It's always fun to create a little historical document to see what we thought would be happening in the expansion right before we know what it is.
It's Halloween of 2019, and we're currently one day away from the announcement of the expansion that will follow Battle for Azeroth.
Right now, the only really solid, practically undeniable leak is a screenshot of Bolvar Fordragon, emerged from the Frozen Throne and carrying a big maul. This was linked to on the Blizzard website for a time, which suggests that this is very much not a fake - it's not clear how it could be.
However, while there was also a "leaked" promo that identified the new expansion as Shadowlands, we haven't had the same kind of evidentiary confirmation. That promo looks very impressive, particularly its logo, which has the typical World of Warcraft expansion logo formatting but with some art elements (like a border) that are both unique and professional looking. Either it's real, or it's a very, very impressive fake.
While there are some players who still believe that we're fated for a Black Empire-themed Old God expansion, I think most of us have taken 8.3's Visions of N'zoth to be the closest thing we're getting to that, at least for now (I would not at all be shocked if some future expansion was about that.) It is, of course, possible that the Old Gods will play a key role - either in the background or center stage - within the Shadowlands, but we don't have much direct evidence that they'll continue with their current prominence after Ny'alotha.
The actual setting of the expansion remains unknown. If the promo is correct, it's a place called Bastion, though where Bastion could be is a mystery - is it another continent, another world, or a place within the Shadowlands?
Given the cinematic screenshot, it would seem Bolvar is likely to play a significant role (unless the cinematic just has him being killed - though given the introduction of his daughter Taelia in BFA, that seems unlikely.) Sylvanas, who most recently in 8.2.5 fled the Horde, leaving it without a Warchief, would make a natural player in any death-themed expansion. I personally suspect she might cause whatever inciting incident starts the expansion's plot, though her ultimate role - whether as final boss, first major raid boss like Gul'dan, or the dangerous villain we must reluctantly seek aid from - is totally unknown.
Mechanically, there are a few things people have speculated about:
First is that we might be getting a significant change to the way that factions work. This has ranged from players choosing a faction regardless of race to the ability to group cross-faction to even the full abolition of the factions as a thing except for those in War Mode or in Battlegrounds. It is possible that the peace between the two sides will be a purely story-based thing, but I'm hoping that we'll see a relaxation of the divide to allow players to group across the lines.
Another thing people have speculated about is a Level Squish. While I've heard rumors that Blizzard wanted to do this for 9.0 but are delaying it - possibly to 10.0 - I do think that there's some logic to the idea, which might also make it easier to level up without having to go through every expansion's content. We've already got a bit of that - you can choose between Outland and Northrend for your 58-80 content, likewise Cataclysm and Pandaria for 80-90.
Typically, we get a new class in every odd-numbered X.0 patch. While Necromancers and Tinkers are getting the usual speculations, another possibility people have put forth are "class skins" that would alter existing classes aesthetically without changing their mechanics, like allowing your Warlock to be a Necromancer instead and getting to summon undead instead of demons. Another possibility is that some or all classes could be getting a new specialization. The datamining of fiery Death Knight swords in 8.3 has fueled rumors that Death Knights could get a fire-based spec (actually, as someone who missed two-handed frost, if this would give us the option for a similar playstyle to that, that'd be cool!)
Lorewise, while there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we'll be dealing with death entities like the Lich King, Sylvanas, Helya, and possibly Mueh'zalla, what we definitely do not know is how they all fit together. The actual plot of the expansion and its premise is a mystery, even if we can be pretty confident about its motifs and themes.
While the "Fourth War" is over, it's clear that there are hardliners on both sides. Sylvanas is a fugitive, but she still has loyalists within the Horde (including some players) and her plots continue to turn. Meanwhile, Tyrande has likely emerged as the main Alliance instigator of further faction conflict, as she is not at all willing to just accept peace after what happened to Teldrassil. We have yet to understand the full implications of her invocation of the Night Warrior. Will Sylvanas' capture be enough to satisfy her? And will that plot even resolve in the next expansion? We don't know.
It's funny to look back on these articles and see how wrong we were sometimes, and even looking at the announcement of BFA, I noticed that I misidentified the final boss of Atal'dazar as a Nerubian, thinking they'd play a bigger role.
There are, of course, also some details that even Blizzard might get wrong. When Wrath was first announced, the Vrykul were going to be vampiric half-giants. That vampirism angle totally went away (perhaps replaced with the San'layn) and I'd assume the notion that the Vrykul were the ancestors of humanity was something they figured out later on. So even if that promo is correct, and we're going to meet the "noble Kyrians," we really have no clue what those actually are, and if they'll play the role that even Blizzard has in mind for them now.
In terms of the actual announcement, I'm relatively confident we'll be getting the full cinematic tomorrow, given the screenshot we have of it.
So, for the record:
I'm about 99.9% confident that the leaked screenshot of Bolvar is real, which suggests that he's going to play a prominent role in the expansion.
I'm about 90% confident that the next expansion will be called Shadowlands, and that the logo we've seen is real.
I'm about 75% confident that the whole promo we saw is real, with its mentions of Bastion and Kyrians and the like.
The other stuff, though, I can't really put into numbers. I'm very excited for an undead-themed WoW expansion, but I really don't have a great sense of what form it will take - I think we don't know enough about the nature of the Shadowlands to figure that out, though I think we'll know a lot better starting tomorrow.
BONUS:
I am also about 90% confident that we'll get a Diablo IV announcement tomorrow.
I'm about 85% sure that Overwatch 2 (or 2.0) is going to be announced as well, and I'm hoping it will include PvE solo content.
I'm about 65% sure that we'll get a new IP announcement.
As I write this, we're 22 hours and 19 minutes until the opening ceremony.
(Also, I predict there will be at least some drama at Blizzcon over the Blitzchung controversy. Blizzard might have walked things back somewhat, but they managed to really hurt their image.)
Thursday, October 31, 2019
What Made the Scourge So Terrifying
The Scourge are my favorite villains in Warcraft lore. They're not the most powerful, and perhaps not the most monumental in their influence on the world. But they're incredibly iconic, and the drama of the Scourge is profound.
I say this as someone who has never been a big fan of zombie movies. The thing is, zombie movies (and shows, and other kinds of stories) are usually about the breakdown of society - apart from the occasional scary elite monster (like the elites in Left 4 Dead) zombies are basically fungible, and while the horrific fate of those who contract the zombie disease is to become one of them, it is a total loss of identity that comes with that. Which yes, is a compelling nightmare. But I find intelligent undead far more interesting.
Of course, the most popular version of intelligent undead are vampires - depending on the author, vampires can vary from little more than zombies with different rules to masterful, diabolical sadists, and even to sympathetic, often romantic figures. (The latter version in particular always seem to be profoundly attractive in a sort of goth way.)
The Scourge plays a little with both versions. The horror of the Scourge is compounded in a number of ways: First, the Scourge recruits its enemies. From a simple logistical standpoint, that's incredibly dangerous. In Game of Thrones, the Army of the Dead (which was clearly an inspiration for the Scourge - the show hadn't begun until after Wrath of the Lich King, but the blue eyes and wights led by intelligent and icy monsters certainly existed in the books prior to Warcraft III) demonstrated this power at Hardhome, where the heroes fight off an assault by the Undead only to find that everyone who fell defending the town just wound up added to the armies. Essentially, it's a military adversary where anything other than a total victory in battle basically counts for nothing.
The second is the simplest: we are, at a deep instinctive level, afraid of dead bodies. It makes sense, given that bodies tend to carry disease, their rotting smell a warning that even those who died of non-infectious causes may now be crawling with pathogens that could spell doom for us if we stay near them too long. Bodies are bad enough, but having those same dead bodies coming at us with a malicious intent is nightmarish.
The third, however, is the thing I find the most interesting: when the undead retain their memories but lose their moral sense, our emotions toward people we knew in life are used against us. The Scourge are cruel, not just violent or dangerous. And they use the knowledge that a living person converted into undeath has of the people from their lives to twist the knife.
Consider the moment Arthas returned to his father after claiming Frostmourne. Arthas was welcomed as a conquering hero, who had saved his kingdom from the Scourge. Flowers that would later come to be known as Arthas' Tears were strewn on the path to the throne room. It was a most horrific event, then, to see Arthas, the crown prince and great hope for his kingdom, walk in and stab his father, King Terenas, through the neck with Frostmourne.
Arthas was meant to be the hero. And he knew that. He used it to inflict maximum terror on the kingdom that was now his and that he would then bring to slaughter.
I've played mostly Alliance since Wrath, but the moment that Horde players arrive at the Deathbringer Saurfang fight is similarly horrifying. Varok's son had been a hero, much like the elder Saurfang, but unlike Varok, Draenosh was not tainted by the many sins of the Old Horde. It is terrible enough to lose a child, but then to see that same child's body reanimated, and for all his honor and love for his father to be turned into cruel mockery is a tragedy that also robs the mourners of their fond memories of the departed.
To get personal here, I lost my mother a little over two years ago. Imagining her coming back somehow but spitting nothing but hatred and malice would, I think, totally break me emotionally.
And with the Scourge, this is not just one isolated case - the Scourge has converted practically entire kingdoms to its cause, and intentionally levied this emotional warfare as part of their tactics.
When you play a new Death Knight - and I should say that datamining suggests this might not be available for long given that there might be a new starting experience, so be sure to check it out if you haven't ever played one - you can find a number of books written by Kel'thuzad within Acherus. The Lich King's majordomo makes some fascinating points and arguments:
Essentially, he says that the Scourge only employs their "evil" aesthetic to play into the fears of the living. The Scourge views itself in very amoral terms. All things within the Scourge are designed to serve its purpose - to convert all life on Azeroth into undeath. And, at least in Kel'thuzad's view, there isn't actually much real malice - just a job to be done and tools used to accomplish that job. He even mentions how all of the Scourge's "culture" is appropriated, such as using Nerubian architecture for its Necropoli.
Holy crap. Does that mean Naxxramas was originally built as part of the Black Empire?
In a weird way, though, doesn't this utilitarian approach to the Scourge's "evil" deeds make it even more horrific? Anger, after all, is human. Hate, vindictiveness - it's all emotional. But Undeath, we know, mutes emotions. So instead, we've got essentially a machine of death that has chosen to use both physical and emotional pain as a weapon against the living purely out of practicalities.
To connect with another game franchise, in Dark Souls, the danger of "Hollowing" is the way that, over time, the Undead lose their personalities and become mindless and, one imagines, stop really having much of an inner life. The plot of at least the first and third games (I haven't played the second) is about trying to find a way to renew the world so that people can live natural lives - mortal, yes, but also meaningful and conscious.
What's interesting, then, and horrifying, is that the Scourge seems to be designed first to unleash terror and cruelty and apocalyptic destruction on the world. But the end goal is for things to be still, cold, and unmoving - meaningless.
All the pomp, all the performative cruelty, is just serving the vision of a still and static world.
Which is pretty freaking scary.
I say this as someone who has never been a big fan of zombie movies. The thing is, zombie movies (and shows, and other kinds of stories) are usually about the breakdown of society - apart from the occasional scary elite monster (like the elites in Left 4 Dead) zombies are basically fungible, and while the horrific fate of those who contract the zombie disease is to become one of them, it is a total loss of identity that comes with that. Which yes, is a compelling nightmare. But I find intelligent undead far more interesting.
Of course, the most popular version of intelligent undead are vampires - depending on the author, vampires can vary from little more than zombies with different rules to masterful, diabolical sadists, and even to sympathetic, often romantic figures. (The latter version in particular always seem to be profoundly attractive in a sort of goth way.)
The Scourge plays a little with both versions. The horror of the Scourge is compounded in a number of ways: First, the Scourge recruits its enemies. From a simple logistical standpoint, that's incredibly dangerous. In Game of Thrones, the Army of the Dead (which was clearly an inspiration for the Scourge - the show hadn't begun until after Wrath of the Lich King, but the blue eyes and wights led by intelligent and icy monsters certainly existed in the books prior to Warcraft III) demonstrated this power at Hardhome, where the heroes fight off an assault by the Undead only to find that everyone who fell defending the town just wound up added to the armies. Essentially, it's a military adversary where anything other than a total victory in battle basically counts for nothing.
The second is the simplest: we are, at a deep instinctive level, afraid of dead bodies. It makes sense, given that bodies tend to carry disease, their rotting smell a warning that even those who died of non-infectious causes may now be crawling with pathogens that could spell doom for us if we stay near them too long. Bodies are bad enough, but having those same dead bodies coming at us with a malicious intent is nightmarish.
The third, however, is the thing I find the most interesting: when the undead retain their memories but lose their moral sense, our emotions toward people we knew in life are used against us. The Scourge are cruel, not just violent or dangerous. And they use the knowledge that a living person converted into undeath has of the people from their lives to twist the knife.
Consider the moment Arthas returned to his father after claiming Frostmourne. Arthas was welcomed as a conquering hero, who had saved his kingdom from the Scourge. Flowers that would later come to be known as Arthas' Tears were strewn on the path to the throne room. It was a most horrific event, then, to see Arthas, the crown prince and great hope for his kingdom, walk in and stab his father, King Terenas, through the neck with Frostmourne.
Arthas was meant to be the hero. And he knew that. He used it to inflict maximum terror on the kingdom that was now his and that he would then bring to slaughter.
I've played mostly Alliance since Wrath, but the moment that Horde players arrive at the Deathbringer Saurfang fight is similarly horrifying. Varok's son had been a hero, much like the elder Saurfang, but unlike Varok, Draenosh was not tainted by the many sins of the Old Horde. It is terrible enough to lose a child, but then to see that same child's body reanimated, and for all his honor and love for his father to be turned into cruel mockery is a tragedy that also robs the mourners of their fond memories of the departed.
To get personal here, I lost my mother a little over two years ago. Imagining her coming back somehow but spitting nothing but hatred and malice would, I think, totally break me emotionally.
And with the Scourge, this is not just one isolated case - the Scourge has converted practically entire kingdoms to its cause, and intentionally levied this emotional warfare as part of their tactics.
When you play a new Death Knight - and I should say that datamining suggests this might not be available for long given that there might be a new starting experience, so be sure to check it out if you haven't ever played one - you can find a number of books written by Kel'thuzad within Acherus. The Lich King's majordomo makes some fascinating points and arguments:
Essentially, he says that the Scourge only employs their "evil" aesthetic to play into the fears of the living. The Scourge views itself in very amoral terms. All things within the Scourge are designed to serve its purpose - to convert all life on Azeroth into undeath. And, at least in Kel'thuzad's view, there isn't actually much real malice - just a job to be done and tools used to accomplish that job. He even mentions how all of the Scourge's "culture" is appropriated, such as using Nerubian architecture for its Necropoli.
Holy crap. Does that mean Naxxramas was originally built as part of the Black Empire?
In a weird way, though, doesn't this utilitarian approach to the Scourge's "evil" deeds make it even more horrific? Anger, after all, is human. Hate, vindictiveness - it's all emotional. But Undeath, we know, mutes emotions. So instead, we've got essentially a machine of death that has chosen to use both physical and emotional pain as a weapon against the living purely out of practicalities.
To connect with another game franchise, in Dark Souls, the danger of "Hollowing" is the way that, over time, the Undead lose their personalities and become mindless and, one imagines, stop really having much of an inner life. The plot of at least the first and third games (I haven't played the second) is about trying to find a way to renew the world so that people can live natural lives - mortal, yes, but also meaningful and conscious.
What's interesting, then, and horrifying, is that the Scourge seems to be designed first to unleash terror and cruelty and apocalyptic destruction on the world. But the end goal is for things to be still, cold, and unmoving - meaningless.
All the pomp, all the performative cruelty, is just serving the vision of a still and static world.
Which is pretty freaking scary.
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Death in the History of Azeroth
Chronicle, and then the Legion expansion, gave us a shockingly concise "unified historical theory" on the Warcraft cosmos.
There was Light and Void, and there were Titans. And Azeroth was a world that had formed around a nascent Titan world-soul, destined to one day arise as a Titan herself.
We know that the Void wished to see the material plane corrupted and turned into more Void, and saw in the Titans a great potential to create a being that was powerful enough to bring about this vision of madness and darkness. The thing is, the Titans are godlike on their own, and a mature Titan could not be corrupted in this way, apparently.
So they send the Old Gods - massive clumps of shadowy void energy made flesh, which then crashed into various worlds and burrowed into them, infecting and spreading like a malignant growth.
We know that the Old Gods - not the four we're familiar with, but presumably beings of similar power and evil - corrupted the world of Telongrus, which itself had a world-soul within it. Telongrus was fated to be the first Void Titan, until Sargeras took it upon himself to slash the planet it half, killing Telongrus and leaving only a shattered world saturated in void that would, eons later, become the home territory of the Alliance's Void Elves.
Azeroth, however, is apparently, potentially, more powerful than any previous Titan, and so it was something of the ultimate prize for the Void. But the Pantheon discovered in before the corruption could be completed. Though the Old Gods had defeated and enslaved the Elemental Lords upon their first invasion, the Titans were able to destroy the Black Empire and contain the Old Gods - though they discovered that removing them was untenable after Aman'thul tore Y'shaarj out of the planet's surface. The destruction wrought by this nearly killed Azeroth, and only by channeling the power of Azeroth's blood back into itself and creating the Well of Eternity was the World-Soul saved.
Sargeras, however, was unconvinced that such half measures were enough to prevent a Void Titan, and instead embraced the chaotic power of the Fel, unleashing the demons he had fought for eons to serve as his army, intending to leave the universe a scorched ruin, perhaps the only thing surviving being his demonic Legion. The Demons seemed to be immune to the power of the Void (though it had been a group of demonic Nathrezim whose dalliances with the Void had led him to Telongrus in the first place) and he felt it was the only option to prevent the universe from succumbing to eldritch madness.
In the cosmic chart at the beginning of Chronicle, there are six Primal Forces, arranged in opposition to one another. From the top, and going clockwise, there's Light, Disorder, Death, Void, Order, and Life. While I don't know if these are all supposed to be equal in power and importance - notably, Light and Void are at the top and bottom - it is curious that Death is at least on the same tier as Disorder (represented by Demons and the Fel.)
There's plenty of undead to be found in World of Warcraft, but the most iconic example is the Scourge. The thing is, the Scourge was created like a weapon - not unlike the Horde, in fact - to be used to invade and weaken Azeroth in order to prepare it for a full scale demonic invasion by the Burning Legion.
Canonically, the Lich King - which is really the font from which the Scourge is poured - was simply a creation by Kil'jaeden, one of Sargeras' two top lieutenants, and a former mortal Eredar who allowed his race to be corrupted into the Man'ari. The Lich King was the spirit of the Orc shaman Ner'zhul - once the wise spiritual leader of the Orcs on Draenor.
What has always bothered me about this is that there's no real primal force at play here - it's just one mortal-turned-demon who took the spirit of an orc he had just killed and stuffed it in a suit of armor. Now, sure, from a human perspective, Kil'jaeden is profoundly ancient. Very generously you could say that human history goes back something like 5000 years (I think the earliest writing is 5300 years old) and Kil'jaeden became a demon five times that much longer ago. But on the other hand, with long-lived races - particularly the Draenei, who either don't really suffer the effects of aging or just have an absurdly long lifespan - personally remember stuff that happened that long ago. Your Draenei character might even remember Kil'jaeden as the charismatic new leader when he first came to power in Mac'aree. And so it maybe takes a bit of the mystery out of him, which subsequently makes the Lich King a less mythic figure.
However, in the expansions since Wrath - and particularly in Legion - we were introduced to Helya and Odyn. Given how profound an impact she had on Azeroth's history, and how cool a villain she was, it was a shame that we killed her just one patch after she was introduced. However, in BFA, you can get a quest from island expeditions that reveal that Helya is doing fine - sure, she no longer has Odyn trapped in the Halls of Valor, but it appears that that is literally all we were able to accomplish in that raid.
However, while Helya feels like a pretty cool ancient exemplar of Death as a power, she's not really at the top of that list.
Instead, there's a mystery regarding Helya's creation. We know that Odyn, annoyed that Tyr had placed the power of the Titans in the dragons to serve as guardians of Azeroth, and did not reserve that power only for the Titanforged, sought to find his own way to create a different sort of guardian for the world. Seeking to undo the Curse of Flesh, Odyn journeyed to the Shadowlands and met with...
Something.
Much like his Norse mythology counterpart, he gave his eye for knowledge - in this case, the knowledge needed to create beings that could retrieve souls from the Shadowlands and put them into new bodies - bodies of metal that were free from the Curse of Flesh.
Odyn, being an arrogant, egotistical dick, forced Helya to become the first of these beings - the first Val'kyr - basically killing someone who had thought of him as her adoptive father. Her eventual rebellion would lead Odyn to be trapped in the Halls of Valor for thousands of years (though apparently he could project himself around Stormheim?) unleash the Kvaldir upon the world, and generally mess things up.
The thing is, while that set the stage for the drama we played through in Legion across Stormheim through two dungeons and a raid, it left one tantalizing question:
What the hell did Odyn meet with? Who has his eye?
The most prominent theory is that it is Mueh'zalla, a being that the Trolls of Zul'farrak revere and fear, and whose name is listed along with two other Loa that we then saw on Zandalar (RIP Shadra.)
Could Mueh'zalla be the death entity that was behind all of this?
It's certainly possible, but it kind of begs the question. All we really know of Mueh'zalla is that he's called the Father of Sleep and seems to be a god of death.
While the Loa are generally just a subset of Wild Gods - which also includes the Ancients revered by the Night Elves like Malorne and Ursoc, as well as the Celestials of Pandaria, like Yu'lon and Xuen - it's clear that not all Loa are the same sort of animal-god beings. Bwonsamdi looks like an undead troll, and might even have once been a mortal troll who ascended to being a Loa. The trolls have even referred to Night Elf wisps as Loa before, which suggests that the term Loa is actually a very broad one.
Which then leaves us to wonder: What even is Mueh'zalla?
Furthermore, we think of the Shadowlands - the likely setting of the next expansion - as being the deathly reflection of the Emerald Dream. But even the Dream is not very well understood, despite an entire class being connected to it. We don't know, for example, if Freya actually created the Dream, or opened a way into it (we should ask her - she's still around.)
But we know way more about the Emerald Dream than we know the Shadowlands.
To step outside the narrative for a moment: I'm sure that the reason these things are so mysterious is that there's new lore Blizzard is developing for the story. Any ongoing franchise like this is going to need to bring about new backstory, sometimes retconning things a bit to make them more interesting.
Still, with the Burning Legion decisively crippled, the danger was that the only really big supernatural threats left would be the Old Gods. Mind you, I like the Old Gods as villains (though I've usually been a little underwhelmed by their use in-game) and I know a lot of people were hoping that 9.0 would be a big Black Empire expansion. That could very well happen at some point, but I'm actually very excited to explore a different cosmic force, and one that I feel Blizzard has generally done a good job with.
I think there's another post to be written here about the tone and themes I'd like to see explored in a Shadowlands expansion, which I might write tomorrow.
But the thing that's funny is that, with the exception of Helya, we haven't really seen Death and Undeath make a huge impact on Azeroth's history in the same way that the Old Gods or the Legion have.
That being said, there's potential. There's a lot of story about stuff that happened over ten thousand years ago, with stuff like the Night Elf Empire, the Trolls fighting the Aqir, and the Pandaren overthrowing the Mogu.
But between the War of the Ancients (maybe the War of the Satyr a little after then) and the First War, there are some yawning chasms of history that have not been explored.
The Drust practiced some kind of necromancy in their fight against the early Kul Tirans, and while it seems as if that story was resolved in the zone, dungeon, and the final quests about Jaina in 8.0, the fact that the Drust were clearly a group of Vrykul makes an interesting connection to the Titans.
I wonder - were there really no powerful necromancers to arise in the early days of the human kingdoms? Also, in Stormheim, there's a side quest involving pirates who have been converted into vampires by an ancient Vrykul vampire. Previously, the only vampires in WoW were the San'layn, created by the Lich King from the Blood Elves who accompanied Illidan to attack Icecrown. As a staple of fantasy fiction (if, admittedly, the fantasy that skews more gothic in nature) I, for one, wouldn't mind seeing more vampire villains in WoW.
We will, of course, be getting the general gist of the new expansion on Friday - major features like new classes and such, as well as a location and general theme. I'm also relatively confident that we'll see the new expansion's cinematic (which used to come much closer to the launch - I think Legion was the first where we got the cinematic at or around the same time as the announcement) given the 99.9% confirmed screenshot of Bolvar.
But I think these lore details are the sort of thing we'll have to wait at least until the Beta goes live to get fine details about.
I'm getting pretty excited, folks.
There was Light and Void, and there were Titans. And Azeroth was a world that had formed around a nascent Titan world-soul, destined to one day arise as a Titan herself.
We know that the Void wished to see the material plane corrupted and turned into more Void, and saw in the Titans a great potential to create a being that was powerful enough to bring about this vision of madness and darkness. The thing is, the Titans are godlike on their own, and a mature Titan could not be corrupted in this way, apparently.
So they send the Old Gods - massive clumps of shadowy void energy made flesh, which then crashed into various worlds and burrowed into them, infecting and spreading like a malignant growth.
We know that the Old Gods - not the four we're familiar with, but presumably beings of similar power and evil - corrupted the world of Telongrus, which itself had a world-soul within it. Telongrus was fated to be the first Void Titan, until Sargeras took it upon himself to slash the planet it half, killing Telongrus and leaving only a shattered world saturated in void that would, eons later, become the home territory of the Alliance's Void Elves.
Azeroth, however, is apparently, potentially, more powerful than any previous Titan, and so it was something of the ultimate prize for the Void. But the Pantheon discovered in before the corruption could be completed. Though the Old Gods had defeated and enslaved the Elemental Lords upon their first invasion, the Titans were able to destroy the Black Empire and contain the Old Gods - though they discovered that removing them was untenable after Aman'thul tore Y'shaarj out of the planet's surface. The destruction wrought by this nearly killed Azeroth, and only by channeling the power of Azeroth's blood back into itself and creating the Well of Eternity was the World-Soul saved.
Sargeras, however, was unconvinced that such half measures were enough to prevent a Void Titan, and instead embraced the chaotic power of the Fel, unleashing the demons he had fought for eons to serve as his army, intending to leave the universe a scorched ruin, perhaps the only thing surviving being his demonic Legion. The Demons seemed to be immune to the power of the Void (though it had been a group of demonic Nathrezim whose dalliances with the Void had led him to Telongrus in the first place) and he felt it was the only option to prevent the universe from succumbing to eldritch madness.
In the cosmic chart at the beginning of Chronicle, there are six Primal Forces, arranged in opposition to one another. From the top, and going clockwise, there's Light, Disorder, Death, Void, Order, and Life. While I don't know if these are all supposed to be equal in power and importance - notably, Light and Void are at the top and bottom - it is curious that Death is at least on the same tier as Disorder (represented by Demons and the Fel.)
There's plenty of undead to be found in World of Warcraft, but the most iconic example is the Scourge. The thing is, the Scourge was created like a weapon - not unlike the Horde, in fact - to be used to invade and weaken Azeroth in order to prepare it for a full scale demonic invasion by the Burning Legion.
Canonically, the Lich King - which is really the font from which the Scourge is poured - was simply a creation by Kil'jaeden, one of Sargeras' two top lieutenants, and a former mortal Eredar who allowed his race to be corrupted into the Man'ari. The Lich King was the spirit of the Orc shaman Ner'zhul - once the wise spiritual leader of the Orcs on Draenor.
What has always bothered me about this is that there's no real primal force at play here - it's just one mortal-turned-demon who took the spirit of an orc he had just killed and stuffed it in a suit of armor. Now, sure, from a human perspective, Kil'jaeden is profoundly ancient. Very generously you could say that human history goes back something like 5000 years (I think the earliest writing is 5300 years old) and Kil'jaeden became a demon five times that much longer ago. But on the other hand, with long-lived races - particularly the Draenei, who either don't really suffer the effects of aging or just have an absurdly long lifespan - personally remember stuff that happened that long ago. Your Draenei character might even remember Kil'jaeden as the charismatic new leader when he first came to power in Mac'aree. And so it maybe takes a bit of the mystery out of him, which subsequently makes the Lich King a less mythic figure.
However, in the expansions since Wrath - and particularly in Legion - we were introduced to Helya and Odyn. Given how profound an impact she had on Azeroth's history, and how cool a villain she was, it was a shame that we killed her just one patch after she was introduced. However, in BFA, you can get a quest from island expeditions that reveal that Helya is doing fine - sure, she no longer has Odyn trapped in the Halls of Valor, but it appears that that is literally all we were able to accomplish in that raid.
However, while Helya feels like a pretty cool ancient exemplar of Death as a power, she's not really at the top of that list.
Instead, there's a mystery regarding Helya's creation. We know that Odyn, annoyed that Tyr had placed the power of the Titans in the dragons to serve as guardians of Azeroth, and did not reserve that power only for the Titanforged, sought to find his own way to create a different sort of guardian for the world. Seeking to undo the Curse of Flesh, Odyn journeyed to the Shadowlands and met with...
Something.
Much like his Norse mythology counterpart, he gave his eye for knowledge - in this case, the knowledge needed to create beings that could retrieve souls from the Shadowlands and put them into new bodies - bodies of metal that were free from the Curse of Flesh.
Odyn, being an arrogant, egotistical dick, forced Helya to become the first of these beings - the first Val'kyr - basically killing someone who had thought of him as her adoptive father. Her eventual rebellion would lead Odyn to be trapped in the Halls of Valor for thousands of years (though apparently he could project himself around Stormheim?) unleash the Kvaldir upon the world, and generally mess things up.
The thing is, while that set the stage for the drama we played through in Legion across Stormheim through two dungeons and a raid, it left one tantalizing question:
What the hell did Odyn meet with? Who has his eye?
The most prominent theory is that it is Mueh'zalla, a being that the Trolls of Zul'farrak revere and fear, and whose name is listed along with two other Loa that we then saw on Zandalar (RIP Shadra.)
Could Mueh'zalla be the death entity that was behind all of this?
It's certainly possible, but it kind of begs the question. All we really know of Mueh'zalla is that he's called the Father of Sleep and seems to be a god of death.
While the Loa are generally just a subset of Wild Gods - which also includes the Ancients revered by the Night Elves like Malorne and Ursoc, as well as the Celestials of Pandaria, like Yu'lon and Xuen - it's clear that not all Loa are the same sort of animal-god beings. Bwonsamdi looks like an undead troll, and might even have once been a mortal troll who ascended to being a Loa. The trolls have even referred to Night Elf wisps as Loa before, which suggests that the term Loa is actually a very broad one.
Which then leaves us to wonder: What even is Mueh'zalla?
Furthermore, we think of the Shadowlands - the likely setting of the next expansion - as being the deathly reflection of the Emerald Dream. But even the Dream is not very well understood, despite an entire class being connected to it. We don't know, for example, if Freya actually created the Dream, or opened a way into it (we should ask her - she's still around.)
But we know way more about the Emerald Dream than we know the Shadowlands.
To step outside the narrative for a moment: I'm sure that the reason these things are so mysterious is that there's new lore Blizzard is developing for the story. Any ongoing franchise like this is going to need to bring about new backstory, sometimes retconning things a bit to make them more interesting.
Still, with the Burning Legion decisively crippled, the danger was that the only really big supernatural threats left would be the Old Gods. Mind you, I like the Old Gods as villains (though I've usually been a little underwhelmed by their use in-game) and I know a lot of people were hoping that 9.0 would be a big Black Empire expansion. That could very well happen at some point, but I'm actually very excited to explore a different cosmic force, and one that I feel Blizzard has generally done a good job with.
I think there's another post to be written here about the tone and themes I'd like to see explored in a Shadowlands expansion, which I might write tomorrow.
But the thing that's funny is that, with the exception of Helya, we haven't really seen Death and Undeath make a huge impact on Azeroth's history in the same way that the Old Gods or the Legion have.
That being said, there's potential. There's a lot of story about stuff that happened over ten thousand years ago, with stuff like the Night Elf Empire, the Trolls fighting the Aqir, and the Pandaren overthrowing the Mogu.
But between the War of the Ancients (maybe the War of the Satyr a little after then) and the First War, there are some yawning chasms of history that have not been explored.
The Drust practiced some kind of necromancy in their fight against the early Kul Tirans, and while it seems as if that story was resolved in the zone, dungeon, and the final quests about Jaina in 8.0, the fact that the Drust were clearly a group of Vrykul makes an interesting connection to the Titans.
I wonder - were there really no powerful necromancers to arise in the early days of the human kingdoms? Also, in Stormheim, there's a side quest involving pirates who have been converted into vampires by an ancient Vrykul vampire. Previously, the only vampires in WoW were the San'layn, created by the Lich King from the Blood Elves who accompanied Illidan to attack Icecrown. As a staple of fantasy fiction (if, admittedly, the fantasy that skews more gothic in nature) I, for one, wouldn't mind seeing more vampire villains in WoW.
We will, of course, be getting the general gist of the new expansion on Friday - major features like new classes and such, as well as a location and general theme. I'm also relatively confident that we'll see the new expansion's cinematic (which used to come much closer to the launch - I think Legion was the first where we got the cinematic at or around the same time as the announcement) given the 99.9% confirmed screenshot of Bolvar.
But I think these lore details are the sort of thing we'll have to wait at least until the Beta goes live to get fine details about.
I'm getting pretty excited, folks.
Monday, October 28, 2019
Eyes of Blue
Eye color in Warcraft is significant. Thrall's blue eyes seemed to signal his significance as a person of destiny. Illidan's golden eyes did the same. When the High Elves began to take on Fel energy to satiate their thirst for magic, their eyes turned from blue to green (in fact, the only visible different between High Elves and Blood Elves is eye color) and later, after years in which the Sunwell was suffused with Holy energy, some Blood Elves began to get golden eyes.
The most striking visual distinction for Death Knights is that their eyes glow blue. Naturally, I had to play a Draenei character whose eyes do that anyway, so it's less distinctive for him, but anyone from Human to Goblin to Blood Elf has blue eyes.
In Wrath of the Lich King's opening cinematic, Arthas' glowing blue eyes opening were an icon of the necromantic power running through him. Frostmourne lights up blue as he prepares to raise Sindragosa, and the shot of the hundreds of thousands if not millions of zombies and skeletons watching him raising this most powerful of Frostwyrms was punctuated by their bodies lighting up with the icy blue necromantic magic.
Blue is kind of an important color for the Scourge.
And that made it so visually interesting that when Bolvar was crowned as Lich King, the fiery orange/red that had been infused into him by the breath of the red dragons shone through the helmet. When he became the Lich King, that glow burst forth from the helmet, and even the blue gem on the forehead changed colors.
This, it seemed, was indicative of the profound change that was Bolvar taking the crown from Arthas. Perhaps Bolvar's fire could melt Arthas' ice, and we would see the Lich King turned from an apocalyptic menace into a gatekeeper holding the tide of death at bay.
So, why, then, are his eyes blue now?
The hope in crowning Bolvar way back then (about ten years ago, actually) was that this pillar of will power, who had held out against the Lich King's personal attention for a full year without falling to his corruption, could then take up the task of running the Scourge in a way that did not threaten all life on Azeroth.
And so far, so good. Mostly.
In Legion, we saw Bolvar more active than he's been since taking on the crown. Empowering the Deathlord and allying with the Ebon Blade, player Death Knights went about recruiting a new Four Horsemen to serve as his champions. And while there were some ironies, like how the Ebon Blade saw raising Sally Whitemane as a Death Knight was actually a kind of redemption for her after her role in the Scarlet Crusade, the Ebon Blade also committed some terrible crimes empowering the Lich King. They struck at Light's Hope Chapel to raise Tirion Fordring - and even if Bolvar had planned it as a way to get Darion Mograine as his replacement from the beginning, it still meant the deaths of several paladins at the hands of their supposed allies.
Later, the Lich King raised the corpse of a red dragon to serve as the Deathlord's mount, but in the process, sent them to the Ruby Dragonshrine where they were likely to slay many benevolent dragons in their search for the information they needed.
Bolvar in life was the epitome of a lawful good paladin - honorable, brave, and skilled in battle. But at the very best, he can only be considered neutral now in terms of morality.
We're really now just at a point where we're hoping he remains Lawful Neutral - holding to his task of keeping the dead at bay. The fear, then, is that he might descend into Lawful Evil and revive the Scourge as the apocalyptic threat that it initially was.
Bolvar's red motif was based on the fire of the Red Dragons. Because the Red dragonflight in Warcraft lore are the guardians of Life, their fire is infused with the power of life. Red and Black dragons both breathe fire, but Black's is the more traditional destructive flame. When the red dragons burned the area in front of the Wrath Gate, not only was the Forsaken Blight burned away, but flowers and plants began to grow up from the ground.
Initially, we assumed that Bolvar's death to the Blight simply meant that his body was burned away in the fires - a cleansing fire, but also one that returned his body to the elements.
Instead, as was heavily implied in 3.1 but confirmed in 3.3, Bolvar was brought back to some strange semblance of light - a charred and blackened body that still glowed with the fire of the dragons, but that could not seem to die.
It made sense, then, for Bolvar to take the Helm of Domination, rather than Tirion Fordring, who was ready to do so. Bolvar was no longer really human anymore, and returning to a normal life in Stormwind was hardly a realistic scenario.
One wonders, then, what it means that in that screenshot - which by now is basically confirmed to be real - his eyes have gone blue. Notably, the rest of his body, and even his amazingly badass looking maul weapon, still glow with red flame. But the eyes are typically what count.
And it's not like this isn't new - as recently as BFA, we've met with the Lich King and he remained frozen within the Frozen Throne, his eyes continuing to burn with red dragonfire.
While I don't necessarily want to endorse it, the most straightforward theory is that this signifies the end of Bolvar as "Jailor of the Damned" and his full transformation into the Lich King. He held out longer than most would, but the Scourge and the Lich King have a purpose, and it is to scour the world of the living.
Obviously, the other point that is so obvious that one forgets to mention it: Bolvar is out.
Arthas spent all the time between the Frozen Throne WCIII expansion and Wrath of the Lich King frozen into the throne - we see the ice begin to crack during the Wrath cinematic. Bolvar, upon his coronation, coated himself in ice, entombing himself in the Frozen Throne, and for all of his activity in recent years, he never left that spot.
But the image depicts Bolvar out, wearing new armor, and wielding a massive new weapon.
Regardless of whether this means he has fallen to evil or if he has come to save us all, Bolvar has, for the first time in a decade, stood up and emerged from his throne. That has got to mean big things are afoot.
It's a really tantalizing mystery. I'm glad that we have less than a week to wait before we get some answers, but damn if it isn't good to have some hard evidence to speculate on.
The most striking visual distinction for Death Knights is that their eyes glow blue. Naturally, I had to play a Draenei character whose eyes do that anyway, so it's less distinctive for him, but anyone from Human to Goblin to Blood Elf has blue eyes.
In Wrath of the Lich King's opening cinematic, Arthas' glowing blue eyes opening were an icon of the necromantic power running through him. Frostmourne lights up blue as he prepares to raise Sindragosa, and the shot of the hundreds of thousands if not millions of zombies and skeletons watching him raising this most powerful of Frostwyrms was punctuated by their bodies lighting up with the icy blue necromantic magic.
Blue is kind of an important color for the Scourge.
And that made it so visually interesting that when Bolvar was crowned as Lich King, the fiery orange/red that had been infused into him by the breath of the red dragons shone through the helmet. When he became the Lich King, that glow burst forth from the helmet, and even the blue gem on the forehead changed colors.
This, it seemed, was indicative of the profound change that was Bolvar taking the crown from Arthas. Perhaps Bolvar's fire could melt Arthas' ice, and we would see the Lich King turned from an apocalyptic menace into a gatekeeper holding the tide of death at bay.
So, why, then, are his eyes blue now?
The hope in crowning Bolvar way back then (about ten years ago, actually) was that this pillar of will power, who had held out against the Lich King's personal attention for a full year without falling to his corruption, could then take up the task of running the Scourge in a way that did not threaten all life on Azeroth.
And so far, so good. Mostly.
In Legion, we saw Bolvar more active than he's been since taking on the crown. Empowering the Deathlord and allying with the Ebon Blade, player Death Knights went about recruiting a new Four Horsemen to serve as his champions. And while there were some ironies, like how the Ebon Blade saw raising Sally Whitemane as a Death Knight was actually a kind of redemption for her after her role in the Scarlet Crusade, the Ebon Blade also committed some terrible crimes empowering the Lich King. They struck at Light's Hope Chapel to raise Tirion Fordring - and even if Bolvar had planned it as a way to get Darion Mograine as his replacement from the beginning, it still meant the deaths of several paladins at the hands of their supposed allies.
Later, the Lich King raised the corpse of a red dragon to serve as the Deathlord's mount, but in the process, sent them to the Ruby Dragonshrine where they were likely to slay many benevolent dragons in their search for the information they needed.
Bolvar in life was the epitome of a lawful good paladin - honorable, brave, and skilled in battle. But at the very best, he can only be considered neutral now in terms of morality.
We're really now just at a point where we're hoping he remains Lawful Neutral - holding to his task of keeping the dead at bay. The fear, then, is that he might descend into Lawful Evil and revive the Scourge as the apocalyptic threat that it initially was.
Bolvar's red motif was based on the fire of the Red Dragons. Because the Red dragonflight in Warcraft lore are the guardians of Life, their fire is infused with the power of life. Red and Black dragons both breathe fire, but Black's is the more traditional destructive flame. When the red dragons burned the area in front of the Wrath Gate, not only was the Forsaken Blight burned away, but flowers and plants began to grow up from the ground.
Initially, we assumed that Bolvar's death to the Blight simply meant that his body was burned away in the fires - a cleansing fire, but also one that returned his body to the elements.
Instead, as was heavily implied in 3.1 but confirmed in 3.3, Bolvar was brought back to some strange semblance of light - a charred and blackened body that still glowed with the fire of the dragons, but that could not seem to die.
It made sense, then, for Bolvar to take the Helm of Domination, rather than Tirion Fordring, who was ready to do so. Bolvar was no longer really human anymore, and returning to a normal life in Stormwind was hardly a realistic scenario.
One wonders, then, what it means that in that screenshot - which by now is basically confirmed to be real - his eyes have gone blue. Notably, the rest of his body, and even his amazingly badass looking maul weapon, still glow with red flame. But the eyes are typically what count.
And it's not like this isn't new - as recently as BFA, we've met with the Lich King and he remained frozen within the Frozen Throne, his eyes continuing to burn with red dragonfire.
While I don't necessarily want to endorse it, the most straightforward theory is that this signifies the end of Bolvar as "Jailor of the Damned" and his full transformation into the Lich King. He held out longer than most would, but the Scourge and the Lich King have a purpose, and it is to scour the world of the living.
Obviously, the other point that is so obvious that one forgets to mention it: Bolvar is out.
Arthas spent all the time between the Frozen Throne WCIII expansion and Wrath of the Lich King frozen into the throne - we see the ice begin to crack during the Wrath cinematic. Bolvar, upon his coronation, coated himself in ice, entombing himself in the Frozen Throne, and for all of his activity in recent years, he never left that spot.
But the image depicts Bolvar out, wearing new armor, and wielding a massive new weapon.
Regardless of whether this means he has fallen to evil or if he has come to save us all, Bolvar has, for the first time in a decade, stood up and emerged from his throne. That has got to mean big things are afoot.
It's a really tantalizing mystery. I'm glad that we have less than a week to wait before we get some answers, but damn if it isn't good to have some hard evidence to speculate on.
Leaked Bolvar Image Appears on Blizzard Store: Shadowlands Looking Very Likely?
A few days ago, there was a supposed leak that involved this image:
(Source: MMO-Champion)
Well, now there appears to be a link on the actual Blizzard store to a page where one can purchase this still as an art piece, which I think 99.9% confirms this as real.
The image was originally found as part of a broader advertisement that identified this as a product related to World of Warcraft: Shadowlands.
We also got this, a bit later:
Well, now there appears to be a link on the actual Blizzard store to a page where one can purchase this still as an art piece, which I think 99.9% confirms this as real.
The image was originally found as part of a broader advertisement that identified this as a product related to World of Warcraft: Shadowlands.
We also got this, a bit later:
(Also from MMO-Champion)
While the concept art there is surprising - to me it looks much more like it should be concept art for Suramar - the logo for Shadowlands is quite convincing. It fits in the format of all other WoW expansions but the border around the logo is entirely unique but still looks professional.
While this one doesn't have the corroborating evidence of an actual link on the Blizzard website, I think it's a very strong possibility that this is also real - indeed, even if it really is Suramar art, it could be a placeholder, as this might be an internal working document rather than a final promo piece.
At this point, with all this coming out less than a week before Blizzcon, this is either the most impressive fake-out for a WoW expansion I've ever seen, or, the scenario I find far more likely: this is legit.
Now, that being said, what can we actually glean from all this?
We know that the Shadowlands are a land of death, just as the Emerald Dream is a land of life. They seem to be the Feywild and Shadowfell equivalent for WoW.
What makes that interesting is that while the Shadowlands are a dark place, they are not, (if it's like the Shadowfell) inherently evil. They probably have a lot more evil going on there - but death has so many potential manifestations. In a universe where death is certainly not the end of existence, the realm of death can take on many forms. The Halls of Valor, for example, are a realm of death, despite being bright and glorious.
While the Shadowlands might be just a dark reflection of Azeroth, I think Blizzard has given themselves enough wiggle room by keeping it vague that they could break that rule. Places like Helheim might exist within the Shadowlands and thus be their own thing.
What kind of entities might call the Shadowlands home? The promo mentions the "Noble Kyrians," and some bright folks have pointed out that Kyrian shares some letters with Val'kyr.
There is so little we know here. Some sword models and allied race death knight skins have suggested that Bolvar - clearly emerging from the Frozen Throne - may be raising new champions, and there might even be some fourth variety with a fiery theme to them.
Personally, I'm really wondering what role Bolvar will play in this. I imagine he'll be a central figure in the coming expansion, but will that be as main villain? That would be a shame, both because it would undermine the end of Wrath of the Lich King and also seem to push it toward repeating itself.
Blizzard still needs to prove to us that Sylvanas' tenure as Warchief was not just Garrosh 2.0, and I don't want to see Bolvar be just another Arthas.
While every even-numbered expansion has given us a new class, I'm beginning to suspect that 9.0 will do something more in the vein of Allied Races - not something brand new (though Vulpera as variant Goblins are stretching the "subrace" notion quite a bit) but for classes.
While there's one leak that supposedly was debunked, there has been a rumor in the past of seeing new "class skins." One example (that I'd be really interested in) is letting Paladins re-skin as Arcane Knights - keeping all the same mechanics but getting new visuals that make them more into Battlemages than Holy Warriors. (I always thought of my Paladin as having originally wanted to be a Mage, so this would be really appropriate for him.) I could imagine with Bolvar as Lich King, perhaps some of the icy theme of the class could, optionally, be replaced with more of a fiery aesthetic.
This could also be a way to allow them to bring in Necromancers - simply re-skinning Warlock abilities to use more death magic. Hell, Demonology could easily be reskinned as an undead-raising spec where you're conjuring ghostly spirits instead of imps, skeletal hounds instead of dreadstalkers, and you have some big skeletal warrior to replace your felguard.
But that's speculation.
Here's my adjusted confidence in the various leaks:
Bolvar Screenshot Being Real: 99.9%
Promo identifying the expansion as Shadowlands: 85%
Fiery Death Knights Playable: 50%
We are now four days from Blizzcon and I'll confess, I'm getting pretty damned hyped.
Sunday, October 27, 2019
Bolvar the Lich King: Friend or Foe?
Bolvar has now been Lich King longer than Arthas was. It's a little surprising to note that, given how iconic Arthas was and how we watched his entire journey from young, hot-headed paladin to undead traitor and then sovereign of the damned.
But there's been a huge question hanging ever since the end of the Icecrown Citadel raid.
To recap, for those who might not remember:
When we entered the Halls of Reflection and, depending on your faction, either Jaina or Sylvanas found, with us, Frostmourne floating above an altar in the Halls of Reflection, the spirit of Uther the Lightbringer appeared.
Uther was the first Knight of the Silver Hand, making him the first human paladin (the Draenei were a couple dozen thousand years ahead of him) and given that Arthas was the crown prince of Lordaeron, it was fitting that Uther became his mentor. But Arthas' ruthless tactics - even if they could have potentially served the greater good, like in Stratholme - created a rift between them that would allow Arthas to descend into obsession over revenge that ultimately allowed him to be corrupted by Frostmourne. When Arthas returned to Lordaeron and murdered his father, Uther confronted him, but ultimately fell to Frostmourne.
The evil rune blade traps the souls of those who touch it - whether dying on its blade or taking up the sword itself. It's not clear if there are any real exceptions to this - Illidan clearly lost the battle with Arthas, and one would imagine that he was wounded with the sword, though perhaps as a half-demon he had some kind of exemption from this effect (prior to his appearance in Onslaught Harbor in Icecrown, I had assumed Mal'ganis was only defeated by Frostmourne because the sword could trap his soul and prevent it from returning to the Twisting Nether.) It also appears as if the sword forged from Frostmourne's shards - the Blades of the Fallen Prince - do not have this same soul-trapping effect.
Anyway, to get back on topic: Uther tells us that there must always be a Lich King, for if the Scourge had no master it would run rampant and go full zombie apocalypse.
Later, when Terenas is freed from the sword and resurrects the raid at the end of the Lich King fight and his son lies dead beneath the Frozen Throne, he claims that there must always be a Lich King.
We took this at face value, but I've always felt skeptical about it.
How, exactly, does the Scourge having a central leadership make it less dangerous? I get that if Bolvar is holding them at bay, that makes sense. But Arthas did, truly, want to overwhelm the entire world with undeath. How would the Scourge be more dangerous without some intelligent strategist behind it all?
It's also a little confusing as to how, exactly, we were able to talk to Uther. One could, of course, just argue that a man of such conviction as Uther the Lightbringer could muster the force of will to push his consciousness out of the sword long enough to speak to Jaina and Sylvanas, but there's another very strange element to this:
Uther's soul shows up in the Western Plaguelands - and did so prior to the end of Wrath.
There was a pre-Cataclysm quest (I can't recall if it still exists) in which a Draenei NPC for the Alliance sends you to pay tribute to Uther, while a Blood Elf, who resents Uther for failing to prevent Arthas' fall to corruption, sends you to desecrate his tomb. In both cases, Uther's soul appears, to thank the Alliance players and to forgive the Horde ones.
But if Uther's soul was there, what was the one that emerged from Frostmourne?
Now, sure, this could just be a continuity error - WoW is huge and these things happen.
Terenas' appearance after Frostmourne is destroyed feels consistent, but I really have to wonder: was he telling the truth? Ominously, Terenas tells Arthas as he's dying "No king rules forever," which is a quote that we heard in the Yogg-Saron fight. Was Yogg-Saron just predicting this moment? Or is there something else at work?
The expectation is that Bolvar would be the right choice as "Jailor of the Damned." He spent about a year being tortured by Arthas and never giving in, never falling to necromantic corruption. Between his force of will as a paladin and the fires of the red dragons filling him with life, he seemed better suited than anyone to resist the corrupting power of the Helm of Domination.
And yet.
In Legion, we had our first major interactions with the Lich King in a long time. While Fire Mages got a brief visit to Icecrown Citadel to get Felo'melorn, Death Knights spent their entire campaign working alongside the Lich King. Indeed, there's a subtle development over the course of the class campaign that begins with the Ebon Blade not really trusting him as an ally, but by the end, Darion Mograine, former Highlord of the Ebon Blade, is now a direct servant of the Lich King once again.
And that campaign sees Death Knights massacring Paladins at Light's Hope and later invading (and potentially slaughtering) Red Dragons in the Ruby Dragonshrine. Heroes and villains of the past are raised as new Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Yes, it's all theoretically to help fight against the Legion, but damn if the Lich King doesn't become way more powerful by the end of it.
Which really raises some interesting questions: what does he intend to do with all this power?
The Scourge may not be rampaging across the world, but Bolvar has clearly rebuilt his base of power after we destroyed much of it in Wrath of the Lich King. And at its height, the Scourge was arguably the biggest menace on Azeroth - rivaling even the Old Gods.
When we crowned him, we assumed that Bolvar was making one last sacrifice, giving up his freedom and any hope for a normal life or even the release of death, in order to hold back the tide of undeath that was the Scourge.
And so far, I think the assumption has remained that that's his intention.
Is it, though?
Bolvar held out for a year being tortured by Arthas. But surely that's a different situation. The corruptor was external. Bolvar took on the power of the Lich King. He is not being tortured - he has been empowered. And power is a corrupting force like no other.
So what might we expect from Bolvar? Is he our worst nightmare, or is he the great and dark force that we will simply count ourselves lucky for having him on our side?
Five days until Blizzcon. If the Shadowlands leak is real - and usually the real ones come around when this one did - it suggests that he'll be playing at least some kind of role.
Will he be plot fodder? Someone to kill off at the beginning and throw everything into disarray? Will be be our only hope against the forces of Death? Or is Bolvar - no, scratch that - is the Lich King ready to make his move, and not repeat the same mistakes his predecessor made?
But there's been a huge question hanging ever since the end of the Icecrown Citadel raid.
To recap, for those who might not remember:
When we entered the Halls of Reflection and, depending on your faction, either Jaina or Sylvanas found, with us, Frostmourne floating above an altar in the Halls of Reflection, the spirit of Uther the Lightbringer appeared.
Uther was the first Knight of the Silver Hand, making him the first human paladin (the Draenei were a couple dozen thousand years ahead of him) and given that Arthas was the crown prince of Lordaeron, it was fitting that Uther became his mentor. But Arthas' ruthless tactics - even if they could have potentially served the greater good, like in Stratholme - created a rift between them that would allow Arthas to descend into obsession over revenge that ultimately allowed him to be corrupted by Frostmourne. When Arthas returned to Lordaeron and murdered his father, Uther confronted him, but ultimately fell to Frostmourne.
The evil rune blade traps the souls of those who touch it - whether dying on its blade or taking up the sword itself. It's not clear if there are any real exceptions to this - Illidan clearly lost the battle with Arthas, and one would imagine that he was wounded with the sword, though perhaps as a half-demon he had some kind of exemption from this effect (prior to his appearance in Onslaught Harbor in Icecrown, I had assumed Mal'ganis was only defeated by Frostmourne because the sword could trap his soul and prevent it from returning to the Twisting Nether.) It also appears as if the sword forged from Frostmourne's shards - the Blades of the Fallen Prince - do not have this same soul-trapping effect.
Anyway, to get back on topic: Uther tells us that there must always be a Lich King, for if the Scourge had no master it would run rampant and go full zombie apocalypse.
Later, when Terenas is freed from the sword and resurrects the raid at the end of the Lich King fight and his son lies dead beneath the Frozen Throne, he claims that there must always be a Lich King.
We took this at face value, but I've always felt skeptical about it.
How, exactly, does the Scourge having a central leadership make it less dangerous? I get that if Bolvar is holding them at bay, that makes sense. But Arthas did, truly, want to overwhelm the entire world with undeath. How would the Scourge be more dangerous without some intelligent strategist behind it all?
It's also a little confusing as to how, exactly, we were able to talk to Uther. One could, of course, just argue that a man of such conviction as Uther the Lightbringer could muster the force of will to push his consciousness out of the sword long enough to speak to Jaina and Sylvanas, but there's another very strange element to this:
Uther's soul shows up in the Western Plaguelands - and did so prior to the end of Wrath.
There was a pre-Cataclysm quest (I can't recall if it still exists) in which a Draenei NPC for the Alliance sends you to pay tribute to Uther, while a Blood Elf, who resents Uther for failing to prevent Arthas' fall to corruption, sends you to desecrate his tomb. In both cases, Uther's soul appears, to thank the Alliance players and to forgive the Horde ones.
But if Uther's soul was there, what was the one that emerged from Frostmourne?
Now, sure, this could just be a continuity error - WoW is huge and these things happen.
Terenas' appearance after Frostmourne is destroyed feels consistent, but I really have to wonder: was he telling the truth? Ominously, Terenas tells Arthas as he's dying "No king rules forever," which is a quote that we heard in the Yogg-Saron fight. Was Yogg-Saron just predicting this moment? Or is there something else at work?
The expectation is that Bolvar would be the right choice as "Jailor of the Damned." He spent about a year being tortured by Arthas and never giving in, never falling to necromantic corruption. Between his force of will as a paladin and the fires of the red dragons filling him with life, he seemed better suited than anyone to resist the corrupting power of the Helm of Domination.
And yet.
In Legion, we had our first major interactions with the Lich King in a long time. While Fire Mages got a brief visit to Icecrown Citadel to get Felo'melorn, Death Knights spent their entire campaign working alongside the Lich King. Indeed, there's a subtle development over the course of the class campaign that begins with the Ebon Blade not really trusting him as an ally, but by the end, Darion Mograine, former Highlord of the Ebon Blade, is now a direct servant of the Lich King once again.
And that campaign sees Death Knights massacring Paladins at Light's Hope and later invading (and potentially slaughtering) Red Dragons in the Ruby Dragonshrine. Heroes and villains of the past are raised as new Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Yes, it's all theoretically to help fight against the Legion, but damn if the Lich King doesn't become way more powerful by the end of it.
Which really raises some interesting questions: what does he intend to do with all this power?
The Scourge may not be rampaging across the world, but Bolvar has clearly rebuilt his base of power after we destroyed much of it in Wrath of the Lich King. And at its height, the Scourge was arguably the biggest menace on Azeroth - rivaling even the Old Gods.
When we crowned him, we assumed that Bolvar was making one last sacrifice, giving up his freedom and any hope for a normal life or even the release of death, in order to hold back the tide of undeath that was the Scourge.
And so far, I think the assumption has remained that that's his intention.
Is it, though?
Bolvar held out for a year being tortured by Arthas. But surely that's a different situation. The corruptor was external. Bolvar took on the power of the Lich King. He is not being tortured - he has been empowered. And power is a corrupting force like no other.
So what might we expect from Bolvar? Is he our worst nightmare, or is he the great and dark force that we will simply count ourselves lucky for having him on our side?
Five days until Blizzcon. If the Shadowlands leak is real - and usually the real ones come around when this one did - it suggests that he'll be playing at least some kind of role.
Will he be plot fodder? Someone to kill off at the beginning and throw everything into disarray? Will be be our only hope against the forces of Death? Or is Bolvar - no, scratch that - is the Lich King ready to make his move, and not repeat the same mistakes his predecessor made?
Fiery Death Knights?
One of the curiously datamined objects in 8.3's PTR is the existence of several new Death Knight-affiliated items. For one, there are new texture skins for allied race and Pandaren death knights. But in addition to these, there are also models for new swords, including a fiery one as well as those that are themed after the three Death Knight specs, that have people speculating about a possible fourth spec.
First, the caveats: while this stuff is on the PTR and not some potentially-BS "leak" it could still have many other meanings. Many models are created only for NPCs to wield. And it's possible we're also looking at some kind of "preliminary item" that one gets before picking a spec.
In Legion, I believe, they changed how specializations worked at early levels. Originally, any player from level 1-9 had no spec - you were just a Paladin or a Druid or whatever. It was at level 10 that you picked a spec. From Vanilla through Wrath, you just got your first talent point to invest in one of the three talent trees, and the tree you spent most of your points in was your spec (which meant that you could actually play a hybrid spec, though this tended not to work very well as the best talents required greater investment to unlock.) In Cataclysm, we still had talent trees, but they were smaller and you only got talent points every other level, but you also had to pick a spec when you hit level 10, which gave you a new ability and some passives but then locked you into a tree until you had put in enough talent point to unlock their ultimate talent before you could put points into anything else.
Mists changed things to the current model, though I think it wasn't until Warlords that you got spec-specific talents and then Legion made pretty much every talent spec-specific.
That tangent aside: Legion saw the various specs really separated out to the point where there was very little overlap between spec when it came to rotational abilities. Not all Rogues would get Sinister Strike (and indeed, in Legion Sinister Strike became Saber Slash when Combat became Outlaw) anymore, and so instead, the game picked one spec to be the default for each class, no longer granting specializations in general at 10, but rather the ability to change specs.
Death Knights can actually change specs immediately upon creation, but they default to Unholy.
It's possible we'll see a redesign of the talent system in 9.0 - maybe bringing things back to the pre-Mists style - but it's this fact that, to me, undermines the notion that any "Fiery" swords that Bolvar's handing out to new Death Knights would simply be a default, pre-specialization model.
Again, it's also possible that the fiery sword is purely a cosmetic option.
But considering the rather believable leak that came out yesterday, which suggests a greater role for Bolvar, it does seem at least somewhat plausible that we could get some new Death Knight spec.
I'll grant that I think the idea of adding a fourth spec to every class (except Druids, and it would be just a third for Demon Hunters) is pretty radical. I would think it would be harder to do that than to add a new class to the game.
On the other hand, if it were only for one class - Death Knights in this case - it would seem pretty underwhelming.
This is really just pure speculation, though. While I feel pretty confident (let's put it at over 50% at least) that we'll be getting a Death-themed expansion that at least involves the Shadowlands (maybe a just-over-50% confidence that yesterday's leak is real and more of an 80% confidence that we've got the basic theme figured out) any real gameplay details like fourth specs or the like is something I really can't say much about with any degree of certainty.
First, the caveats: while this stuff is on the PTR and not some potentially-BS "leak" it could still have many other meanings. Many models are created only for NPCs to wield. And it's possible we're also looking at some kind of "preliminary item" that one gets before picking a spec.
In Legion, I believe, they changed how specializations worked at early levels. Originally, any player from level 1-9 had no spec - you were just a Paladin or a Druid or whatever. It was at level 10 that you picked a spec. From Vanilla through Wrath, you just got your first talent point to invest in one of the three talent trees, and the tree you spent most of your points in was your spec (which meant that you could actually play a hybrid spec, though this tended not to work very well as the best talents required greater investment to unlock.) In Cataclysm, we still had talent trees, but they were smaller and you only got talent points every other level, but you also had to pick a spec when you hit level 10, which gave you a new ability and some passives but then locked you into a tree until you had put in enough talent point to unlock their ultimate talent before you could put points into anything else.
Mists changed things to the current model, though I think it wasn't until Warlords that you got spec-specific talents and then Legion made pretty much every talent spec-specific.
That tangent aside: Legion saw the various specs really separated out to the point where there was very little overlap between spec when it came to rotational abilities. Not all Rogues would get Sinister Strike (and indeed, in Legion Sinister Strike became Saber Slash when Combat became Outlaw) anymore, and so instead, the game picked one spec to be the default for each class, no longer granting specializations in general at 10, but rather the ability to change specs.
Death Knights can actually change specs immediately upon creation, but they default to Unholy.
It's possible we'll see a redesign of the talent system in 9.0 - maybe bringing things back to the pre-Mists style - but it's this fact that, to me, undermines the notion that any "Fiery" swords that Bolvar's handing out to new Death Knights would simply be a default, pre-specialization model.
Again, it's also possible that the fiery sword is purely a cosmetic option.
But considering the rather believable leak that came out yesterday, which suggests a greater role for Bolvar, it does seem at least somewhat plausible that we could get some new Death Knight spec.
I'll grant that I think the idea of adding a fourth spec to every class (except Druids, and it would be just a third for Demon Hunters) is pretty radical. I would think it would be harder to do that than to add a new class to the game.
On the other hand, if it were only for one class - Death Knights in this case - it would seem pretty underwhelming.
This is really just pure speculation, though. While I feel pretty confident (let's put it at over 50% at least) that we'll be getting a Death-themed expansion that at least involves the Shadowlands (maybe a just-over-50% confidence that yesterday's leak is real and more of an 80% confidence that we've got the basic theme figured out) any real gameplay details like fourth specs or the like is something I really can't say much about with any degree of certainty.
Have We Seen the Shadowlands? And If So, How Many?
In Warcraft Chronicle, we can read that when Helya rebelled against Odyn, there were some Val'kyr who did not take her side. Obviously, Eyir and her loyalists remain true to him, but there were apparently a group of them who decided not to side with Helya but also not to return to Odyn's service, and instead chose to dedicate themselves to reviving champions that could help defend Azeroth.
They're Spirit Healers.
This revelation - that there's now a real story explanation for us going into ghost form and recovering our bodies - was kind of incredible. What had always been just a way to handle death in an MMO in a way that punished players but not too harshly now had the backing of canon.
But it also introduced an interesting notion: that the mysterious Shadowlands are actually the other plane of existence that WoW players are most familiar with.
The Emerald Dream is said to be a parallel to our reality, but one in which humanoid civilization never reshaped the earth. The Emerald Dream is an Azeroth free of Old Gods as well as any people - it's Azeroth as pure nature would have had it. This was part of the horror of the Nightmare - corrupting that which was meant to be incorruptible. But it's especially dangerous if the Dream serves the purpose we've long suspected - as essentially Azeroth's back-up disk should the Halls of Origination be activated.
Indeed, a popular theory (that this blogger subscribes to) is that the purpose of the Emerald Nightmare was to corrupt the back-up as, essentially, a backdoor to establish total Old God corruption of Azeroth.
What's interesting, then, is that Ny'alotha seems to be a very similar concept - a version of Azeroth where the Old Gods are triumphant, to be overlaid onto the real Azeroth.
So where is Ny'alotha?
To be fair, the oft-whispered Ny'alotha could just be its own thing. But I also wonder if it's of a piece with a few other locations we've encountered.
In Legion, we journeyed to Helheim, the realm of Helya, which is a dead and haunted realm of the drowned, and the source of the Kvaldir (and how freaking cool was it to finally get an explanation for the Kvaldir?) In BFA, Alliance players at least got to visit Thros, a realm to which the spirits of the Drust had retreated after the Kul Tirans had conquered the land (and, obviously, intermarried with those Drust who weren't so hardline. To be clear, Drust are Vrykul, and Kul Tirans are so big and burly because they are part Vrykul. We all agree on this, right?)
We know so little of the Shadowlands - on one hand, it seems to be where our ghosts go while we're dead, and at various times in Wrath of the Lich King we journeyed to the Shadowlands as part of quests involving the Lich King - though that realm was never identified in those exact words.
I have a couple theories on the Shadowlands.
One is that it has both overlay zones and its own special areas. Thros, to be fair, looks just like Drustvar only... darker. Helheim has no direct equivalent in Azeroth, unless it exists under the waves - which to be fair is totally possible.
So what is Ny'alotha then?
Here's my theory, and yes this is a bit tin-foil hat-y: I think that while N'zoth was working on the Emerald Nightmare, he was doing the same thing in the Shadowlands. We don't know what purpose the Shadowlands serve for Azeroth, but perhaps it is in its own way a sort of back-up alternative for the world. Or maybe it's a kind of "working document" or maybe something totally different.
But maybe while N'zoth was corrupting the Dream to make the Nightmare, he was also corrupting the Shadowlands in order to make Ny'alotha.
In other words: like Helheim or Thros, Ny'alotha might be one of the Shadowlands.
Now, the Shadowlands might simply be one large plane that's all interconnected. But borrowing some D&D lore (the 5th Edition version, to be clear,) it's possible that beyond the Shadowfell proper (in WoW's case the Shadowlands,) there might also be several demiplanes. In the Ravenloft D&D setting you find the various Demiplanes of Dread, the most famous of which is Barovia, the home of Count Strahd von Zarovich, a powerful vampire lord. Is it possible that the Shadowlands have demiplanes, such as Ny'alotha, that kind of bud off from it?
Given the very convincing leak that came out earlier today (see previous post) we might be about to learn a whole lot more about the Shadowlands very soon.
They're Spirit Healers.
This revelation - that there's now a real story explanation for us going into ghost form and recovering our bodies - was kind of incredible. What had always been just a way to handle death in an MMO in a way that punished players but not too harshly now had the backing of canon.
But it also introduced an interesting notion: that the mysterious Shadowlands are actually the other plane of existence that WoW players are most familiar with.
The Emerald Dream is said to be a parallel to our reality, but one in which humanoid civilization never reshaped the earth. The Emerald Dream is an Azeroth free of Old Gods as well as any people - it's Azeroth as pure nature would have had it. This was part of the horror of the Nightmare - corrupting that which was meant to be incorruptible. But it's especially dangerous if the Dream serves the purpose we've long suspected - as essentially Azeroth's back-up disk should the Halls of Origination be activated.
Indeed, a popular theory (that this blogger subscribes to) is that the purpose of the Emerald Nightmare was to corrupt the back-up as, essentially, a backdoor to establish total Old God corruption of Azeroth.
What's interesting, then, is that Ny'alotha seems to be a very similar concept - a version of Azeroth where the Old Gods are triumphant, to be overlaid onto the real Azeroth.
So where is Ny'alotha?
To be fair, the oft-whispered Ny'alotha could just be its own thing. But I also wonder if it's of a piece with a few other locations we've encountered.
In Legion, we journeyed to Helheim, the realm of Helya, which is a dead and haunted realm of the drowned, and the source of the Kvaldir (and how freaking cool was it to finally get an explanation for the Kvaldir?) In BFA, Alliance players at least got to visit Thros, a realm to which the spirits of the Drust had retreated after the Kul Tirans had conquered the land (and, obviously, intermarried with those Drust who weren't so hardline. To be clear, Drust are Vrykul, and Kul Tirans are so big and burly because they are part Vrykul. We all agree on this, right?)
We know so little of the Shadowlands - on one hand, it seems to be where our ghosts go while we're dead, and at various times in Wrath of the Lich King we journeyed to the Shadowlands as part of quests involving the Lich King - though that realm was never identified in those exact words.
I have a couple theories on the Shadowlands.
One is that it has both overlay zones and its own special areas. Thros, to be fair, looks just like Drustvar only... darker. Helheim has no direct equivalent in Azeroth, unless it exists under the waves - which to be fair is totally possible.
So what is Ny'alotha then?
Here's my theory, and yes this is a bit tin-foil hat-y: I think that while N'zoth was working on the Emerald Nightmare, he was doing the same thing in the Shadowlands. We don't know what purpose the Shadowlands serve for Azeroth, but perhaps it is in its own way a sort of back-up alternative for the world. Or maybe it's a kind of "working document" or maybe something totally different.
But maybe while N'zoth was corrupting the Dream to make the Nightmare, he was also corrupting the Shadowlands in order to make Ny'alotha.
In other words: like Helheim or Thros, Ny'alotha might be one of the Shadowlands.
Now, the Shadowlands might simply be one large plane that's all interconnected. But borrowing some D&D lore (the 5th Edition version, to be clear,) it's possible that beyond the Shadowfell proper (in WoW's case the Shadowlands,) there might also be several demiplanes. In the Ravenloft D&D setting you find the various Demiplanes of Dread, the most famous of which is Barovia, the home of Count Strahd von Zarovich, a powerful vampire lord. Is it possible that the Shadowlands have demiplanes, such as Ny'alotha, that kind of bud off from it?
Given the very convincing leak that came out earlier today (see previous post) we might be about to learn a whole lot more about the Shadowlands very soon.
Saturday, October 26, 2019
Latest Possible Leak: WoW: Shadowlands
(EDIT: MMO-Champion has put this leak on their front page. So at the very least, this leak is getting a lot of traction.)
With only six days to go until Blizzcon, speculation is running at top gear regarding WoW's next expansion.
Most recently, I saw a post on MMO-Champion that depicts what appears to be a shot from a cinematic-quality cutscene (like the intro cinematics for each expansion or the various Saurfang "Old Soldier" ones) in which the Lich King - in new armor except for the helmet - stands before what appears to be the Frozen Throne with a big maul. It appears to be some sort of ad for a print of that still from the cinematic and t-shirts for World of Warcraft: Shadowlands.
Is it fake? It could very well be. But it's the most impressive-looking "leak" I've seen so far for 9.0. Naturally, it also ties very directly into most of the theories about what's coming next - which on one hand could be the product of people coming up with leaks based on what the community is expecting, or it could just be, you know, that we're expecting things because Blizzard has done a good job of foreshadowing.
The thing that impresses me most is the quality of the cinematic still - the design of Bolvar's armor and weapon look, to me at least, like something that would require more than just a quick photoshop job. That is, of course, assuming this isn't taken from some other game.
One note that people have made is that in the image, Bolvar's eyes are blue while his chest and accents on his weapon glow with his characteristic red/orange fire. Since his crowning at the end of ICC, Lich King 3.0 has had that same red/orange glow to his eyes. That being said, some are speculating that his eyes turning blue might mean something - maybe Bolvar is finally gone and the Lich King is all that truly remains?
The logo for the expansion looks very cool - it's white with a black border that has a kind of skeletal and fire motif. Again, its quality is impressive if it's a fake.
WeakAuras, the very useful addon, posted a tweet that seems to be an ad for the expansion, which talks about entering the Shadowlands and exploring a land called Bastion and meeting the "Noble Kyrian," which... no idea what they could be. There's what appears to be concept art depicting a beautiful fairy-tale castle somewhat in the aesthetic of the Nighthold.
So... what do we think?
As with any leak, we have to take this with a massive grain of salt.
That being said, this, to me, looks way more realistic than anything else I've seen so far. And we're getting close enough to Blizzcon that stuff like ads and other assets need to be disseminated to a larger group of people, which makes leaks far easier to come out.
I'll confess that any expansion that puts Bolvar the Lich King center-stage is probably one I'm going to be very excited for, though whether he'll play the role of the big bad or the big good is an interesting question. It also really makes me think about those fiery Death Knight sword models and rumors of a fourth spec. (I think I also saw references to the four types of death knight with the four horsemen, which would fit pretty well.)
So the big caveat is that I've got massive confirmation bias here because this, my friends, is what I really want the next expansion to be. It could easily turn out that someone just clipped together some cinematic-quality images to make that art still and photoshopped-together the expansion logo.
But seriously, if this is the big death-magic, undead-focused expansion, I might actually get the collector's edition this time (kind of wish I'd gotten it for Legion, frankly.) Because Scourge WoW is my favorite WoW.
With only six days to go until Blizzcon, speculation is running at top gear regarding WoW's next expansion.
Most recently, I saw a post on MMO-Champion that depicts what appears to be a shot from a cinematic-quality cutscene (like the intro cinematics for each expansion or the various Saurfang "Old Soldier" ones) in which the Lich King - in new armor except for the helmet - stands before what appears to be the Frozen Throne with a big maul. It appears to be some sort of ad for a print of that still from the cinematic and t-shirts for World of Warcraft: Shadowlands.
Is it fake? It could very well be. But it's the most impressive-looking "leak" I've seen so far for 9.0. Naturally, it also ties very directly into most of the theories about what's coming next - which on one hand could be the product of people coming up with leaks based on what the community is expecting, or it could just be, you know, that we're expecting things because Blizzard has done a good job of foreshadowing.
The thing that impresses me most is the quality of the cinematic still - the design of Bolvar's armor and weapon look, to me at least, like something that would require more than just a quick photoshop job. That is, of course, assuming this isn't taken from some other game.
One note that people have made is that in the image, Bolvar's eyes are blue while his chest and accents on his weapon glow with his characteristic red/orange fire. Since his crowning at the end of ICC, Lich King 3.0 has had that same red/orange glow to his eyes. That being said, some are speculating that his eyes turning blue might mean something - maybe Bolvar is finally gone and the Lich King is all that truly remains?
The logo for the expansion looks very cool - it's white with a black border that has a kind of skeletal and fire motif. Again, its quality is impressive if it's a fake.
WeakAuras, the very useful addon, posted a tweet that seems to be an ad for the expansion, which talks about entering the Shadowlands and exploring a land called Bastion and meeting the "Noble Kyrian," which... no idea what they could be. There's what appears to be concept art depicting a beautiful fairy-tale castle somewhat in the aesthetic of the Nighthold.
So... what do we think?
As with any leak, we have to take this with a massive grain of salt.
That being said, this, to me, looks way more realistic than anything else I've seen so far. And we're getting close enough to Blizzcon that stuff like ads and other assets need to be disseminated to a larger group of people, which makes leaks far easier to come out.
I'll confess that any expansion that puts Bolvar the Lich King center-stage is probably one I'm going to be very excited for, though whether he'll play the role of the big bad or the big good is an interesting question. It also really makes me think about those fiery Death Knight sword models and rumors of a fourth spec. (I think I also saw references to the four types of death knight with the four horsemen, which would fit pretty well.)
So the big caveat is that I've got massive confirmation bias here because this, my friends, is what I really want the next expansion to be. It could easily turn out that someone just clipped together some cinematic-quality images to make that art still and photoshopped-together the expansion logo.
But seriously, if this is the big death-magic, undead-focused expansion, I might actually get the collector's edition this time (kind of wish I'd gotten it for Legion, frankly.) Because Scourge WoW is my favorite WoW.
One Week Until Blizzcon - Predicting Expansion Transitions
The last several WoW expansions have had stories directly lead into one another. I don't know that I think that's entirely necessary for the story, but it's been an interesting narrative concept.
Essentially: Vanilla had no real central story - it was more about just introducing Azeroth as an explorable space, where we encountered some icons of Warcraft lore (actually, Kel'thuzad might have been the only raid boss who had actually appeared in the RTS games... wait, no, Sapphiron did as well, but that was literally the final and second-to-last raid bosses to be found in vanilla WoW.)
Burning Crusade was also a bit more focused on just introducing environments, and its "story" was more about tracking down Illidan and beating him, and then Blizzard realizing that they had released the final raid way too soon and putting out Sunwell Plateau later on.
Wrath of the Lich King, however, I think, created the real model for how an expansion should work. While demons did invade through the Dark Portal in the pre-patch to BC, it wasn't entirely clear how everything tied together with Illidan. Indeed, as someone who was then a neophyte to WoW lore, I went in thinking Illidan was the leader of the Burning Legion, not an enemy of it. But in Wrath, it was very clear who the big bad was from the word go: Arthas Menethil, traitorous prince of Lordaeron and now Lich King, had to go down.
But Arthas' death didn't have anything to do with Deathwing's emergence from Deepholme. You could argue that the Cataclysm did lead into Mists given that it seemed to break the... Mists that had kept Pandaria secret. But that was more of a coincidence than a direct connection.
However, starting with the end of Mists, we had much more direct connections between the expansions. Garrosh's defeat and imprisonment led to his resentment and release by Wrathion and his True Horde loyalists and a group of Infinite Dragons (which... dude, are we not going to address that Wrathion was working with the infinite dragonflight? Also, where the hell were they in Warlords?) His travels to the alternate version of Draenor ultimately led to the introduction of a new Gul'dan (in a plotline that, now that I think about it, really parallels the creation of a second Thanos in Avengers: Endgame... um, spoilers.)
Gul'dan B then kicked off the plot of Legion, opening the portal at the Tomb of Sargeras that allowed the Legion back onto Azeroth.
And then, Legion ended with Sargeras stabbing the planet as he was being dragged off to his imprisonment at the Seat of the Pantheon.
Which brought us to Battle for Azeroth - the rush for Azerite that kicked off the Alliance/Horde war and the machinations of N'zoth taking advantage of said war.
8.3 is not out yet, and we don't know how it will end, but
SPOILERS AHOY
Essentially: Vanilla had no real central story - it was more about just introducing Azeroth as an explorable space, where we encountered some icons of Warcraft lore (actually, Kel'thuzad might have been the only raid boss who had actually appeared in the RTS games... wait, no, Sapphiron did as well, but that was literally the final and second-to-last raid bosses to be found in vanilla WoW.)
Burning Crusade was also a bit more focused on just introducing environments, and its "story" was more about tracking down Illidan and beating him, and then Blizzard realizing that they had released the final raid way too soon and putting out Sunwell Plateau later on.
Wrath of the Lich King, however, I think, created the real model for how an expansion should work. While demons did invade through the Dark Portal in the pre-patch to BC, it wasn't entirely clear how everything tied together with Illidan. Indeed, as someone who was then a neophyte to WoW lore, I went in thinking Illidan was the leader of the Burning Legion, not an enemy of it. But in Wrath, it was very clear who the big bad was from the word go: Arthas Menethil, traitorous prince of Lordaeron and now Lich King, had to go down.
But Arthas' death didn't have anything to do with Deathwing's emergence from Deepholme. You could argue that the Cataclysm did lead into Mists given that it seemed to break the... Mists that had kept Pandaria secret. But that was more of a coincidence than a direct connection.
However, starting with the end of Mists, we had much more direct connections between the expansions. Garrosh's defeat and imprisonment led to his resentment and release by Wrathion and his True Horde loyalists and a group of Infinite Dragons (which... dude, are we not going to address that Wrathion was working with the infinite dragonflight? Also, where the hell were they in Warlords?) His travels to the alternate version of Draenor ultimately led to the introduction of a new Gul'dan (in a plotline that, now that I think about it, really parallels the creation of a second Thanos in Avengers: Endgame... um, spoilers.)
Gul'dan B then kicked off the plot of Legion, opening the portal at the Tomb of Sargeras that allowed the Legion back onto Azeroth.
And then, Legion ended with Sargeras stabbing the planet as he was being dragged off to his imprisonment at the Seat of the Pantheon.
Which brought us to Battle for Azeroth - the rush for Azerite that kicked off the Alliance/Horde war and the machinations of N'zoth taking advantage of said war.
8.3 is not out yet, and we don't know how it will end, but
SPOILERS AHOY
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Screw It, I Want a Necromancer Class for WoW
I'm just going to come out and say it: I know it treads on the toes of Death Knights and Warlocks, but I want a Necromancer class in WoW. I won't even say that it'd be my favorite class (lorewise that's pretty much always going to be the Death Knight) but I think that it would be cool.
So let's talk about what I'd want to see from a Necromancer.
First off, would it be a hero class or a regular, start-at-1 class? Story-wise, I think the latter makes more sense. Necromancers are, in other games, typically just people - usually wizards but sometimes warlocks or clerics - who have studied the magic of death and come to wield it (in Diablo, they're definitely more of a cleric-like class.) The only reason I'd like them to be a hero class is that it might afford them some of the cosmetic coolness that you get with Death Knights and Demon Hunters, and because it would be easier to level them up. But it would make more sense as a regular class, like the Monk.
Next, what armor would they wear?
Admittedly, again, lorewise, it would make sense for them to wear cloth armor. But I don't think it would be that much of a stretch to just throw them in mail armor - and you could make some cool bone-based armor options for them - imagine chainmail of various bones woven together.
One of the most exciting aspects for this class would be that they could finally add a new ranged DPS spec to the game - something they haven't done in their 15 years since Vanilla. Naturally, Necromancers would have a ranged spec.
How it would actually play, though, is trickier. It seems a Necromancer has to have some kind of undead-summoning ability, but you would need to design it in a way that feels distinct from the other pet-based classes. A swarm of skeletons (like the unit in WCIII) might feel too similar to Demonology Warlocks, and quick bursts of undead might be too much like an Unholy DK.
Given that Warlocks who aren't Affliction are less bound to damage-over-time effects, I think you could have some focus on plagues that could then bring forth minions. Maybe you infect a target with some plague that then causes something like blood worms to erupt from them.
I also think focusing more on incorporeal undead could be a good niche for the Necromancer to go for - rather than zombies like the Unholy DK, you could have ghostly minions and banshees that attack your target - or perhaps weaken them to other attacks.
Given their mastery over life force, Necromancers would also be a fantastic option for a dark-themed healer. You could go super-gross with this, or perhaps create some sort of healing-for-damage theme where the target heals the more damage they deal (or perhaps healing they do so you can cover other healers.) Like a Disc priest, but rather than healing through your own damage, you reward targets for their own damage output.
I'm sure opinions vary, but I think the two-spec Demon Hunter actually wound up working pretty well, and so I wouldn't be shocked if Necromancers also just got one spec per role. I don't imagine Necromancers being tanks - that really overlaps far too much with the Blood Death Knight.
Because it's a learned discipline, you could also be very liberal with what races get access to it. At the very least I'd want to see the various "darker" races be able to play Necromancers, which means Undead, Worgen, Void Elves, and Nightborne. But frankly, I'd just make it available to everyone.
We're just a little ways from Blizzcon. What seems to be the most popular theory for the next expansion (and one that this writer holds) is that the next expansion is going to be heavily about Death, Necromancy, and the Undead, and likely the Shadowlands. Necromancers would fit perfectly into such an expansion.
So let's talk about what I'd want to see from a Necromancer.
First off, would it be a hero class or a regular, start-at-1 class? Story-wise, I think the latter makes more sense. Necromancers are, in other games, typically just people - usually wizards but sometimes warlocks or clerics - who have studied the magic of death and come to wield it (in Diablo, they're definitely more of a cleric-like class.) The only reason I'd like them to be a hero class is that it might afford them some of the cosmetic coolness that you get with Death Knights and Demon Hunters, and because it would be easier to level them up. But it would make more sense as a regular class, like the Monk.
Next, what armor would they wear?
Admittedly, again, lorewise, it would make sense for them to wear cloth armor. But I don't think it would be that much of a stretch to just throw them in mail armor - and you could make some cool bone-based armor options for them - imagine chainmail of various bones woven together.
One of the most exciting aspects for this class would be that they could finally add a new ranged DPS spec to the game - something they haven't done in their 15 years since Vanilla. Naturally, Necromancers would have a ranged spec.
How it would actually play, though, is trickier. It seems a Necromancer has to have some kind of undead-summoning ability, but you would need to design it in a way that feels distinct from the other pet-based classes. A swarm of skeletons (like the unit in WCIII) might feel too similar to Demonology Warlocks, and quick bursts of undead might be too much like an Unholy DK.
Given that Warlocks who aren't Affliction are less bound to damage-over-time effects, I think you could have some focus on plagues that could then bring forth minions. Maybe you infect a target with some plague that then causes something like blood worms to erupt from them.
I also think focusing more on incorporeal undead could be a good niche for the Necromancer to go for - rather than zombies like the Unholy DK, you could have ghostly minions and banshees that attack your target - or perhaps weaken them to other attacks.
Given their mastery over life force, Necromancers would also be a fantastic option for a dark-themed healer. You could go super-gross with this, or perhaps create some sort of healing-for-damage theme where the target heals the more damage they deal (or perhaps healing they do so you can cover other healers.) Like a Disc priest, but rather than healing through your own damage, you reward targets for their own damage output.
I'm sure opinions vary, but I think the two-spec Demon Hunter actually wound up working pretty well, and so I wouldn't be shocked if Necromancers also just got one spec per role. I don't imagine Necromancers being tanks - that really overlaps far too much with the Blood Death Knight.
Because it's a learned discipline, you could also be very liberal with what races get access to it. At the very least I'd want to see the various "darker" races be able to play Necromancers, which means Undead, Worgen, Void Elves, and Nightborne. But frankly, I'd just make it available to everyone.
We're just a little ways from Blizzcon. What seems to be the most popular theory for the next expansion (and one that this writer holds) is that the next expansion is going to be heavily about Death, Necromancy, and the Undead, and likely the Shadowlands. Necromancers would fit perfectly into such an expansion.
Deathwing Coming to Heroes of the Storm - And Announced Right Before Blizzcon?
One of the long-hoped-for characters for Heroes of the Storm was announced in the past couple days: Deathwing, the grand-daddy of evil dragons in the Warcraft universe and primary villain of the Cataclysm expansion.
While his announcement is sure to be very welcome amongst HotS players, the timing of this announcement is surprising. As of today we're just a week and two days from the start of Blizzcon, which is when you'd typically expect to find news about new characters being added to the game.
Heroes of the Storm has, infamously, been put on a bit of a back-burner lately amongst Blizzard games, and the fact that they're rolling out this announcement before the big Con suggests to me two possibilities:
The first is that they have really big stuff to share that goes beyond a new character. To be clear, I don't think this is the right one.
The other is that there's much bigger news for other franchises and as such, the Heroes presence at the Con will be very small - announcing Deathwing now means that they pretty much don't even need to mention Heroes of the Storm, so instead they can focus on the new WoW expansion, Diablo IV, possibly Overwatch 2, and whatever else they have in store.
While his announcement is sure to be very welcome amongst HotS players, the timing of this announcement is surprising. As of today we're just a week and two days from the start of Blizzcon, which is when you'd typically expect to find news about new characters being added to the game.
Heroes of the Storm has, infamously, been put on a bit of a back-burner lately amongst Blizzard games, and the fact that they're rolling out this announcement before the big Con suggests to me two possibilities:
The first is that they have really big stuff to share that goes beyond a new character. To be clear, I don't think this is the right one.
The other is that there's much bigger news for other franchises and as such, the Heroes presence at the Con will be very small - announcing Deathwing now means that they pretty much don't even need to mention Heroes of the Storm, so instead they can focus on the new WoW expansion, Diablo IV, possibly Overwatch 2, and whatever else they have in store.
Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Blizzcon Schedule: Four "Coming Soon" Panels that are Free to Watch
Blizzard released the schedule for the convention coming in a week and a half, and there's some curious stuff there.
On the main stage, after the opening ceremonies, there will be four panels. None of these have been given names, but they will be free to watch, which is usually only allowed for those opening ceremonies when they do the very initial announcements - playing announcement trailers and such.
There have been rumors coming from Blizzard employees that this is going to be a very big Blizzcon, and this does seem to play into that rumor.
Here are my general predictions:
We're obviously getting a new WoW expansion, though I also wonder if it's going to be a bigger one than usual. With the conclusion of the faction war, we might see a fundamental shift to the way that the game handles its two rival sides. Indeed, if 8.3 is supposed to see the longterm (though I would never say permanent) defeat of the Old Gods, it would mean that the background villain that has been there for all of WoW (though only retroactively through all of Warcraft) has been dealt with. I don't think we're ever going to get a WoW 2 (or rather, I'd argue that we got it back in 2007 and it was called Burning Crusade) but I wouldn't be surprised if we get an expansion with a more radical redesign of the game - possibly as big as Cataclysm.
Next, I think Diablo IV is looking more and more likely, especially after a German magazine seemed to spoil that announcement. Diablo players have been waiting for a new game for a long time, and I think part of the reason Blizzard was caught off guard by the uproar over Diablo Immortal was that they would never have thought of it as "replacing" a true sequel because they already knew the real sequel was in the works. What Diablo IV is going to be like, however, remains to be seen - Reaper of Souls ended on a scary note - is Tyrael going to turn on humanity, or perhaps are the Nephalem going to be the new villains?
Another big speculation/rumor is that we could get a sequel to Overwatch. The real hope for that would be one that has a single-player mode. Overwatch has a deep well of lore that, frustratingly, is almost entirely absent from the game itself. Having a game where we could play through the story and also allow said story to evolve would be pretty exciting.
Now, the fourth panel could be for another one of Blizzard's major franchises. Or, it could be for a new IP. Blizzard is of course very conservative in creating new franchises - Hearthstone is really part of the Warcraft brand and Heroes of the Storm is just a Smash Bros.-like mishmash of their brands. That means the gap between their two most recent IPs, Overwatch and Diablo, was over a decade. Meanwhile, their most iconic one (except perhaps if you live in South Korea) is 25 years old this year.
Anyway, the rumor mill should be kicking into high gear.
On the main stage, after the opening ceremonies, there will be four panels. None of these have been given names, but they will be free to watch, which is usually only allowed for those opening ceremonies when they do the very initial announcements - playing announcement trailers and such.
There have been rumors coming from Blizzard employees that this is going to be a very big Blizzcon, and this does seem to play into that rumor.
Here are my general predictions:
We're obviously getting a new WoW expansion, though I also wonder if it's going to be a bigger one than usual. With the conclusion of the faction war, we might see a fundamental shift to the way that the game handles its two rival sides. Indeed, if 8.3 is supposed to see the longterm (though I would never say permanent) defeat of the Old Gods, it would mean that the background villain that has been there for all of WoW (though only retroactively through all of Warcraft) has been dealt with. I don't think we're ever going to get a WoW 2 (or rather, I'd argue that we got it back in 2007 and it was called Burning Crusade) but I wouldn't be surprised if we get an expansion with a more radical redesign of the game - possibly as big as Cataclysm.
Next, I think Diablo IV is looking more and more likely, especially after a German magazine seemed to spoil that announcement. Diablo players have been waiting for a new game for a long time, and I think part of the reason Blizzard was caught off guard by the uproar over Diablo Immortal was that they would never have thought of it as "replacing" a true sequel because they already knew the real sequel was in the works. What Diablo IV is going to be like, however, remains to be seen - Reaper of Souls ended on a scary note - is Tyrael going to turn on humanity, or perhaps are the Nephalem going to be the new villains?
Another big speculation/rumor is that we could get a sequel to Overwatch. The real hope for that would be one that has a single-player mode. Overwatch has a deep well of lore that, frustratingly, is almost entirely absent from the game itself. Having a game where we could play through the story and also allow said story to evolve would be pretty exciting.
Now, the fourth panel could be for another one of Blizzard's major franchises. Or, it could be for a new IP. Blizzard is of course very conservative in creating new franchises - Hearthstone is really part of the Warcraft brand and Heroes of the Storm is just a Smash Bros.-like mishmash of their brands. That means the gap between their two most recent IPs, Overwatch and Diablo, was over a decade. Meanwhile, their most iconic one (except perhaps if you live in South Korea) is 25 years old this year.
Anyway, the rumor mill should be kicking into high gear.
Planeswalkers in D&D Ravnica
While Magic and D&D both have settings filled with cool creatures, magical spells, and enchanted items, their cosmology is not quite the same. In D&D, all mundane worlds coexist in the Prime Material Plane, and travel between them requires just a simple teleportation spell (or a Spelljammer ship.) Gods and otherworldly creatures then inhabit other planes of existence that require spells like Plane Shift or Astral Projection to visit.
In Magic, however, every world is a different plane. And travel between them requires very powerful magic, such that it's typically only possible for planeswalkers.
So, naturally, I figured: how do I let players become Planeswalkers?
Designing a future Ravnica campaign, I've come up with the following rules, including a Feat called "Planeswalker Spark."
First, the rules:
Spells that allow interplanar travel are not available unless some story progress comes with a breakthrough that would allow them. We know that artifacts like the Planar Bridge built in Kaladesh allow for interplanar travel (as did Phyrexian Planar Gates,) so it might be possible to later allow these spells to be learned. But for now, things like Plane Shift, Astral Projection, or Etherealness are prohibited.
However, players can take a feat that gives them a planeswalker spark. This spark is dormant at first. The feat can be taken any time the player could take any other feat, but it remains dormant until at least thirteenth level (total level - there is no class requirement for this, so you could be a Barbarian planeswalker, which is what I'd say Domri Rade is.)
Ok, so the feat is the following:
Planeswalker Spark:
You have within you a planeswalker spark, giving you the potential to become a planeswalker. You can take this feat any time you could gain a feat, but it remains dormant at least until you reach thirteenth level. Once you are thirteenth level or higher, the DM decides if an event is profound enough to ignite your planeswalker spark, turning you into a planeswalker. When the spark ignites, you immediately make your first planeswalk, explained below.
As a planeswalker, you gain the ability to cast Plane Shift once per long rest. You can only use this spell to transport yourself alone to another Plane of the Magic Multiverse. Casting Plane Shift in this way does not require material components, however, the first time you cast it, which you must do when your planeswalker spark ignites, you go to a random plane determined by rolling on the table below.
Once you have visited a plane, you can choose to travel to that plane again in the future using this feature. Because you are a native of Ravnica, you are automatically familiar enough with your home plane to travel back there using this feature.
If you speak with other planeswalkers, you can gain enough familiarity with other planes you have not visited in order to attempt to intentionally travel to a plane you have not yet visited.
You can spend ten work weeks of downtime traveling between planes in order to practice drawing upon the mana of the land to summon others with you when you planeswalk. Subtract a number of weeks equal to your intelligence modifier (if you have a negative modifier, the process will take additional weeks.) Once you have completed this training, your Plane Shift spell granted by this feat is no longer limited and can be cast on yourself and up to eight additional willing creatures (or a single unwilling creature) as normal for the spell.
Planes of Dominia Table:
d20
1-4 Dominaria
5: Kamigawa
6: Lorwyn/Shadowmoor (roll again. 1-10 is Lorwyn, 11-20 is Shadowmoor.)
7-8: Zendikar
9-11: Innistrad
12: Theros
13: Tarkir
14: Kaladesh
15: Amonkhet
16-17: Ixalan
18-19: Eldraine
20: New Phyrexia
So that's the feat.
The logic here is that players can't get Plane Shift until level 13 usually (it's what's required for pure casters to get 7th level spells) so it shouldn't break the game too much. Additionally, level 13 should leave them powerful enough to survive for a day in a harsh new environment (New Phyrexia might be a bit of a challenge.)
I was initially going to try to include every single Magic plane that has been the primary setting for a set, but decided to cut out some of the ones I didn't think would be too interesting. Rabiah is really just the real world Middle East. Ulgrotha I don't really know enough about to make interesting. Alara's big defining thing is no longer there, if I recall correctly. Mercadia I think was just that one city with not a lot else to make it interesting. Rath no longer really exists since it overlaid Dominaria. The original Phyrexia was destroyed. Mirrodin is of course New Phyrexia now, so it's represented. I believe we're otherwise covered (though I know there's a new one coming next year.) Obviously Ravnica's the primary setting that they'll be traveling from initially.
Of course, only allowing the players who have taken this feat to actually go to other planes would be pretty annoying for the rest of the party, which is why I've included this downtime option - essentially making them players in a game of magic, summoning their party members as legendary creatures.
While I'm going to try to go light on major arc-plots - the campaign is designed so that players can drop in and out on sessions as their schedules permit, because adulthood - I imagine that having some planeswalkers in the party will allow for bigger things to happen.
In fact, there will actually be a big bad hanging out in the background, and no, it isn't Nicol Bolas (though I think at some point we'll have to address the whole War of the Spark thing happening - probably while they're not on Ravnica.) Instead, starting fairly early, we might have some adventures involve finding odd monsters with strange, biomechanical parts and people using a glyph that looks oddly like a Greek letter Phi...
In Magic, however, every world is a different plane. And travel between them requires very powerful magic, such that it's typically only possible for planeswalkers.
So, naturally, I figured: how do I let players become Planeswalkers?
Designing a future Ravnica campaign, I've come up with the following rules, including a Feat called "Planeswalker Spark."
First, the rules:
Spells that allow interplanar travel are not available unless some story progress comes with a breakthrough that would allow them. We know that artifacts like the Planar Bridge built in Kaladesh allow for interplanar travel (as did Phyrexian Planar Gates,) so it might be possible to later allow these spells to be learned. But for now, things like Plane Shift, Astral Projection, or Etherealness are prohibited.
However, players can take a feat that gives them a planeswalker spark. This spark is dormant at first. The feat can be taken any time the player could take any other feat, but it remains dormant until at least thirteenth level (total level - there is no class requirement for this, so you could be a Barbarian planeswalker, which is what I'd say Domri Rade is.)
Ok, so the feat is the following:
Planeswalker Spark:
You have within you a planeswalker spark, giving you the potential to become a planeswalker. You can take this feat any time you could gain a feat, but it remains dormant at least until you reach thirteenth level. Once you are thirteenth level or higher, the DM decides if an event is profound enough to ignite your planeswalker spark, turning you into a planeswalker. When the spark ignites, you immediately make your first planeswalk, explained below.
As a planeswalker, you gain the ability to cast Plane Shift once per long rest. You can only use this spell to transport yourself alone to another Plane of the Magic Multiverse. Casting Plane Shift in this way does not require material components, however, the first time you cast it, which you must do when your planeswalker spark ignites, you go to a random plane determined by rolling on the table below.
Once you have visited a plane, you can choose to travel to that plane again in the future using this feature. Because you are a native of Ravnica, you are automatically familiar enough with your home plane to travel back there using this feature.
If you speak with other planeswalkers, you can gain enough familiarity with other planes you have not visited in order to attempt to intentionally travel to a plane you have not yet visited.
You can spend ten work weeks of downtime traveling between planes in order to practice drawing upon the mana of the land to summon others with you when you planeswalk. Subtract a number of weeks equal to your intelligence modifier (if you have a negative modifier, the process will take additional weeks.) Once you have completed this training, your Plane Shift spell granted by this feat is no longer limited and can be cast on yourself and up to eight additional willing creatures (or a single unwilling creature) as normal for the spell.
Planes of Dominia Table:
d20
1-4 Dominaria
5: Kamigawa
6: Lorwyn/Shadowmoor (roll again. 1-10 is Lorwyn, 11-20 is Shadowmoor.)
7-8: Zendikar
9-11: Innistrad
12: Theros
13: Tarkir
14: Kaladesh
15: Amonkhet
16-17: Ixalan
18-19: Eldraine
20: New Phyrexia
So that's the feat.
The logic here is that players can't get Plane Shift until level 13 usually (it's what's required for pure casters to get 7th level spells) so it shouldn't break the game too much. Additionally, level 13 should leave them powerful enough to survive for a day in a harsh new environment (New Phyrexia might be a bit of a challenge.)
I was initially going to try to include every single Magic plane that has been the primary setting for a set, but decided to cut out some of the ones I didn't think would be too interesting. Rabiah is really just the real world Middle East. Ulgrotha I don't really know enough about to make interesting. Alara's big defining thing is no longer there, if I recall correctly. Mercadia I think was just that one city with not a lot else to make it interesting. Rath no longer really exists since it overlaid Dominaria. The original Phyrexia was destroyed. Mirrodin is of course New Phyrexia now, so it's represented. I believe we're otherwise covered (though I know there's a new one coming next year.) Obviously Ravnica's the primary setting that they'll be traveling from initially.
Of course, only allowing the players who have taken this feat to actually go to other planes would be pretty annoying for the rest of the party, which is why I've included this downtime option - essentially making them players in a game of magic, summoning their party members as legendary creatures.
While I'm going to try to go light on major arc-plots - the campaign is designed so that players can drop in and out on sessions as their schedules permit, because adulthood - I imagine that having some planeswalkers in the party will allow for bigger things to happen.
In fact, there will actually be a big bad hanging out in the background, and no, it isn't Nicol Bolas (though I think at some point we'll have to address the whole War of the Spark thing happening - probably while they're not on Ravnica.) Instead, starting fairly early, we might have some adventures involve finding odd monsters with strange, biomechanical parts and people using a glyph that looks oddly like a Greek letter Phi...
Monday, October 21, 2019
Rumor Watch: Revamp and Old Expansion Skip
So, with less than two weeks to go until Blizzcon, the rumor mill is working at high capacity. That being said, a lot of rumors are clearly made up by people with no actual inside information. I can tell you a bunch of theories I have about where the expansion will go from here, but I claim no direct "leak" from Blizzard. Indeed, on the forums of MMO-Champion, the term "Leak" has mutated, no longer meaning an actual bit of information smuggled out from Blizzard, but instead just descriptions of possible future expansions.
However, there's something kind of interesting going on regarding these non-leaks. I've seen a number of rumors that the next expansion will involve a revamp like Cataclysm to older zones - though whether those are Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor or potentially Outland and Northrend remains to be seen.
One of the major reasons Classic exists is that people wanted to be able to access WoW as it existed prior to Burning Crusade, but especially prior to Cataclysm, when certain zones and quests were changed forever. If you started playing after 2010, you might not realize, for example, that Thousand Needles used to be a dry, desert zone without a drop of water in it. And the Western Plaguelands used to be filled with a haze of choking plague and basically felt like a dangerous nightmare the moment you stepped inside (it was also funny to have a zone designed for level 50+ right next to the Undead starting zone - the Western Plaguelands' "welcome bears" would one-shot any newbie who accidentally wandered past the Bulwark - this was also before there was any indication on the map to say what levels a zone was for, so there wasn't any strict indication that you shouldn't go there other than the big physical barricade the Forsaken had built on that road.)
However, Blizzard has taken to using things like Bronze Dragonflight NPCs to allows players to visit old versions of zones. Cenarion Hold in Silithus, along with nearly everything in that zone, was canonically obliterated by Sargeras when he plunged that massive sword down there. But if you want to see the old version of the zone and do those quests (for some reason - maybe you still want to get your Guardian of Cenarius title) you can just talk to an NPC to do so. Not so with, say, the original Hillsbrad Foothills (the only way you can go to a non-ruined Southshore is to visit the one in the Caverns of Time dungeon.)
So maybe a true revamp would not be as big of a loss now that they have that technology and game mechanic.
What is interesting about these rumors is that they also suggest a more radical way to do a level squish.
Essentially, the idea is that future characters would be able to skip all the other expansions' content and just go 1-60 through the "old world" and then move directly on to the latest expansion. The old content would, of course, still exist, but it would primarily be there so you could get cosmetic items, reputation with old factions, and the like.
I will say that this rumor does solve a couple problems. For one thing, the "Cataclysm problem" of going to Outland or Northrend or both after going through an Old World that is, for example, post-Arthas, is a little narratively jarring.
It would also, I think, make leveling up new characters feel far less daunting. Getting from 1 (or 20) to 58 is not that arduous right now, but having to go through the Outland/Northrend "chapter" followed by the Cataclysm/Pandaria chapter, then Draenor, then the Broken Isles, and then Kul Tiras/Zandalar is a bit of a tall ladder to climb.
Rather than just nerf XP to the point where you're only doing half of Val'sharah before you're ready to leave the Broken Isles, it might be more sensible to just let people get past it - but keeping it around if you never got to experience that story, or just want to run through it again.
That being said, Cataclysm's world revamp wound up being way bigger than Blizzard expected it to be. While I think that in a lot of ways it made leveling more fun in those lower levels (though all the people who seem to be loving Classic might beg to differ) it did also freeze a lot of the world in that Cataclysm moment - something which was less jarring when thing were frozen in that... World of Warcraft moment. Another revamp would potentially make all the other expansions' content feel narratively disjointed as well - though on the other hand, if it's all skippable, maybe that's not a problem.
Now the huge caveat to all of this is that I really don't know if this rumor is at all based on facts or just speculation. Here I am, spreading it further, and so many fake leaks might just be taking up the idea and tweaking it enough to seem to be some other rumor.
Here is one other thing that could be an argument in its favor though: if we are going to see a fundamental change to the way that factions work in WoW, the Old World is probably the most faction-defined area in the world. If faction restrictions are going to be significantly loosened in 9.0, it might make sense to remake the world once again as one in which the Alliance and Horde are no longer operating in opposition to one another. Would it go so far as to allow your Orc Hunter to freely walk the streets of Stormwind? I don't know. But if that were to happen, you'd need some major revamp to the world in order to allow that to work.
I personally have a lot of planned activities during the remaining days of October, from one of my best friends' birthday party to some D&D nights, so the next week and a half actually feels like a significant stretch of time. But I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes next for WoW.
I heard (not personally, just on their respective outlets - I don't know these people personally) from Matt Rossi at Blizzard Watch and Taliesin from... Taliesin and Evitel that this Blizzcon is supposed to be a huge one. And while I'm sure it will in part be huge because of the whole Hearthstone Hong Kong clusterfuck, I'm really hoping we get not just a WoW expansion announcement (which is almost certainly guaranteed) but the announcement of a really exciting and good expansion.
(Oh, and I might write a post about this, but apparently there's been a leak - like, a real one, as in a magazine published something it maybe wasn't supposed to) - about Diablo IV, so fingers crossed this time?)
However, there's something kind of interesting going on regarding these non-leaks. I've seen a number of rumors that the next expansion will involve a revamp like Cataclysm to older zones - though whether those are Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor or potentially Outland and Northrend remains to be seen.
One of the major reasons Classic exists is that people wanted to be able to access WoW as it existed prior to Burning Crusade, but especially prior to Cataclysm, when certain zones and quests were changed forever. If you started playing after 2010, you might not realize, for example, that Thousand Needles used to be a dry, desert zone without a drop of water in it. And the Western Plaguelands used to be filled with a haze of choking plague and basically felt like a dangerous nightmare the moment you stepped inside (it was also funny to have a zone designed for level 50+ right next to the Undead starting zone - the Western Plaguelands' "welcome bears" would one-shot any newbie who accidentally wandered past the Bulwark - this was also before there was any indication on the map to say what levels a zone was for, so there wasn't any strict indication that you shouldn't go there other than the big physical barricade the Forsaken had built on that road.)
However, Blizzard has taken to using things like Bronze Dragonflight NPCs to allows players to visit old versions of zones. Cenarion Hold in Silithus, along with nearly everything in that zone, was canonically obliterated by Sargeras when he plunged that massive sword down there. But if you want to see the old version of the zone and do those quests (for some reason - maybe you still want to get your Guardian of Cenarius title) you can just talk to an NPC to do so. Not so with, say, the original Hillsbrad Foothills (the only way you can go to a non-ruined Southshore is to visit the one in the Caverns of Time dungeon.)
So maybe a true revamp would not be as big of a loss now that they have that technology and game mechanic.
What is interesting about these rumors is that they also suggest a more radical way to do a level squish.
Essentially, the idea is that future characters would be able to skip all the other expansions' content and just go 1-60 through the "old world" and then move directly on to the latest expansion. The old content would, of course, still exist, but it would primarily be there so you could get cosmetic items, reputation with old factions, and the like.
I will say that this rumor does solve a couple problems. For one thing, the "Cataclysm problem" of going to Outland or Northrend or both after going through an Old World that is, for example, post-Arthas, is a little narratively jarring.
It would also, I think, make leveling up new characters feel far less daunting. Getting from 1 (or 20) to 58 is not that arduous right now, but having to go through the Outland/Northrend "chapter" followed by the Cataclysm/Pandaria chapter, then Draenor, then the Broken Isles, and then Kul Tiras/Zandalar is a bit of a tall ladder to climb.
Rather than just nerf XP to the point where you're only doing half of Val'sharah before you're ready to leave the Broken Isles, it might be more sensible to just let people get past it - but keeping it around if you never got to experience that story, or just want to run through it again.
That being said, Cataclysm's world revamp wound up being way bigger than Blizzard expected it to be. While I think that in a lot of ways it made leveling more fun in those lower levels (though all the people who seem to be loving Classic might beg to differ) it did also freeze a lot of the world in that Cataclysm moment - something which was less jarring when thing were frozen in that... World of Warcraft moment. Another revamp would potentially make all the other expansions' content feel narratively disjointed as well - though on the other hand, if it's all skippable, maybe that's not a problem.
Now the huge caveat to all of this is that I really don't know if this rumor is at all based on facts or just speculation. Here I am, spreading it further, and so many fake leaks might just be taking up the idea and tweaking it enough to seem to be some other rumor.
Here is one other thing that could be an argument in its favor though: if we are going to see a fundamental change to the way that factions work in WoW, the Old World is probably the most faction-defined area in the world. If faction restrictions are going to be significantly loosened in 9.0, it might make sense to remake the world once again as one in which the Alliance and Horde are no longer operating in opposition to one another. Would it go so far as to allow your Orc Hunter to freely walk the streets of Stormwind? I don't know. But if that were to happen, you'd need some major revamp to the world in order to allow that to work.
I personally have a lot of planned activities during the remaining days of October, from one of my best friends' birthday party to some D&D nights, so the next week and a half actually feels like a significant stretch of time. But I'm really looking forward to seeing what comes next for WoW.
I heard (not personally, just on their respective outlets - I don't know these people personally) from Matt Rossi at Blizzard Watch and Taliesin from... Taliesin and Evitel that this Blizzcon is supposed to be a huge one. And while I'm sure it will in part be huge because of the whole Hearthstone Hong Kong clusterfuck, I'm really hoping we get not just a WoW expansion announcement (which is almost certainly guaranteed) but the announcement of a really exciting and good expansion.
(Oh, and I might write a post about this, but apparently there's been a leak - like, a real one, as in a magazine published something it maybe wasn't supposed to) - about Diablo IV, so fingers crossed this time?)
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Two Weeks Until Blizzcon: Hopes and Thoughts
Blizzcon this year is going to be a big one for WoW players, though to be fair, you can say that for most Blizzcons that come in odd-numbered years, as we typically get the announcement of the expansion to come the following year.
First off, let's talk briefly about what is sure to be a very large elephant in the room:
Blizzard has walked back some of its punishments of Blitzchung for speaking out in favor of the Hong Kong protestors after winning a Hearthstone tournament, giving his prize money back and cutting his ban to six months rather than a year.
Still, there is still a punishment. While I'm certainly more sympathetic to Blitzchung's stance and Hong Kong's desires for democratic autonomy than China's ruthless oppression of free speech and free thought, I can understand a general attitude of wanting to keep gaming tournaments a realm that is free of divisive politics. As someone with grandparents who survived the holocaust (though I hope having a personal history with this wouldn't be the only thing qualifying me to have this view,) I'd totally understand and laud Blizzard banning a player who used their platform to advance an ideology of white supremacy or some other horrific political stance.
That being said, I think one of the big challenges we face as a liberal democracy is the balance between political even-handedness and identifying those core political ideas that define us, you know, as a liberal democracy.
International capitalism, however, straddles countries that have different core political values. There was hope, when we established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, that opening them to Western markets would also open them to liberalism (small L, to be clear, though big L Liberalism is one facet of that.) That clearly hasn't worked out as well as we hoped.
So Blizzard, being a big company with some immensely popular brands, has enjoyed profits gained by doing business in China, and are thus disincentivized to do things that would get on the Chinese government's bad side. Blizzard claims that their harsh actions toward Blitzchung were not based on a desire to bow to pressures from China, but that assertion has been met with some healthy skepticism from public.
It's sad, because the game designers and community managers that we gamers interact with had nothing to do with the decision, and it's their work that we're eager to find out about and celebrate at Blizzard's annual convention.
So, putting that massive elephant to the side, let's talk a bit about what I'm hoping to see.
I'm not going to go franchise-by-franchise here, because I honestly don't really know if all of them are going to get a major focus.
But we will go with franchises I am very curious about.
Diablo: The unveiling of Diablo Immortal was basically a marketing nightmare - you don't usually get new entries in a beloved franchise booed on stage. Of course, the upset over it (expressed in not really the most mature way) was based on a fear that there would be no more Diablo as we knew it - PC-based with all the complexity one expects of the franchise.
Reaper of Souls was a fantastic release that basically fixed Diablo III, but that came out a good long time ago, and players have wanted more. If Blizzard announces Diablo IV, and it looks enough like Diablo as we know it, people will be very happy.
WoW: Given that this blog is mostly a World of Warcraft one (admittedly with a whole lot more D&D in the past few years) I won't go into full detail here. We're almost certainly getting a new expansion announcement - and frankly if we don't, you're going to see an even worse reaction than Diablo Immortal got. That being said, what that expansion is going to be remains to be seen.
With 8.3 put on the PTR just weeks before Blizzcon, it's clear that they wanted not to have to spend too much time on the final patch of Battle for Azeroth, and so I think we're going to get a fair amount of info on the new expansion. Major features, like a new level cap, new zones, and any sort of new class or race are going to be the big headliners here.
If there is to be some revolutionary change to the game, my big suspicion is some fundamental shake-up to the breakdown of the two factions. I'll admit this is partially wishful thinking, but I suspect we're going to see a relaxation of the division between the factions, likely allowing cross-faction grouping at the very least. A "level squish" is also a possibility.
Overwatch: Overwatch is still quite popular. That being said, I could imagine, given that popularity, that they might finally release the single-player game that it could have been - whether that will be as add-on content for Overwatch itself or a new release (I would think the latter) is unknown.
We could easily see new heroes announced (likewise in Heroes of the Storm,) but it would be fun to get a bigger story.
A New IP: I haven't heard anything about a new IP. Overwatch, back when it was Titan, was in the works for many years (a guild member claimed to have done some concept art for it back during Wrath) but we haven't really been hearing about anything like that. Could be cool, but I'm not holding my breath.
First off, let's talk briefly about what is sure to be a very large elephant in the room:
Blizzard has walked back some of its punishments of Blitzchung for speaking out in favor of the Hong Kong protestors after winning a Hearthstone tournament, giving his prize money back and cutting his ban to six months rather than a year.
Still, there is still a punishment. While I'm certainly more sympathetic to Blitzchung's stance and Hong Kong's desires for democratic autonomy than China's ruthless oppression of free speech and free thought, I can understand a general attitude of wanting to keep gaming tournaments a realm that is free of divisive politics. As someone with grandparents who survived the holocaust (though I hope having a personal history with this wouldn't be the only thing qualifying me to have this view,) I'd totally understand and laud Blizzard banning a player who used their platform to advance an ideology of white supremacy or some other horrific political stance.
That being said, I think one of the big challenges we face as a liberal democracy is the balance between political even-handedness and identifying those core political ideas that define us, you know, as a liberal democracy.
International capitalism, however, straddles countries that have different core political values. There was hope, when we established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, that opening them to Western markets would also open them to liberalism (small L, to be clear, though big L Liberalism is one facet of that.) That clearly hasn't worked out as well as we hoped.
So Blizzard, being a big company with some immensely popular brands, has enjoyed profits gained by doing business in China, and are thus disincentivized to do things that would get on the Chinese government's bad side. Blizzard claims that their harsh actions toward Blitzchung were not based on a desire to bow to pressures from China, but that assertion has been met with some healthy skepticism from public.
It's sad, because the game designers and community managers that we gamers interact with had nothing to do with the decision, and it's their work that we're eager to find out about and celebrate at Blizzard's annual convention.
So, putting that massive elephant to the side, let's talk a bit about what I'm hoping to see.
I'm not going to go franchise-by-franchise here, because I honestly don't really know if all of them are going to get a major focus.
But we will go with franchises I am very curious about.
Diablo: The unveiling of Diablo Immortal was basically a marketing nightmare - you don't usually get new entries in a beloved franchise booed on stage. Of course, the upset over it (expressed in not really the most mature way) was based on a fear that there would be no more Diablo as we knew it - PC-based with all the complexity one expects of the franchise.
Reaper of Souls was a fantastic release that basically fixed Diablo III, but that came out a good long time ago, and players have wanted more. If Blizzard announces Diablo IV, and it looks enough like Diablo as we know it, people will be very happy.
WoW: Given that this blog is mostly a World of Warcraft one (admittedly with a whole lot more D&D in the past few years) I won't go into full detail here. We're almost certainly getting a new expansion announcement - and frankly if we don't, you're going to see an even worse reaction than Diablo Immortal got. That being said, what that expansion is going to be remains to be seen.
With 8.3 put on the PTR just weeks before Blizzcon, it's clear that they wanted not to have to spend too much time on the final patch of Battle for Azeroth, and so I think we're going to get a fair amount of info on the new expansion. Major features, like a new level cap, new zones, and any sort of new class or race are going to be the big headliners here.
If there is to be some revolutionary change to the game, my big suspicion is some fundamental shake-up to the breakdown of the two factions. I'll admit this is partially wishful thinking, but I suspect we're going to see a relaxation of the division between the factions, likely allowing cross-faction grouping at the very least. A "level squish" is also a possibility.
Overwatch: Overwatch is still quite popular. That being said, I could imagine, given that popularity, that they might finally release the single-player game that it could have been - whether that will be as add-on content for Overwatch itself or a new release (I would think the latter) is unknown.
We could easily see new heroes announced (likewise in Heroes of the Storm,) but it would be fun to get a bigger story.
A New IP: I haven't heard anything about a new IP. Overwatch, back when it was Titan, was in the works for many years (a guild member claimed to have done some concept art for it back during Wrath) but we haven't really been hearing about anything like that. Could be cool, but I'm not holding my breath.
Friday, October 18, 2019
Desire for WoW: Design Around Flight, Don't Make it an End Goal
I know I've made this sort of argument before, but it bears repeating.
Flight has been part of WoW almost since the beginning. The very first expansion, Burning Crusade, gave us flying mounts. And Blizzard has always struggled a bit to figure out the proper way to let us fly.
In Burning Crusade, it was simply a gold cost at level 70 - then the level cap. In Wrath of the Lich King, you got "Cold Weather Flying" at level 77 - not the cap, but the level at which you gained access to Icecrown and Storm Peaks, two leveling zones that required flying to do all the quests. In Cataclysm, you could get a "Flight Master's License" (though players nicknamed this "Old Weather Flying,") which I think required you to be level 80 (Wrath's level cap,) but allowed you to do all of Cataclysm's leveling zones in the air, and of course allowed you to fly over the "old world." Mists of Pandaria was the only expansion to go to the original model, giving flight at the level cap (then 90.)
In Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard sitrred controversy as the first expansion in which you could not even fly at the level cap. For a time, they even suggested that we would never be able to fly in Draenor, but later, they came up with the model for what we have used for the last three expansions: Pathfinder.
The problem with flight, from Blizzard's perspective, is that it makes it too easy for players to just dip in, hit the targets they need for a quest, and then fly away. Navigation is safe and easy, and all the topographical complexity of the environment is rendered moot if you can just fly in a direct line toward the objective.
Now, I'd argue this is more of a problem with the quest tracker, where real exploration is replaced with a GPS-like waypoint. I'll confess I've gotten totally used to this feature since it was introduced in Cataclysm, and it's clear that quest designers have as well, because the quest text doesn't always tell you exactly where to go, which it did in Vanilla through Wrath (something you can experience again in Classic.)
As such, Blizzard has decided they prefer to have players spend a great deal of time on foot navigating the world and then just reward flight to them once they've "finished" all the world questing.
However, I think this robs us of some real opportunities. In the early days of flight in WoW, you had zones and quests designed around flying. In BC, the Tempest Keep dungeons were all flying high above Netherstorm. If you wanted to run them, you had to physically get there, and this was before meeting stones actually summoned a player to the dungeon (even if they did, the stone was down on the ground near Cosmowrench.) Getting flight was a gateway to more content, not a reward meant to trivialize old content.
That, to me, is the key. Pathfinder is designed to come after you've done the major content of the expansion. In Warlords, it was something you only got after you'd exhausted what there was to do in Tanaan Jungle. In Legion, we did get Argus afterward, but we never got to fly there.
In BFA, admittedly, we'll have new content where flight will be useful in N'zoth's invasions of Uldum and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, but that's likely because they couldn't find a way to keep us from flying in these old zones.
I think there's a missed opportunity for three-dimensional exploration. I'd love to have a zone where you can fly from the get-go, but there are airships and floating islands aplenty with their own quests and NPCs and mysteries to unravel. I wrote a couple posts back that even Antoran Wastes didn't quite hit the same menacing dread of Icecrown, and I think to a large extent that was because it wasn't practical to navigate the zone on foot.
I strongly suspect that, perhaps with a few tweaks (requiring only revered reputation being a welcome one) we'll probably see Pathfinder as the model moving forward. But I do wish Blizzard would consider the potential they unleashed by putting flight into the game, and not just its downsides.
Flight has been part of WoW almost since the beginning. The very first expansion, Burning Crusade, gave us flying mounts. And Blizzard has always struggled a bit to figure out the proper way to let us fly.
In Burning Crusade, it was simply a gold cost at level 70 - then the level cap. In Wrath of the Lich King, you got "Cold Weather Flying" at level 77 - not the cap, but the level at which you gained access to Icecrown and Storm Peaks, two leveling zones that required flying to do all the quests. In Cataclysm, you could get a "Flight Master's License" (though players nicknamed this "Old Weather Flying,") which I think required you to be level 80 (Wrath's level cap,) but allowed you to do all of Cataclysm's leveling zones in the air, and of course allowed you to fly over the "old world." Mists of Pandaria was the only expansion to go to the original model, giving flight at the level cap (then 90.)
In Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard sitrred controversy as the first expansion in which you could not even fly at the level cap. For a time, they even suggested that we would never be able to fly in Draenor, but later, they came up with the model for what we have used for the last three expansions: Pathfinder.
The problem with flight, from Blizzard's perspective, is that it makes it too easy for players to just dip in, hit the targets they need for a quest, and then fly away. Navigation is safe and easy, and all the topographical complexity of the environment is rendered moot if you can just fly in a direct line toward the objective.
Now, I'd argue this is more of a problem with the quest tracker, where real exploration is replaced with a GPS-like waypoint. I'll confess I've gotten totally used to this feature since it was introduced in Cataclysm, and it's clear that quest designers have as well, because the quest text doesn't always tell you exactly where to go, which it did in Vanilla through Wrath (something you can experience again in Classic.)
As such, Blizzard has decided they prefer to have players spend a great deal of time on foot navigating the world and then just reward flight to them once they've "finished" all the world questing.
However, I think this robs us of some real opportunities. In the early days of flight in WoW, you had zones and quests designed around flying. In BC, the Tempest Keep dungeons were all flying high above Netherstorm. If you wanted to run them, you had to physically get there, and this was before meeting stones actually summoned a player to the dungeon (even if they did, the stone was down on the ground near Cosmowrench.) Getting flight was a gateway to more content, not a reward meant to trivialize old content.
That, to me, is the key. Pathfinder is designed to come after you've done the major content of the expansion. In Warlords, it was something you only got after you'd exhausted what there was to do in Tanaan Jungle. In Legion, we did get Argus afterward, but we never got to fly there.
In BFA, admittedly, we'll have new content where flight will be useful in N'zoth's invasions of Uldum and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, but that's likely because they couldn't find a way to keep us from flying in these old zones.
I think there's a missed opportunity for three-dimensional exploration. I'd love to have a zone where you can fly from the get-go, but there are airships and floating islands aplenty with their own quests and NPCs and mysteries to unravel. I wrote a couple posts back that even Antoran Wastes didn't quite hit the same menacing dread of Icecrown, and I think to a large extent that was because it wasn't practical to navigate the zone on foot.
I strongly suspect that, perhaps with a few tweaks (requiring only revered reputation being a welcome one) we'll probably see Pathfinder as the model moving forward. But I do wish Blizzard would consider the potential they unleashed by putting flight into the game, and not just its downsides.
Thursday, October 17, 2019
New Unearthed Arcana Brings Fighter, Ranger, and Rogue Subclasses
With the latest Unearthed Arcana, we have the three classes that had yet to have new subclasses getting... new subclasses. All of these are very flavorful, and once again I am very curious to see if Wizards of the Coast is planning to release a new book with subclass options - whether that's a campaign setting book or another Xanathar's like sourcebook.
Let's go through them:
Fighters get the Runic Knight subclass. The premise here is that your fighters has discovered the power of Giant Runes. Inscribing those runes into the fighter's weapons and armor, the fighter gets various benefits. The Runes, all themed after the various types of Giants, grant a passive benefit as well as a way to invoke them for a short-term buff that can be used a limited number of times per day. They also gain the ability to "hulk out" and grow larger, gaining bonus damage.
Rangers get the Swarmkeeper subclass. This very creepy subclass has the Ranger constantly surrounded by a swarm of creatures that can then aid them in battle or provide utility for them (they get the Mage Hand cantrip, but rather than a hand it's just a swarm of creatures.)
Finally, Rogues get The Revived subclass. This one is particularly story-driven, as when the Rogue takes this subclass, they realize that they've been dead before, and that they have past lives from which they might derive some latent skills or abilities. As the rogue becomes more powerful, they get more explicitly supernatural powers, including the ability to speak with the forces of death if they're making death saving throws, or the ability to step into the Ethereal Plane.
The Rogue one I'm pretty sure is the premise behind the main character in Planescape: Torment, which I assume is what inspired the subclass.
Let's go through them:
Fighters get the Runic Knight subclass. The premise here is that your fighters has discovered the power of Giant Runes. Inscribing those runes into the fighter's weapons and armor, the fighter gets various benefits. The Runes, all themed after the various types of Giants, grant a passive benefit as well as a way to invoke them for a short-term buff that can be used a limited number of times per day. They also gain the ability to "hulk out" and grow larger, gaining bonus damage.
Rangers get the Swarmkeeper subclass. This very creepy subclass has the Ranger constantly surrounded by a swarm of creatures that can then aid them in battle or provide utility for them (they get the Mage Hand cantrip, but rather than a hand it's just a swarm of creatures.)
Finally, Rogues get The Revived subclass. This one is particularly story-driven, as when the Rogue takes this subclass, they realize that they've been dead before, and that they have past lives from which they might derive some latent skills or abilities. As the rogue becomes more powerful, they get more explicitly supernatural powers, including the ability to speak with the forces of death if they're making death saving throws, or the ability to step into the Ethereal Plane.
The Rogue one I'm pretty sure is the premise behind the main character in Planescape: Torment, which I assume is what inspired the subclass.
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
Will 9.0 Bring a New Class?
While opinions certainly vary - some people hated Wrath, and some loved Warlords of Draenor, even if I would never understand those positions - the WoW community tends to think of expansions as coming in peaks and valleys. Basically, if it's an odd-numbered X.0 patch, it's usually good, while the even-numbered ones are less impressive. The possible exception to this is Burning Crusade - BC was the first expansion and sort of defined what a WoW expansion would look like. Because I started playing only shortly before BC launched (September of '06, and BC launched in Janurary of '07) I didn't really have a ton to compare it to. And of course, I think it's noteworthy that Mists of Pandaria was derided by many, unfairly for thinking it was too "childish" due to the silly Panda people and fairly because of the massive number of daily quests the game expected you to complete in the early patches.
But typically, starting with Wrath, you tend to see Wrath, Mists, and Legion looked upon favorably while Cataclysm, Warlords, and likely BFA being seen as the "lesser" expansions. Indeed, there's even a conspiracy theory that there are two design teams, the "good one" and the "bad one" that alternate expansions. (One that, for the record, I think is false.)
What makes every other expansion a winner? Well, you could say it's interesting stories and thorough worldbuilding. But oddly, the common denominator I notice is that the "good expansions" have all brought in a new class.
A new class is the most exciting thing for Blizzard to add to the game. Suddenly, the dynamics of groups shift. And we're all incentivized to try out this new gameplay. Players who love the class might start prioritizing it over old alts or even make them their new mains. New classes shake things up and they give us exciting new toys to play with.
But they're also probably the most difficult thing to add to the game.
Blizzard has a reputation for careful balance. And while there are always going to be tiers of play at which some class or spec is going to outshine another, their reputation for balancing is well-earned. But to earn that, they need to work very hard to keep the different classes balanced. And they also need to come up with new creative space for both flavor and mechanics to give the classes their own distinct feel.
And this is the area where things get tricky. WoW started with 9 classes. One could even have argued then that there were some with a bit of a conceptual overlap. Mages and Warlocks are both cloth-robed scholars who throw fire (as well as other elements) at their foes. But by leaning into the darkness (and the use of damage-over-time effects) they made the Warlock feel pretty distinct. Likewise, Shamans and Druids are both nature-based classes, but they gave Shamans a strong focus on the primal elements while giving Druids more of a focus on natural life, as well as a celestial, star-and-moon theme.
Death Knights gave us the first class to really focus on necromancy, though in a lot of ways it was set up to be the dark mirror to the paladin - even having some early talents that were variants on existing Paladin talents (Conviction becoming Dark Conviction, for example.) Monks were able to explore new space with their unarmed attacks, but actually did slide in pretty close to Shamans when it came to their mist-based healing spells. And Demon Hunters infamously took (back) the core mechanic of the 5.0-6.2 Demonology Warlock, forcing that spec to be totally redesigned so that demon hunters could get Metamorphosis.
So there is this question to be asked regarding whether a new class is warranted: is there conceptual space for it?
For example, I'd love to have a Necromancer class, which I'd envision as a ranged caster/healer hybrid (giving us a cool "dark" healer class.) The obvious problem, however, is that we already have two dark summoner specs in the Unholy Death Knight and the Demonology Warlock. Necromancers would seemingly have to have some kind of undead-summoning ability, but between Unholy's periodic summoning of big armies of the dead and Demonology's constant barrage of demonic imps, it's not clear how you would design something that felt distinct from both of them.
Another common suggestion for a new class would be the Tinker, which would be a sort of tool-and-invention based class. This, to be fair, would feel very distinct from any existing class. The real questions then are where it would fit in thematically. We obviously don't know what the next expansion will be yet, but none of the most popular theories suggest a very tech-heavy location of characters. The past three classes added to the game have felt like exactly the right class for the theme of the expansion.
Of course, classes are by their nature evergreen content for the game, and that means any addition now means all future WoW expansions are going to need to have some kind of content or at least balancing work and new abilities designed for the new class.
So should Blizzard just not make a new class?
No, I think they should. And the reason is that an expansion needs something big to make it feel worthwhile. Warlords of Draenor was the only expansion not to give us a race or a class. Admittedly, this was probably due to the fact that Mists had given us one of each. But all the pre-Cataclysm races got updated models in Warlords, it did give us one more reason to think of that expansion as being kind of insubstantial. BFA, on the other hand, will ultimately wind up giving us ten playable races - to the point where I've basically given up on getting all of them their heritage armor at least for the foreseeable future.
I don't know if new classes are an endlessly sustainable thing, but on the other hand, you only have to do a new one every four years.
Just make this one wear mail. And then bring back class tier sets.
But typically, starting with Wrath, you tend to see Wrath, Mists, and Legion looked upon favorably while Cataclysm, Warlords, and likely BFA being seen as the "lesser" expansions. Indeed, there's even a conspiracy theory that there are two design teams, the "good one" and the "bad one" that alternate expansions. (One that, for the record, I think is false.)
What makes every other expansion a winner? Well, you could say it's interesting stories and thorough worldbuilding. But oddly, the common denominator I notice is that the "good expansions" have all brought in a new class.
A new class is the most exciting thing for Blizzard to add to the game. Suddenly, the dynamics of groups shift. And we're all incentivized to try out this new gameplay. Players who love the class might start prioritizing it over old alts or even make them their new mains. New classes shake things up and they give us exciting new toys to play with.
But they're also probably the most difficult thing to add to the game.
Blizzard has a reputation for careful balance. And while there are always going to be tiers of play at which some class or spec is going to outshine another, their reputation for balancing is well-earned. But to earn that, they need to work very hard to keep the different classes balanced. And they also need to come up with new creative space for both flavor and mechanics to give the classes their own distinct feel.
And this is the area where things get tricky. WoW started with 9 classes. One could even have argued then that there were some with a bit of a conceptual overlap. Mages and Warlocks are both cloth-robed scholars who throw fire (as well as other elements) at their foes. But by leaning into the darkness (and the use of damage-over-time effects) they made the Warlock feel pretty distinct. Likewise, Shamans and Druids are both nature-based classes, but they gave Shamans a strong focus on the primal elements while giving Druids more of a focus on natural life, as well as a celestial, star-and-moon theme.
Death Knights gave us the first class to really focus on necromancy, though in a lot of ways it was set up to be the dark mirror to the paladin - even having some early talents that were variants on existing Paladin talents (Conviction becoming Dark Conviction, for example.) Monks were able to explore new space with their unarmed attacks, but actually did slide in pretty close to Shamans when it came to their mist-based healing spells. And Demon Hunters infamously took (back) the core mechanic of the 5.0-6.2 Demonology Warlock, forcing that spec to be totally redesigned so that demon hunters could get Metamorphosis.
So there is this question to be asked regarding whether a new class is warranted: is there conceptual space for it?
For example, I'd love to have a Necromancer class, which I'd envision as a ranged caster/healer hybrid (giving us a cool "dark" healer class.) The obvious problem, however, is that we already have two dark summoner specs in the Unholy Death Knight and the Demonology Warlock. Necromancers would seemingly have to have some kind of undead-summoning ability, but between Unholy's periodic summoning of big armies of the dead and Demonology's constant barrage of demonic imps, it's not clear how you would design something that felt distinct from both of them.
Another common suggestion for a new class would be the Tinker, which would be a sort of tool-and-invention based class. This, to be fair, would feel very distinct from any existing class. The real questions then are where it would fit in thematically. We obviously don't know what the next expansion will be yet, but none of the most popular theories suggest a very tech-heavy location of characters. The past three classes added to the game have felt like exactly the right class for the theme of the expansion.
Of course, classes are by their nature evergreen content for the game, and that means any addition now means all future WoW expansions are going to need to have some kind of content or at least balancing work and new abilities designed for the new class.
So should Blizzard just not make a new class?
No, I think they should. And the reason is that an expansion needs something big to make it feel worthwhile. Warlords of Draenor was the only expansion not to give us a race or a class. Admittedly, this was probably due to the fact that Mists had given us one of each. But all the pre-Cataclysm races got updated models in Warlords, it did give us one more reason to think of that expansion as being kind of insubstantial. BFA, on the other hand, will ultimately wind up giving us ten playable races - to the point where I've basically given up on getting all of them their heritage armor at least for the foreseeable future.
I don't know if new classes are an endlessly sustainable thing, but on the other hand, you only have to do a new one every four years.
Just make this one wear mail. And then bring back class tier sets.
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