Netherlord and Archmage Mount Quests

All right, two more classes!

Warlocks will get an up-to-date Dreadsteed of Xoroth-like mount (like the Paladin mount, this one flies without any visible wings, just glowing hoofprints.) You speak with the guy who collected materials for the original mount quest (that got 86'd in Cataclysm) and he sends you to do a number of things.

There's some auction house stuff - a potion, some metal, and some gems - and a pretty quick collection of Moonkin blood from a place in Val'sharah, and then the thing that will probably be frustrating to you if the stars have not aligned: an item off of the final boss of an invasion scenario.

With that stuff gathered, you get a quick quest to on the Broken Shore requiring the use of your Succubus and then you get to go into one little solo-scenario that has you slaying demonic minions (that go down easier with a Felhound) before taking out an eredar and enslaving its demonic horse, which you then get to claim.

The Mage mount has less set-up, requiring you to gather three pieces of a device Antonidas was working on before he died. These require a little bit of combat but mostly just ample use of teleportation and using Dalaran's central tower portals.

Once you get all three pieces, you go to the Eye of Eternity and have three somewhat challening fights against the elemental energy trapped in each fragment. Once all three are defeated, the three pieces are linked together and you get your cool flying disk.

Slayer, Farseer, and Shadowblade Mount Quests

Getting your class mount, in most cases, is primarily about just finishing the Broken Shore campaign, which is unfortunately gated behind champion missions, world quests, and rare spawns such that you might have to just log off and wait to complete them. The worst, however, is the hidden wyrmtongue cache quest. They did reduce this from having to find 10 to 5, but I really think it should be exactly one. Anyway, rant over.

Demon Hunters pretty quickly get a little scenario-like quest where they head to a remote fragment of Mardum and chase down the broodmother of the felbats on that world. You track it down and fight it while fending off its many offspring, but it mostly pretty simple.

Shamans simply get a summons from Thunderaan where you beat the three djinn bosses from Throne of the Four Winds (wait, if they're air elementals and you killed them in the raid, how the hell are they back? And if they can come back, why can't Al-Akir?) Anyway, these are just three tough but not too tough fights that I was able to do without much trouble. Once all three are defeated (not killed,) you get the mount.

And then Rogues.

Holy. Crap.

Rogues have by far the toughest of the mount quests. I was lucky enough to encounter a couple of other rogues working on it, and teamwork definitely helped.

You receive word that the Legion has planted undead homunculi in all the major capital cities now that the Illidari are able to spot demonic infiltrators. To avoid putting the Uncrowned in a tough position, they send you to the opposite faction's cities so that your attacks can be passed off as standard Horde/Alliance aggression.

This is not phased or anything, so other players can make your life a living hell.

My rogue is Undead, so I went first to the Exodar, where you have to use Distract or Blind to keep the target's incredibly tough (basically he one-shots you) arcane golem from attacking.

Next is Darnassus, where the target is throwing a party in the entry area (from inner Teldrassil) and you have to sap her elite priest friend and then use Evasion and Cloak of Shadows while you target her and take her down (there's also a standard elite patroller who can detect through stealth that pats near the target.)

In Ironforge, there's a guy actually in the entryway to the throne room who takes almost no physical damage, so you'll definitely want to go either Assassination or Subtlety (and spec for Gloomblade for the latter) to max your non-physical damage.

Finally, the nastiest one that will never get easier: in Stormwind, you have to kill the guy in the Trade District auction house. So, where every Alliance player is in the city.

With those four killed, you're done, and you can be very, very proud of that mount.

The Joys of Nonviolent Encounters in D&D

So for my birthday (well, the night before, but going into the morning of) I had a really great session of D&D with my party. I came away with a smile on my face, and that's always great.

Partially it was because of a good fight - the party encountered a feature of the land in which they find themselves, called a Darkstorm, where undead and demons assail them. I decided to ditch my randomized list and instead pick an appropriately creepy creature from Volo's Guide to Monsters called a Spawn of Kyuss - a zombie-like thing filled with burrowing worms that can infect people (none of the players got hit, but a couple of NPCs they were guarding did - thankfully for them, the Paladin was ready with Lay on Hands to cure diseases.) Everyone got to do something cool during the fight.

The best part, however, was when I had them go into an Outer Plane of my own devising (I muck around a lot with D&D lore, though if I get into serious trouble I'll just make this a subsection of the Nine Hells) called the Oubliette, where they were trying to secure the release of a prisoner who had knowledge of the fortress they had just taken. As I had planned, a Bearded Devil appeared to try to stop them, but thankfully I trusted my instincts (and my battle fatigue after a protracted Darkstorm fight) I decided to play up the lawful, and thus bureaucratic nature of devils.

The Bearded Devil, who I named on the spot Kanameir, talked with the wizard in the party about securing a prisoner release form, which could only be done by proving the demise of the fortress' former commander and convincing him that the wizard was the new commander. The wizard rolled three natural 20s in a row - first to get the fiend to talk to him, second to know it would not be a good idea of ignore the devil's instruction to wait while he did hours worth of paperwork, and third to sign with a fake (ridiculous) name that, with a Deception check crit, he pulled off.

So now this party member not only has a friend in the infernal bureaucracy, but also secured the ability to house up to five prisoners within this horrific dimension. (He's True Neutral, so I don't think he'd have qualms.)

Anyway, as I said before, my quasi-new-years resolution was to allow for more non-combat encounters as the players saw fit, and this early example was a huge success.

Mounts for the Highlord and Deathlord

I've gotten two of the new class mount quests done. Both involve a short quest chain that can only be started after finishing the Broken Shore campaign (the last quest of which simply requires you to kill 100 demons in the zone - very easy if you go to the areas with lots of imps.)

The Paladin quest chain is highly reminiscent of the original Vanilla Charger quests (I never did the Blood Elf one added in BC, but I believe it had similar steps done in a different order.) Like that original chain, you are there to redeem a Death Knight's charger's spirit with the help of blessed barding. You need to pick up a few supplies (leystone and a Stonehide Barding from a leatherworker) and then you'll be able to go into Stratholme to face off against some necromancer who is doing some nefarious things.

The Death Knight chain is chapter two in the "uh... I'm not so sure we're the good guys anymore" series for the class. You get a message from the Lich King, who tells you of a vision he saw of a group of undead marching toward something on a glacier north of Icecrown. Yet when you go to investigate, there's only a tiny iceberg. The Lich King sends you to Wyrmrest to find out records of a fallen dragon in that area, and when the Red flight doesn't really cooperate, you go and take their records by force. You have an entire Ruby Sanctum's worth of red dragons and dragonkin to kill, and if you kill every last one of them (this might take a little patrolling to catch the flying drakes) you'll actually get a Feat of Strength achievement called Unholy Determination. Also, you'll be a pretty terrible person, as these guys' only reason to be hostile is that they don't want you raising one of their kind from the dead.

I'll be doing the Demon Hunter one relatively soon - I just need to get a Broken Shore champion mission completed - but the other classes will probably take a bit more time, as I haven't gotten them as far through the Broken Shore campaign (some haven't even gone there yet.)

Evaluating a Supposed, Poorly Sourced WoW Leak

It's pretty crazy to think that it is now June and this year is nearly halfway through. For WoW fans, assuming a release schedule consistent with history, it also means that we're looking at an expansion announcement in only a couple months.

One of the really big questions is how exactly, story-wise, they're going to follow up Legion. Given that Kil'jaeden is probably going to die at the end of only the second raid tier, it's hard to imagine us fighting anyone but Sargeras as the expansion's final boss. Even if we don't kill Sargeras, the fact that we will have defeated him marks the sort of logical extreme of our power.

Still, for a long time, level has not really been an indication of lore-wise power - I'm pretty sure they don't mean for us to take literally that some bear in Stormheim is truly harder to kill than the Lich King.

The other day a friend told me he had seen a rumor about the next expansion - a supposed leak. Now, I think it's wise to take any leaks with a grain of salt, but there have been several leaks in the past that proved accurate. I remember seeing some poorly-translated leak of Legion that suggested Demon Hunters and Warchief Sylvanas. The latter I thought disqualified the leak, as it seemed absurd that they would replace Vol'jin so quickly, yet here we are.

So just in case this does prove correct, let's put it out there so we can feel cool about ourselves. We'll break it down element-by-element.

Setting/Villain:

The "leak" suggests that the next expansion would be a nautical/Naga-themed expansion, presumably with Queen Azshara as its final boss or at least an important antagonist. Azshara has seemed like an obvious expansion-carrying bad guy for ages, and every time there's a new expansion announced, people tend to assume that it'll be hers. While it has never been the case, the reasoning is still sound.

Allies on the Sea:

In this rumor, it appears that both Kul Tiras and Kezan would play a role. Again, I think these are pretty reasonable for the setting. Kezan we've been to, but its volcanic activity forced the playable goblins to leave. Still, assuming that things have cooled down there since the end of the Cataclysm, it might be an opportunity to finally see Undermine. And Kul Tiras, being the most navally-oriented of the human kingdoms, is an obvious Alliance location for a sea-based expansion.

New Race: Naga:

Supposedly playable Naga are something Blizzard's wanted to do for a long time. The Naga would be a new neutral race, like the Pandaren. Clearly, there are some anatomical issues to work out with Naga. While simply hiding pants and boots would probably work out (you often don't see shoes on Tauren, Trolls, Draenei, and Worgen) there's also the question of mounts and, if there were to be Naga Rogues or Monks, figuring out how kicking moves would work. One really interesting opportunity here, though, is that Naga would be a perfectly appropriate third race for Demon Hunters, as the Naga have been part of the Illidari longer than even the Blood Elves, and Demon Hunters just got a Naga class champion.

New Class: Tinker:

Ok, here's where I get a lot more skeptical. So far, we've gotten a new class every other expansion, so getting one right after we got Demon Hunters is a little far-fetched. The other question is how any new class is going to work with the class systems introduced in Legion. Obviously any hero classes that come about can just skip Legion content, but if we get a new start-at-1 class, what are they going to do in the Broken Isles? Do they get their own artifact weapons and class hall? To be fair, that's going to be an issue regardless of when they come out with a new class. I'm always excited to see more player options, and a gadget-based class could be a ton of fun. But this aspect of the rumor also seems very player-wishlist-y. Not to say that Blizzard isn't concerned with players' wishes.

Tomb of Annihilation and Xanathar's Guide to Everything Announced for D&D

Wizards of the Coast has announced new D&D products coming this year during their "Stream of Annihilation" that they've been hyping for a good while now.

Two books are coming out this year.

The first is Tomb of Annihilation, an adventure that takes players to an area called Chult (not part of the until-now standard 5e setting of the Sword Coast, though it is still in Faerûn) where the demilich from the infamous Tomb of Horrors is performing all sorts of nasty deeds, eating away at resurrection magic to fuel his undead. The adventure is going to be filled with dinosaurs, zombies, and zombie dinosaurs, and presumably the eponymous tomb, which we can expect to be a real death-trap.

The other book actually excites me a lot more, which is Xanathar's Guide to Everything. Just as Volo's Guide to Monsters was theoretically written from the perspective of a character in the Forgotten Realms, Xanathar is a beholder crime lord in Waterdeep. This book will be an expansion of rules, worked out in the Unearthed Arcana articles but now pinned down in official forms.

I've gotten way more use out of Volo's than any of the adventure books I've bought, and so I think Xanathar's will be a definite purchase. This includes new and expanded rules systems, but also new subclasses for every class (possibly with the exception of the Wizard, but they've got to have the most already, right?)

Anyway, I'll be following these releases.

The Nature of the Lich King

The official story is that the Lich King was created by Kil'jaeden - Ner'zhul, a mortal orc, had his soul torn from his body and placed in the suit of armor (especially the Helm of Domination) that would form the original Lich King.

This implies that, powerful as the Lich King is, he's ultimately just an empowered undead mortal, and that power is ultimately derived from a demon (who is himself a former mortal.)

But there are a couple things that have never really sat well with me. In Warcraft Chronicle, there's a chart that delineates six primal forces that each have an associated type of magic. The one generally see as "good" are Light, Life, and Order, embodied by Holy, Nature, and Arcane magic respectively. The "evil" ones are Void, Death, and Chaos, embodied by Shadow, Necromancy, and Fel magic, also respectively.

In the game, however, we've tended to see Void and Chaos as the two really grand pillars of Warcraft villaindom. The Void Lords and their creations, the Old Gods, seek to corrupt the universe with Shadow, while the demons of the Burning Legion use Fel magic to try to utterly destroy the universe.

(Side note: one would think that the servants of the Void (described by Star Augur Etraeus as "avatars of non-existence") would be more into utter universal annihilation while the demonic Fel force would seek to corrupt it. But it could be we're just not seeing the long game here.)

Death as a force, however, doesn't seem to get the same kind of top billing as Void and Chaos, but perhaps that's something Blizzard will remedy in the future.

The origins of the Lich King's necromantic powers are somewhat enigmatic. We know that Fel-affiliated demons and warlocks have performed necromancy in the past - consider the original Death Knights, for example, who were created by Gul'dan. And so perhaps it wouldn't be too crazy to think that Kil'jaeden could tap into necromancy to create the Lich King.

On the other hand, seeing Ner'zhul B in Draenor showed us that using Shadow magic, one can also raise the dead, as we saw in Shadowmoon Burial Grounds.

So maybe I'm getting too hung up on that chart, but if we want to run with it, it would seem to suggest that necromancy really is its own thing, not beholden to Shadow magic or Fel magic.

Considering that the Burning Legion employs Voidwalkers (there's a whole section to the Broken Shore that's purple-void-corrupted rather than the usual green-fel-corrupted) despite the fact that such beings are theoretically the exact thing the Legion was founded to defeat (though in a Halo-like "cutting off the food supply" manner,) it wouldn't be that odd to think that Kil'jaeden dabbled in other kinds of magic.

But the explanation that I prefer, and I think that Blizzard would benefit a lot from in terms of future story potential, is that Necromancy is, in fact, totally independent, and the the Lich King, or whatever dark entity that served as the basis for the Lich King, existed long before Kil'jaeden got involved.

Now, it's also possible that some "prime representatives" of these primal magics still owe their origins to others. The Druid artifact backstory implies that the Wild Gods (aka Night Elf Ancients, Pandaren August Celestials, and Troll Loa) were originally just ordinary animals that Freya (yes, the one we fought in Ulduar) empowered and linked to the Emerald Dream. And while he was once a mortal, Kil'jaeden is now a being of nearly god-like power (the Warcraft universe is pretty strict on who gets to be called a god, though that's getting looser, with the Titans getting confirmed god status - albeit non-immortal gods) so if someone like Freya could create beings of such power, Kil'jaeden ought to be able to do so as well.

Still, I think there are elements of the Lich King that we really have not explored yet. Chronicle Vol. 2 ends right before the Third War, so we don't get anything about the Lich King.

In addition to the primal power of Death, there are a couple of other sort of related concepts in that chart of magic and planes. Moving to the elemental plane, there's two forces in addition to the four basic elements. One is Spirit, which is aligned with life, and is used by Shamans as a kind of binding agent for the four elements and is used by Monks as their primary power on which they draw (they call it Chi.) Spirit is demonstrably powerful - the Elementals on Azeroth are so chaotic because the Titan world soul requires so much of it to grow. Meanwhile, on Draenor, with no world-soul and an abundance of Spirit, the plantlife grew so powerful that it threatened to overwhelm its own resources and ironically wind up starving itself out of overgrowth, which is why Aggramar created a giant who was the ultimate ancestor to the Magnaron, Gronn, Ogron, Ogres, and Orcs.

The opposite of Spirit is something called Decay, which, unlike the harmonious Spirit, is all about force. Dark Shamanism is distinguished from classical shamanism because of its emphasis on this. While a typical Shaman beseeches the elements for aid and is something of a conduit for consensual elemental power, Dark Shamans enslave the elements to do their will. The result, as we saw with the Korkron in Mists of Pandaria, is that Dark Shamanism leads to environmental damage - polluted air and water and treacherous earth.

Finally, getting to the real semi-physical planes, we get one that is truly associated with death: the Shadowlands. While the Emerald Dream is a place of vibrant life (except where the Nightmare corrupts it, though I think we've officially destroyed almost all of the Nightmare,) the Shadowlands are an empty and cold land of death.

It has never been officially confirmed, but there is very strong evidence that in-game, if we die and go into ghost form, we're actually running around in the Shadowlands (and that the Spirit Healers are actually rogue Val'kyr who defied both Odyn and Helya for the sake of the greater good, namely returning the heroes of Azeroth to life so that we can continue protecting the world.)

If the Emerald Dream is the domain of the Wild Gods, it would stand to reason that the Shadowlands would have some sovereign. A King, if you will.

Now, perhaps that Sovereign was actually Helya - Helheim's location isn't ever really defined, and could be its own plane (we also don't know where the Halls of Valor are, exactly) and given that Helya assisted Ra-Den in creating the Elemental Planes, it's not that hard to imagine her creating Helheim from scratch.

But Helheim certainly looks like it could be a part of the Shadowlands.

Still, if we're talking about Death as being a primal force that is independent from other primal embodiments like Old Gods, Titans, and Demons, it seems to me that you could imagine there being some entity within the Shadowlands that was the embodiment of death and necromancy.

And perhaps that entity was amorphous - not in any way human-like. Perhaps Kil'jaeden poured that entity into Ner'zhul not just as a weapon, but also as a way of controlling an entity that was likely more powerful than Kil'jaeden himself.

And this actually begins to explain why "there must always be a Lich King." It wasn't really clear what the Scourge "running rampant" would look like, given that they weren't exactly friendly at the time, but maybe we really haven't seen anything yet.

Prior to the Lich King, this Death God was in the Shadowlands - incredibly dangerous but safely in its own realm. Kil'jaeden sought to use its power for the purposes of the Legion, but simply releasing it into the prime material plane would have meant undeath spreading everywhere - perhaps even to demons (and while the Legion's official mission is universal annihilation, but their actions suggest their actual goal is more a kind of universal tyranny - which requires subjects.) The Lich King thus may be a kind of de-powered Death God - something that the people serving as the Lich King may only know to varying degrees.

Kil'jaeden pulled the Death God out of the Shadowlands, putting it in a humanoid-shaped (or armor-shaped at first) vessel to ensure that it didn't escape and simply wash over everything and to ensure that its power could be used productively by the Burning Legion.

So then this opens questions as to what the longterm goals of Bolvar are. He nominated himself to be Jailor of the Damned, which seems like it would mean especially controlling the Death God within himself. But we don't know if he's been as effective at holding out against this influence as he was in the past. He's definitely not a good person anymore, but one really has to wonder what our actions as Death Knights have been doing for his goals. We recruited the Four Horsemen - who seem to serve the Lich King, rather than us Deathlords. And even Darion Mograine has been raised from the dead a second time - which means that his break from the Lich King's control after the Battle of Light's Hope may no longer be in effect! As the folks at Blizzard Watch pointed out in their latest Lore Watch podcast, when we start the expansion, Darion tells us explicitly that we're getting assistance from the Lich King, but we're not rejoining the Scourge. And yet, and yet, every action we take to empower the Ebon Blade is actually making the Scourge more powerful.

Now it's possible that being part of this Bolvar-era Scourge will ultimately be good for Azeroth, even if we do things to seriously piss of the Silver Hand and the Red Dragonflight and anyone else who gets in our way.

But the Deathlord may have really screwed things up and will have a serious price to pay when he or she looks around and finds that all of his comrades are now getting conscripted into the Death God's campaign to wipe out all life on the planet.