Speculating on the State of Northrend in Last Titan

 Blizzard is doing something a little on the risky side by having back-to-back expansions exploring existing, established parts of the world. Truly, there's no direct precedence here, though Warlords of Draenor (hardly a model for expansions that Blizzard would want to follow) did give us the alternate timeline/past version of many places we visited in Burning Crusade.

While Draenor was an alternate timeline, we can probably assume that this is what Outland looked like prior to the degradation of the planet at the hands of Fel magic and eventually its shattering from Ner'zhul's overzealous portal creation.

Midnight took advantage of the fact that Quel'thalas, then Eversong Woods, the Ghostlands, and The Isle of Quel'danas, were stowed away in a separate instance than the rest of the Eastern Kingdoms to simply place the modern, updated one into an updated Eastern Kingdoms map (allowing access to the old one via portals).

All in all, while Quel'thalas did exist in Burning Crusade, only three of its zones were directly translated into the Midnight versions, merging Eversong and Ghostlands thanks to the healing that has occurred (beyond the Ruins of Deatholme, the actual border between the two BC zones is far from obvious in the updated version). While the raid, later converted into a dungeon during Cataclysm, was called Zul'Aman, that has been kind of retconned into saying that what we were fighting through was actually Atal'Aman, the temple city at the center of the zone, which has been pretty faithfully recreated as part of that zone, but with the rest expanded out to give us a more conventionally sized WoW zone that was always implied to be there.

Midnight then has places like Harandar, Voidstorm, and the Coiled Isle, all of which are pretty much new to the lore of the game (while it was established that Mythrax was buried somewhere in Zul'Aman, I had previously assumed it was under Atal'Aman).

We don't really know precisely how The Last Titan will approach a return to Northrend. Unlike Quel'thalas, which was just a pair of starting zones for Blood Elf characters and then, at the end of the expansion, the setting for the final raid (I don't think Warcraft III ever implied that the Sunwell was on an island north of the capital,) Northrend was a full continent that we really spent basically all of Wrath on (if memory serves, the only things Wrath brought to the old world were Stormwind Harbor and the eastern coast of the Eastern Plaguelands, to serve as the area for the Death Knight starting experience).

When first announced way back in like 2023, back when the World Soul Saga was first revealed, there was mention of the expansion being centered around Ulduar.

Now, Midnight has done something interesting by not actually giving us a new "continent" but instead just expanding one of WoW's original continents (and then also adding two zones that are disconnected from any continent, which I'm assuming will also be the case for 12.2's zone). It's funny, actually, that at this point I think the subcontinent of Lordaeron is larger than the southern part of the Eastern Kingdoms (the Khaz Modan/Stormwind/Zul'Gurub part of it).

Thus, before we even get started: are we sure that Last Titan will even use all of Northrend?

I think it would be a little awkward not to: Quel'thalas was partitioned off from the rest of the Eastern Kingdoms (I think it was technically on the Outland map, along with Azuermyst and Bloodmyst Isles). But if Last Titan were to only, say, update Storm Peaks, Crystalsong, Dragonblight, and Icecrown, it would be unclear how that should work: shouldn't the 2008 version of Northrend just be left in one intact piece and the Last Titan version stand on its own as something totally new?

Now, Northrend was the setting for WoW's second expansion, and as the years have gone on, Blizzard has tended toward somewhat different standards for an expansion's zones. Northrend has ten zones (eleven if you count the tiny Hrothgar's Landing off the coast of Icecrown). Now sure, Crystalsong had very little actually in it (a few quests that were part of the Icecrown quest chains, but mostly just Dalaran floating above it) and Wintergrasp was a novel experiment in world PvP, which they kept tinkering with with Tol Barad and Ashran, though they seem to have kind of given up on such projects.

Still, even if we cut out those two, there were eight zones with pretty fully-fleshed out questing experiences.

In contrast, recent expansions tend to launch with four zones that you'll level up in. Other zones will be added, but these come in major patches - again, apart from Hrothgar's Landing (a tiny island with I think just like one Vrykul you had to kill for an Argent Tournament daily quest), Wrath never added any zones over its patches. The game was far less focused on outdoor content - while the Argent Tournament added a lot of daily quests in both 3.1 and 3.2 (I think in 3.0 it was just an open bit of snowy tundra, but they were starting to build it when Ulduar came out) there wasn't really any outdoor content added to the game outside of it, with the focus being far more on running dungeons and raids.

The formula today is generally that you get a reputation faction (or rather, a Renown faction) in each of the major zones, and the zones then scale up with you to the level cap, with max-level content there, and sometimes some additional repeatable stuff like the Void Incursions.

Basically, in the old days, a zone like Grizzly Hills was truly "used up" after you hit a certain level, and you wouldn't go back there unless you wanted to farm materials for crafting or if you were heading into a dungeon nearby (like Drak'tharon Keep).

Today, the emphasis is on bigger zones that you have lots of reason to return to over the course of the expansion.

Ok, so, what would a 2027 version of Northrend look like?

Well, I think if we're using the whole continent, even if modern zones are bigger, it's still probably a larger area than we tend to get in an expansion, at least at launch. Admittedly, my memory of is size is based on the old version of flying mounts, which were far slower than the post-Dragonflight skyriding system. (Also the improvements to draw distance do shrink distances - I remember being stunned at the fact that I could see Dalaran while I was down in Azsuna.)

But might we see zone consolidation, like how Eversong Woods absorbed the Ghostlands in Midnight?

I think that's likely to happen given the structure of modern WoW. But how do you justify it? The only zones I could really imagine merging from Wrath would be perhaps dividing Grizzly Hills and distributing part of it to Zul'Drak and part of it to Howling Fjord.

However, perhaps the teaser we got at Blizzcon hints at ways in which the continent might be changed far more than a simple graphical upgrade. That Titan construct, towering over Dragonblight and making both Wyrmrest Temple and Icecrown Citadel look tiny in comparison, would almost inevitably destroy much of what it walked through.

Thus, I could really imagine some massive destruction re-shaping the face of Northrend. Being just south of the Storm Peaks probably doesn't bode well for Zul'Drak (nor does the fact that we've already gotten a fair amount of Troll content in Midnight - though that doesn't guarantee that they'll skip out on it in Last Titan). The Drakkari Empire was in a pretty rotten state during Wrath, of course, and while they did have some representation in Zandalar, I could imagine things falling apart in Zul'Drak even before whatever wrathful Titan stuff is going on.

Now, I think one thing that will be interesting about our return to Northrend is that, while Icecrown Citadel loomed over Wrath of the Lich King as the very obvious final raid and headquarters of the expansions main villain (part of what made ICC and the fight with Arthas so memorable was that it was clear from the word go that everything was building to it throughout the expansion,) it's likely that the Scourge will be a secondary issue in the Last Titan. Might the Titans even go so far as to wreck Icecrown?

After all, the black ramparts of Icecrown were forged from Saronite, a pretty clearly non-Titan-approved building material (while they never really explicitly got into this, it seemed obliquely implied that the undead were immune to the maddening whispers of the Old Gods, which is potentially a really cool bit of cosmic rock-paper-scissors if they ever wanted to expand upon that).

I love the Scourge, but post-Arthas, and especially post-Shadowlands, it just doesn't seem like they can really be justified as a major threat in Azeroth anymore. While I'd frankly be offended if we didn't get any undead threats in Last Titan, I do think that it's highly likely that our main focus will be on the Titans and their constructs. Much as Ulduar was the mid-patch side story in Wrath, I expect that the Scourge/Icecrown/the Undead will at best be the mid-patch side story for Last Titan.

And if we've got Titan constructs rampaging across the continent with what I'm sure is a directive to "re-establish order" there, that gives them license to change a lot of things.

So, wild speculation time: let's go zone-by-zone.

    Howling Fjord:

This was where we were first introduced to the Vrykul, which turned out to be pretty important as both the ancestors of humanity (and thus four of WoW's playable races) and also seemingly among the most common and widespread Titanforged races.

But the Vrykul of Howling Fjord are distinctly post-Curse-of-Flesh versions. They had also been in stasis for countless ages prior to the Scourge waking them up, so what do they look like A: after Ymiron died and B: potentially reconnected with other Vrukul cultures, such as the Stormheim Vrykul? (Also, can we confirm that the Drust were another group of Vrykul, and that the reason Kul Tirans are so burly is that they have far more recent Vrykul ancestry?)

    Borean Tundra:

This zone had something of a less focused theme. The Coldarra is probably a more friendly place with Kalecgos in charge of the Blue Flight (also, it was something of a surprise that Malygos turned out to be a villain in Wrath, as he had previously been seen as a largely benevolent figure). Weirdly, the pretty huge notion of the Curse of Flesh was first introduced in just one of the major quest lines here.

    Dragonblight:

I really think of this zone as being the heart of Northrend, and given its importance to dragons, it's a place we've revisited periodically, as swiftly as the Dragon Soul raid in Cataclysm, but also Wyrmrest Temple shares a fair bit of vibes with Valdrakken, and a newly-reunited draconic regime that is notably no longer loyal to the Titans feels like it could be a pretty major factor here. Add to that the likelihood that Iridikron is a major player in the Last Titan and even the fact that Vyranoth is the ice-based Primal Incarnate and you've got a lot of stuff to work with.

Also, how cool would it be if Naxxramas were crashed into the ground there after our victory against Kel'Thuzad back in the day?

    Grizzly Hills:

Among the most beloved WoW zones, I think in large part due to the memorable fiddle music. I think that this zone is really what they were trying to recapture with the Azure Span in Dragonflight. The odd thing is that there... wasn't actually much that went on here. There were some quests involving the Worgen, back when Worgen were universally hostile monsters (I have a screenshot of an NPC who reveals the fact that the villagers are secretly lycanthropes demanding to know if my Worgen Warrior was bitten. I mean, duh, right? Back in Gilneas City). The fallen, failed World Tree of Vordrassil is here, and I believe is the tree that allowed the Old Gods to infect the Emerald Dream with the Nightmare, though that plot seems pretty much resolved, so I'm not sure what you do with it.

    Zul'Drak:

As mentioned above, the Drakkari Trolls were in a rough spot. Not only were the lower parts of the zone taken by the Scourge, but the Trolls themselves had sacrificed their own Loa to gain power to fend off the Scourge.

If this place isn't in ruins, I think you have the potential to explore a civilization that has basically collapsed. The danger is that it might tread similar ground to what we got in Zul'Aman. Notably, back in Burning Crusade, it wasn't clear that the Amani had done anything out of step with their Loas' wishes (the bosses in that before Malacrass and Zul'jin were simply called "Nalorakk" and "Jan'Alai," etc., though later we discovered these were really troll priests who had stolen their Loas' essence).

    Sholazar Basin:

The weird outlier zone, which I think was there in part just to give us a break from all the cold and ice. Not a ton actually happened here, though it's also deeply tied to the Titans and their experiments on Azeroth (more evidently Titanic in nature than its counterpart of Un'Goro Crater in Kalimdor).

Given that we now know that Life is a separate cosmic force from the Titans' Order, might we see some tension between the Titans and their attitudes, as hinted at in lore books we got in Dragonflight?

    Crystalsong Forest:

A bizarre, small zone that I think mainly existed to have not a ton of stuff going on underneath Dalaran. Well, Dalaran sure isn't showing up in Northrend again, so what they actually do with this is up in the air. Night Elf ruins are not quite as prominent in Northrend as they are in other parts of the world, but we have a bit of those here.

    Wintergrasp:

Does Blizzard want to actually re-create the game's first dedicated PvP zone as a PvP zone? The place is also a Titan facility, so outside of that specific gameplay purpose, it could have other functions. Fun fact, Vault of Archavon was where Wrath's equivalent of World Bosses was, which they tied to PvP for some bizarre reason, doing so again in Cataclysm with Tol Barad. Mists of Pandaria brought World Bosses back into the world, but way, way later in 12.1, we got Lairs, which seem to be once again throwing world bosses into instances. They probably want to vary it up, but I wouldn't be shocked to see the Vault of Archavon function as the Lair for the 13.0 world boss.

    Storm Peaks:

Well, surely this is going to be the center of it all, right? With Ulduar as well as tons of other Titan facilities, this is going to be a very important location for the expansion, and I'd be shocked if the expansion's first raid weren't here (this is another example of how expansion design has shifted: back in the early days, you wouldn't expect to go into the big, scary, central-to-the-expansion's vibes structure until the end of the expansion, primarily with Black Temple and Icecrown Citadel. Catalcysm shifted things, with Bastion of Twilight being among the first raids, and since then, final raids have always shown up in new zones or repurposed old ones).

    Icecrown:

Again, given the shift in emphasis, we're going to likely see Icecrown playing second-fiddle to Storm Peaks in contrast to how it was in Wrath. But this is still a storied location, home to some of the most beloved stories out of WoW (and also some controversial ones, like the entrance to the Shadowlands).

I was actually really excited when, at the end of Sepulcher of the First Ones, the Jailer activated the Soul Forges under ICC, which were established in the 3.3 dungeons as part of the Lich King's vast array of sinister-looking tools, but whose purpose was ambiguous.

Again, I don't know how much they want to really build out of the lore of Shadowlands given how unpopular it was (I will say that I actually found a lot to like in Shadowlands, but I think it fell short of its potential, not helped by both Covid and the breaking news of all the horrible scandals at Blizzard that had come to light,) but as the place most closely tied to another major cosmic force that contrasts with Order, I could imagine the Titans being none-too-pleased about this frozen land of the undead being so close to their central command station on Azeroth.

Even if the Last Titan doesn't focus on the Scourge or undead in general as much as Wrath did, I think it would be insane for us to come to Northrend and not at least touch on it. Icecrown is both less important with the end of the Lich King (not Bolvar individually, but the Helm of Domination) but also more important given its connection to the Shadowlands.

What the zone actually looks like? That I'm not sure about. All those Saronite ramparts would presumably be very difficult to actually destroy or dismantle, and there's a part of me that wonders if the resilience of the architecture there might actually wind up being an important asset in fending off the zealous Titanic enforcers.

Arthas is deader than dead, but the Scourge as a thing is notably still around, just leaderless and disorganized. Nowhere more appropriate to explore what that means than Icecrown.

    Anyway, we're still surely many months away from learning about the Last Titan's features and general scope.

I will say that while I did technically start playing in Vanilla, and I was there for all of Burning Crusade, Wrath was the expansion that I first felt that I really experienced nearly in its entirety at the time. We didn't actually get the Lich King down, but this was the expansion in which I first found a guild that did regular raiding, and I felt like I was truly getting all I could out of the game.

So I am full of Northrend nostalgia. Curious to see what they do with it.

Is The Last Titan Finally Time for Tinkers?

 WoW has had a pretty big influence on my taste in fantasy. Before I played WoW, I had no particular affinity for dark and gothic fantasy and the use of undead as monsters to fight, but I found myself so enamored with the Scourge and the Plaguelands as a setting (and the playable Undead) that it's now become pretty core to a lot of what I do in fantasy, like how I tend to use a lot of undead monsters in my D&D games (especially when a campaign is starting off).

But in a similar way, I don't know that I was all that into the idea of anachronistically advanced technology in an otherwise classic medieval fantasy world, but boy did WoW instill that in me.

WoW's approach to technology has never been realistic. In the real world, technology has generally gotten more powerful and more efficient over time. While it's debatable how much life has actually gotten better with technological progress (though I think we sometimes forget how miserable life was prior to innovations in agriculture and medicine) it's pretty clear that in a military sense (it is Warcraft after all) that a modern military unit with attack drones, automatic weapons, and guided missiles would fare quite well against a medieval unit of a bunch of peasants with (generously) pikes supported by longbowmen and armored knights.

But in World of Warcraft, we have people like the Draenei, with futuristic crystal technology like something out of a far-future sci-fi story, compared with the Tauren, who have stone-age (and I don't mean this in the pejorative way, but in the sense that much of their stuff is made of stone) tools, but it's all actually balanced out because of, well, the way that game balance works.

There is a conceit here in fantasy that you don't get with sci-fi, which is that the more "primitive" technology might be imbued with powerful magic. In a sense, magic can be a kind of alternative path or, depending on your perspective, just a different avenue of technological development.

The point, though, is that Warcraft as a franchise has never shied away from having modern and futuristic technology.

In Dungeons & Dragons, some were a little put off by the introduction of the Artificer class, fearing that it was injecting a steampunk aesthetic into a game that they preferred stick to the pre-industrial style of fantasy. I think there were some mitigating factors, though. First off, the class was initially introduced for the Eberron setting, which is explicitly meant to feel like 1930s pulp adventure stories, with a city full of skyscrapers, airships, and lightning rail trains, along with a playable species that are basically robots (though I'd argue, especially given the runes they each have on their foreheads, that they are more accurately sentient golems). On top of that, there are subclasses for the Artificer, like the Alchemist, that live very comfortably in a pure medieval world.

But I don't think you would have any trouble with an equivalent class in World of Warcraft, given the wide breadth of technology levels that we already have well-represented in-game. The Engineering profession has, since vanilla, always injected that Steampunk/Gearpunk look and feel into the game.

That profession does kind of inhabit similar spaces to where I'd expect a Tinker class to live, but such overlap is not a dealbreaker - I have a Blood Elf Shadow Priest I created right when Burning Crusade came out, and the introduction of the Void Elves does raise some interesting questions about what that actually means for him as a character (why is he tolerated in Silvermoon while his Ren'dorei cousins aren't? Though to be fair, he does get hostile comments from passers-by in Midnight-era Silvermoon).

I don't think there's quite the precedence we had for Death Knights and Demon Hunters in terms of the Tinker as a new class. Many WoW classes were built on the conceptual bones of Warcraft III heroes, with Arthas serving as the model for both the Paladin and Death Knight (his abilities being much more mirrored than the two classes are in 2026) and Illidan as the Demon Hunter. Chen Stormstout, who appeared in the Founding of Durotar campaign, which focused more on the RPG elements present in the game, gave us the Brewmaster, which would be expanded out into the Monk class (itself a fairly common RPG class archetype, though I think WoW's version is far more mystical/magical than they tend to be).

Lore-wise, there is a role of High Tinker as the elected leader of the Gnomes of Gnomeregan (though boy, how long has Gelbin's incumbency lasted? How long are the terms?) but there's no formal suite of abilities I think we could draw from as the starting point for the class.

The Evoker, however, was pretty much unprecedented in the lore. Warcraft III came out 24 years ago, so I don't think that WoW needs to remain beholden to it (and it certainly hasn't been that way - though I do find it interesting that the new WCIII campaign chapter apparently establishes Forsaken Paladins. If only I could get my old copy to install!) Basically, behind the Deep Breath ability, I don't think anything that the Evoker casts had any direct precedence other than the obvious presence of dragons across WoW's history.

In a similar way, I don't think this would be much of a problem for the Tinker as a class.

So, let's ask a couple questions: First, why now? Second, if we do get them, what kind of class might they be?

As to the "why now," the main thing I have to say is: giant robots. We got a tiny teaser for Last Titan, where a truly staggeringly enormous mech (bigger than Dimensius, possibly?) towers over Dragonblight. There is some speculation that this mech is Ulduar, animating like a transformer, though I don't know how compelling the arguments for that are.

The Last Titan is likely to feature the Titans and their creations quite heavily, and Titan stuff has always been technologically-themed, with the Titanforged creations acting as automatons, the creeping corruption of the Old Gods' Curse of Flesh being the only thing that would lead to fully sentient Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, and such.

Titan technology is thus probably the most advanced technology that we've ever seen in the WoW universe (other than possibly the First Ones, though I don't know to what extent Blizzard is going to lean so much into the presence of the First Ones as they kind of feel like they're just the Titans, but... um... older, and they made the Titans, right? Feels a bit like lore one-upsmanship at the cost of narrative cohesion, even if I thought the aesthetic of Zereth Mortis was freaking incredible).

And so, it would make sense to have a class that really focuses on technology coming into the spotlight.

But what kind of class would it be?

Well, let's start with the basics at the beginning:

I think that in an ideal world, the Tinker would, like the Monk, be a "regular" class, rather than a Hero class that starts at higher levels. Granted, these days, Death Knights, Demon Hunters, and Evokers start at level 10, just a small boost compared to other characters, but the appeal for each was that you could get one started and immediately jump into the current content.

Frankly, I don't know that the leveling game is all that great right now - one of the problems is that you level up faster than your quests give you appropriate gear, and with level scaling, this winds up making you feel less powerful (it's still better than the pre-level-squish days when you'd level up without getting any sort of talent point or new ability and truly be worse off in every way when you hit a new level).

Notably, when introduced, Death Knights started at level 55 when the level cap had just raised to 80, so you were still expected to level up through Outland before heading to Northrend, where established characters could go at midnight right when the expansion came out (I think I actually hopped in to start my DK at the time. This was also when you had to go to the store at midnight to pick up the game with its discs to install it, which did sort of stagger when people were logging in. I think the first expansion I got purely digitally was Warlords of Draenor, which had an infamously rough launch).

Monks were the only class added to the game that started at level 1, and when you were going around Pandaria in the first few weeks of Mists, it was very funny to just not see anyone playing the new class because, well, they hadn't gotten to a high enough level to start yet! The first time I saw a Monk in one of my dungeon groups, like a week and a half in, I was astonished that they had leveled so quickly (this was also when leveling was a slower process).

Should the Tinker be released, I think it would make sense for it to be a "normal" class, but I think the appeal of getting them into the mix from the get-go might compel Blizzard to have them start off at a higher level, at least during The Last Titan. But that would also meant they probably need a unique starting experience.

That's actually probably fine. While "allied races" get a brief intro, it's not a fully starting zone or anything, and so the last time we truly got a fully-fledged starting zone for a new race was... The Pandaren on the Wandering Isle, 14 years ago. Now, I love the Worgen starting zone (can you guess what class I'd think of making a Tinker? In fairness, the last three times they released a new class, I had hoped to make a Worgen character, only to find out that they were not allowed. Worgen Monks are a thing now, but they weren't available during Mists, so my Monk is a Pandaren like I assume 90% of them are,) but it's not exactly "current" content up to all the modern standards.

Still, more like the Monk than WoW's three hero classes, Tinkers feel like they would be something that's just a learned discipline rather than some intrinsic alteration to one's physiology, which means in my mind that you could easily make them available to every playable race, and we probably don't need special cosmetic customizations and unique voice lines the way that Demon Hunters do (though note that Void Elf demon hunters use standard Void Elf voices).

In other words, I think the class can sit upon the existing races without much issue.

But what would the class actually... play like? What roles might it perform in a group?

I think that the safest bet is to just let it do all three: Tank, Damage, and Heal. I think each of these can easily be justified by the use of technology that is specialized for that role.

Then, the next question is armor type. This is, I guess, less of an issue in today's WoW where so much loot is just personal and you get all your relevant stats on any armor, but it can be a matter of aesthetics.

I think that, no matter what, they've got to have one of the heavier kinds of armor. Mail or Plate could both work. They should be wearing some kind of metallic armor. Between the two, I'd lean in more for Plate, but it does create some (admittedly easily-solved) issues based on where I go with this.

Plate armor, I think, works for the Tinker because of how you could imagine a Tinker building out their armor like a hull. There's precedence with Tanks, as all plate-wearing classes can perform the Tank role, and precedence for healers wearing Plate thanks to Paladins.

Now, I'd like Tinkers to all use Intellect as their primary stat, but for Tanks, it would make more sense to go with Strength given that tank trinkets tend to have Strength and Agility on them. That's fine - these stats are nearly indistinguishable in modern WoW, as you get equal numbers of any piece of gear you're likely to actually use.

Here, though, is where my vision for the class makes itemization slightly awkward:

I think their DPS spec should be ranged, and use ranged weapons.

Back when we had a ranged weapon slot, Warriors and Rogues would wield bows, crossbows, and guns, even if they only used them as "stat sticks." But since the removal of said slot (I want to say in Mists? Monks never had a relic for that slot, did they?) these three weapon categories have been used by only a single class, and after Legion redefined Survival as a strictly melee spec, only two specs actually use these three kinds of weapons. The Demon Hunter-exclusive Warglaive weapon, thus, ironically, with the addition of the Devourer spec, is now used by more specs than these three weapon types that were once used by nine different specs.

I think Tinkers should use ranged weapons.

But that does, admittedly, create some itemization issues. If it's a Plate class, Tinkers would be using Intellect or Strength as their primary stat, and ranged weapons only have agility on them.

Now, one solution is profoundly simple: just add stats. They did this with Warglaives in Midnight, adding Intellect on top of Agility so that any Demon Hunter can use any Warglaive and have it function for their spec. Perhaps we could then add Strength or Intellect to ranged weapons as well.

We've put the cart before the horse a little, though, so let me back up:

Currently, every Tank class has a melee dps spec. It makes sense, as if you're a class that can fight in melee, it seems reasonable that you could focus those skills on survival or on damage output.

But I do think that the Tinker ought to be able to use guns (and by extension, bows and crossbows). In part, this is because the Engineering profession has always been the one that is used to make guns. But I also think that a weapon like that is, you know, a bit of advanced technology.

Also, from Vanilla up through Shadowlands, WoW had not added a single ranged dps spec to the game (even removing one by making Survival a melee spec in Legion). Since then, we have gotten three new ones with Devastation, Augmentation, and Devourer. Weirdly, all three of these have been "short range" ranged specs, so you could argue that we still haven't seen a single "full range" ranged spec added to the game in its 22 years.

Now, it would probably be simpler to just make a ranged Tinker DPS spec function as a spellcaster - you already have Intellect on Plate. But I really feel that making the class more generally weapon-based would be a better choice - a weapon, after all, is a type of tool.

The other alternative is to just make the class a Mail one - Agility could work for ranged weapons, and half of the existing tank classes use Agility anyway. Bizarrely, despite Mail actually giving more armor than Leather, we don't actually have any Mail tanks (though there's an evergreen rumor that Shaman tanks are right around the corner, which has been circulating for about 22 years). Itemization works out fine here, as tanks and dps would use agility trinkets while healers would use intellect.

I think this could work, but I do feel like the aesthetic of Plate makes more sense to me.

Next, another thing:

Let Tinkers use Shields.

It's kind of absurd that only three classes in WoW can use Shields, and one of them can't even tank! The fact that 4/6 tanks don't use shields is kind of crazy. I get why Death Knights went without them (though funnily enough, the D&D Death Knight monster stat block does use a shield) and it wouldn't really make sense for Monks or Demon Hunters. I'm not sure it really makes sense for Shamans, except that back in Vanilla when Paladins and Shamans were faction-exclusive, you had to have someone on the Horde who could make use of all the Intellect Shields.

But I think Shields make a lot of sense for Tinkers, and we even have a fair amount of precedence with various mech suits and such using shields.

Mechanically, I think Tinkers could just use Mana, though this resource has basically ceased to have any real meaning for specs that aren't Healers or Arcane Mages (and I think even for them, managing mana has gotten less central). I think instead I'd prefer some form of unique, original resource like Power.

This could act as a secondary resource like Essence does for Evokers or Runes for Death Knights (well, I'd argue that Runes are the primary resource and Runic Power is secondary, but whatever).

I don't really want to get into the weeds on this, though. Broadly speaking, I think tanks would probably have bursts of electricity and fire (maybe some arcane damage to distinguish it a bit from Shamans) and use force fields as damage absorption shields. Ranged dps would distinguish themselves from Hunters by focusing on charging their shots with various energies and possibly throwing bombs and missiles (I realize there's a bit of an overlap here with Survival Hunters). Healers, I figure, would channel healing energy into allies, maybe shielding them and possibly tossing down helpful pylons (though I get that the latter concept is a bit Shaman-like).

Aesthetically, here's what I'd want to avoid:

The Dracthyr problem.

I think part of why the Dracthyr are (I take it) unpopular is that you don't actually get to see your freaking gear on them when they're in their draconic true form. So much of the fun of a WoW character is building the perfect aesthetic for them, and while the Dracthyr customization options are broad and deep, they still pale in comparison with the sheer breadth of transmog options that any other WoW character can get their hands on.

Truly, I try to fill out the full tier sets for each class each season (ideally grabbing Heroic pieces in each slot and upgrading them to 6/6 to get the Mythic looks) but with Evokers I don't think I've ever actually done so because... well, why bother?

This is, admittedly, something of a problem for Druids, and while I love the spooky Wicker Man vibes of my Kul Tiran Druid (the only BFA Allied race who took over as a class main and had me putting my 2006 vintage Night Elf Druid in mothballs) I'm less motivated to grab all those transmog appearances given that when he's in combat, he always looks the same.

I do want Tinkers to have a signature, unusual look, but I don't want that to get in the way of letting their actual chosen gear appearances showing up.

Now, I don't think that's going to be much of a problem: the problem for Evokers is really more a problem of Dracthyr, and if this is available to every race, then I think we'll be fine.

But, that being said, I think we could do some fun things:

I think the tank spec should be in some kind of mech suit. The key is to make the suit unobtrusive enough that you can still show off your cool transmog. In fairness, maybe the solution is simply to have Tinker tier sets give off something of a mech suit vibe. Spells/abilities that manifest as big mechanical arms or antennae or the like might be enough to give off this feel.

Blizzard has gotten more creative with how class abilities manifest themselves, so maybe we can evoke the idea of being in a mech suit without messing too much with the overall silhouette of our character.

    So, as a big caveat: there's zero direct evidence that we're getting a Tinker class. It'll be probably a ways into 2027 before we get firm details on the actual expansion features of The Last Titan, and much as we never got Necromancers in Shadowlands, there's every possibility that the announcement will come and go with no new class announcement (though I think if not, there's a decent possibility we'll see new specs added, like the aforementioned Shaman tank).

I would very much like to get a Tinker like what I've described, but this is all just rampant speculation for now.

Faction Division and World of Warcraft D&D

 I've been following the WotC-produced "Dungeon Masters" series, which does short (like, less than ten episodes a pop) campaigns with a consistent group of players (including a couple of Baldur's Gate 3 cast members and also someone who is a friend of a friend), basically acting as promotion for the latest D&D book, with a series based in Ravenloft, then one themed around the arcane magic of Arcana Unleashed, and coming up, an Azeroth-based World of Warcraft adventure.

Now, WoW is a game that was built at least initially around a factional divide: the Alliance versus the Horde. While the world of Azeroth is threatened by villains that both Horde and Alliance are equally investing in stopping, the bad blood between these two groups created a perpetual engine of conflict, driving some of the drama and even taking center-stage with the Battle for Azeroth expansion (though that expansion was sort of half-invested in this divide and half in the machinations of the Old God N'zoth).

Starting with 2022's Dragonflight, the barriers between the factions have been loosened and made more permeable, with the resolution of 2018's Battle for Azeroth seeming to establish an enduring peace between the two sides (such that in the current expansion, Midnight, the central capital city is Silvermoon, which is the historical capital of the Blood Elves, a member race/nation of the Horde. The fact that there are still Alliance-aligned High Elves and Void Elves who are essentially the same people as the Blood Elves except for different politics and perhaps a bit of an infusion of different kinds of magic into their physiologies both stirs tension but also gives the Alliance a slightly more reasonable foothold to justify their presence here - something that the Blood Elf NPCs of Silvermoon have very conflicted feelings about).

Generally speaking, I'm a strong advocate of letting players play what they want to play. But I do think it's an interesting and worthwhile session zero discussion to have if you're going to play a Warcraft D&D campaign as to whether you want to make a party that is firmly affiliated with just one faction.

While there are some exceptions - the Pandaren, Dracthyr, Earthen, and Haranir - generally the race (or species, to use D&D's newly preferred term) determines your affiliation. When WoW first came out, the Alliance was Humans, Dwarves, Gnomes, and Night Elves, while the Horde was Orcs, Trolls, Tauren, and Undead (presented in the book as Forsaken, which is the term they use to distinguish themselves from mindless servants of the Lich King in the Scourge).

The first two games only had the Alliance and Horde as factions (actually, in the first game it was more accurately just Humans versus Orcs. While the Orcs had formed their Horde, the kingdom of Stormwind stood alone against them, with the Alliance not actually forming until the Second War, aka the second game). Thus, all conflict in those first two games was primarily through the clashing of these two factions (though I think there were opportunities to have Alliance vs. Alliance and Horde vs. Horde thanks to the traitorous human kingdom Alterac, secretly taken over by the black dragon Deathwing, and I believe the divide between the demon-worshipping forces loyal to Gul'dan in the Horde versus the more independence-minded faction under Warchief Orgrim Doomhammer).

While most of the world has always been available to both sides, there have always been territories where one side is welcome and the other is not, especially the major cities, where powerful elite NPCs are there to protect it, and player characters get flagged as valid targets for PvP even if you're on a non-PvP server (or, in more recent years, simply not in "war mode.")

Again, even though both factions are generally heroic (though I do feel that the Horde seems to slip into villainy a little easier) through much of the game's history, there has been a simmering hostility when there isn't outright warfare breaking out between them.

In a lot of ways, though, I think that the exciting possibility of a WoW D&D campaign would be to be able to do the things you can't usually do in WoW. That could as simple as having an Orc Druid (which is honestly probably the best way to realize the more spellcasting-focused Shaman specializations) but it could also mean having the party need to advocate for allowing their Forsaken party member to be allowed to enter Stormwind without being immediately cut down.

The faction conflict could be an interesting source of drama and tension within a party - rather than just assuming a total incompatibility, perhaps lean into the idea that we do, in fact, need to band together to face graver threats.

To be clear, NPCs have often and frequently reached across the factional divide. In Cataclysm, we were introduced to a pair of young paladins, Tarenar Sunstrike and Gidwin Goldbraids, a Blood Elf and Dwarf, who traveled the Plaguelands hoping to join the Argent Crusade (a faction-neutral force dedicated to protecting the world from the Scourge). Or we have Tehd and Marius, a Forsaken Warlock and Night Elf Demon Hunter who go around looking for powerful demons to slay.

The freedom, I think, of running a WoW-based D&D game is that you can really mix things up. Sentinel Hill is the central "town" of the rural realm of Westfall, basically the Kansas of the kingdom of Stormwind, and is basically the second zone that human players are expected to go in the natural quest flow from the human starting area - back in the day, you'd head there around level 10 (remember that WoW originally had a max level of 60, so 10 was really just getting started - I'd say it's basically the equivalent of level 3 in D&D. You started to get talent points/pick your specialization at 10, much as in D&D you get your subclass at level 3). 

But there's nothing saying you can't have an adventure set in Westfall that is far higher-stakes than anything that we've seen in the zone before (ok, to be fair, during the Legion pre-launch event in 2016, there was a full-scale demon invasion, a tier 4 challenge if ever I heard of one).

In other words, if your party is a mixed-faction group, that doesn't mean that firmly Alliance or Horde areas are necessarily going to be safe for everyone, and even if you've got some in-narrative explanation for why that Worgen is allowed to walk around Thunder Bluff without issue, it doesn't mean that hostile factions in your campaign's story aren't going to make these "safe" territories a bit dangerous.

While I don't know that it tells it with profound nuance (it does have its moments,) the overall "message" or "theme" of WoW is that these divides leave lasting scars, but at the end of the day, we're all just people, and when we can recognize that, we can work together toward a common goal (is that goal usually fighting some different "other?" For sure. It is Warcraft, after all).

But also, conflict is where we get drama, and while you want a party that can ultimately find a way to work together, I think having inherent resentments and grievances in a mixed-faction party could make for some really interesting roleplay.

Why Is Jesse MIA in Control Resonant?

 In Control, Jesse's primary motivation entering the Oldest House is simply to find her brother. Nearly two decades earlier, the FBC abducted Dylan in a misguided attempt to groom him as the next Director, seeing his paranatural abilities and figuring that if they controlled (it's kind of a theme word) everything about his upbringing that he'd wind up an ideal successor to Trench.

This backfired like crazy. Not only did a young Dylan kill numerous FBC personnel, but he wound up resenting the Bureau so much that he welcomed the Hiss when it began infecting everyone there.

Dylan's unique resilience to his Hiss infection is notable - he retains a sort of intelligence and intelligibility. Is this because of the lingering presence of Polaris? Is it because of his own paranatural powers? Is it because he didn't resist?

The point is, Control doesn't end with much of a victory for Jesse. The Hiss are still rampant in the Oldest House, the lockdown can't be lifted. The only real point she manages to score is that Dylans is... not infected by the Hiss anymore, but it's something of a Pyrrhic victory, as Dylan is comatose. Not exactly the reunion she was aiming for, and now she's trapped in the building, performing a leadership role for a Bureau that she only vaguely understood before that fateful night, that same Bureau that abused her brother for the better part of his life.

The FBC as an entity occupies a strange space in the world: Clearly, it has done some really morally wrong things. But there are factors that make us (or at least made me) view them in a more positive light: first, that there truly are threats that need to be handled, and the clandestine secrecy might actually have some justification given that the rules of the paranormal/supernatural (my guess is the insistent use of "paranatural," which is not a term I'd ever heard before playing the game or anywhere else since, is meant to blur the lines between the more sci-fi term of paranormal and the more fantasy term of supernatural) mean that people simply believing things can shape reality.

It's honestly one of the most potent concepts in speculative fiction: the whole scientific, empirical manner of viewing and studying the world rests on the assumption that our observations reflect a concrete, objective universe underlying everything that is consistent and exists completely independent of our perception of it. But the only evidence we have of that objective universe are our very flawed perceptions, and the more we learn about psychology, the more fallible our perceptions prove to be, which raises the question: can we be so certain that there is an objective reality, or is reality malleable and shaped by perception?

Beyond that, there's also an adventurous spirit amongst people at the FBC, especially as embodied by Casper Darling, which makes it very easy to forget that what he did to Dylan was unconscionable.

Jesse, after what you'd assume would be a horrible trauma of walking into an office right after the man inside shot himself, and then being compelled to pick up the gun and hold it to your head while you go through some bizarre psychic evaluation, arrives back in her own body and says she's actually happy she's there - she's excited to be initiated into this world of the Weird.

In other words, even if the FBC has played an antagonistic role toward her through much of her life, the world it opens up to her is something she deems worth it.

Generally, I think we're meant to think of Jesse as a good person. She wants to save as many lives as she can, and she hopes to reform the FBC with whatever power she gets from being the Director. But it's such a weird idea, to find this secret government agency and to be in charge of it ten minutes after walking in the door before meeting any employees other than the mysterious janitor.

I haven't played FBC Firebreak, but I'm given to understand that in the documents found in that game, Jesse is not terribly popular with the Oldest House staff. I mean, who would be happy with things when you're stuck inside an office building filled with deadly threats for a full seven years?

Control Resonant, we know, will be inverting the story a bit - instead of Jesse looking for Dylan, Dylan is looking for Jesse. And instead of entering into this strange world of the Oldest House, Dylans is emerging out into the wide world that has been denied to him for most of his life (if memory serves, Dylan was born in 1992, so he's 34, and has spent 24 of those years inside that freaking building).

We know that Jesse is the one who drives the Aberrant, which will be his weapon as the Service Weapon is for her, into Dylan's abdomen while he's lying in his coma, and at least the way the trailers are edited, this seems to be what wakes him up.

But... does that make sense? I don't know if the timeline actually adds up if that's the case.

Because the last time we saw Dylan was not 2019, but 2023, when Kieran Estevez was investigating the Lake House out near Bright Falls, and was transported via the Oceanview Motel into the Containment Sector of the Oldest House, where she found Dylan in a containment unit.

Now, it's possible this was some kind of mental construct: I doubt that Jesse would have allowed him to be kept in such a bare-bones glass case. But here I need to break through the fourth wall and say that it's also possible that Remedy just didn't want to built all the assets to give Dylan a nice and comfortable cell.

I do think, though, that there's strong evidence to support the idea that Dylan wakes up before 2026 - not only can Kieran talk with him in that meeting (and again, could be a mental construct, could also be a connection across temporal distances) but there are also drawings found in the Lake House evidently made by Dylan.

Hm. But how would they have those if they weren't from before the lockdown...?

Ok, maybe that's not a valid line of reasoning.

The point is, Jesse drives the Aberrant into Dylan while he seems to still be in his coma, and that seems to initiate his bonding with what we can probably assume is an Object of Power (it may have even been described as one officially - though the name certainly elicits some curiosity.

If Dylan just wakes up right when that happens, surely he might have a moment to speak with Jesse. Might she give him some hint as to where he's going?

In clips of the game we've seen in previews, Dylan does seem to be able to interact with Jesse in the mind-place like "Gap" (the stunning instant-shift to the Mind Place and the Writer's Room from Alan Wake II will evidently also be how we access the Gap in Resonant) but she also seems to doubt that it's actually him that she's interacting with.

Jesse is missing - that seems to be the headline. And with her gone, the FBC turns to Dylan as the other incredibly powerful Parautilitarian to try to deal with some of the threats out there.

But why does she leave?

Ok, to be fair, that's probably the driving mystery of the game.

I guess there's a question, though, of the timeline:

It sounds like there is some signal detected days before the Oldest House lockdown fails, which I think Emily Pope describes as some unprecedented resonance.

The catalyst or source of that resonance is probably related to the Blessed Organization (I don't know about you, but I always read Blessed as the two-syllable version, like a "Blessèd Day!" Do we get any audio of FBC people reading it out loud? Or did I just conclude that on my own?) We know from emails with Barry that Chester Bless said something about it being good that Barry had gotten out of New York - a decidedly ominous remark that Barry doesn't seem to find nearly as concerning as he probably should.

But will Blessed be our main antagonists in Resonant? Or are they just the ones who tip over the first domino?

Bless cheekily seemed to imply he had some connection to the Board - his motivational speaking tour employed what was probably an Altered Item that was a Surf Board, but given the power behind the FBC, and Bless's well-informed understanding of the Bureau's inner workings (enough to, for example, send a deadly altered item to the America Overnight studio, a show that was not publicly known to be an FBC project,) it seems pretty clear that he knows about the Board.

But here's the question: Is Bless and his organization opposed to the Board? Or are they actually working for the Board behind the scenes?

Control's Foundation DLC sees tensions begin to form between Jesse and the Board. They, bizarrely, limit the powers that they are willing to grant her while down there, despite the fact that she clearly needs both to fix the problem there. And the Board also seems to sabotage Marshall's HRA in retaliation for her destruction of the Nail, an act she does to prevent the Hiss from infecting it. While the ensuing problems from this action are, of course, also quite dangerous, it shows both a ruthlessness and an evident misaligned set of priorities between the human FBC and the inhuman Board.

I think it's very possible that Jesse's awareness of the danger that the Board poses to her and to the entire world grew over her seven years stuck in the Oldest House. And I think the most obvious reason for her to go MIA is because she knows that the Board is ready to get rid of her, no longer convinced that she can be useful to them anymore. Trench, it would seem, after his infection by the Hiss, had proven to no longer be a suitable choice for Director, and I believe it was the Board that forced to blow his brains out with the Service Weapon.

I think there's a good chance, then, that if they retain control of that OOP, Jesse might not be carrying it with her anymore, because the Board might no longer feel they can control (there's that word again) her as Director.

It would explain a couple things: first, why Dylan doesn't get the Service Weapon (while we see it as a gun throughout the first game, it is implied that it has taken on other forms, including possible Mjolnir and Excalibur, both of which are melee weapons that would suit Dylan's playstyle). But it would also explain why Jesse has to leave in a hurry without telling anyone where she's going or why.

Much as Dylan has even less reason to trust the FBC than Jesse did, it also stands to reason that as someone who is unlikely to romanticize the world of the Weird, having steeped in it for nearly a quarter-century, we might see the Board go from creepy but ostensible ally in the first game to the ultimate threat that must be defeated in the second.

Devouring the Void: Further Thoughts on WoW's Newest Spec

 The Devourer Demon Hunter is honestly a bit weird on a conceptual level.

Demon Hunters had only two specs for the first ten years of their existence, and they both sort of operated in a similar conceptual space: fel fire, demonic transformations, and sucking up soul fragments (whether as a bit of soloing sustainability for Havoc or a central healing mechanic for Vengeance). Interestingly, the two specs originally had different resources, with Havoc using the purple Fury that they now all use and Vengeance having the ultimate edgelord resource, Pain, which was colored more kind of orange. They honestly worked basically the same, and so it made sense that they consolidated it into the resource that also more or less shared the class color.

But we haven't really dealt with demons as a major threat since Legion. Demon Hunters work pretty well as one of the major "cosmic warrior" classes given the kind of space-alien theming of Warcraft demons, and so it sort of makes sense that, as we have an expansion with void-based villains that are if anything even more space-alien-coded that it would be Demon Hunters who develop a new technique to deal with them.

This comes hand-in-hand with adding Void Elves to the list of races that can play Demon Hunters (the only real downside is that they don't have quite as many unique customization options as the Night Elf and Blood Elf ones, and don't get unique voice lines. I did, however, discover that they have evidently added the ability to give at least Void Elf Demon Hunters glowing blue eyes rather than green).

Anyway, I leveled up a Void Elf Demon Hunter to stick pretty religiously to Devourer as a spec, while my original Night Elf one remains committed pretty firmly to Havoc (he dabbles in the other specs, but I also have a Blood Elf who I think is committed to Vengeance. Does this make sense in this day and age of extremely simple spec-switching and where most gear works for all your class's specs? Maybe not. But it helps me kind of organize the way I think about a character, and also lets me try out new looks and feels).

Devourer as a spec has always felt a little weird to me: looking at it without any kind of external guidance, it feels like the point is to cast Collapsing Star as often as you can, which means first building up the Void Fragments you need to activate Metamorphosis, and then racing to generate and gather as many more as you can to get as many casts of Collapsing Star in there as possible.

But it has always been quite difficult to get Metamorphosis to actually last long enough to get the spell off, even just casting it once (we'll address Apex talents in a moment).

The weird thing is that, at least according to Icy Veins, this isn't actually how the spec plays, or at least how it plays most effectively. Instead, what seems to be more ideal is to basically ignore Collapsing Star - instead of trying to extent your Metamorphosis as long as you possibly can, you instead want to get it as frequently as possible to take advantage of Voidsurges from the Void-Scarred hero talent (is the Demon Hunter the only class where one of its Hero Talent trees changes names depending on your spec?)

I am of two minds here.

See, I actually like the version of the spec that I had in my head, and I do think that building around it, which would involve actually picking up the Apex talents, could be fun, but it seems that this Voidsurge-focused build is considered more effective.

And actually, once I released my attachments toward that Collapsing Star-focused version of the spec, I started to enjoy the version I had. It's zippy (I don't think any spec has as much movement built into it, even Havoc) and bursty in a fun way.

The other major change I needed to make was that I think at least early in the expansion, you could take talents that made Soul Immolation a passive proc rather than an activated ability. Perhaps in 12.1 they changed this so that you do really need it to be a button on your bars.

Well... while I was leveling my Voidy DH up, I was not aware of that, and I will tell you, now that I am actually hitting that button, it's smoothing out the rotation a bit and also helping a lot with survival (given that you get healed for 30% of your HP over the course of it).

I still think I probably like Havoc best, but I do find myself enjoying the increased speed and flow of Devourer.

Sargeras in The Last Titan

 Sargeras is the original Big Bad of the Warcraft Franchise.

As the mightiest warrior of the Titans, themselves godlike beings (the closest that WoW gets to a classical Olympian-style pantheon - they're literally called The Pantheon,) the story goes (after a retcon or two) that Sargeras, in the ancient past, was tasked with fighting demons across the cosmos. While any given demon was not much of a match for him, the problem was that they kept returning from death, reborn in the Twisting Nether.

So, Sargeras built Marduum, a prison-planet where, rather than killing the demons, he would bind them there so that they could not escape.

Notably, the Titans actually used demons for some of their purposes. As we learned in the Green Fire quests back in Mists of Pandaria, Doomguards were used to sniff out people performing sacrificial magic - essentially, taking demons that were particularly drawn to mortal sacrifices, the Titans could then track down mortals performing such heinous rites using the very creatures they were attempting to summon and bind to their will.

It was when Sargeras found the world of Telogrus (never officially confirmed, but implied to the point that I think it's more or less undeniable,) it was infected not with demons, but with its own version of the Old Gods, who had wormed their way into the planet's Worldsoul and corrupted it. A group of demons, the Nathrezim, had come there to take part in this corruption, or perhaps study it (or, perhaps they had led Sargeras there knowing the effect it would have on them. Look, the Revendreth-Nathrezim connection was a wild swing for Shadowlands, and I don't know how much Blizzard would prefer to sweep that under the rug, but it's canon until retconned away).

Sargeras determined that the Telogrus World Soul was beyond saving, and so slashed the planet it half, killing its world soul and horrifying the rest of the Pantheon.

(As a side note: if the death of Argus sundered the Arbiter and the Shadowlands, had something similar happened when Telogrus was killed? Or was the fact that Telogrus hadn't yet fully formed as a Titan or other equivalent entity enough to keep it from disrupting things? Presumably the Jailer had already fallen from grace by that point if he was sending the Nathrezim out there into the cosmos, so this wouldn't have been the start of his villainous journey.)

Now an outcast, Sargeras determined that he would need help if he was going to purge this void corruption from the cosmos, and so he destroyed his own demonic prison, unleashing the demons he had trapped and conscripting them into what would become the Burning Legion.

When the rest of the Pantheon confronted him, they told him how they had saved another world soul from void corruption - namely Azeroth. This didn't work out very well, as Sargeras' "destroy the entire universe to save it" plan had gone into full swing. He "killed" (they got better) the rest of the Pantheon and set out searching for Azeroth and looking for new recruits to join the Burning Legion, ultimately discovering the Eredar, a super-advanced civilization living in a seeming utopia, but whose curiosity to learn more about the cosmos would make them easily manipulated. As we know, most of the Eredar willingly joined the Legion, while some fled into exile as the Draenei (or fought in resistance as the Krokul).

Sargeras tried numerous times to invade Azeroth - the War of the Ancients was the first major attempt, while the invasion of the Horde was another notable one (though the Horde's defeat and the death of Gul'dan allowed the Orcs to break free of their Legion affiliations). Finally, we had the events of Legion, which ultimately led to the biggest blowback of one of these invasion attempts, as Illidan Stormrage opened a portal to Argus, and the heroes of Azeroth were able to strike a deadly blow to the heart of the Legion and free the Titans from their eons-long imprisonment.

The last we saw of Sargeras, the other Titans magically pulled him away from Azeroth, dragging him into the Seat of the Pantheon where he would be imprisoned and guarded by the other Titans along with Illidan.

Sargeras attempted one last parting blow, driving his sword into the heart of Azeroth, and as we've seen in the 12.2 preview images, got like, 20 feet away from hitting the World Soul itself (given this is a sword nearly the size of a planet, 20 feet is almost nothing).

But, as I noted in the end of Legion, it felt kind of strange that after all this time, and after an expansion called Legion, we didn't get to fight Sargeras himself (to be fair, the first expansion was Burning Crusade, which is practically synonymous with Legion. But we didn't have Demon Hunters yet!)

I'm still not sure we're going to kill Sargeras at the end of The Last Titan. Frankly, my money is on Iridikron acting as the expansion's big bad.

It was, after all, Iridikron's plan to lure the Titans to Azeroth and lay a trap for them.

But... look, we can't discount the fact that the Dark Titan himself is out there, and specifically, if the Titans themselves come to Azeroth... they've got to bring him with them, right?

Sargeras became the master of a universe-wide army of demons, but he's not actually a demon himself (though he looks way different than he did before destroying Marduum. Originally black-haired and rocking a vaguely Ancient Egyptian vibe, he's now fire-haired-and-beared and has big scary wings and such (and I think horns?)

Still, while Aman'thul is the ultimate patriarch of the Pantheon, occupying the Zeus/Odin role within it, I think Sargeras might represent the absolute worst impulses of the Titans, the need to control everything to the extent that he'll destroy that which he can't control. I can totally imagine a world where Aman'thul emerges as the villain of the story, to be sure.

But I do really wonder what role Sargeras will be playing. It's only been 8 or 9 years since the final raid of Legion, and even if it's a little longer in-universe because of the post-Shadowlands time skip, this is an infinitesimal amount of time for beings like the Titans. (Though to be fair, as Algalon said, he's seen entire worlds created in the space of a heartbeat, so maybe they can process a whole lot of information in a very short period of time.)

My guess is that if Sargeras is playing a major role in The Last Titan, it's something Blizzard will play pretty close to the vest.

Honestly, I think they have a marvelous opportunity here: The Jailer jumped into canon as this massive, Sargeras-level threat, but was written so simplistically and also had so little time to develop as a bad guy that he wound up falling flat.

Blizzard has shown that they can do villains, even if they are cartoonish and mustache-twirling, a lot better with Xal'atath, and while he hasn't had a ton of screen time, Iridikron also feels like a smarter, more strategic threat.

I would love to get some high-quality writing to give us a Sargeras that truly feels like the deserving Big Bad of Warcraft. I want to see him be both mighty and a genius. Let him feel august in his regal power, larger than life, but without spouting cliche lines like "pitiful mortal," as we had the Jailer do. (Sargeras wouldn't find mortals pitiful - that would require him to feel pity.)

And... don't kill him off. For a bad guy who I think has been part of the lore for 32 years, it's not like it'd be too early. But the thing is, we haven't actually gotten enough time with him to earn that catharsis. I know that part of the idea of ending the Worldsoul Saga is to move onto something new, but I think it would be great to actually see some classic villains get their due (and not in a half-assed Warlords of Draenor way).

What Does WoW Forever Mean for Retail WoW?

 I haven't really played WoW Classic much - I basically got an Undead Warlock out of Deathknell and onto Bree and then decided I liked how modern WoW plays better. I ran a Death Knight through the starting experience to unlock a cool undead proto-drake mount, but beyond that, I haven't really touched it.

It's something I appreciate as a sort of living archive of the game WoW used to be.

There have been "Classic" recreations of various expansion, with I think even Warlords of Draenor Classic due to launch (though man, who would be eager to live through that again?) But as I understand it, there's also been a version locked at Vanilla-only.

This version (and I could be totally wrong here, as again, I don't play Classic) saw an experiment with the Season of Discovery, which brought in new (I think temporary) gameplay ideas that diverged from the 2004-2007 run of the original WoW.

Forever seems to be building on the popularity of Season of Discovery and making it the whole gist of the game, as a kind of alternate timeline for WoW (which they describe as not really changing the overarching story, but filling in gaps here and there with additional stories and characters).

Now, as I understand it, part of what appeals to Classic players is the relaxed pace - knowing that things are going to be as they are indefinitely means you aren't rushing to get geared up on all your alts to run Naxxramas.

In the early days of WoW, the endgame really wasn't the whole game. There's just a natural shift that occurred as players had been playing longer, where their mains and alts would hit the level cap of an expansion and thus be well-positioned to hit the level cap pretty early in the next one.

Given that, WoW has shifted its focus more and more to level-cap content, with the actual process of leveling up being more of a kind of prologue to the real game.

But for those of you who weren't playing 20 years ago, that wasn't necessarily the expectation back in the day. "Hitting the level cap" in Vanilla was practically being done with a character, and endgame content like raiding was reserved for a narrow few, more akin to Mythic Raiding today (and even that I think might be more accessible than it used to be). The game, then, was focused more on the personal journey as you quested across zones, perhaps occasionally running dungeons together along that journey (and given that the level 40+ questing content prior to Cataclysm was utterly anemic, you kind of had to grind dungeons to get to level 60. Seriously, if I recall, you could come to Tanaris at level 40, get like one quest, and then find that the next quest in the zone required you to be level 45 or something, when you were maybe near 41 after that quest. I ran Zul'Farrak a lot).

I'll confess that my approach to WoW is a bit mechanistic - honestly, my main goal is to try to get the fully Mythic tier appearances on each class (by getting Hero gear from Delves primarily and then upgrading them to 6/6). It's not necessarily the way I really ought to be playing the game, to be frank.

So I can kind of see the appeal of an endless "get there when you get there" version of the game. Indeed, as expansions have been coming out faster recently (War Within was by several months the shortest expansion in WoW's history, and Midnight seems likely to be on a similar 18-month timeframe) there's something of a rush to consume all the content you can (I gotta say, the in-between patch content like Forbidden Reach, Siren Isle, and Ritual Sites are ones that I've really kind of checked out of).

Anyway, the thing that's really odd, though, about WoW Forever is that this new content doesn't exist in the main WoW. So... should it?

I will say, I was glad to find out that the added Paladin-capable races coming in WoW Forever will also be joining us in I believe 12.2 (possibly 12.2.5). I'm honestly kind of eager to take an Undead Paladin through Tirisfal Glades and such, as it's been a while since we've really been able to hang out in WoW's spooky mode (Talebound appeals to me).

But what of, for example, the Skyborne? The backstory on these people is that they're apparently exiles from Dire Maul, who rose up against their prince. Practically speaking, they seem to use the Blood Elf model (a popular one) but have blue skin and golden eyes. While we could probably recreate that look with the Void Elves, it does make me wonder how much of what they come up with for WoW Forever that they might then import into mainline WoW.

It is a strange thing - this sort of parallel, or perhaps branching version of Azeroth. I guess the other big question is what this will do to the playerbase? I suspect that Forever won't siphon off players from "retail" anymore than Classic did, but will the Classic playerbase be divided here?