With the Eternal Palace now open, we know what happens after the raid.
But just in case you were worried about spoilers, here's a cut!
We fight Azshara at the "Final Prison," the last Titan facility holding an Old God locked away. As she reveals during the fight (not in the cinematic,) Magni has been manipulated into getting us to empower the Heart of Azeroth so that the power within can shatter the chains binding N'zoth to his prison.
In defeating Azshara, the ritual to unlock the chains is complete, and though Azshara sinks to the ground defeated (maybe dead, maybe unconscious?) the Titan mechanism behind her undergoes its last sequence, and everything goes red before the ethereal chains beyond the room are disintegrated. A single glowing eye deep below opens, and then N'zoth in his shadow-monster form rises up, unfettered, and grabs Azshara.
Unconscious or dead, N'zoth appears to revive her, though the look on her face is one of shock and horror as N'zoth drags her away. Azshara's story is not over, though I suspect that her sense of control over the whole situation has completely fallen apart. (How freaking cool would it be to see Azshara turn against N'zoth and help us? Though I think the more likely scenario is that her loss of control extends even to her own mind - I think Azshara's going to be the very slave she refused to be when they first made their deal. In fact, I think she has been without knowing it all this time.)
Thus, N'zoth has done something no Old God ever did - he has fully escaped his prison and menaces Azeroth once again.
What does that mean for the future?
Well, given that Blizzard said we'd know the final boss of BFA by the end of this raid, I think N'zoth has got to be it (some people are arguing that it'll have to be next expansion, but my money is on this expansion ending with Sylvanas drawing N'zoth into the Blade of the Black Empire and then fleeing to the Shadowlands, where we'll follow her in 9.0.) (Granted, the fact that two of the other Warbringers have been the final bosses of the major "tier raids" - not that that has much meaning in an expansion without tier sets - does push for Sylvanas being the final boss. But I still think it's got to be N'zoth.)
The other really interesting question is what happens with the Heart of Azeroth?
Do we keep empowering it because hey, it's already done the damage it could? Or will we see another radical shift in 8.3 changing the system once again?
Also, what becomes of Azshara? Does she become just another boss in the next raid, or does she disappear for potentially a few expansions before she comes roaring back into relevance?
Naturally most of us aren't going to see the Azshara fight for a while - it'll be over a month before it's available for LFR and I don't know how most guilds operate, but it always takes us a good long while before we make it through a full raid.
While I wouldn't say she's the most vital lore character in WoW, I am still somewhat heartened to see Azshara survive the raid. She's been built up for so long (since the Frozen Throne expansion for WCIII) that it would be a bit of a shame to just knock her off in a single patch.
That being said, we're also fighting her on her home turf, which means that whatever future interactions we have with her are going to be, I think, very different.
No comments:
Post a Comment