Deathwing was an incredibly underrated villain

[Deleted]

Deathwing had great potential to be an amazing villain, but Cataclysm did a poor job portraying him. And his ending was very unsatisfying where he basically did nothing but attack random targets around Wyrmrest Temple, flee when Ultraxion gets defeated and then continues getting his ass beaten till he explodes into confetti. He has great power yet he never used them efficiently. There's also no real story building up for him unlike Arthas from previous expansion. Cataclysm as a whole was just bad and sadly Deathwing became a victim of bad writing.

Yup, very well said, agree 100%

[Eggroll]

Poor Deathwing, he needs your help.. Call the hotline now


Also I miss the Wrathion/Anduin bromance I hope we get to see some more of them.

[Banard]

The problem was that Blizz put themselves (and the story) in an impossible position, Deathwing wrecked large parts of Azeroth by flying over it, no way that players could measure up to that, so the questing appearances amount to Deathwing showing up, hovering in the air a bit while ranting a bit, then flying away...

Then the Deathwing fight itself, first we pull metal plates off his back, and then we pummel his fingertips a bit until Thrall plotdevices him to death, a good villain is imposing enough to be threatening, but not too powerful to be reasonably killable, Deathwing failed in both IMO

The story in zones and the build to DW was good. The fight it self...yes it was meh. No hands down...by far the worst raid in wow and how long it lasted don't make that fact bias. ICC/SOO/HFC all lasted as long or longer and they were all better raids.

i don't think he was underrated...the dragon aspects lost their immortality to stop him. ( was it immortality?...they lost something....)

man he busted up the DAM...i miss that dam....

side note...tonight i will kill him for the 1,000,000,000 time looking for the normal mount to finish awake the drakes achievement...god i hate that raid. ^*(^*(^%*&%* ^*(&^*(

[mysticx]

Threatening? It got old rather quickly. I wonder if anyone's counted how many times he states something along the lines of: "I will let you live, this time...", might have been cool the first time, but not when he keeps repeating it over and over.

Blizzard came fresh out of BC With InvisibIllidan (I think his only appearance outside Black temple was in the quest for reaching Netherwing exalted), Blizzard have a bit of a problem with moderation, it's all or nothing with them...

I personally like the more light-natured tone, with WoW's visual style and mechanics, attempts to go all grimdark tend to fall flat, it's better to play to your strengths.

[Banard]

The genre is Saturday Morning Cartoon?

yes it is...yes it is....can't wait to go home and play meself some pirates of dark water.

[Deleted]

He wasn't well included into the whole twilight hammer / old god theme as their "1st general" I think.

[Deleted]

yes it is...yes it is....can't wait to go home and play meself some pirates of dark water.

Then Deathwing is a perfect cartoon monster if that's the standards

[purebalance]

I don't think people were underwhelmed by Deathwing, I think there were some people who didn't play any of the Warcraft games before WoW and didn't know the lore who didn't know who Deathwing was, and there were some people who thought his treatment in Cata was a bit cartoony.

Except every wow villain was cartoony so that was always a bad example.

[Deleted]

I personally like the more light-natured tone, with WoW's visual style and mechanics, attempts to go all grimdark tend to fall flat, it's better to play to your strengths.

Like in MoP? I loved that setting as well as its lore, would love another expansion like that.

[Deathquoi]

Except every wow villain was cartoony so that was always a bad example.

I disagree. The Lich King was an ever present threat throughout Wrath and was empowering the Scourge and building up his army. Deathwing showed up, burned a bunch of things, and then that was basically it. Then we fought his wacky spaghetti arms and he got killed by Green Jesus.

I'm not sure how you could make the argument that the LK was cartoony. Same with Garrosh. Illidan I could see.

[Captain Douchebag]

I'm not sure how you could make the argument that the LK was cartoony.

Shows up multiple times, seeing us mess with his stuff and going "You'll never defeat me, and my evil plans" and "I'll let you live this time, but next time I'll get you".

Hell, in the end, he even goes "Mhyeees, you've fallen into my trap, all according to plan". He might aswell have been sitting in an armchair, stroking a cat.

[Shakou]

Second reason,
He was entirely too powerful: Which means it required a Deus Ex to kill him, and really our involvement was pointless.

Umm, there was no "deus ex" involved in killing him. Deus Ex Machina is latin for "a god from a machine" and it refers to a situation such as in a story where an unexpected power saves the day.

Not the case here, we were quite well aware ahead of time how this was going to play out.

It was just really bad writing.

[Deleted]

Main problem was probably the in-game storytelling around him.

If you actually look up for his motivations and behaviors (as others stated: why just scratch the world when he could actually do WAY more damage) he gets more interesting imo.

Other bosses like Arthas and Illidan that u mentioned need less backstory (ingame) since other Warcraft-games already told you their story.

You can see the consequences in the following expansions though. In MoP they mixed the new and existing lore. In WoD they used existing lore in a timeline we are about to change and now in Legion they kind of go back with everything and try to use existing characters (similar to WotLK), but with more player involvement, which is pretty neat.


Long story short: If you want to catch up on the lore and not just wanna go all-out "why did he do this, dumb storytelling", then you have to look up this stuff on the internet instead of in-game. Many many things make WAY more sense after u did that

[Raugnaut]

Deathwing was underrated, and mainly portrayed terribly in Cata.

[RyanEX]

Problem was that it became pretty obvious that a lot of people had little to no knowledge of who Deathwing was, as opposed to Illidan and Arthas.

It also didn't help that people already had their backs up over the sudden difficulty spike in Cata after the aoefest that was Wrath. And by the time Dragon Soul came around you could tell that Blizzard were just trying to cut their losses.

I actually envisioned a fight that involved you acting kinda like fleas to help the other Aspects take down Deathwing. Splitting the raid into groups that both dealt with any Twilight and Elemental adds and aided a limited number of various NPC dragons...and another group that had to cause Deathwing to be interrupted when he was about to do a big move on one of the other Aspects.

[Ashrynn]

I think that Deathwing's issue was just how bad the writing was for him and the way they displayed his power. Having him be that powerful is fine, but you need to restrict it somehow so we have a fair shot. Bad writing put DW up in the air and killing folks for shits and giggles. Think about the human model that they datamined for him way back in Cata. What if after Deathwings original assault he was still weak from exerting so much power and for, reasons, we went to BWD in a last ditch effort to kill Deathwing who is presumably channeling his power somewhere in the mountain.

When we finally kill Nefarian, Deathwing appears in his human form to applaud us for killing his son(since that whole family is fucked up) and basically says fuck all to his schemes in Stormwind(which we never knew anything about anyways and gives him reason to reveal his human identity as Lord Prestor) since his master's have finally signal'd for the Hour of Twilight to begin and he can now torch us. Before he can do that random NPC(presumably a Dragon Aspect/super powerful mage(s)) that seal him up in his human form using knowledge found within BoT and BWD. Keeps DW a threat, but nerfs down his power so we aren't one-shot. Then we eventually fight him one on 10/25 and during the fight DW transforms and all hell breaks lose and eventually we triumph through being good at following mechanics and staying out of fire.

[Gadzooks]

Arthas was also present during leveling + in a ton of 80 content lol.

And there were complaints about that, too - that Arthas was just a weakling who showed up, shook his fist at us and said "I'll kill you! ...later." They didn't really tell the whole story very well that he was prepping us to be taken over and ruled by him, he just showed up and it was nothing that threatening.

Same thing for Deathwing. We witness him occasionally during quests, but we never really feel much threat from him. He flies around burninating stuff - and you do a corpse run, and the flames go out. Wooo.

Personally, I think they should have only had us seeing the aftermath of him showing up, destroying more (phasing), because if you can SEE Deathwing - you're dead. Then present him properly in an end raid (not the one they did.) Classic monster movie storytelling - you don't reveal the full monster until the end.

[Wondercrab]

Deathwing was certainly the most visually and thematically imposing villain. The problem was that (like most Blizzard villains, unfortunately) he was a one-dimensional wrecking ball of evil with bland, clichéd dialogue and no compelling personality to speak of. I think the WoW team learned after Wrath that in order for a villain to feel threatening they do actually have to do bad things the players care about, but they're still struggling on the personality and dialogue front.

[Count Zero]

The problem I have with Deathwing is that his plans just don't seem to make any sense. He's flying around the world setting things on fire to... I don't know. Is he exterminating all life on Azeroth in order to die of starvation? It just doesn't make any sense to me.

Warcraft villains rarely have interesting motivations, but Deathwing was the worst. "I destroy everything because I'm evil!" is just bad writing.

Madness of Deathwing. As in, insanity. He was insane. That's why his plans didn't make sense.

[Mojo03]

Literally the worst execution of a villain I've ever seen in anything.

Such a cool concept, such a badass intro and backstory. A master's class in how to screw up execution.

From his story to his dialogue to his voice. Even his model was kind of derpy and I have nothing but praise for Blizzard's art team on almost everything.

The character was such a low point and embarrassment for the WoW team and it had so much potential.