.

Having 6 Primary interests all intercompeting is far more balanced than having two poles that can never move.

4 Likes
30

My objection to this one is that I may agree with the literal premise, but it’s not like the only alternative is a focus on faction war. In fact, the rise of faction war prominence is strongly coincidental with a rise in cosmic crap, as they keep repeating “BUT THERE’S A BIGGER MENACE OUT THERE” right after they do something to rile everyone up in Red vs. Blue and they ran out of bigger menaces without going to gods.

2 Likes
31

Gnomes deserve far more respect than they get and should finally have their city back. They’ve been waiting far longer than the gilneans and nelves combined and have been apart of the alliance far longer. They are the technological backbone of the alliance providing tanks, airships,firearms and etc yet Blizz rarely treats them with respect or gives them any characters that are meant to serve as comic relief.

Vulpera are nothing more than a furbait race that adds nothing to the game world. Blizzard couldn’t even be bothered to give them proper lore or even a loa during an expansion where we couldn’t go two feet without tripping over one. Why do we need vulpera when goblins exists and are far more useful?

4 Likes
32

That was also in vanilla though. The Alliance meet a defector in southshore who tells you that the Crusade is nothing but the worst of the worst when it comes to light ‘worship’. So he tasks you with purging the monastery of Whitemane and her followers.

33

Shadowlands and Sylvanas history are better than all alliance lore combined.

Au Gul’dan is far better written than MU gul’dan.

The legion was the ultimate villains of the setting, so legion was the true ending of Warcraft, everything after it, is fanfic

2 Likes
34

Horde vs Alliance is the best version of WoW’s storytelling and the franchise should double down on it rather than turn away. By moving away from a conflict intergral to the motivation of characters in the the franchise, WoW has been rapidly(not slowly) neutering interesting character dynamics that they could better exploit for a less grounded “cosmic/universe” nonsense that falls flat.

Red vs Blue does not always need to be all out war. There can be subterfuge during the cold war, disgruntled veterans with grudges still left to settle, proxy fights for resources, high stakes but low awareness adventures with a small party of heroes either begrudgingly cooperating or competing against one another. But this forced sense of cooperation is sterile and it needs to go.

7 Likes
35

These aren’t unpopular, these are inflammatory.

36

You want the hottest of hot takes? A take so hot it’s already burning you from the inside AND outside, and you just don’t realize it? A take so hot that it’ll burn away whatever is left of your brain???

…

Ok. I shall give you this take.

…

Get ready, because this one’s hot. Spicy hot. Ghost pepper spicy hot. Ghost pepper spicy lava hot.

…

Here it comes.

…

Get ready…

…

WoW’s lore and story is actually pretty good, and people tend to over-exaggerate the misses while diminishing the home runs just because.

Boom!! You cannot handle this and you know it is true!!

11 Likes
37

For what it is and what it needs to be, it’s well enough.
It serves as a unique setting where you can really tell any story you’d want, that’s its best quality.

I think the predominant issue is people expect something out of it which simply never existed within WoW’s lore. I’ve noticed that there’s this expectation that WoW’s story or lore is meant to be high-art, realistic, majorly complex, or ““dark fantasy”” which is something WoW has never been. They’ve dipped their toes in bits and pieces of it, but Warcraft has never really tried to be anything more complex than an entertaining high fantasy setting, which it does well.

38

I think this is nice example of a hot take.
And I happen to kind of agree. I think AU Guldan is a smidge more awesome than MU Guldan.

1 Like
39

Most writers these days don’t, and usually default to making spiritual/religious people one-dimensional villains.

This reminds me of a quote from the Youtuber “Terrible Writing Advice”;

“Thoughtful critique of organized religion is rare in fiction. Usually it’s one extreme or the other.”

– a footnote from his “MYTHS, LEGENDS, AND GODS” Episode)

I agree with your entire comment (except the Velen part, I can go either way on that), this part deserved special mention.

40

This is a mix of a hot take and headcannon, and can apply to many other fantasy settings: fire should be the weakest element.

It’s doused by water, pushed around by wind, smothered by dirt, it’s 0 for 3 in elemental matchups. The reason humans and the like see fire as incredibly powerful and destructive is because it’s elemental advantage isn’t over any of the other elements, but over organic matter. Which is to say, Life.

This is why the elementals of the Firelands are the ones most frequently launching invasions into the material world. It isn’t just their desire to consume; they want a fight they can actually win.

3 Likes