Midnight 12.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Raetary]

Except... it was destroyed.

K'aresh is best compared to Argus, except Argus had way more significance.

Outland says hello.
Its destruction means absolutely nothing.

We've had now multiple expansions set on a few isles, there could only be a tiny sliver of the planet left and it'd be enough to set an expansion on it.

And Blizzard always creates brand new environments and lore to fill out their expansion setting.
Them dropping the ball 1 time with Argus doesn't make it the norm.

Especially given the fact that its an Ethereal planet, so there'd at the very least be an Arcane/Mana related zone and a zone made up of a bunch of Eco-Domes in addition to the Void altered environments.

[Well Done Steak]

yep, we should go back to what was before fated raids - LONG ASS CONTENT DROUGHT
why do some people tread fated raids as if we got them instead of new raids, we got it instead of NOTHING ffs...

Because that's exactly what happened...

This is why the narrative for SL was dogshit.

Same reason for wod skipping a raid tier.

Fated raids are SHIT.

[Hitei]

I know Blizzard can create entire expansions based on virtually nothing. The Broken Isles, the Dragon Isles, and so on are all great examples of this.

But like I said, K'aresh was destroyed. Not only that. Its existence, and destruction, is a mere footnote in the lore, to give the Ethereals some backstory.

In comparison to Outland, which was the ancestral home of the Orcs, or Argus which had the same significance to the Draenei, K'aresh pales in significance.

Even if they were to build a "continent" out of floating debris and eco domes, there's still so little of value there. They'd have to extract an ocean of lore from a droplet.

The last time they attempted this, we got Shadowlands. It felt forced, fake, paper-thin, and unrecognisable.

That's why I maintain that K'aresh would be much more appropriate as patch content. It would be fantastic to do a raid there, with bosses from all over the cosmos.

My guy. I just gave you three other expansion locations that "were destroyed".

Pandaria was a footnote joke in the lore. Zandalar was a footnote in the lore to give trolls backstory. Shadowlands was a footnote. The Broken Isles were a few rocks and a ruin. You are, RIGHT NOW, playing Dragonflight, an expansion that takes place on the Dragon Isles, a location which up until this expansion had only ever existed as a footnote and a half-made random building model completely irrelevant to what it was actually supposed to be.

"The last time they attempted this" is 10.0, and before that MoP, and BfA, and Legion and Shadowlands. You are describing half of the expansions this game has ever had.

[Nymrohd]

This is true. But how on earth would you achieve this with K'aresh? I'd wager people would feel it was even more disconnected from normal Warcraft lore, than anything that came before it.

If I did K'aresh it would be the trade center of the physical universe. Legion forces, Void cultists and the Army of Light would all have people walking the streets; even the Brokers would have a Cartel representative there. Use the background lore created throughout WoW (Especially during Legion) to make a truly cosmopolitan metropolis (and focus on urban questing, similar to the Suramar storyline).

For me, an expansion would use K'aresh, it would not be centered on it. K'aresh would have one large city and some adjoining Ecodomes (which would mostly be used for quests that still originate in the city itself). The Ethereals seem to have extremely advanced teleportation magic. The trade hubs on K'aresh would give us access to multiple other areas. We would go to K'aresh because we want something that cannot be found on Azeroth, to search the cosmos. From there we'd move to places like X'oroth, the ruins of Nathreza etc. Heck add something like Island Expeditions only it is small instanced areas around the cosmos. Maybe we are hunting down Denathrius, maybe Xal'atath escapes with the Heart of Azeroth and is looking for a Void-dominated planet, maybe we are just looking for information on how to handle a specific crisis. If you are doing K'aresh and keeping up with the Ethereal theme, you are doing sci-fi.

[guro-tchai]

Except... it was destroyed.

K'aresh is best compared to Argus, except Argus had way more significance.

the problem with Argus is that it was under Legion's full control for millenia. it is true that it's more significant - it's also true that Legion tends to transform everything it touches into the same green asteroid, see Mar'dum, Shadowmoon Valley and any Legion hold in Outland, then we got sensible Krokuun and Antoran wastes. it's unclear how Mac'aree remained relatively lush and habitable after all these years, and it's hard to imagine more zones like that.

K'aresh, on the other hand, belongs to the ethereals. they seem to appreciate nature, culture and life in general - at least more than the Legion. cdev's ass is full of mysteries, and there's simply more stuff related to K'aresh to pull from it.

btw, what do you think about the ogre continent from AU Draenor? the conversion of the landmass we've been on is probably complete at this point, so the neighbors are next to fall. dark portal was blue, then green, then red - which primary color remains?

[Nymrohd]

the problem with Argus is that it was under Legion's full control for millenia. it is true that it's more significant - it's also true that Legion tends to transform everything it touches into the same green asteroid, see Mar'dum, Shadowmoon Valley and any Legion hold in Outland, then we got sensible Krokuun and Antoran wastes. it's unclear how Mac'aree remained relatively lush and habitable after all these years, and it's hard to imagine more zones like that.

Areas where the Legion makes heavy use of Fel end up like that. They did not make heavy use in Mac'aree, either because they feared L'uura or because they wanted to preserve it. Most places they conquer are pretty much either abandoned after being destroyed by heavy use of fel magic or they are utilized in their war industry which makes heavy use of fel magic so yeah, they end up a mess. It's unclear also how Argus was pulled into the Twisting Nether, was it done consciously or is it a natural effect of too much Fel use. Or a natural effect of too much Dimensional Magic; the Scepter of Sargeras lore says that opening portals constantly threatens the universe so maybe you need to be in the Nether to create a portal center.

[Hitei]

I will grant you that Zandalar and the Broken Isles were effectively retconned back from the brink. It is true Blizzard regularly creates new lore from scraps.

That said, there's very little connecting us to it. The only difference between K'aresh and the (presumably) millions of other worlds out there that got destroyed by one of the antagonistic cosmic forces, is that it was named at some point. There are no playable races from it, and no significant NPCs. You could even argue that the Ethereals' most defining traits are the ones they gained away from K'aresh (being merchants that travel the Twisting Nether, wrapped in ribbons).

You... are still just describing previous expansions.

Pandaria had no playable races from it in 2011 and the ONE and only significant named character, Chen, was a WC3 easter egg who had never appeared in game. So already K'aresh is ahead just by virtue of being the home of Locus Walker, a major NPC of the end of Legion and large figure for a playable race and being the homeworld of Ethereals in general.

The Ethereals didn't get their ribbons from the twisting nether, they were turned into pure energy on K'aresh during the fall and bound themselves in the cloth on K'aresh prior to their counter-offensive against Dimensius.

I feel like you are just not appreciating that before MoP released, not only was Pandaria just "where the Pandren came from", but Pandaren themselves were a non-existence. They were the Pandaren CE pet and a quest in the barrens for a keg that Chen left behind. You are comparing them to Ethereals, a race that people have been playing alongside and fighting against for over fifteen years. A race that has dozens of named NPCs in game, and multiple factions (both hostile and neutral/friendly) in game, with probably hundreds of quests, that has multiple associated toys and pets, exists in many major cities, is a major presence in Hearthstone and is so recognizable that other races like Broker are introduced as being "like Ethereals".

[Sondrelk]

You... are still just describing previous expansions.

Pandaria had no playable races from it in 2011 and the ONE and only significant named character, Chen, was a WC3 easter egg who had never appeared in game. So already K'aresh is ahead just by virtue of being the home of Locus Walker, a major NPC of the end of Legion and large figure for a playable race and being the homeworld of Ethereals in general.

The Ethereals didn't get their ribbons from the twisting nether, they were turned into pure energy on K'aresh during the fall and bound themselves in the cloth on K'aresh prior to their counter-offensive against Dimensius.

I feel like you are just not appreciating that before MoP released, not only was Pandaria just "where the Pandren came from", but Pandaren themselves were a non-existence. They were the Pandaren CE pet and a quest in the barrens for a keg that Chen left behind. You are comparing them to Ethereals, a race that people have been playing alongside and fighting against for over fifteen years. A race that has dozens of named NPCs in game, and multiple factions (both hostile and neutral/friendly) in game, with probably hundreds of quests, that has multiple associated toys and pets, exists in many major cities, is a major presence in Hearthstone and is so recognizable that other races like Broker are introduced as being "like Ethereals".

It was however still firmly on Azeroth, which meant you could tie in all kinds of Azeroth centric plotlines and story elements. You could have Titan influence, Old Gods, continuation from previous plotlines, shared history with the Zandalari invasion, etc.

With K'aresh the best you can do is have Ethereal and the occasional interdimensional drifter like Medivh. Titan and Old God influence would not have the same heft it would on Azeroth. Unless you do massive retcons tying K'aresh to Azeroth you can't have a shared history to pull from outside what we already know.

All you would have is a whole bunch of void stuff alongside fresh lore we have no knowledge of. It would be the same as the Shadow lands, except even more flimsy a connection.
And just like how Shadowlands would have been much better as a Northrend revamp with elements of the Shadowlands sprinkled in, K'aresh would be much better served as a flavoring element of an Azeroth based expansion.

[Hitei]

I feel like you really want K'aresh to be a thing. Which is totally fine.

I don't. This is wholly incorrect assumption on your part. I'm extremely indifferent to it, I am just presenting you with the objective circumstance of previous expansions, because you keep listing "problems" with K'aresh that were EVEN WORSE with other expansion locations.

But you're using a collection of pebbles and space debris from thousands of years ago to base the argument that it makes sense to set an expansion there.

There are a number of reasons why those other locations made sense. Being on Azeroth for one thing, which means it logically makes sense to "undestroy" them, and that they have various ties to different things in the lore.

The closest comparisons from a practical standpoint would be Outland and Argus, both of which had known landmasses and heaps of lore tied to them. Simply put, it made sense for Blizzard to go back and unpack those.

There was no reason why it was necessary to "undestroy" Zandalar. There was an entire lore context for it being gone, which was the basis for the Zandalari's whole involvement in other plots. The whole reason why they were seeking out the other tribes in Cata and the power of the Mogu in MoP, because they had lost everything. Bringing it back opened plot holes in their previous narratives and undermined the story.

The closest comparison from a practical standpoint is Pandaria. Because it is a heavily-cultured, known location for an extant race that is highly requested and a locale often thought to be a potential expansion location that at current lacks definition beyond the barest givens. i.e. K'aresh is a desert world, Pandaria is Asiatic in nature.

With K'aresh, I feel like it doesn't even need to be an expansion. Blizzard has nothing to really gain from it. They could pick virtually any among the millions of destroyed planets out there, and say "okay let's do this one". It wouldn't make any difference.

There was no particular reason to remake the Broken Isles into an entire continent. They could have put the Legion invasion point anywhere instead of retconning an entire new region into an existing place with all sorts of stuff on it that made it super weird for no one to have bothered visiting beforehand. Pandaria and Dragonflight don't "need to be" expansions. WoD, BfA and Shadowlands didn't need to be expansions.


None of these places past Outland and Northrend--the two hanging threads of WC3TFT--were required. All of them are options. K'aresh has been a long term option. It remains an option. It is exactly in line with the state of previous options, like Pandaria, that have been chosen. Ergo, it could quite easily be 11.0.

It was however still firmly on Azeroth, which meant you could tie in all kinds of Azeroth centric plotlines and story elements. You could have Titan influence, Old Gods, continuation from previous plotlines, shared history with the Zandalari invasion, etc.

With K'aresh the best you can do is have Ethereal and the occasional interdimensional drifter like Medivh. Titan and Old God influence would not have the same heft it would on Azeroth. Unless you do massive retcons tying K'aresh to Azeroth you can't have a shared history to pull from outside what we already know.

All you would have is a whole bunch of void stuff alongside fresh lore we have no knowledge of. It would be the same as the Shadow lands, except even more flimsy a connection.
And just like how Shadowlands would have been much better as a Northrend revamp with elements of the Shadowlands sprinkled in, K'aresh would be much better served as a flavoring element of an Azeroth based expansion.

It was very firmly a completely foreign location on Azeroth that had no Titan influence, no Old gods, no ongoing plotlines (because its only named character was busy running around Kalimdor) and no shared history.

All these things you're listing are added context. They took a place with no identity beyond the Pandaren race and their pseudo-asiatic association and decided "hey we could put a titan thing here and maybe old gods? And then maybe insects because of that", "Hey it's been a while since trolls were a huge thing, maybe they could have some made up history here?", etc., etc.

With K'aresh what you can do is exactly the same thing. Nothing about the Titan and Old god stuff on Pandaria had heft: it's not Uldum, it was a largely neutered facility and the single most already defeated Old God, two instances of "stuff that happened here". What I am trying to point out is that "Unless you do massive retcons there's no context" is the default way every expansion ever added to the game has worked. They added background antiquity context that related to existing concepts to ground the unknown location in the greater Warcraft narrative.

Every expansion does that. Pandaria had no Titan or Troll ties, or Mogu, or an Old God, it was a bunch of Pandaren traders and merchants with some empire in a small unassuming land.

The relevance K'aresh has to Azeroth is whatever they decide it might be, like any other locations. Maybe it's where Azshara has built her new empire in pursuit of the true throne. Maybe she's working side by side with Xal'atath in the foundation of a new Black Empire. Maybe K'aresh possesses the physical gateway to Elune's presence and is the proxy through which she operates in the Great Dark and the first Ethereals were her very first worshippers. Maybe the Ethereals in their initial physical form were created directly by her as soldiers of her plane to spread her influence and the Naaru were forged in the star they orbit.

Maybe K'aresh's entire physical planet was a massive titan research facility created to study the void, reduced to a desert when a Titan protocol vaporized the entire surface in primordial times, and the reason Dimensius found the world was that the Ethereals grew smart enough to fuck around with the machinery and activate some sort of tether for him to hone in on.

Maybe K'aresh is the remains of one of the main pantheon's initial world soul, and its desert state is what happens when a world soul awakens and leaves its host planet, taking most of the life-giving magical force with it. Painting a very grim picture for the future of Azeroth on how to stop our planet from following in its tracks.

Who knows, because like every other expansion, Blizzard will just make new connections and tie ins.

[Alanar]

K aresh feels like an argus patch to me.

It has the same status as Nathrezim planet( destroyed) both are viable options to explore if they wanted to.

The current status means literally nothing, we have enough examples in wow, where the content before we went there was known to have been either sank or be nothing but smaller island. Neither being the case when it was current.

[Nymrohd]

With K'aresh the best you can do is have Ethereal and the occasional interdimensional drifter like Medivh. Titan and Old God influence would not have the same heft it would on Azeroth. Unless you do massive retcons tying K'aresh to Azeroth you can't have a shared history to pull from outside what we already know.

OK now you gave me a cool idea on why we'd go there.
How do we survive the birth of Azeroth?

We have no idea what happens. It is likely that by the end of DF, our trust in the Keepers and the Titans on this subject will be non-existent. So our best option is to find an answer by locating the worlds from which the Pantheon was born. Khadgar contacts Medivh, he tells us to come to K'aresh, we lead archeological expeditions to distant planets that the Ethereals trade with (via an IE type of content as well as zones for places we find things of importance) trying to find out what will happen to Azeroth when the World Soul is born and if there is any way to survive it.

[Kiivar86]

In regards to the eco-domes, I saw that apparently there was found some Fortnite-themed stuff in the files as well. The usual WoW parody stuff as you can imagine but from what I know of Fortnite and similar games, eventually a shield closes in to cut off outside areas.

In WoW, an eco-dome would perform a similar function.

We may well be looking too hard into this.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

yep, we should go back to what was before fated raids - LONG ASS CONTENT DROUGHT
why do some people tread fated raids as if we got them instead of new raids, we got it instead of NOTHING ffs...

Doesn't mean we should skip a content tier/raid tier though. SL's situation had very extreme circumstances. Its not the norm, its fine that Blizz found some back up plan but I don't think its needed when things are going just fine.

We may well be looking too hard into this.

Probably

[Mecheon]

My go-to with Karesh is just up the fantasy. We don't know how it was specifically 'destroyed', all we really know is it was. And boy, there's been a lot of destroyed things we've come across in Warcraft. remember when the Broken Isles were just this little tropical forest and not, y'know, a whole group of civilisations? Remember when Suramar was destroyed and just tan and green ruins?

Throw some mystery to it. Say a mysterious city appears in the deserts when you enter it around twilight. A mirage. And those who walk into that city... Never return

well unless they hearth back but, you get the gist. Mythology has tons of tales of ghost cities like that, or places that only turn up once ever 100 years. K'aresh could easily be Warcraft's version of that

[Khaza-R]

The current status means literally nothing, we have enough examples in wow, where the content before we went there was known to have been either sank or be nothing but smaller island. Neither being the case when it was current.

Indeed. Lets not forget that Draenor was completely obliterated in WC2. Its destruction was revised to become less and less dramatic in TFT and TBC

[Cheezits]

Couldn't the ecodomes just be related to the Draenei quest? Maybe good guy Eredar help the Ethereals?

[Gurahk]

The fact that the lighforged are their own race while the Man'ari are just a skin color option is still humorous to me. Would've really liked to see their potential racials and more fel/chaos focused customization.

[AOL Instant Messenger]

Even if they were to build a "continent" out of floating debris and eco domes, there's still so little of value there. They'd have to extract an ocean of lore from a droplet.

The last time they attempted this, we got Shadowlands. It felt forced, fake, paper-thin, and unrecognisable.

And the time before that, we got Mists from what was originally an island in the RPG that was made as flavor lore based on an April Fools' joke. Your point?

- - - Updated - - -

The trade hubs on K'aresh would give us access to multiple other areas. We would go to K'aresh because we want something that cannot be found on Azeroth, to search the cosmos. From there we'd move to places like X'oroth, the ruins of Nathreza etc.

I'm rather uncertain about the idea of a decentralized expansion. Shadowlands demonstrated that an expansion entirely deprived of a contiguous (by land or by sea) mass of disjointed zones often creates a very odd and jarring disconnect.

Heck add something like Island Expeditions only it is small instanced areas around the cosmos.

This could be entertaining as a small feature on the side. However, I would much prefer if they were styled more like the Invasion Points than Island Expeditions, since the former were markedly more well-liked.

[Nymrohd]

I'm rather uncertain about the idea of a decentralized expansion. Shadowlands demonstrated that an expansion entirely deprived of a contiguous (by land or by sea) mass of disjointed zones often creates a very odd and jarring disconnect.

This could be entertaining as a small feature on the side. However, I would much prefer if they were styled more like the Invasion Points than Island Expeditions, since the former were markedly more well-liked.

I haven't really thought this pitch fully but two points

The major issue with Shadowlands being decentralized was travel times. A travel hub that was in a different level of the "city" than the main hub. Much of the main hub not navigable by mount because it arbitrarily switched between indoors and outdoors. Long travel times from the hub to the individual zones, with the entry point always placed at the EDGE of a zone instead of being central.
Now imagine this; an open area city with a portal hub in the middle, the portal depositing you at an Ethereal market town in the MIDDLE of the zone. This is closer to the Cataclysm model which was to be honest still problematic. I somewhat improve it by moving the towns to a central location and making the transitions less jarring by keeping the portal areas thematic.
As for Islands vs Invasion Points; I guess I should say Island-type content; detailed area, events, large variety of mobs, large variety of cosmetics with Torghast gameplay; solo to group, unique power ups (not as varied as Torghast but imagine a small number of spec specific powers that help every spec do things solo). And have it interact with an archeology revamp that turns archeology to a general lore collector profession.

[Kiria]

I know this video is conjecture and won't happen but I would love for this type of class to happen;