Ok, one more Legion post before... oh, who am I kidding? Legion is definitely the most exciting news we've gotten about World of Warcraft in years, and I honestly don't think I've been this excited about a new expansion since Wrath of the Lich King, so I'll be posting a ton about the expansion, basically up until the point about two years from now when the expansion that follows it is announced.
We got a ton of information at the announcement at Gamescom - more than we expected, though perhaps not the in-depth stuff we typically get with Blizzcon (and given that there is a Blizzcon coming this year, I'm sure that's when we'll get the big details.)
In an interview with J Allen Brack and Alex Afrasiabi, the two of them alluded to some interesting, tantalizing mysteries - things that they cannot yet talk about for the upcoming expansion.
When asked what their favorite feature of Legion was, both answered that their second favorite was Demon Hunters, but their first favorite was something that they could not discuss yet.
Now, I'd love to speculate on what the hell they're talking about, but it's really impossible to do so - this is so open-ended that it could be anything from 5-player LFR to Path of the Titans to Timewalker Zones. There is really nothing to indicate what it is, so I wouldn't even known where to begin when speculating (the aforementioned three are completely out-of-thin-air guesses.) I'd imagine that this is something that they are not yet sure that they'll be able to implement, and they don't want to make any promises they wind up breaking - not a bad idea, given some of the problems of Warlords.
Something we can speculate on, however, is Karazhan.
Karazhan features in the Legion trailer, and it's clearly a hugely important location to the history of Azeroth and the presence of the Burning Legion.
It really looks like Khadgar has assumed the role of his former mentor - he wields Atiesh and he transforms into a crow to get around, and begins the trailer by taking off from the tower to witness the initial onslaught. His entrance to Stormwind Keep is almost exactly how Medivh appeared before King Terenas before the Third War, trying to warn them of the coming Scourge and Legion invasion. Of course, Varian is far more likely to heed his warning.
Karazhan is a truly mysterious place. The area around it, Deadwind Pass, had some sort of spatial and temporal anomaly in it for ages, until Medivh was born and the tower just... appeared there. It was almost as if the tower's arrival had echoed backward in time.
Karazhan served as Medivh's home, and it was there that Sargeras took control of the Last Guardian's mind, opening the Dark Portal through Medivh and unleashing the Horde on the world. It was also there that Medivh was slain by his childhood friends. Ever since, the place has been a haunted ruin, plundered by an Eredar demon called Malchezaar.
Karazhan was the beginning raid of the Burning Crusade expansion, and was, for many, the first exposure to raiding (including myself - though I only ran it like twice, getting halfway through.) It's one of the most popular raids in WoW's history, usually fighting Ulduar for the position of most favorite of all time. The mood and tone of the place is fantastic.
It sounds like the Blizzard folks might not know exactly what they want to do with it, if anything, in Legion. I'd imagine that if we do get stuff there, it will probably be in later patches.
So what should they do?
I think it would be a travesty if they got rid of the old raid in order to revamp it. As much as I like the Scarlet Monastery and Scholomance revamps from Mists and the Deadmines one in Cataclysm (less enthusiastic about the SFK and UBRS ones - though the latter is actually pretty good, to be honest,) I'd far prefer that they do additive revamps rather than destructive ones. It looks like that will be the case with the Violet Hold, as the Dalaran in Broken Isles, while canonically the same city, will be a separate space, and the one in Northrend will remain, presumably with the old Violet Hold.
However, there are a couple of avenues they could pursue to expand Karazhan into more of a dungeon/raid hub. Karazhan is rumored to have an exact copy that is upside-down directly underneath it. That's pretty weird, but you could imagine a raid or dungeon called Karazhan Depths, where rather than slowly climbing a massive tower, we'd instead be delving lower and lower into it (it'd be super cool to have a view out the windows that shows an alien, upside-down landscape.)
There's also the Karazhan Crypts. In game, actually, though unreachable, there's actually a fairly large network of tunnels that can (or at least could) be accessed by glitching through a metal gate within a crypt outside of Karazhan (where your ghost spawns if you die inside.) This area has been explored by some intrepid players, and while it's not incredibly detailed, it does have an area called the Hall of Upside-down Sinners, where several bodies attached to chains float underwater (this is a reference to Big Trouble in Little China, but still super creepy and disturbing.)
To me, it seems like the best thing they could do with the area is create some new five-player dungeons in a future patch. Given that it's far from the Broken Isles, it would be a cool kind of change of pace from the current locations.
And given that Medivh died while possessed by Sargeras, there's a huge unanswered question in Karazhan - where did Sargeras go after Medivh was killed? (Also how did he come back to be the Prophet in the Third War, but more the first question.)
We've been told (oh yeah, this is another lore bombshell) that the Burning Legion is not just going around destroying worlds for the sake of it. There's some actual goal that they're working toward that we'll discover in Legion. Might we discover that reason in Karazhan?
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