It's a catch-22.
Because World of Warcraft is designed to basically last forever, with a new expansion coming out every two years, they need renewable villains.
In the early expansions, when I don't think Blizzard had a sense of how much of a perpetual motion machine this thing was, they were killing off major lore figures left and right. BC saw Kael'thas, Vashj, and Illidan all die (Kael'thas briefly got better, Illidan did much later on.) Wrath had us tear through Malygos, Yogg-Saron, Kel'thuzad (a second time - and we didn't find his phylactery that time,) Anub'arak and Arthas himself.
Obviously, enemy recycling was not a totally new practice, but Cataclysm in particular made two of its five raids sort of sequels to Vanilla raids with the same final boss. Nefarian was resurrected (and he brought back his sister Onyxia!) and Ragnaros came back as well. But even Cataclysm was burning through established lore figures. Ragnaros met his final end (until they say it wasn't final) and we also saw Cho'gall and Deathwing killed.
Mists of Pandaria really broadened the lore, giving us new figures like Lei Shen and the Sha. And they even saved its final boss to appear in the next expansion. But Warlords and Legion both did a bit of "boss recycling," or if not boss recycling, then at least villain recycling, having us face off against Gul'dan's alternate universe doppelganger and fighting Kil'jaeden once again (to be fair, they were pretty explicit about his surviving the Sunwell raid.)
The thing is, with all these villains coming back for us to fight them again (and given that we're going to the land of the dead in Shadowlands, don't be surprised if some major villains are familiar faces,) it has gotten to a point where we can't always trust whether something is dead or not.
And a ton of that confusion has surrounded the Old Gods.
For one thing, it seemed early on that if the Old Gods were killed, Azeroth would die - she couldn't take another wound like the one she suffered after the destruction of Y'shaarj. Thus, a lot of players have assumed that by defeating C'thun and Yogg-Saron, we weren't really killing them so much as injuring them. These things, after all, are meant to be utterly enormous - it's implied that Yogg-Saron's mass stretches underneath all of Northrend - and even if we fought the "head," their alien biology could easily suggest that there's plenty left to regenerate.
I do think there is a problem also in the way that players perceive themselves. There's a mentality that "if we were able to fight it, it can't have been all that powerful." The thing is, player characters in WoW have been essentially "tier 4" characters (this is a D&D term representing, for example, spellcasters having the most powerful spells in the game, and is generally when you start traveling between planes and fighting gods) since Burning Crusade. At some point, you just have to accept that we adventurers are utter badasses.
And yet, given how persistent the Old Gods have been in the background of Warcraft lore, it also feels weirdly anticlimactic for us to actually be done with them.
Theoretically, defeating N'zoth in Ny'alotha will mean that all the Old Gods on Azeroth are dead.
Why does that feel bad?
I think a big part of it is the build-up, but also the lack thereof. Let me explain:
N'zoth was first introduced conceptually to us in Cataclysm. He was mentioned in the Dragon Soul dungeon journal and some of the bosses mentioned him. C'thun and Yogg-Saron were both introduced in the same expansion where they died, while N'zoth is something they've been talking about for about a decade. Likewise Ny'alotha.
Despite being referred to as the "weakest" of the Old Gods, it's also implied that that referred strictly to his physical strength and the size of his armies. The implication is that N'zoth was always scheming, always actually controlling things behind the scenes, and was always willing to play low status with the other Old Gods in order to achieve his ends (he's very House Dimir, for you Ravnica fans.)
And that means that N'zoth is the Old God that seems to have the most personality. Frankly, in the Azshara Warbringers short, I've also thought that N'zoth's slick "I like deals" voice (which is closer to voice actor Darrin DePaul's real voice) is his true one. (Actually, in general I dislike how they made Yogg-Saron's voice into a generic screaming monster. C'thun's super-creepy whispers feel way more appropriate for an eldritch abomination.)
It is tough, to be fair, to do a big build up to a character whose whole deal is manipulating things behind the scenes. The whole point, after all, is for you not to realize that he's been behind things.
The problem, though is that now N'zoth feels as if he's kind of tacked on to this expansion. And that feels like a wasted opportunity given how interesting a villain he should be.
Here's the thing: BFA's story is a bifurcated mess. I know it's always a danger to suggest that you, an audience member, know how a plot should have been written, but let me pitch you an alternative:
N'zoth should have been the one behind this war. He should have been the one manipulating it behind the scenes. He should have corrupted people in the inner circles of the Alliance and Horde to drive the war forward. We should have spent much of the war campaign discovering the plotting behind the scenes like some kind of conspiracy thriller, and at the end of 8.2, we should have come to the shocking realization that this war has all been serving N'zoth's purposes - maybe mining all that Azerite (and destroying it, given how we seem to be making explosives out of the stuff) has weakened the World Soul's defenses enough that N'zoth is finally able to make his final push to corrupt her.
And that would create great urgency for the final raid, in which we race to kill N'zoth before he can fulfill his ancient mission.
And given that it's N'zoth, he might have some contingency plan in place (to be fair, that could still be true.)
We know almost nothing about the Jailor in the Shadowlands, but it feels as if he's actually doing the sort of things that I'd have expected N'zoth to do. I'm super excited to go to death world and everything, but it does feel as if N'zoth is getting short shrift, even if he's the first Old God to be the final boss of an expansion.
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