The Blood God and Uldir

This might be counted as a spoiler, except that a Blizzard employee talked about it at Blizzcon, so if you want to go in fresh, I guess... don't read this?

According to an interview, Uldir, Battle for Azeroth's first raid, is a Titan facility in which the Titans were attempting to experiment on the Old Gods. After the fallout from Y'shaarj's destruction, the Titans knew they couldn't just pluck the Old Gods out of the surface of the planet. But they wanted to see if they could destroy or neutralize them some other way (obviously this didn't work.)

Uldir is where they were trying to do this. And the experiment went terribly wrong.

The product of this experiment is referred to as a "Blood God," which is supposedly "even worse" than an Old God.

Now, I'm a little skeptical about power creep in monsters we fight - it's ok for us to have a lower-stakes expansion this time - but we also got a few more details about Uldir, and I think that terminology really gives some speculation fuel.

One of the details they mentioned for Uldir is that there are three Titanic seals on the facility, and two of them are broken. That certainly puts a ticking clock on the whole thing, but it also makes me think about a couple things we've heard in Legion and before.

"At the hour of her third death, she will usher in our coming." Three deaths? Three seals? One could imagine that the Sundering and the Shattering (War of the Ancient and Cataclysm, respectively) could refer to the first two "deaths" of the Titan Azeroth. Could Sargeras' stabbing Azeroth in the Silithus be her third death? If so, would that mean that the third seal is broking (or maybe breaking?)

Another major question is about the relationship between the Old Gods and the Blood God(s.) I'm still mostly convinced that N'zoth is going to be the big bad of this expansion, whereas whatever in Uldir will be the first final raid boss. I doubt N'zoth is in there (he's supposed to be in Ny'alotha, wherever that is,) and I'd assume that the final boss will be this "Blood God" in a weakened state.

The other big question is: Blood God? Is this related to Hakkar the Soulflayer?

If you didn't play pre-Cataclysm, Hakkar was a major figure in both Swamp of Sorrows and Stranglethorn Vale, and the Sunken Temple dungeon and Zul'Gurub raid (yes, it was originally a 20-player raid, which back then was a small raid.) When 4.1 revamped the Zul raids to make them challenging 5-player dungeons, the story of Zul'Gurub had moved on, with Jindo the Hexxer (now "the Godbreaker") drawing on the essence of Hakkar, who was locked away in a realm of Shadow (possibly the Shadowlands,) and only by breaking the seals on Hakkar's chains were we able to escape and defeat him - thus freeing Hakkar.

But Hakkar was referred to as the Blood God - in fact, a debuff from his fight, Corrupted Blood, actually continued to persist outside of the instance, which led to a hilarious bug that epidemiologists have actually studied in which the debuff, which spread to people near the infected player, cut a swath through Stormwind.

Hakkar seems tied close to the Troll Loa (in fact, one of the slain Loa in Zul'drak, who still gives you quests as a disembodied spirit in, again, I'd guess the Shadowlands, has the same model,) and so I had assumed he was just an evil Wild God. He may indeed be connected to them, but the coincidence of this name in a heavily Troll-related area makes me suspect something different.

Could Hakkar be a Blood God, created in Uldir by misguided Titan experiments? Maybe the Titans tried to contain the essence of the Old Gods within the body of a Wild God - the latter of whom were generally noble beasts who were uplifted by Freya and given a connection to the Emerald Dream. Maybe Hakkar was meant to be a way to transform the evil of the Old Gods into something that could be a force for good. As we know from A Thousand Years of War, the Void is not exactly inherently evil, and so it wouldn't be that hard to imagine the Titans trying to find a way to use Void Magic in a constructive and positive way.

But instead, Hakkar became a horrible monster with a cult dedicated to it that sent an empire into decadent violence and madness. It got to a point where the threat of having Hakkar in the world was such a danger that the Green Dragonflight (guardians of the Dream, remember?) was forced to destroy the Temple of Atal'Hakkar and bury it beneath the Swamp of Sorrows.

If we assume Hakkar the Blood God is a product of Uldir, does that mean he's the final boss of the raid? Have we only encountered avatars and manifestations of the true Hakkar?

Or is this something separate, maybe the thing that created Hakkar or even something entirely unrelated (I'd be disappointed if that were the case.)

Hakkar's escape from Zul'Gurub is a plot thread that has been dangling since Cataclysm, and given a return to explore the Zandalari and thus Troll culture in general, this would be a great opportunity to reexamine this guy, and it looks like there's a perfect opportunity to do so.