With the Battle for Dazar'alor now live (I have yet to try it out on LFR - I'm in a bit of a WoW lull these days) we've now had BFA's first major raid.
If we imagine that BFA will have a similar release pattern to Legion, we can expect Uldir to be the equivalent of the Emerald Nightmare, Crucible of Storms the equivalent of Trial of Valor (the order is slightly different, but they're still equivalent,) Dazar'alor is BFA's Nighthold, and then we'll have the Azshara raid as the Tomb of Sargeras equivalent.
So what is to be the Antorus of BFA? I think we can reasonably guess that we have only one more raid and one more major patch to anticipate in this expansion.
While the focus of the expansion has been on Alliance/Horde conflict, the hints we have been receiving throughout have been that N'zoth is most likely to figure prominently by the end.
It is, to be fair, possible that N'zoth will come later, but frankly to me it seems the trajectory of the expansion seems far more likely to have N'zoth as its final raid encounter. I could certainly imagine another Alliance/Horde-themed raid to end the expansion, but given how experimental Dazar'alor was, I doubt they would have had two in the pipeline already.
I'm not putting it at 100% certainty, but I believe that we're going to be transitioning to a heavily Old God-themed remainder to the expansion, starting with the Crucible of Storms.
We already know we're heading to Nazjatar in 8.2, with the raid on Azshara's palace as the capstone of that patch. So where, then, do we go to follow?
It seems to me that Ny'alotha must be the location of N'zoth. Whether it's a Titan facility (unlikely given it's not an Uld-something) or an ancient Black Empire city (I tend to think those are Ahn-something like Ahn'qiraj or Ahn'kahet - while they did at some point declare Ahn'qiraj a Titan facility as well, what we've seen of Black Empire architecture to me suggests that Ahn'qiraj is actually a preserved part of that era of Azeroth's history.)
Ny'alotha could be another zone with a raid inside or perhaps we'll find an Ahn-something city somewhere with a Ny'alotha raid. It seems most likely that N'zoth's prison is beneath the ocean, though with the waters opening up over Nazjatar, who knows?
One suggestion that I think someone at Blizzard Watch made was that we could have a zone in which N'zoth is actually fully visible and ridiculously enormous, and we only get to fight it once we enter the raid zone.
While a fight against the eldritch monstrosities of N'zoth seems like a great final act for the expansion, we have to consider how the other major plots will fit in:
In classic Warcraft fashion, it seems like we could see the Alliance and Horde setting aside their differences in order to fight this larger foe. The real question is how it would be different this time. We don't know exactly how the faction conflict will "resolve" this expansion, but it would feel pretty cheap if we had a Warlords-style lull in hostilities only for them to reignite again an expansion or two from now. The stakes were raised tremendously when Teldrassil and Undercity were destroyed, and that means that a simple truce ain't going to be a very satisfying conclusion to the story.
We also need to see what the Heart of Azeroth ultimately does. Azeroth the Titan is still theoretically dying or on life support. At what point do we imbue her with the power we've collected? Would that need to happen not at the end of this expansion's plot but rather at the beginning of the next one? Mechanically we need to hold on to the Heart of Azeroth until we're ready to move on to bigger and better things, but in theory we're supposed to give her her, you know, blood back once we have enough.
Finally, even if I could see the Zandalari and Kul Tirans finding some semblance of peace (though that's harder post-Dazar'alor, with the Horde side finally having better reason to be angry!) what we've seen of this war has only been escalation. The Alliance can't possibly trust Sylvanas to honor any peace they make with the Horde. To my mind, it feels as if Sylvanas cannot remain Warchief. But I also don't think she's going to die, because that would be played out.
The Death with a capital D stuff we've seen in BFA seems as if it has been hinting toward something massive in the future - likely the next expansion, much as the Old God hints seemed to be foreshadowing this one. I'm going to throw out an idea here that is a little more speculative than the other stuff I've had in this post:
Could the next expansion start with the hunt for Sylvanas Windrunner?
What if Sylvans goes AWOL, abandoning the Horde and evading the Alliance? The two factions might have different motives for finding her, but she is nevertheless Azeroth's most wanted.
WoW expansion tend to begin with some kind of big war - an invading army or devastating atrocity. But wouldn't it be cool if we had one where we initially think we're just tying up loose ends? We figure, ok, war is over and we've saved the world and killed an Old God. All we need to do is find Sylvanas and we can finally take a breather. But then we find out that Sylvanas has gone somewhere where a far greater threat lurks - like the Shadowlands.
The great thing is that Sylvanas isn't the villain here. She's searching for answers and attempting to retain her freedom, but when she sees what is waiting for us on, as Bwonsamdi would put it, "de other side," she realizes that she is going to need our help - the very people who want her dead.
I love the trope of being forced to work with odd bedfellows, and while that often applies any time the Alliance and Horde cooperate, it would be really cool to see Sylvanas - one of the least trustworthy people in the Warcraft cosmos - needing to earn our trust.
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