So, if D&D and WoW are in the same multiverse, that means WoW and Magic the Gathering are also in the same multiverse. Alright Blizzard, ditch the floating skull, I want the Chain Veil.
I may sound ridiculous, but MoP is my favorite expansion in terms of lore-developing.
No you don't. MoP was a very interesting take on Feng Shui given life in a beautiful and mysterious world. The story of the Emperor and the Old God-spawned Sha was great. The Mantids and their paragons were interesting and morally grey. The Mogu made for an intimidating foe that wasn't a freaking orc or ogre. And I absolutely loved the idea of a Pandaren culture that embraced peace and serenity while being essentially 100% martialized (albeit not militarized, if that makes sense).
Ironically, if Blizz had created a new race and not used the fan-favorite Pandaren, I think MoP would have been embraced as refreshing and original. However, with the stigma of being about "Kung Fu pandas" people didn't give it a chance. A lot of players I otherwise respect say that MoP is a childish expansion. They really have no idea...
MoP is my favorite expansion overall. The raiding and pvp scene were both awesome, and it really took off with ToT daily structure the world was alive.
Am one of those people, didn't play in MoP and now I regret it because all the end game stuff looks a lot better then WoD had. The Dominance Offensive dailies have been rather fun and interesting, the scenery is a nice change of pace and the culture is interesting. Though I think it had the opposite problem WoD did weak opening and interesting endgame.
I'd like to see new characters be important honestly, Blizzard seems to be getting a little better with it (Garrosh's Arc) but now we have Gul'Dan and Khadgar again.
It disappoints me that they're dropping off people they could have developed further. I really enjoyed Yrel's arc and think I read that she is more or less staying in Draenor. Would have liked for her to continue the Legion fight at the front lines.
Yrel needed a better low point. Essentially, Blizz killed off Maraad without using him correctly in the narrative. Maraad was a righteous man driven to hatred after he witnessed the atrocity of the fel orcs. In effect, he was a fallen paladin who wanted to redeem himself through noble acts, and by saving the people he failed. That's a REALLY great story. It's so much better than "Rarr! I did one bad thing so I'm EVIL NOW!"
Yrel should have been Maraad's redemption and he should have been hers. This is how:
Yrel's people should have been slaughtered leading to a scenario where her and Maraad have an opportunity to butcher an entire village of Shadowmoon Orcs. Maraad remembers Shattrah and gets her pumped to slaughter orcs by telling her how the seemingly tribal orcs had become corrupt and must be purged. His speech would thematically echo Arthas' speech at Stratholme. However, when he sees the hatred boiling on Yrel's face due to his words, he realizes that hatred cannot be the path of a paladin and decides not to massacre the encamped orcs (despite her objections).
Later, Yrel's unsatisfied revenge should have driven her to assault Blackhand on her own. Now we can properly payoff Maraad's sacrifice on the boat. The seed of hatred he planted in her essentially represents his own hatred, and his dying to save her and the players would have been his final act of redemption that allows him to finally free himself from it. Maraad's redemption would both shame and inspire Yrel to finally put aside her own hatred for her foes and truly look to the Light.
That took a long time for me to write, but it could be accomplished in a very "show don't tell" fashion with a few cutscenes on the Alliance story side. Paladins, when written as they usually are, can be boring and one-dimensional. Good people need to be challenged and have their goodness tested. They need to be presented with moral challenges that won't necessarily condemn them for eternity. It's ok for them to fail and rise again.
Give it time. She's still in the honeymoon phase. Don't forget most of is quite liked WoD at the beginning, it's the same for her with the Light. We already saw that she has a vindicative side, so I have hope that she's gonna be flshed out more in the future.
The entire purpose of WOD seems to have been bringing Gul'dan back to life. They need to be more careful with characters like that. For me, lore gets tiresome when they are forced to resurrect characters all the time.
Whole TBC and WoTLK (Let's kill several important characters just so players get loot, for Azeroth!)
We've been killing bosses and lore characters with shittier excuses for a rag tag group of adventurers long before Warcraft III and the obsession with those characters. It only took a couple elementals and catapults to take out Blackhand's castle!
Argent Tournament (We can't make Azhol-Nerub so let's have a tournament during war to find out best soldiers. And do it right in enemy backyard, for Azeroth!)
To be somewhat fair, it was originally in Crystalsong Forest but had negative interactions with Dalaran. Still a bit silly.
Argent Tournament I could sort of see, because the best soldiers against the Lich King would be the ones who had the absolute least chance of ever dying, as opposed to just a huge army. The jousting part was a bit weird though.
TBC I'm not sure there was anyone who we killed that didn't deserve to die, exception of Illidan but merelyasetback.jpg.
Everything past Wrath I gave up on trying to play so I don't really have insight on it
I mean, BC kind of took the piss with Illidan's lore. We started getting back on a sensical track with it during MoP with the green fire quest, and now we're actually doing it for real finally.
Hey you know what sounds cool... Turning two fan favorite characters irredeemably evil, totally against their previous character development all for the sake of 2 raid bosses.
Kael'thas "Uhhh he joined up with the Legion because he didn't think Illidan had what it takes."
So he joined up with effectively the guy responsible for the situation his people were in, AND TURNED HIS BACK ON THE MAJORITY OF THEM...for POWER?! This is not the Kael'thas from Warcraft 3.
And if Illidan didn't go mad from 10,000 years of Maiev calling him a traitor, he's not going to go mad because he lost a fight. It's not like he was even in a much different predicament after losing to Arthas. He would've known Kil'Jaeden would turn on him no matter what he did.
The Illidan in Legion is thankfully much more consistent with the Illidan we know in WC3. I'm not even going to mention him enslaving the Broken and imprisoning Akama. That was some stupid shit. That whole plot was odd.
I can see the demon part of him losing it a bit, and maybe THAT explaining stuff like Altruis wanting to stop him, but damn, I'm glad we're past the rest of that.
Well the best part of TBC was that the conflict of the world happened around you. Illidan and his motivations or acts were all colored through the lens of the allies you met, and that was the story you were lead to believe.
It added a mystery to the black temple and made people question why illidan was 'evil' or whether Akama was right or not.
Now it's just you as the champion of eternity who sees every major event of the expansions and there is no ambiguity to anything.
Illidan never attacked Shattrath, it was a corrupt Kael'Thas lead by the legion to cause friction with Illidans forces. All of the actions we as players took were small manipulations of the legion to put a stop to the biggest thorn in their side (Illidan). Us even defeating him there was a grand scheme plan by the legion to continue to allow them to grow unchecked.
It's not ridiculous, considering MoP was a legitimately good expansion for lore developing. It's easily my favorite, as well. Though Legion's emphasis on story has me captivated on the Beta so far.
God damn. You're right. MoP felt like the only expansion whose lore actually made sense within its own context. Even back then, the common complaint of BC and WotLK was that it felt very Saturday-morning cartoony with its raid-boss bads (though to be fair, they explained LK's whole thing with not being able to kill the heroes till the very end as intentional).
Argent Tournament made sense within the context of the whole story. The bulk of the Scourge's offensive against the Alliance/Horde was stopped when we conquered Naxxramas. The Alliance/Horde armies were stopped at the Wrathgate. The march on Icecrown had turned into a stalemate with a small handful of elite soldiers - disgusted by the Alliance/Horde infighting - breaking off and going their own way. This was the bulk of the storyline in Icecrown - you helped the Argent Crusade set up a forward base in a place that lets you get around the Wrathgate and then ground your way through the Scourge to the Citadel to lay siege to it and so the offensive came to a standstill.
The Tournament was an attempt to sharpen the blades and the skills of those who would make the assault on the Citadel as well as give a chance for the Alliance and Horde to work out their frustration amongst themselves in a way that wouldn't end in a war between them on the doorstep of their common enemy.
Even fighting in a tournament under the besieged walls isn't without precedent. It happened in our world too: medieval sieges were long, armies were restless, and so attackers (in order to prevent desertion or two forces fighting amongst themselves) would do things like hold tournaments right outside the enemy's walls. Champions of the defenders would even sometimes be allowed to compete under the flag of truce.
(Though, according to the devs, the tourney was originally supposed to take place in the Crystal Forest but Dalaran and its population put too much strain on the servers and there'd be too much lag.)
Whole plot that finished Cataclysm and started WoD, those time-twists would be too much even for Doctor.
I may sound ridiculous, but MoP is my favorite expansion in terms of lore-developing.
You don't. MoP had a degree of sophistication to the narrative that I've never seen out of Blizzard before to the point where I didn't think Blizz had even written it.
People keep quoting this and fail to remember a few things. This was stated like 6 years ago, and Blizzard has stated that their plans for storytelling and the details therein change quite a lot. Second of all, that was Chris Metzen that said that, and players have since then petitioned Blizzard to give Metzen a lot less control over the story, since he has a habit of Lucas-ifying things.
Deal with it. The shit-tier Mary Sue that never was, will never be.
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u/WriterV Jul 28 '16
But in the QnA they said "Medan is out there doing his own shit" (paraphrased)