Originally Posted by
Jujudrood
The problem here is that the story keeps getting bigger and the threats need to follow, else it feels kind of a letdown.
We have killed elemental lords, dragons, old gods, and that was just Vanilla.
BC had us magically whisked away to a broken planet somewhere in the stars killing demon lords and such.
It went from 'bandits in Elwynn Forest' to 'potentially world-ending threats' pretty quickly, if you ask me.
They did try toning it down a little in BFA and make it more about the faction war, and it was kind of a shitshow.
Not that SL was any better for less of a focus on the faction war, mind you, but that's kind of the state of the writing team nowadays.
With these threats snowballing, it would be strange if the next expansion's big bad is the grandson of Van Cleef or whatever; it would feel very small and, quite frankly, not even worth our time, being the champions of the planet who have traveled the stars and even the afterlife to preserve it and all that jazz.
WoW suffers from the same thing that afflicts many long-running shows in that the first couple of "seasons" were plotted out, with a dedicated team passionately focused on them, then around season 4 or so, they were greenlit for more and had a timebox to do it in, and they really didn't have much framed out, so it's felt like a hastily slapped together run of season after season where you can see they had a semblance of an idea, but it never really rounded out well.
Now that we are on season 10, WoW is in much of the same state as like Walking Dead for example, where it's jumped the shark so long ago, and the characters that were fleshed out that people cared about are gone, your one or two maguffins were still mucking about even though it flew in the face of logic and reason, and ultimately the story has gotten so weird and random with the most bland BBEGs that I don't know if it can ever recover.
But, as long as it rakes in the money, it will soldier on.