Midnight 12.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Osmeric]

the backside of Azeroth

Am I the only one who giggled like a tween at this?

[Cheezits]

Avaloren being Pandaria 2.0 with laid back races would be pretty awful I imagine.
Something like the backside of Azeroth hiding from the Titan Keepers would need a strong martial race of xenophobes, or at least actively hostile to Titans.

The name Avaloren is honestly pretty interesting because the obvious name concept (Avalon) does NOT mesh with the little info we get (heretics, enemies of Titans). So either the name is a red herring or its going to be a very weird framing of Arthurian Mytho.

[Murlocos]

That was literally BFA. After the fanbase had a massive hysterical tantrum about being "forced" to play bad guys for two years, they got rid of GALLYWIX. Who wasn't even THAT bad.

Bad/edgy is done, at least more than the level of Heritage Forsaken.

That's what I said right after, it's more following up what BfA did. The lack of a real conclusion to the Fourth War and not just Saurfang's story made writing that reconciliation between Alliance and Horde a daunting task, and from what we've all seen so far they just don't even want to tackle it so we've been doing two expansions with the factions barely existing.

[Cheezits]

Goblins invent a toy to reduce the size of entire armies, they push the wrong button and all the adventures are sized down. Gallywix seize this opportunity to take control of the world by eating us all. We then spend the whole expansion inside the fat goblin's body, fighting against diabetes.

This sounds great though. Gallywix's Inside Story!

Not even kidding, you get a lot of zone variety with anatomy.

[Sondrelk]

Am I the only one who giggled like a tween at this?

Well it's only the backside compared to what we know. Maybe we have always been on Azeroths butt cheeks the entire time.

[Houle]

Back to the topic of a world revamp. I know it's a meme, but what would Silithus look and play like in a world revamp? What kind of content would be good and justify the amount of lore surrounding the giant sword?

C'thun being revived by the Azerite shower he got, and he decides that the sword is the best stronghold for his body this time, so he starts burrowing inside it instead of the planet, with his big eye being where the big "energy ball" was before. Basically, the sword itself becomes a monument to him, where he watches over his new city/empire.

Imagine all of Silithus and Ahn'qiraj being reworked into one large, spiraling temple city, with the sword at its center and C'thun living in it, watching over it all. Now that would make an OG feel like a big deal again, just by a visual point of view, and actually give a feel of "constantly being watched" while playing there - because you actually are being watched.
Would be a pretty sick endgame zone imho in the spirit of Suramar: you fight yourself through the outer reaches of the city while leveling, and then the inner core+sword are a raid.
And it would be a little callback to both the swords original design (where an eye was at that spot instead of an energy orb) and the old, deleted Cata questline which was supposed to end with C'thuns gigantic eye floating over Silithus.



Granted, it would be veeeeeery similar to Sauron in the LotR movies lawl, but...basically everything Blizzard does is ripped from somewhere, so might as well go all out with it.

[Sondrelk]

The name Avaloren is honestly pretty interesting because the obvious name concept (Avalon) does NOT mesh with the little info we get (heretics, enemies of Titans). So either the name is a red herring or its going to be a very weird framing of Arthurian Mytho.

Or it's the name it originally had as a Titan outpost.

Regardless it's hard to say for sure. It's not a well defined theme by any stretch of the imagination. For all we know it's just a regular island off the coast of Northrend, and not a big landmass on the opposite side of Azeroth.

[Cheezits]

That's what I said right after, it's more following up what BfA did. The lack of a real conclusion to the Fourth War and not just Saurfang's story made writing that reconciliation between Alliance and Horde a daunting task, and from what we've all seen so far they just don't even want to tackle it so we've been doing two expansions with the factions barely existing.

The reasoning is either they have no interest in utilizing them ever again (moderately likely) or they are locking faction stuff to EK/Kalimdor, which I think is more likely. So when they are ready for a revamp they will explain what happened, but not a second before.

[Super Dickmann]

The spicier answer is some sort of Azeroth expansion, Avaloren or revamp or otherwise, where the edges of the setting are completely sanded off. All races become reskinned humans lead by councils that share the same ideals as each other. All the good guys are pristine and boring, all the bad guys are toothless. Azeroth is united as one homogeneous bland blob, which I guess would inevitably lead to SL 2 as the next expansion anyways. This may sound like doubling down on Dragonflight's tone, but I'm thinking more them totally giving up on faction writing after BfA.

This already happened. In fact, that was BFA's end state. Both SL and DF already exist in this status quo. DF's saving grace, such as it is, is that it goes with it and doesn't bother using any of these thoroughly useless characters and uses the fact that it's a new location and a bunch of ciphers to make its tone internally coherent, in contrast to the tonal trainwreck that were BFA And SL.

[AOL Instant Messenger]

C'thun being revived by the Azerite shower he got, and he decides that the sword is the best stronghold for his body this time, so he starts burrowing inside it instead of the planet, with his big eye being where the big "energy ball" was before. Basically, the sword itself becomes a monument to him, where he watches over his new city/empire.

Imagine all of Silithus and Ahn'qiraj being reworked into one large, spiraling temple city, with the sword at its center and C'thun living in it, watching over it all. Now that would make an OG feel like a big deal again, just by a visual point of view, and actually give a feel of "constantly being watched" while playing there - because you actually are being watched.

Pretty sweet idea, actually. Would also present a nice bit of irony that Sargeras' sword wound up being hijacked by his enemy.

[Murlocos]

That sounds even worse than the first option given that an expansion set in an entirely unrelated realm wholly disconnected from Azeroth and preexisting lore comes with the caveat that it can't irrevocably destroy the setting like a terribly-handled expansion on Azeroth can. See: Shadowlands and BfA, where the consequences of the latter effectively left an entire faction thematically-crippled for the foreseeable future.

That's why I've been saying for a while now that while SL is funnier to poke apart and laugh at all the strained attempts to connect it to the rest of the mythos, everything with the Jailer and THE SIGILS and FRACTALS and so on, BfA was enormously destructive to the actual setting itself. They just gave up!

[Sondrelk]

C'thun being revived by the Azerite shower he got, and he decides that the sword is the best stronghold for his body this time, so he starts burrowing inside it instead of the planet, with his big eye being where the big "energy ball" was before. Basically, the sword itself becomes a monument to him, where he watches over his new city/empire.

Imagine all of Silithus and Ahn'qiraj being reworked into one large, spiraling temple city, with the sword at its center and C'thun living in it, watching over it all. Now that would make an OG feel like a big deal again, just by a visual point of view, and actually give a feel of "constantly being watched" while playing there - because you actually are being watched.
Would be a pretty sick endgame zone imho in the spirit of Suramar: you fight yourself through the outer reaches of the city while leveling, and then the inner core+sword are a raid.



Granted, it would be veeeeeery similar to Sauron in the LotR movies lawl, but...basically everything Blizzard does is ripped from somewhere, so might as well go all out with it.

Man that would be cool. And reminds me of an idea I had for a desert zone way back.

[Magistrate]

C'thun being revived by the Azerite shower he got, and he decides that the sword is the best stronghold for his body this time, so he starts burrowing inside it instead of the planet, with his big eye being where the big "energy ball" was before. Basically, the sword itself becomes a monument to him, where he watches over his new city/empire.

Imagine all of Silithus and Ahn'qiraj being reworked into one large, spiraling temple city, with the sword at its center and C'thun living in it, watching over it all. Now that would make an OG feel like a big deal again, just by a visual point of view, and actually give a feel of "constantly being watched" while playing there - because you actually are being watched.
Would be a pretty sick endgame zone imho in the spirit of Suramar: you fight yourself through the outer reaches of the city while leveling, and then the inner core+sword are a raid.

Granted, it would be veeeeeery similar to Sauron in the LotR movies lawl, but...basically everything Blizzard does is ripped from somewhere, so might as well go all out with it.

Ok this is the first time I've ever seen someone mention this and this honestly sounds awesome. Props.

[Murlocos]

That sounds even worse than the first option given that an expansion set in an entirely unrelated realm wholly disconnected from Azeroth and preexisting lore comes with the caveat that it can't irrevocably destroy the setting like a terribly-handled expansion on Azeroth can. See: Shadowlands and BfA, where the consequences of the latter effectively left an entire faction thematically-crippled for the foreseeable future.

That's why I've been saying for a while now that while SL is funnier to poke apart and laugh at all the strained attempts to connect it to the rest of the mythos, everything with the Jailer and THE SIGILS and FRACTALS and so on, BfA was enormously destructive to the actual setting itself. They just gave up!

C'thun being revived by the Azerite shower he got, and he decides that the sword is the best stronghold for his body this time, so he starts burrowing inside it instead of the planet, with his big eye being where the big "energy ball" was before. Basically, the sword itself becomes a monument to him, where he watches over his new city/empire.

This is awesome.

[Super Dickmann]

Definitely fun to imagine how that would come about. Using precedent from Exploring Kalimdor, I figure it'll be the goblins' fault: "long-nosed greedy race uses multiculturalism to distort a faction" sounds like something that wouldn't usually fly, but doesn't seem too outlandish after someone seriously thought to publish the well-poisoning thing.

My original concept for Mists 3.0 was Gallywix being a thinly veiled caricature of the once and future US president and turning Ironforge into a parking lot. Sadly, his eviction made it impossible. Maybe Bob can poach Ironforge instead as part of a dwarf-elf feud.

Also @Houle 's idea for the sword is top notch.

[Cheezits]

Forgot to mention, but it's very funny how the Forsaken Lordaeron quest takes place right after Shadowlands, but the Forsaken Heritage quest takes place two seconds after that quest... despite it being FIVE YEARS LATER.

The timeskip clearly isn't relevant to DF, so why did Danuser even bother to implement it? Wouldn't it make more sense for Amirdrassil to bloom and Iridikron to come back five years later, AFTER DF??

[Sondrelk]

That's why I've been saying for a while now that while SL is funnier to poke apart and laugh at all the strained attempts to connect it to the rest of the mythos, everything with the Jailer and THE SIGILS and FRACTALS and so on, BfA was enormously destructive to the actual setting itself. They just gave up!

Habe to disagree. SL was just boring to me. BfA was equal parts baffling and infuriating.
Why does the Alliance just not immediately siege Orgrimmar with their superior navy? Why is the Horde not immediately disintegrating? Is Thalyssra actually alright with the genocide of the Nelves because Tyrande was slightly more sceptical?

[Super Dickmann]

Forgot to mention, but it's very funny how the Forsaken Lordaeron quest takes place right after Shadowlands, but the Forsaken Heritage quest takes place two seconds after that quest... despite it being FIVE YEARS LATER.

The timeskip clearly isn't relevant to DF, so why did Danuser even bother to implement it? Wouldn't it make more sense for Amirdrassil to bloom and Iridikron to come back five years later, AFTER DF??

The Forsaken heritage quest can take place at any point after the Council pops up. By dint of how it's the most basic possible Forsaken template questline it's functionally timeless at least until Blizzard breaks the glass and the council are physically liquidated to make way for Sylvanas or Calia purifies the three legacy Forsaken characters.

[Sondrelk]

Forgot to mention, but it's very funny how the Forsaken Lordaeron quest takes place right after Shadowlands, but the Forsaken Heritage quest takes place two seconds after that quest... despite it being FIVE YEARS LATER.

The timeskip clearly isn't relevant to DF, so why did Danuser even bother to implement it? Wouldn't it make more sense for Amirdrassil to bloom and Iridikron to come back five years later, AFTER DF??

It would. But like so much, having a time skip is a nice bit of promotional excitement. Players have expectations, and that sells.

Being generous I guess they wanted to set up the time skip right away so that they didn't haveto consider it later.

[Cheezits]

The Forsaken heritage quest can take place at any point after the Council pops up. By dint of how it's the most basic possible Forsaken template questline it's functionally timeless at least until Blizzard breaks the glass and the council are physically liquidated to make way for Sylvanas or Calia purifies the three legacy Forsaken characters.

I think it will be dated by the Scarlets because there's some secret foreshadowing of a female commander that one of the new names escapes to. So there's something else going on there and we will probably kill the remainders either in quests or new continents.

Some of these heritage quests arent going to mesh well with a revamp, to the point that I think they may make the quests optional and do them more like the AR heritage.