The War Within 11.X Patches & World Soul Saga Speculation Thread

[Sondrelk]

I suspect they wanted to ape the vibe of the Orzhov from Magic the Gathering with Calia & the regime change but now we've gone through
several writing regime changes that now nobody has any idea what they wanted to do. I wouldn't bet against Sylvanas just coming back & riding the loyalist storyline for any future Forsaken storyline. Make Calia a powerless figurehead; it'd be funny.

Making Sylvanas return would be a massive mistake.
But having a charismatic Forsaken leader do much of the same stuff Sylvanas used to do (i.e. horribly evil stuff) ostensibly for the betterment of the Forsaken would be a fun idea.
Would actually make Calia serve a purpose. As she would be the reasonable face of the Forsaken, as the new character maintains the edge that made the Forsaken such interesting morally ambiguous characters back in the day.

Would also make it easier to have both the good Forsaken, and also the evil ones that like sending innocent captives to die in horrific plague based experiments.

[Ersula]

Sylvanas has so much baggage. I think they're terrified of using her outside of a "big story" role a la the 11.2.7 stuff. She's also very similar to Illidan as a "break glass" popularity character.

My only opposition at this point, besides that they'll inevitably drag her corpse through bad writing again if they bring her back full-time, is that it's almost contractually obligated for her to say some variant of "I'M VERY SORRY FOR WHAT I DID" every other line ad nauseam at this point and it's very on the nose and tiring.

Metzen would probably want to refirm the status quo from when he was in charge. Bring back Sylvanas, the character Forsaken fans actually liked, but never officially make her the leader of anything. Setting her up as this Charon/Persephone character is good, but Forsaken being defined as her simps is accurate to them & the people who play them.

[Vakir]

@Sondrelk I like that on paper, my only issue is the same I always have with these kinds of groups - it's only a matter of time before they enforce some schism that requires us to remove the "evil" one and puts us back at square 1, or stretches believability to have them present in the first place without eventually asking "How the actual hell are these people still trusted in the Undercity?"

But for what it's worth, I've always felt Garrosh, for example, was a missed opportunity to be kept around on a sort of "we unleash this guy as the nuclear option" anti-hero/anti-villain leash, similar to this idea to have multiple opposed perspectives in a racial group.

They'd need to be very careful to kind of tread that line, but Blizzard tends to use a hammer where they should be wielding a scalpel. It beats what we've had so far, though, to be sure.

Metzen would probably want to refirm the status quo from when he was in charge. Bring back Sylvanas, the character Forsaken fans actually liked, but never officially make her the leader of anything. Setting her up as this Charon/Persephone character is good, but Forsaken being defined as her simps is accurate to them & the people who play them.

To be fair, some of that shift was already happening to some extent even prior to his departure.

Golden's still contracted to Blizzard from time to time, and she is transparently the one responsible for Calia pushing, even if Roux was the one who wrote the book where it got much, much worse.

IDK how many Forsaken fans that did like Sylvanas, still do. But it's one of those weird areas where everyone played those characters for different reasons.

[Sondrelk]

Metzen would probably want to refirm the status quo from when he was in charge. Bring back Sylvanas, the character Forsaken fans actually liked, but never officially make her the leader of anything. Setting her up as this Charon/Persephone character is good, but Forsaken being defined as her simps is accurate to them & the people who play them.

Problem is that the Sylvanas players liked back then is completely and utterly gone. Letting her return would require either making her do a complete 180 on her character change in SL. Which means she is immediately back to being public enemy #1, and the Forsaken would instantly be the villain faction again.
Or you keep her character change. And what you have is someone who doesn't act anything like the old Sylvanas. And who would in all honesty be little more than there so that the developers can take in the benefits of simply stating that Sylvanas has returned.

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@Sondrelk I like that on paper, my only issue is the same I always have with these kinds of groups - it's only a matter of time before they enforce some schism that requires us to remove the "evil" one and puts us back at square 1, or stretches believability to have them present in the first place without eventually asking "How the actual hell are these people still trusted in the Undercity?"

But for what it's worth, I've always felt Garrosh, for example, was a missed opportunity to be kept around on a sort of "we unleash this guy as the nuclear option" anti-hero/anti-villain leash, similar to this idea to have multiple opposed perspectives in a racial group.

They'd need to be very careful to kind of tread that line, but Blizzard tends to use a hammer where they should be wielding a scalpel. It beats what we've had so far, though, to be sure.



To be fair, some of that shift was already happening to some extent even prior to his departure.

Golden's still contracted to Blizzard from time to time, and she is transparently the one responsible for Calia pushing, even if Roux was the one who wrote the book where it got much, much worse.

IDK how many Forsaken fans that did like Sylvanas, still do. But it's one of those weird areas where everyone played those characters for different reasons.

Not that I disagree that it would inevitably lead to that specific Forsaken faction being villain batted. But it would be an interesting development that the writers could milk for at least 3-4 expansions.

[Ersula]

Golden's still writing for Blizzard and she is transparently the one responsible for Calia pushing, even if Roux was the one who wrote the book where it got much, much worse.

I don't think the people who wrote the book actually decided the plot, they were only primarily in control of the characterization. I would have been the devs in charge of the larger narrative that introduced Calia & decided what happened.

All in all the idea of an alternative to Sylvanas is a fine idea, but they way it felt forced for her to step into Sylvanas' place so quickly. Her constantly saying she's not doing that being undercut by them literally giving her "The Palid Lady" the inverse of Sylvanas' title & Giving Derek Nathano's title was pretty blatant. At best it feels like fanfic.

Problem is that the Sylvanas players liked back then is completely and utterly gone.

I think we've reached a headspace of Sylvanas that pre-fuckening fans can be comfortable with. Personality wise she's mostly back to normal. A bit less seething, a bit more brooding.

I mean she's essentially back already. Back in the sense that she's allowed to be present in quests. She doesn't want to leave the Maw, but she can. Or she can do that Sentinel hologram thing whenever she wants. We've seen more of Sylvanas than we have of Thrall in TWW at this point.

[Vakir]

Not that I disagree that it would inevitably lead to that specific Forsaken faction being villain batted. But it would be an interesting development that the writers could milk for at least 3-4 expansions.

This time they might even have it make sense! Not with the current pool of writers, of course.

Seriously, I loved Edge of Night Sylvanas and then they proceeded to have her do tons of absolutely insane shit that jeopardized her people harder than even before and it was all completely ignored by a neutral paladin order surrounding her on all sides. In the very same expansion they introduced her new goal. That was when they started to lose me with her, so Hypothetical Zombie Agitator would definitely work if they were more subtle than...death-gripping in a major Ebon Blade NPC to brainwash as a totally unnecessary risk. "Oh well, we can't deal with all that now, we have the Legion to fight" like 6 years later was asinine.

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At best it feels like fanfic.

Yeah. We all definitely wanted an Alliance-adjacent Light character served by a revived Proudmoore around the Forsaken. This is fine, this is great. /s Sigh.

[Hitei]

Not that I disagree that it would inevitably lead to that specific Forsaken faction being villain batted. But it would be an interesting development that the writers could milk for at least 3-4 expansions.

That's not what villain batting is and I don't really think a contrived dragging out of a group that should realistically just immediately be executed is interesting.

[Ersula]

Yeah. We all definitely wanted an Alliance-adjacent Light character served by a revived Proudmoore around the Forsaken. This is fine, this is great. /s Sigh.

That makes me assume Alonsus Faol is going to get killed in Midnight; at least by normal writing conventions: So far he & Calia have been appearing everywhere in Midnight but they serve the exact same purpose. They don't need two pious Forsaken priests in the cast.

[AOL Instant Messenger]

I really don't think Arator has ever had enough characterization to be complaining about him being young when he should be older. The real complaint is he's another generic protagonist- and that should be it, not "HE SHOULD ACT 50 IN HUMAN YEARS!!!"

Au contraire, it feeds into the worst thing about his portrayal, since while the specifics around how he ages aren't especially relevant the reason why those specifics were retroactively declared is to justify his worst distinguishing feature from Anduin, which is how awkwardly stunted he is. Anduin, for all his problems, acted roughly whatever age he was supposed to be at the time. In MoP, he acted like a teenager (and a more intelligent, world-weary one than Arator is acting like now) In BfA, he acted like an adult, just an idealistic and conflicted one. He's, to my memory, never been inexplicably ignorant of things he should be aware of in the way Arator is.

This, aside from him just being flat-out redundant, is part of what makes him more insufferable than Anduin ever was. Anduin wasn't usually an especially bad character in himself and he didn't have such weird, glaring problems: he never was ignorant of basic facts about being a paladin that you learned in classic at level 12 and he usually approached problems like longstanding racial tensions with a relative amount of maturity, he became insufferable when he became a setting tumor in a way that had less to do with his characterization and far more to do with him becoming an icon of the setting's change in moral status quo. The only time I can recall him even getting close to Arator-tier was when he lectured Horde races about how ugly people can be people too and compared a nerubian city to Stormwind, this lecture only being as egregious as it is when being told to Horde characters specifically and being passably Anduinesque for Alliance characters, and his worst moment was pretty solidly having his suffering explicitly compared to that of a race of cursed and tortured undead and a woman whose defining event was a rape-analogue and becoming one of said race of cursed and tortured undead, a problem on the level of the narrative and not on the level of Anduin himself.

[Merryck]

How is FFXIV still getting nominated for best ongoing game? Its recent expansion was so poorly received. And the hype FFXIV gained from the Shadowlands disaster has long faded. Let it be known, FFXIV succeeds only when WoW fails. It cannot stand on its own two legs.

[Enrif]

How is FFXIV still getting nominated for best ongoing game? Its recent expansion was so poorly received. And the hype FFXIV gained from the Shadowlands disaster has long faded. Let it be known, FFXIV succeeds only when WoW fails. It cannot stand on its own two legs.

the community. The community holds the game up. Meanwhile in WoW we bitch like the most braindead toddlers. Just look at all the threads here, over at the WoW Subreddits or the official forums. WoWs community is compared to FF14 extremely toxic mindset. Sadly it slowly also comes to FF14, mostly by WoW refugees who bring that mindset with them.

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But the Undead especially would feel wrong mingling with the living and it undermines the overall sense of loss and/or outcast nature of the race.

The undead mingle with the living since Vanilla when they joined the horde. It was just a matter of time until that arrangement doesn't make sense anymore. And we might be in that situation. Outside of the forsaken, everyone is living. So, they have to mingle with the living. If you want that undead feel back, we would need a undead empire like place. Northrend used to be that with the Scourge. But they were the bad guys. And there is a reason that undead in fiction are 99% of the time the bad guys.

In WoW, they are part of the hero's, so they will become hero's (mostly anti-hero's, but still), which waters down their appeal as the evil player race, as the player races can't be evil, as neither faction is evil, even if the horde has taken to it again at times.

So, either the Forsaken embrace that they are among the living, or they bail out.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Golden's still contracted to Blizzard from time to time, and she is transparently the one responsible for Calia pushing, even if Roux was the one who wrote the book where it got much, much worse.

The idea that the novel people are directing things is silly notion given how obviously the Calia flip flopping was which lines up with the swap in story heads.

Under Alex she was obviously suppose just take over with her whole destiny thing all over BTS, but then under Steve in SR she takes a back seat with Voss being the leader and Calia getting like one scene where she gets to be an ineffective diplomat to the night elfs.

The two novels really just don’t line up at all when it comes to the direction of the forsaken which makes sense with Steve’S obsession with sylvanas and how much of crap shoot every thing he did with her was in SL instead of Alex just killing off.

[Jaggler]

How is FFXIV still getting nominated for best ongoing game? Its recent expansion was so poorly received. And the hype FFXIV gained from the Shadowlands disaster has long faded. Let it be known, FFXIV succeeds only when WoW fails. It cannot stand on its own two legs.

FFXIV is in their Shadowlands-era and people are still sucking the game off. Yeah, the WoW community can be shit at times, but at least they don't let the devs get away with everything and are pretty vocal about bad stuff.

FFXIV fostered a culture, that basically ostrasized you, when you dared to critizise the game (best community ever, btw) which caused the game to fumble the immense advantage they had over WoW during Shadowlands times

[AOL Instant Messenger]

In WoW, they are part of the hero's, so they will become hero's (mostly anti-hero's, but still), which waters down their appeal as the evil player race, as the player races can't be evil, as neither faction is evil, even if the horde has taken to it again at times.

So, either the Forsaken embrace that they are among the living, or they bail out.

Yeah, but the original post he posted in response to having the living among them, not just the Forsaken collaborating with the living.

The thing is that while collaborating with the living is what they've been doing for a while, having the living among them is, irrespective of the fact it would damage their identity, something which has legitimate barriers as opposed to a difference of culture that can be remedied by a metropolitan superculture. If you have orcs and humans living together, you have two species that can eat the same things, have the same needs, and are largely similar in both cognition and physiology.

Conversely, undead have a fundamentally different way of experiencing their unlife. Their emotional processing is vastly different, they hunger for raw meat and maggots, and their senses are dulled, they don't need to sleep and they barely feel pain. Their food is inedible for humans. Trying to coexist with humans would be immensely challenging and it makes sense for them to found their own communities both for historical, cognitive, and biological reasons. This is clearly visible in-game in pretty much every Forsaken zone, which has coffins for beds and inedible rotten food on tables. The fact that the Forsaken condition is entirely incomparable to a regular experience of life is a pretty necessary part of their portrayal.

[Nymrohd]

I think this is all interesting but widely off topic

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Btw, think it is kind of lazy how Harandar and the Voidstorm have the same ore with Quel'thalas.

[Super Dickmann]

I'm now imagining a marketing booth in every major city where Forsaken are handing out flyers for people to sign up for Undeath.

You kid, but it'd also bring back some of the dark humor that the Forsaken had going for them. BFA's dour sadsack approach killed all the fun and replaced it with not much of anything and while they've tacitly headed back to it (Calia and Velonara being weirded out by cannibalism) it's small potatoes. It's also something that the Ebon Blade dont' get in the turf of.

@Vakir

I was gearing up for this to be the LowTierGod copypasta. Amused, but still a little disappointed.

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Problem is that the Sylvanas players liked back then is completely and utterly gone. Letting her return would require either making her do a complete 180 on her character change in SL. Which means she is immediately back to being public enemy #1, and the Forsaken would instantly be the villain faction again.

She's fine in the new patch and was fine in the book, given the severe handicaps the latter had to work with. She doesn't issue any apologies or repent, she lets that insufferable pathos machine Zelling flail at her while burning in hell (as deserved) and she maintains her position re: the Shadowlands, which would perfectly flow into the Forsaken as a more literal bulwark against the infinite and allow the 'Dark Lady watch over you' line to have a new meaning.

Disconnecting Sylvanas from the Forsaken was and always will be an utterly pointless, destructive exercise for both participants and has made both worse.

As regards new characters to bounce off of Calia - that's unnecessary. Just bring back the actual elephant in the room of the Forsaken, which is the military bureaucracy. Pick any Executor (I personally went with Wroth for fanfiction purposes, but it can be anyone, hell give the role to Belmont if you want) and put him in the role of the traditional Forsaken military junta which Calia and Co have to accommodate. Sylvanas was, by virtue of being entirely unideological up to Cata and then not actually a former Lordaeronian in Cata and onwards, a moderate relative to a full ideologue of Lordaeronian revanchism. Velonara can be the ancien (Sylvanas) regime rep, Voss already is in her best element as the most positive possible example of undeath as a transformative new chance and Calia can be stuck in the middle with them.

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I think people are forgetting Liadrin was always the gentle forgiving devout priestess of the Blood Elves and after the Sunwell Plateau raid, she calmed her rage and became the devout of the Light again.

Yes, there is a problem with the Liadrian writing, but it's not her acceptance and guiding of Zul'jarra, they mirror alot her past with what the Amani are dealing with. No, it's mentioning BOTH sides of Liadrin, her reasoning her calmness and devoutness. Even when she was kidnapped, she was the one that asked Halduron to stop torturing Zul'jin.

I'm on the record with the position that Liadrin is the most boring woman alive and only appears because an elf paladin girl in black and red with 'Blood' in her title is popular regardless of any content. Hence why the only reaction to her cinematic show was as regards her appearance, as it undercut her only relevant trait. Now, as an actual character, her crisis of faith narrative in this story is fine, but it has little relation to Zul'aman and how sanitized her relationship with Zul'jarra is undercuts what was once an interesting part of her personality.

Namely, that Liadrin back in TBC had ditched the Light because it'd failed to protect her and her home and became a militant maltheist to compensate. It springs as much from faith as from helplessness. Trolls killed her family and later tortured her, again, while she was helpless. These points can align thematically and having her confront her first moment of being powerless via the Amani at the same time as she's struggling with its externalization to her people via her faith has room for drama. It just isn't there and can't be there as it'd require to be at least initially stand-offish and hostile.

[allegrian]

Am I the only one feeling that wow is being written from an alliance main character point of view? Blizz goes out of the way to make sure the alliance players feel immersed by in the game when horde characters, factions or cities are involved.

That's why we have the token alliance goblin as a main character in undermine, and the explanation of undermine bilgewater not being part of the horde, or now in midnight having a restricted area and a clear expanation of why we are there, alongside with many main alliance characters like Alleria, Turalyon and Umbric. They did the undermine bilgewater thing again with the Revantusk Amani trolls as well, so the alliance players don't feel they're helping the horde again.

On the other hand, all alliance content and characters are treated as neutral, so the horde players get unrestricted access to their cities/zones, factions and even allied races (Earthen, Haranir) and become best friends with main alliance characters like Alleria or Anduin with not much explanation or care for the horde character. Horde races are also getting more focus lately with goblins in undermine, BE and trolls (amani) in midnight, vs alliance which only get focus on adjacent copy paste allied races and factions (Earthen, Arathi, Haranir).

So, when/if we get alliance content like undermine/QT/Zul'aman in the form of a revamped alliance zone/city and main races as factions (humans, Dwarves, actual NW...), will blizz go out of the way to make the horde player immersed and give good reasons for them to feel like they're are actually playing the other faction?

[Nymrohd]

Am I the only one feeling that wow is being written from an alliance main character point of view? Blizz goes out of the way to make sure the alliance players feel immersed by in the game when horde characters, factions or cities are involved.

WoW is written from a vanilla fantasy point of view, so Alliance works. But modern Blood Elf works just as well.

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That's why we have the token alliance goblin as a main character in undermine, and the explanation of undermine bilgewater not being part of the horde, or now in midnight having a restricted area and a clear expanation of why we are there, alongside with many main alliance characters like Alleria, Turalyon and Umbric. They did the undermine bilgewater thing again with the Revantusk Amani trolls as well, so the alliance players don't feel they're helping the horde again.?

They did both for gameplay reasons. Why would you start at Neutral with the Bilgewater as Horde if they are the existing faction? And the Alliance absolutely is helping the Horde throughout the expansion. Otherwise we would have open faction conflict with the Alliance agreeing with the Vanguard that risking their own troops to save Silvermoon isn't worth it when they can stop the Voidstorm far easier by destroying the Nexus Points.

[Super Dickmann]

Am I the only one feeling that wow is being written from an alliance main character point of view? Blizz goes out of the way to make sure the alliance players feel immersed by in the game when horde characters, factions or cities are involved.

Some strikingly handsome and well-read people spoke many moons ago about how the endgame of BFA's operation was to remove any character or idea of prominence on the Horde that doesn't align with world peace so they could be safely shuffled off, in turn guaranteeing that the plot only rotates around following Anduin and cosmopolitan Alliance heroes fighting ghosts in space. Sometimes the ghosts are in a cave and sometimes they're in an elf forest, and sometimes Anduin has pointy ears, but the gist of it is little changed.

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They did both for gameplay reasons. Why would you start at Neutral with the Bilgewater as Horde if they are the existing faction? And the Alliance absolutely is helping the Horde throughout the expansion. Otherwise we would have open faction conflict with the Alliance agreeing with the Vanguard that risking their own troops to save Silvermoon isn't worth it when they can stop the Voidstorm far easier by destroying the Nexus Points.

For the same reason Night Elves start at Neutral with any of the umpteen druid rep factions we do quests for or why Blood Elf paladins and hunters, themselves Blood Knights and Rangers, will be neutral to the organisation they have a high rank in for the purposes of the Silvermoon cartel options. Nothing in the plot required the Bilgewater to be unrelated and no such steps are taken when explaining why we're following Arator around as Horde when surely any given Blood Elf off the street would be a suitable replacement.

[allegrian]

Some strikingly handsome and well-read people spoke many moons ago about how the endgame of BFA's operation was to remove any character or idea of prominence on the Horde that doesn't align with world peace so they could be safely shuffled off, in turn guaranteeing that the plot only rotates around following Anduin and cosmopolitan Alliance heroes fighting ghosts in space. Sometimes the ghosts are in a cave and sometimes they're in an elf forest, and sometimes Anduin has pointy ears, but the gist of it is little changed.

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For the same reason Night Elves start at Neutral with any of the umpteen druid rep factions we do quests for or why Blood Elf paladins and hunters, themselves Blood Knights and Rangers, will be neutral to the organisation they have a high rank in for the purposes of the Silvermoon cartel options. Nothing in the plot required the Bilgewater to be unrelated and no such steps are taken when explaining why we're following Arator around as Horde when surely any given Blood Elf off the street would be a suitable replacement.

I think that after 2 borrowed alliance magical elf races and 2 villain bats and dead leaders, the horde makes so little sense narratively with so many contradictions that blizz just stopped trying, and just focus on their races individually when needed (Goblins, BE...) while barely focusing on the horde organization itself.

This worked with the alliance because their races are not really defined by their faction, as it's just a literal alliance of nations that help each other. But the horde was the nation itself when it was created, so if you're just focusing on blood elves or a neutral goblin nation, you're not really focusing on the horde, just on some races the horde players may like.