Blizzard courted some controversy a few weeks ago when it became apparent that those on the "Balance of Power" quest chain could not obtain the quest items required for it within the LFR difficulty of Emerald Nightmare, instead requiring Normal or higher difficulties, despite there being no indication of this in the quest text.
Frankly, I was expecting this to be the case, as earlier steps in the chain required players to run two dungeons on Mythic difficulty, which would mean that the raiding portion would be a step down in difficulty if LFR was an acceptable method of acquisition.
Still, in the absence of a Mists or Warlords style legendary chain, this seemed like the next variation - not an expansion-spanning legendary chain, but at least something to keep people running LFR.
At this point, my main character has an average item level of 850, thanks to lucky gear upgrades and Mythic dungeon loot. The Emerald Nightmare raid on LFR provides 835 gear. I do enjoy the raid (actually, I'm very fond of it) but I find that I'm basically running it purely for the acquisition of transmog gear. This might change with Trial of Valor (the quality of whose rewards I do not yet know) and Nighthold (which, at 845, could provide some upgrades and would of course be more likely to Warforge or Titanforge up to an attractive level.
But while Blizzard tries to figure out exactly how to make the various kinds of content rewarding (in fact, if you completely stay away from manually-made PUGs, LFR should provide you with some attractive gear,) the issue, I think, that is bigger is a cosmetic one.
The reward for the Balance of Power chain (which begins with Kalecgos appearing in your class hall) is a cosmetic one - a new model for your artifact weapon. Blizzard has, reasonably I think, argued that people should not get so upset about missing out on these quests given that the reward is entirely cosmetic. Still, that raises another issue, one that we have been thinking about since the introduction of the artifact weapon concept.
Everyone's weapons look alike.
Now, to be fair, it's not as bad as it might be - a Destruction Warlock and an Affliction Warlock have totally different looking staves. And if you look at the era of, say, when Highmaul was the only raid available at the start of Warlords (very analogous to our current situation in Legion,) there were only I think two staff models that you'd see Priests, Mages, Warlocks, Druids, Monks, and Shamans using.
And of course, one is free to transmog over one's artifact weapons. Personally, I don't do that because, well, if I'm going to be wielding an artifact of incredible power, I feel that it ought to look like itself, even if it is a rather radical variation thereof.
I finally got my first secret artifact appearance - doable easily because it did not require me to farm for rare drops (actually, the official method does require one to do so, and in fact I found the item I needed, but I made my first attempt without it.) This was the Havoc Demon Hunter secret appearance, which transforms the Twinblades of the Deceiver into glaives that appear to be made of demon bones and teeth.
Incidentally, to get this you'll want to either glide down from the peak of Highmountain toward Felsoul Hold or farm the demons there for Candrael's charm. The latter can be brought to a female demon hunter on a hill on the west side of the hold (you'll want to climb up out of the pit back to where it's grassy) and if you give it to her, she will launch you toward the target, a massive Felbat named Downfall. Downfall will create a patch of wind around him that allows you to fly, but periodically he'll punt you away and you'll want to use Glide to make sure you get back into his air pocket. I found that, being hesitant to use Fel Rush in a small space, it was easier to complete this in Vengeance spec. Downfall simply drops the item needed to grant the special appearance for the Twinblades, which can be collected in either spec but can only be activated when you're in the proper one.
Demon Hunters demonstrate the need for more artifact appearances I think better than anyone else, as Warglaives are a brand-new type of weapon, and if you want to keep that classic demon hunter look, you're very limited in your options.
The good news is that Legion has only been out a little over a month, and Blizzard claims that the expansion is slated to have a lot of content patches. 7.1 is currently on the PTR, though I haven't heard about any other artifact appearances. There was another set datamined from the Beta, though they have not shown up in game.
I'm hoping that we'll get many more of these over time - as impressive as it was to see Truthguard upgraded from its original form to its Heroic variant at the end of the class campaign, I wouldn't mind seeing another version of it. And while I keep doing the Withered Army Training, so far I have not had any luck with the hidden appearance item.
Friday, October 7, 2016
Thursday, October 6, 2016
Blademaster Samuro Coming to Heroes of the Storm
This one's a bit of a deep cut, but if you played Warcraft III's expansion The Frozen Throne and did the Founding of Durotar campaign, Samuro was an Orc Blademaster who aided Rexxar in his fight to protect the fledgling orcish nation.
While Grom Hellscream was also a Blademaster, Samuro really instilled the class with a distinctly samurai-like feel, including the banner worn on the back and the katana-like sword. Samuro was a member of the Burning Blade Clan, which, as we learned in Warlords of Draenor, was originally considered a very honorable clan that was focused on discipline and precision, but would later fall to demonic corruption. Samuro represented one of the last remnants of the original Blademaster tradition.
I'll confess I'm not sure that Heroes of the Storm desperately needs another Orc character (so far we've got four, not counting Samuro, and we don't have any Trolls or Draenei, and the only Gnome is actually a dragon while the only Tauren is sort of a joke character.)
It looks like Samuro will have some of the traditional Blademaster abilities. Mirror Image, Critical Strike, and Windwalk are your Q, W, and E abilities, while your heroics are Bladestorm and Illusion Master, the latter of which allows you to swap places with one of your Mirror Images.
Samuro will be a melee assassin, and hopefully the voice acting won't be a kind of offensive Japanese accent this time!
While Grom Hellscream was also a Blademaster, Samuro really instilled the class with a distinctly samurai-like feel, including the banner worn on the back and the katana-like sword. Samuro was a member of the Burning Blade Clan, which, as we learned in Warlords of Draenor, was originally considered a very honorable clan that was focused on discipline and precision, but would later fall to demonic corruption. Samuro represented one of the last remnants of the original Blademaster tradition.
I'll confess I'm not sure that Heroes of the Storm desperately needs another Orc character (so far we've got four, not counting Samuro, and we don't have any Trolls or Draenei, and the only Gnome is actually a dragon while the only Tauren is sort of a joke character.)
It looks like Samuro will have some of the traditional Blademaster abilities. Mirror Image, Critical Strike, and Windwalk are your Q, W, and E abilities, while your heroics are Bladestorm and Illusion Master, the latter of which allows you to swap places with one of your Mirror Images.
Samuro will be a melee assassin, and hopefully the voice acting won't be a kind of offensive Japanese accent this time!
Alt-Friendly Changes in 7.1
With 7.1 on the PTR and people already testing Trial of Valor and Return to Karazhan, there are of course, also some under-the-hood changes coming.
Right now, leveling up a new alt means that hitting 110 is only sort of the point at which you can set them down and pick them up when you're ready to gear them. You still need to unlock World Quests, which requires doing a few quest chains in Suramar. And if you want to run either of Suramar's mythic-only dungeons, you'll need to do a fairly significant portion of the Nightfallen quest chain in order to unlock them.
In 7.1, these things are changing - but only for alts.
If you have unlocked World Quests on any character (which, unless you just started playing through the expansion, you probably have,) your new 110 characters will be able to immediately go to Khadgar and grab a Flight Master Whistle and start doing those world quests.
Similarly, the Arcway and Court of Stars dungeons will now be unlocked for your entire account once you have beaten the dungeons on any character. So while you will still have to get through the quests up to that point (and unlike World Quests, I imagine there are a fair number of people who have not yet done so) on your main character, subsequent ones will be able to run them as long as you've beaten them on the character who unlocked them in the first place.
Right now, leveling up a new alt means that hitting 110 is only sort of the point at which you can set them down and pick them up when you're ready to gear them. You still need to unlock World Quests, which requires doing a few quest chains in Suramar. And if you want to run either of Suramar's mythic-only dungeons, you'll need to do a fairly significant portion of the Nightfallen quest chain in order to unlock them.
In 7.1, these things are changing - but only for alts.
If you have unlocked World Quests on any character (which, unless you just started playing through the expansion, you probably have,) your new 110 characters will be able to immediately go to Khadgar and grab a Flight Master Whistle and start doing those world quests.
Similarly, the Arcway and Court of Stars dungeons will now be unlocked for your entire account once you have beaten the dungeons on any character. So while you will still have to get through the quests up to that point (and unlike World Quests, I imagine there are a fair number of people who have not yet done so) on your main character, subsequent ones will be able to run them as long as you've beaten them on the character who unlocked them in the first place.
Wednesday, October 5, 2016
State of the Old Gods
I know, I know, we finally get an expansion that gives the Legion top billing and all I want to do is talk about the Old Gods.
Still, as I mentioned in an earlier post, there are a lot of hints that while the Legion invasion is the biggest thing happening in Azeroth right now, the Legion itself might be subject to the manipulation of the Old Gods, who could be using it as a long-con to get us, the heroes of Azeroth, to unwittingly set them free.
But what freedom can these monstrosities have? What exactly is going on with them?
There have been four Old Gods on Azeroth, and while I wouldn't say Blizzard can't introduce a new one, the number seems pretty much set. We do know that there are Old Gods that have existed on other planets, and these presumably have their own qualities and identities. But on Azeroth, it appears there have only ever been four.
C'thun:
The first Old God to be named in-game and the first one we've been able to face, C'thun managed to corrupt members of the Anubisath and Tol'vir races (though apparently without infecting them with the Curse of Flesh) and used them along with his own Qiraji (whom he pretty much created whole cloth, I think, or at least their Aqir ancestors) to transform Ahn'Qiraj, originally a Titan installation meant to serve as his prison, into the capital of his own evil empire. Ahn'Qiraj was sealed away by the Bronze Dragonflight after the War of the Shifting Sands a thousand years ago (yes, there are things that happened between the War of the Ancients and the oddly-titled First War!)
When the Qiraji tried to launch another war (somehow breaking through the seal... but then we had to open the seal... look, I wasn't playing yet at that point) the heroes of Azeroth banded together to war against the Qiraji and took the fight into Ahn'Qiraj, ultimately slaying C'thun.
But Old Gods are enormous, and the thing that we fought may have been an important part of the creature, it seems highly unlikely that C'thun was truly killed.
In fact, we know that something of C'thun remained, because later, Cho'gall would travel to Ahn'Qiraj and be "blessed" by C'thun, growing eyes all over his body and a cephalopod-like beak on one of his heads. Some would even begin to call him "Cho'thun." We would then slay Cho'gall in the Bastion of Twilight.
Here's the question: was this simply a blessing from the Old God, or did Cho'gall actually take on the essence of C'thun? By killing Cho'gall, did we also permanently kill C'thun? Or does C'thun remain beneath southern Kalimdor, perhaps having lost (maybe temporarily) the ability to commune with his Qiraji subjects within the Temple, but still very much alive and a threat?
Yogg-Saron:
Yogg-Saron's prison also happened to be the main headquarters of the Keepers on Azeroth, which maybe was not a great plan, actually. After Odyn left in a huff because the Keepers wanted to empower dragons (evolved from organic life that itself evolved from native elementals) rather than a Titanforged race like the Vrykul to serve as Azeroth's greatest protectors, Loken was left in charge of Ulduar. And after he had an affair with Thorim's wife Sif and then accidentally (maybe accidentally) killed her when she wanted to break the affair off, his paranoia in covering up the murder made it easy for Yogg-Saron to get into his head and make him do a bunch of awful things, including programing the Curse of Flesh into the Forge of Wills.
Indeed, Yogg-Saron's machinations on Azeroth might be the most impactful of all the Old Gods. Not only did he effectively create the Curse of Flesh, but he also created the Emerald Nightmare after well-intentioned Druids planted Vordrassil in Grizzly Hills unaware that its roots would connect with the Old God's own tendrils.
After taking over Loken's mind, Yogg-Saron pretty much manipulated him into giving him control of Ulduar for countless years.
So what about now?
Well, we of course went into Ulduar and fought him. And in theory, we killed him.
Here's why I'm more convinced that Yogg-Saron is dead-dead than C'thun. When fighting C'thun, you kill him by entering what appears to be his stomach (probably one of many) and disabling his damage immunities from the inside. A stomach is certainly important, but it's something that you could theoretically live without, especially if you're an incredibly-hard-to-kill Lovecraftian monstrosity.
When we fight Yogg-Saron, we enter his brain. It is by attacking his brain that we are able to finally slay him, and that suggest to me that if Yogg-Saron is still alive in any way, he could very well be brain-dead - essentially just a mass of flesh that yes, probably radiates dangerous void magic, but is incapable of true intentional menace.
On the other hand, that may have been one nerve cluster among many. Still, I'm guessing that Yogg-Saron is far less likely to recover from our fight with him than C'thun is.
Y'Shaarj:
Y'Shaarj was apparently the most powerful of the Old Gods during the days of the Black Empire, but he's also the one that is absolutely explicitly dead. Aman'thul didn't pluck something the size of the things we fought in AQ40 and Ulduar out of the crust of Azeroth. It's implied he really grabbed the whole body, even the tendrils digging down toward the World-Soul, and pulled him out, root and stem.
So Y'Shaarj (it bugs me a little that it's pronounced "Yah-sha-raj" but oh well) is dead as dead can be. During Mists of Pandaria, the implication seemed to be that the reason the Titans then decided this had been a bad idea was that Y'Shaarj created the Sha with his dying breath, and that perhaps killing an Old God would result in such a curse.
Later, in Chronicle, we found out that while this was certainly a bad thing, the biggest problem was that pulling Y'Shaarj out created a gaping wound in the planet (the Well of Eternity) that threatened the life of the World Soul.
As far as we know, there were only really two remnants of Y'Shaarj. The Sha were, in a sense, more like a permanent spell effect of his - they were separate enough from the Old God himself that the Klaaxi - who still absolutely worshipped the Old Gods - still found their effect on the Empress to be anathema.
The other remnant was the Heart of Y'Shaarj - literally the monstrosity's heart, which was sealed away by the Titanforged for safe keeping, and was used by Garrosh Hellscream as a weapon against his foes.
I believe that the official story is that when Garrosh bled the remaining power out of the Heart, and we defeated him nonetheless, the very last of Y'Shaarj's essence was purged. In fact, lorewise, the Sha might not even exist anymore. Even if they still do, the Heart and the corruption it inflicted on the Vale of Eternal Blossoms are both definitely on their way out.
Returning to C'thun, the reason I speculated that killing Cho'gall while he was carrying the essence of C'thun might mean the permanent end of C'thun is that we basically did that with Garrosh. Garrosh of course took the power of the Heart by force, and it didn't seem to have a real influence on him (he was pretty evil, but I think that's just because he was a fascist asshole, not any supernatural corruption,) while Cho'gall was utterly devoted to the Old Gods. Still, if the mechanics were basically the same, C'thun might be gone gone.
N'Zoth:
So now we come to N'Zoth. Interestingly, three expansions in a row we got a new Old God named for us. But while we fought Yogg-Saron and Y'Shaarj's influence was felt throughout Mists of Pandaria, N'Zoth was never more than a background influence.
N'Zoth was first talked about I believe in the Dragon Soul raid (I could be wrong about that, but it was definitely in Catalcysm.) N'Zoth seemed personally invested in Deathwing's plan for destruction. The second and third bosses of Dragon Soul were some of N'Zoth's top minions.
While there was some implication that Yogg-Saron had been the one to corrupt Deathwing, N'Zoth may have been the primary force driving him instead.
N'Zoth also seems to have a strong tie to the Emerald Nightmare. While we know that Yogg-Saron is the one who created it, N'Zoth clearly has a great presence within it. When defeating Il'gynoth, which appears to be the purest manifestation of the Nightmare's corruption, he/it/whatever says "N'Zoth, I go to Ny'alotha."
Ny'alotha has been mentioned before by the Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron - a toy gained through archaeology that is basically a lore-speculation-fodder-generator.
The Puzzle Box implies that Ny'alotha is probably under the ocean, and is most likely where N'Zoth is imprisoned.
When Whispers of the Old Gods was released for Hearthtstone, we actually got our first look at both N'Zoth and Y'Shaarj. The latter looked fairly similar to the Sha he spawned. N'Zoth looks a lot like a giant kraken - meaning that beings like Ozumat and all those other evil cephalopods you find in Vashjir are probably his creation.
In fact, toward the end of the Vashj'ir quests, you find that the massive L'ghorek is being corrupted by these massive tentacles reaching up into its shell. These things are so huge that kind of can't imagine they're anyone's but N'Zoth's.
Clearly we haven't interacted directly with N'Zoth, so it's most likely that he's still around. In fact, in a way, N'Zoth might be the last Old God standing, which could potentially give him a lot of power (by the way, I'm saying "him" but I should really be saying "it.")
Ny'alotha could be a titan facility meant to keep him trapped, though I'd guess that, much like Ahn'Qiraj and Ulduar, he's probably running the show there by this point.
If the tentacles attempting to corrupt L'ghorek are actually his, then that would place N'Zoth and by association Ny'alotha somewhere in the Great Sea, probably to the east.
Unfortunately I lent my copy of Chronicle to a friend, so I can't check where exactly his territory was during the Black Empire, but I'm pretty sure that it includes, well, the area that we now call the Broken Isles.
I feel pretty confident that between the Nightmare, the presence of Neltharion's Lair (which is probably where he started to get corrupted into Deathwing,) and the evidence that the Legion's invasion might be part of an Old God plot, N'Zoth is doing some serious behind-the-scenes shenanigans.
Still, as I mentioned in an earlier post, there are a lot of hints that while the Legion invasion is the biggest thing happening in Azeroth right now, the Legion itself might be subject to the manipulation of the Old Gods, who could be using it as a long-con to get us, the heroes of Azeroth, to unwittingly set them free.
But what freedom can these monstrosities have? What exactly is going on with them?
There have been four Old Gods on Azeroth, and while I wouldn't say Blizzard can't introduce a new one, the number seems pretty much set. We do know that there are Old Gods that have existed on other planets, and these presumably have their own qualities and identities. But on Azeroth, it appears there have only ever been four.
C'thun:
The first Old God to be named in-game and the first one we've been able to face, C'thun managed to corrupt members of the Anubisath and Tol'vir races (though apparently without infecting them with the Curse of Flesh) and used them along with his own Qiraji (whom he pretty much created whole cloth, I think, or at least their Aqir ancestors) to transform Ahn'Qiraj, originally a Titan installation meant to serve as his prison, into the capital of his own evil empire. Ahn'Qiraj was sealed away by the Bronze Dragonflight after the War of the Shifting Sands a thousand years ago (yes, there are things that happened between the War of the Ancients and the oddly-titled First War!)
When the Qiraji tried to launch another war (somehow breaking through the seal... but then we had to open the seal... look, I wasn't playing yet at that point) the heroes of Azeroth banded together to war against the Qiraji and took the fight into Ahn'Qiraj, ultimately slaying C'thun.
But Old Gods are enormous, and the thing that we fought may have been an important part of the creature, it seems highly unlikely that C'thun was truly killed.
In fact, we know that something of C'thun remained, because later, Cho'gall would travel to Ahn'Qiraj and be "blessed" by C'thun, growing eyes all over his body and a cephalopod-like beak on one of his heads. Some would even begin to call him "Cho'thun." We would then slay Cho'gall in the Bastion of Twilight.
Here's the question: was this simply a blessing from the Old God, or did Cho'gall actually take on the essence of C'thun? By killing Cho'gall, did we also permanently kill C'thun? Or does C'thun remain beneath southern Kalimdor, perhaps having lost (maybe temporarily) the ability to commune with his Qiraji subjects within the Temple, but still very much alive and a threat?
Yogg-Saron:
Yogg-Saron's prison also happened to be the main headquarters of the Keepers on Azeroth, which maybe was not a great plan, actually. After Odyn left in a huff because the Keepers wanted to empower dragons (evolved from organic life that itself evolved from native elementals) rather than a Titanforged race like the Vrykul to serve as Azeroth's greatest protectors, Loken was left in charge of Ulduar. And after he had an affair with Thorim's wife Sif and then accidentally (maybe accidentally) killed her when she wanted to break the affair off, his paranoia in covering up the murder made it easy for Yogg-Saron to get into his head and make him do a bunch of awful things, including programing the Curse of Flesh into the Forge of Wills.
Indeed, Yogg-Saron's machinations on Azeroth might be the most impactful of all the Old Gods. Not only did he effectively create the Curse of Flesh, but he also created the Emerald Nightmare after well-intentioned Druids planted Vordrassil in Grizzly Hills unaware that its roots would connect with the Old God's own tendrils.
After taking over Loken's mind, Yogg-Saron pretty much manipulated him into giving him control of Ulduar for countless years.
So what about now?
Well, we of course went into Ulduar and fought him. And in theory, we killed him.
Here's why I'm more convinced that Yogg-Saron is dead-dead than C'thun. When fighting C'thun, you kill him by entering what appears to be his stomach (probably one of many) and disabling his damage immunities from the inside. A stomach is certainly important, but it's something that you could theoretically live without, especially if you're an incredibly-hard-to-kill Lovecraftian monstrosity.
When we fight Yogg-Saron, we enter his brain. It is by attacking his brain that we are able to finally slay him, and that suggest to me that if Yogg-Saron is still alive in any way, he could very well be brain-dead - essentially just a mass of flesh that yes, probably radiates dangerous void magic, but is incapable of true intentional menace.
On the other hand, that may have been one nerve cluster among many. Still, I'm guessing that Yogg-Saron is far less likely to recover from our fight with him than C'thun is.
Y'Shaarj:
Y'Shaarj was apparently the most powerful of the Old Gods during the days of the Black Empire, but he's also the one that is absolutely explicitly dead. Aman'thul didn't pluck something the size of the things we fought in AQ40 and Ulduar out of the crust of Azeroth. It's implied he really grabbed the whole body, even the tendrils digging down toward the World-Soul, and pulled him out, root and stem.
So Y'Shaarj (it bugs me a little that it's pronounced "Yah-sha-raj" but oh well) is dead as dead can be. During Mists of Pandaria, the implication seemed to be that the reason the Titans then decided this had been a bad idea was that Y'Shaarj created the Sha with his dying breath, and that perhaps killing an Old God would result in such a curse.
Later, in Chronicle, we found out that while this was certainly a bad thing, the biggest problem was that pulling Y'Shaarj out created a gaping wound in the planet (the Well of Eternity) that threatened the life of the World Soul.
As far as we know, there were only really two remnants of Y'Shaarj. The Sha were, in a sense, more like a permanent spell effect of his - they were separate enough from the Old God himself that the Klaaxi - who still absolutely worshipped the Old Gods - still found their effect on the Empress to be anathema.
The other remnant was the Heart of Y'Shaarj - literally the monstrosity's heart, which was sealed away by the Titanforged for safe keeping, and was used by Garrosh Hellscream as a weapon against his foes.
I believe that the official story is that when Garrosh bled the remaining power out of the Heart, and we defeated him nonetheless, the very last of Y'Shaarj's essence was purged. In fact, lorewise, the Sha might not even exist anymore. Even if they still do, the Heart and the corruption it inflicted on the Vale of Eternal Blossoms are both definitely on their way out.
Returning to C'thun, the reason I speculated that killing Cho'gall while he was carrying the essence of C'thun might mean the permanent end of C'thun is that we basically did that with Garrosh. Garrosh of course took the power of the Heart by force, and it didn't seem to have a real influence on him (he was pretty evil, but I think that's just because he was a fascist asshole, not any supernatural corruption,) while Cho'gall was utterly devoted to the Old Gods. Still, if the mechanics were basically the same, C'thun might be gone gone.
N'Zoth:
So now we come to N'Zoth. Interestingly, three expansions in a row we got a new Old God named for us. But while we fought Yogg-Saron and Y'Shaarj's influence was felt throughout Mists of Pandaria, N'Zoth was never more than a background influence.
N'Zoth was first talked about I believe in the Dragon Soul raid (I could be wrong about that, but it was definitely in Catalcysm.) N'Zoth seemed personally invested in Deathwing's plan for destruction. The second and third bosses of Dragon Soul were some of N'Zoth's top minions.
While there was some implication that Yogg-Saron had been the one to corrupt Deathwing, N'Zoth may have been the primary force driving him instead.
N'Zoth also seems to have a strong tie to the Emerald Nightmare. While we know that Yogg-Saron is the one who created it, N'Zoth clearly has a great presence within it. When defeating Il'gynoth, which appears to be the purest manifestation of the Nightmare's corruption, he/it/whatever says "N'Zoth, I go to Ny'alotha."
Ny'alotha has been mentioned before by the Puzzle Box of Yogg-Saron - a toy gained through archaeology that is basically a lore-speculation-fodder-generator.
The Puzzle Box implies that Ny'alotha is probably under the ocean, and is most likely where N'Zoth is imprisoned.
When Whispers of the Old Gods was released for Hearthtstone, we actually got our first look at both N'Zoth and Y'Shaarj. The latter looked fairly similar to the Sha he spawned. N'Zoth looks a lot like a giant kraken - meaning that beings like Ozumat and all those other evil cephalopods you find in Vashjir are probably his creation.
In fact, toward the end of the Vashj'ir quests, you find that the massive L'ghorek is being corrupted by these massive tentacles reaching up into its shell. These things are so huge that kind of can't imagine they're anyone's but N'Zoth's.
Clearly we haven't interacted directly with N'Zoth, so it's most likely that he's still around. In fact, in a way, N'Zoth might be the last Old God standing, which could potentially give him a lot of power (by the way, I'm saying "him" but I should really be saying "it.")
Ny'alotha could be a titan facility meant to keep him trapped, though I'd guess that, much like Ahn'Qiraj and Ulduar, he's probably running the show there by this point.
If the tentacles attempting to corrupt L'ghorek are actually his, then that would place N'Zoth and by association Ny'alotha somewhere in the Great Sea, probably to the east.
Unfortunately I lent my copy of Chronicle to a friend, so I can't check where exactly his territory was during the Black Empire, but I'm pretty sure that it includes, well, the area that we now call the Broken Isles.
I feel pretty confident that between the Nightmare, the presence of Neltharion's Lair (which is probably where he started to get corrupted into Deathwing,) and the evidence that the Legion's invasion might be part of an Old God plot, N'Zoth is doing some serious behind-the-scenes shenanigans.
Tuesday, October 4, 2016
The Tormented Guardians - Emerald Nightmare Wing Two (Update: Completed)
I got in on the Dragons of Nightmare, meaning that I missed Ursoc and thus don't have a rundown of him yet. Once I do (I probably won't bother running it again this week on my main as the gear is all at least 5 points lower than everything he's got) I'll edit this post and put in stuff about him.
Update: I was able to clear the full wing on my Death Knight (and even got an 845 relic for my axe!) so now I can go over the full wing.
Ursoc:
Ursoc is one of these bosses that has two debuffs, a bit like Gruul in Blackrock Foundry or Nalorakk in the original Zul'aman (yeah, that's an old reference.)
I think it's more or less a damage race - not sure there's much for DPS to worry about, but I'll have to run it on a DPS character to know.
Tanks will get debuffed by Overwhelm and Rend Flesh - the former increases damage taken by the latter and I believe stacks up. In theory (and I'm sure on Normal and higher difficulties) you'll need to ensure that one tank is taking Rend Flesh (which is a bleed) while the other is getting the Overwhelms (and possibly swapping who gets it when Overwhelm stacks up high, as I think it also increases its own damage but by a much smaller amount.)
Still, this is a "stand your ground" kind of boss, at least on LFR, so it's fairly simple.
Dragons of Nightmare:
This fight will remind you of the Four Horsemen if you ever did it in Wrath's Naxxramas (I'm given to understand you actually needed eight tanks in the original Naxxramas, which is pretty insane.)
The main crux of the fight is that each dragon will radiate an aura that causes a stacking debuff. If this hits 10, you'll be stunned for I believe 30 seconds, which means you're probably going to be dead.
While my co-tank preferred to move to the dragons rather than dragging the dragons across the room, I imagine the better strategy would be to have each tank stay in place and taunt the other dragon (well, they'll have to move to get in range.)
Basically, you want to have every raid member and dragon on one side of the room or the other so that no one is getting stacks of the debuffs from two dragons. If you taunt on 6 stacks, you'll have time for the other dragon's stacks to fall off without paying much of a penalty.
The big wrinkle, however, is that while I believe Ysondre will always be down, the other three dragons will rotate - so if you're currently on Ysondre, you can't simply taunt the other tank's dragon when it's time to switch.
The individual abilities of the dragons escape me, as I was more focused on this, but I'm sure I'll have more thoughts on this once I take a DPS character in.
Cenarius:
Cenarius is a two-phase encounter, with phase two starting at I want to say 40% or 30%.
During phase one, you can actually just have one tank on the boss while the other gathers adds. I happened to be on the boss, but generally I think you want to keep the adds off the boss, as they might buff or heal him.
Everyone will get a stacking debuff that increases damage taken by the adds (I believe they do some AoE moves so that's a concern for everyone.) Periodically, Malfurion will purify a patch of ground and an add, which will allow them to aid you in the fight as well as creating a big green patch. Stepping inside this will reset all your stacks of the big debuff, but it will also diminish the size of the patch, eventually causing it to disappear.
Update: If you're tanking the adds on phase one, there are a few kinds you'll get - dragons, dryads, and ancients. Malfurion will purify one of these (I can't recall how one chooses for him) but the other two need to be picked up. The dragon has a breath attack, so you should point him away from the raid. The ancient has an AoE stomp and the dryads have a spell that should be interrupted (you get two at a time, I believe.) There might also be a fourth kind of add, which is a group of wisps, but I think the one time we got them when I was tanking adds we purified them, so I don't know what they do.
On phase two, I believe the adds stop spawning, but now Cenarius will start hitting the tank with a powerful spear attack that leaves a debuff. On higher difficulties I think this creates a need for quick taunt-swapping, but on LFR I was able to handle a few stacks while my co-tank finished off an add from phase one.
Defeating Cenarius will open up the way into the Rift of Aln, but that wing isn't open yet, so you'll have to wait until... next week? Honestly I was surprised that this one was open already, as I figured we'd get it two weeks after wing one.
Overall I'm really liking the Emerald Nightmare raid. LFR's low gear rewards (though clearly they can warforge or titanforge into more attractive pieces for those of us who have mythic dungeon gear) and the lack of any long legendary quest grind means I'm somewhat less incentivized to ensure I do a full clear each week, but it does make me eager to bring in lower-geared alts and definitely to get my guild running this on Normal.
Update: I was able to clear the full wing on my Death Knight (and even got an 845 relic for my axe!) so now I can go over the full wing.
Ursoc:
Ursoc is one of these bosses that has two debuffs, a bit like Gruul in Blackrock Foundry or Nalorakk in the original Zul'aman (yeah, that's an old reference.)
I think it's more or less a damage race - not sure there's much for DPS to worry about, but I'll have to run it on a DPS character to know.
Tanks will get debuffed by Overwhelm and Rend Flesh - the former increases damage taken by the latter and I believe stacks up. In theory (and I'm sure on Normal and higher difficulties) you'll need to ensure that one tank is taking Rend Flesh (which is a bleed) while the other is getting the Overwhelms (and possibly swapping who gets it when Overwhelm stacks up high, as I think it also increases its own damage but by a much smaller amount.)
Still, this is a "stand your ground" kind of boss, at least on LFR, so it's fairly simple.
Dragons of Nightmare:
This fight will remind you of the Four Horsemen if you ever did it in Wrath's Naxxramas (I'm given to understand you actually needed eight tanks in the original Naxxramas, which is pretty insane.)
The main crux of the fight is that each dragon will radiate an aura that causes a stacking debuff. If this hits 10, you'll be stunned for I believe 30 seconds, which means you're probably going to be dead.
While my co-tank preferred to move to the dragons rather than dragging the dragons across the room, I imagine the better strategy would be to have each tank stay in place and taunt the other dragon (well, they'll have to move to get in range.)
Basically, you want to have every raid member and dragon on one side of the room or the other so that no one is getting stacks of the debuffs from two dragons. If you taunt on 6 stacks, you'll have time for the other dragon's stacks to fall off without paying much of a penalty.
The big wrinkle, however, is that while I believe Ysondre will always be down, the other three dragons will rotate - so if you're currently on Ysondre, you can't simply taunt the other tank's dragon when it's time to switch.
The individual abilities of the dragons escape me, as I was more focused on this, but I'm sure I'll have more thoughts on this once I take a DPS character in.
Cenarius:
Cenarius is a two-phase encounter, with phase two starting at I want to say 40% or 30%.
During phase one, you can actually just have one tank on the boss while the other gathers adds. I happened to be on the boss, but generally I think you want to keep the adds off the boss, as they might buff or heal him.
Everyone will get a stacking debuff that increases damage taken by the adds (I believe they do some AoE moves so that's a concern for everyone.) Periodically, Malfurion will purify a patch of ground and an add, which will allow them to aid you in the fight as well as creating a big green patch. Stepping inside this will reset all your stacks of the big debuff, but it will also diminish the size of the patch, eventually causing it to disappear.
Update: If you're tanking the adds on phase one, there are a few kinds you'll get - dragons, dryads, and ancients. Malfurion will purify one of these (I can't recall how one chooses for him) but the other two need to be picked up. The dragon has a breath attack, so you should point him away from the raid. The ancient has an AoE stomp and the dryads have a spell that should be interrupted (you get two at a time, I believe.) There might also be a fourth kind of add, which is a group of wisps, but I think the one time we got them when I was tanking adds we purified them, so I don't know what they do.
On phase two, I believe the adds stop spawning, but now Cenarius will start hitting the tank with a powerful spear attack that leaves a debuff. On higher difficulties I think this creates a need for quick taunt-swapping, but on LFR I was able to handle a few stacks while my co-tank finished off an add from phase one.
Defeating Cenarius will open up the way into the Rift of Aln, but that wing isn't open yet, so you'll have to wait until... next week? Honestly I was surprised that this one was open already, as I figured we'd get it two weeks after wing one.
Overall I'm really liking the Emerald Nightmare raid. LFR's low gear rewards (though clearly they can warforge or titanforge into more attractive pieces for those of us who have mythic dungeon gear) and the lack of any long legendary quest grind means I'm somewhat less incentivized to ensure I do a full clear each week, but it does make me eager to bring in lower-geared alts and definitely to get my guild running this on Normal.
Return to Karazhan Looks Like a 5-Player Raid
Fatboss.tv, which has become a great source for previews of new WoW content, put up a video talking about their first run of Return to Karazhan on the PTR.
Here it is, if you want to watch:
Karazhan is the first raid I ever ran - though I only did so twice and got stuck at the Curator both times. Still, I have a lot of nostalgia for that place and was incredibly excited to find out that they were bringing it back (without getting rid of the original version) in Legion.
Blizzard is clearly experimenting a lot with dungeons this time around - Arcway and Court of Stars are both pretty unconventional, and the whole Mythic+ system is an attempt to find a new way to keep dungeons relevant throughout the expansion (my only problem with the system is that it's based on time limits.)
Return to Karazhan is a clear example of this experimentation. Or, one could argue that it's a throwback to something we really haven't seen since vanilla, namely a super-long dungeon (ok, you could argue that Halls of Origination in Cataclysm was the most recent example, but that felt a bit different because bosses 4-7 were all doable in quick succession.)
Return to Karazhan bears similarities with the original raid, but this is clearly not a simple rehash. For one thing, one enters from around the middle of the tower, and the first boss is the Opera Event, with three all-new plays to fight through. Players will clear the lower part of the tower, ending I believe with Moroes, before heading up to face the Curator. After the Curator, things become very different. You'll walk along the ceilings of the library and fight all new bosses. One stand-out example is the Mana Devourer, which is actually a little trash mob, but you've been shrunken down to a tiny size, making it a boss-like challenge. Beating it will restore you to your correct size and allow you to easily AoE down a big pack of Mana Devourers in a kind of cathartic revenge.
The dungeon appears to be filled with secrets, including heavy implications that Nightbane returns as a secret boss. It also appears as if a run will take a couple hours - unlike most modern dungeons which tend to be about a half hour unless you screw up a lot (actually, I'm not sure about that. I'd bet Vault of the Wardens takes a bit more time.)
The length does, I think, imply that pugging this dungeon is probably not a great idea unless you have the patience of a saint. On the other hand, for smaller guilds (or guilds with only a few members who sign up for things...) could look at Karazhan as a place to progress through - treating it like a raid.
I don't think we know what the rewards are going to be for the dungeon. Blizzard has implied that because it is a bigger challenge (and certainly time investment) than other dungeons, that they are willing to make the rewards more attractive. I wouldn't be shocked to see the gear out of here on par with Normal Emerald Nightmare (which to be fair is only ten item levels above 7.0 mythic dungeons.)
I do hope that the gear uses different models than the generic dungeon gear currently available - new stuff would be appreciated of course, but they could easily just use the models from the original Karazhan.
No word yet on when 7.1 comes out, but I'd bet some time before the end of the year.
Here it is, if you want to watch:
Karazhan is the first raid I ever ran - though I only did so twice and got stuck at the Curator both times. Still, I have a lot of nostalgia for that place and was incredibly excited to find out that they were bringing it back (without getting rid of the original version) in Legion.
Blizzard is clearly experimenting a lot with dungeons this time around - Arcway and Court of Stars are both pretty unconventional, and the whole Mythic+ system is an attempt to find a new way to keep dungeons relevant throughout the expansion (my only problem with the system is that it's based on time limits.)
Return to Karazhan is a clear example of this experimentation. Or, one could argue that it's a throwback to something we really haven't seen since vanilla, namely a super-long dungeon (ok, you could argue that Halls of Origination in Cataclysm was the most recent example, but that felt a bit different because bosses 4-7 were all doable in quick succession.)
Return to Karazhan bears similarities with the original raid, but this is clearly not a simple rehash. For one thing, one enters from around the middle of the tower, and the first boss is the Opera Event, with three all-new plays to fight through. Players will clear the lower part of the tower, ending I believe with Moroes, before heading up to face the Curator. After the Curator, things become very different. You'll walk along the ceilings of the library and fight all new bosses. One stand-out example is the Mana Devourer, which is actually a little trash mob, but you've been shrunken down to a tiny size, making it a boss-like challenge. Beating it will restore you to your correct size and allow you to easily AoE down a big pack of Mana Devourers in a kind of cathartic revenge.
The dungeon appears to be filled with secrets, including heavy implications that Nightbane returns as a secret boss. It also appears as if a run will take a couple hours - unlike most modern dungeons which tend to be about a half hour unless you screw up a lot (actually, I'm not sure about that. I'd bet Vault of the Wardens takes a bit more time.)
The length does, I think, imply that pugging this dungeon is probably not a great idea unless you have the patience of a saint. On the other hand, for smaller guilds (or guilds with only a few members who sign up for things...) could look at Karazhan as a place to progress through - treating it like a raid.
I don't think we know what the rewards are going to be for the dungeon. Blizzard has implied that because it is a bigger challenge (and certainly time investment) than other dungeons, that they are willing to make the rewards more attractive. I wouldn't be shocked to see the gear out of here on par with Normal Emerald Nightmare (which to be fair is only ten item levels above 7.0 mythic dungeons.)
I do hope that the gear uses different models than the generic dungeon gear currently available - new stuff would be appreciated of course, but they could easily just use the models from the original Karazhan.
No word yet on when 7.1 comes out, but I'd bet some time before the end of the year.
Monday, October 3, 2016
The Nature of the Nightwell
Wells are a common motif in Warcraft. The Well of Eternity transformed the Dark Trolls and Yaungol into the Night Elves and Tauren, respectively, and while that Well was destroyed ten thousand years ago, its waters allowed the creation of other incredibly powerful wells, and its remains, the Maelstrom, are still an important part of Azeroth's landscape.
Not only that, but the Night Elves use sacred Moonwells that empower them with some sort of mix of arcane and holy magic.
So it should perhaps not be so surprising that Suramar City has a magical well at its heart that drives its society.
Suramar is not some unknown quantity invented for the sake of the Legion expansion. We've known for years that Illidan and Malfurion were born there (though that's a little like saying I grew up in Boston - technically, the Stormrage brothers and I grew up in the suburbs) and that it was one of the key cities in the ancient Night Elf empire (something I hadn't quite grasped is that Azshara the zone is actually the remnant of Zin-Azshari, which was the capital of the empire.)
Actually, Suramar was described as being just across the Well of Eternity from Zin-Azshari, which does leave some oddities in the game lore. The Well we saw in the Well of Eternity dungeon cannot possibly be large enough - on the maps of old Kalimdor, the Well was the size of a fairly large in-land sea, and we sure as hell couldn't see Suramar from Azshara's palace in that dungeon.
The other implication is that, rather than most of Old Kalimdor sinking beneath the waves, instead it really does appear that the continents and islands moved very quickly away from each other. The Broken Isles are much closer to the Eastern Kingdoms and Northrend than they are to the continent we now call Kalimdor.
If we accept that you could see Suramar from Zin-Azshari, that would imply that the zone of Azshara and the Broken Isles were once right next to each other, huddled around what is now the Maelstrom.
(Also, I assumed that Nazj'atar was built out of the sunken ruins of Zin-Azshari. Granted, maybe in the continental shift during the Sundering the city was kind of strewn out over a long span, with part of it in modern-day Azshara and part under the ocean.)
Setting this issue aside, let's talk about the Nightwell.
If Suramar, like Zin-Azshari, was really right on the Well of Eternity, it actually seems like the Nightwell would be very closely related to it.
Before Malfurion could detonate the Well and enact the Sundering, Illidan collected seven vials of water from the Well of Eternity. He gave one of these to Dath'remar Sunstrider, who brought it to the Eastern Kingdoms and used it to create the Sunwell on the Isle of Quel'danas. This font of arcane magic fed the people who would become the High Elves for ten thousand years, until the Sunwell was corrupted by Arthas in order to resurrect Kel'thuzad as a Lich. Later, Velen used the spark of the Naaru M'uru to reignite it, now as a font of both Holy and Arcane magic, allowing the Blood Elves to be have their magical addiction sated in a more wholesome manner.
Illidan used another vial to create a well at the top of Mount Hyjal, and in order to contain the magic there (lest it cause a second Sundering,) Malfurion, the Ancients, and the Bronze, Green, and Red dragonflights planted Nordrassil over it, allowing the World Tree to soak in the waters and stabilize it.
Two of the other vials were given to Vashj and Kael'thas much later (players used to have to gather these as part of the attunement quest to get to Black Temple, or maybe the Hyjal raid - I wasn't a raider back then so the only attunement I did was for Karazhan.)
So one might be tempted to think that the Nightwell was created with another one of these vials.
But this doesn't quite add up. The Sundering marked the end of the War of the Ancients, and it was only right before that point that Illidan gathered his vials. Suramar locked itself away before that point. Had the war been won already at that point, it's unlikely that Elisande and her followers would have made such a drastic move.
So we can probably conclude that the Well of Eternity and the Nightwell coexisted for some period of time.
The Nightwell is clearly not as powerful as the Well of Eternity - even the World Tree on Mount Hyjal is not as potent as source of power. But we know where these other wells come from - Illidan, basically.
I suppose it's possible that Illidan might have created the Nightwell as well. He was the leader of the Moonguard, whose headquarters are right outside Suramar City, and given his fascination with the power of the arcane, I wouldn't put it past him to have been experimenting with creating other Wells before the War of the Ancients.
In all honesty, that's probably the easiest explanation - Illidan was from Suramar and so it would make sense for him to want to help out his hometown by giving them a font of incredible power.
But let's consider different possibilities:
The Vale of Eternal Blossoms in Pandaria has been compared with Un'goro Crater and Sholazar Basin as a kind of Titan petri dish for experimenting with life. The Jinyu, for example, are actually Murlocs who underwent a similar transformation that the Dark Trolls and Yaungol went through, only instead of the Well of Eternity, they were transformed by the waters of the Vale. I believe pretty strongly that the Pandaren are in the same category, probably descended from Furbolgs who were empowered by the waters of the Vale.
But the waters of the Vale are something very different from the Well of Eternity.
In Chronicle, we find out that the Well of Eternity is actually a gaping wound in the nascent Titan Azeroth. As the Titanforged were warring against the Black Empire of the Old Gods, Aman'thul grew so worried for his creations that he physically reached down and tore the Old God Y'Shaarj out of Azeroth's surface. This did kill the Old God, but it damaged Azeroth so much that the Titans concluded they could not do the same with the remaining three Old Gods.
As Titans are beings of Arcane magic, the blood of Azeroth was an incredibly potent magical water.
Later, Sargeras would war against the rest of the Pantheon over their refusal to let him destroy Azeroth (he believed it was the only way to spare the universe from an Old-God-corrupted Titan.) Sargeras killed his fellow Titans, but not before they could send their spirits and memories to live on in the Keepers of Azeroth. Each Titan sent their essence into one or two keepers, and one of the Keepers to receive the spirit of Aman'thul was Ra-Den. Unlike the other Keepers, who were unable to make sense of the strange images and power with which they had been imbued, Ra-Den understood that their gods had been slain. Unable to bear the weight of that knowledge, he extracted Aman'thul's power from himself and poured it into the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, creating the magical waters there.
This all happened well before the War of the Ancients.
Could it be, then, that the Nightwell is not actually related to the Well of Eternity, but is instead the essence of a different Titan?
We don't know of any other Keepers realizing the implications of the Titans' final gift (Ra-Den didnt' tell anyone and instead went and sulked in Mogu'shan Vaults for the next several thousand years, until Lei Shen showed up and stole his heart - good thing a Keeper can live without a heart,) so it seems unlikely that the Nightwell would be created by some Keeper extracting the power of whatever Titan had empowered them.
However, recently, I've speculated a bit about the nature of Elune, and this could tie into what the Nightwell is.
My potential theory is that Elune is actually a Titan who pre-dates Aman'thul and never joined the Pantheon. In this theory, Elune is in a somewhat literal sense the mother of Azeroth. She sacrificed a great deal of her own power in order to make Azeroth the most powerful Titan in existence. She diminished in size after doing so, becoming one of Azeroth's moons.
Elune is associated with the Nighttime - which makes sense, as we do the same for our real moon even though technically the moon is just as often on the "day" side of the planet as it is on the night side (more or less.)
So what if the Nightwell is not Azeroth's blood, but in fact Elune's? Perhaps it was actually created not as a source out of which to extract power from Azeroth, but rather was meant to feed power into Azeroth?
Consider this - the Burning Legion's goal is to kill Azeroth's world-soul. Even though the planet is probably billions of years old, the Titan within is still essentially a fetus. If the Nightwell is effectively Azeroth's umbilical cord (which the elves of Suramar have been able to tap into and draw off some relatively insignificant portion of the power to sustain themselves) then if the Legion had control of it, they could pump deadly Fel magic directly into the World-Soul itself.
The Legion wants the Nightwell - has the Nightwell, actually - and is highly invested in keeping it. Perhaps this is the reason why they care so much about it.
Not only that, but the Night Elves use sacred Moonwells that empower them with some sort of mix of arcane and holy magic.
So it should perhaps not be so surprising that Suramar City has a magical well at its heart that drives its society.
Suramar is not some unknown quantity invented for the sake of the Legion expansion. We've known for years that Illidan and Malfurion were born there (though that's a little like saying I grew up in Boston - technically, the Stormrage brothers and I grew up in the suburbs) and that it was one of the key cities in the ancient Night Elf empire (something I hadn't quite grasped is that Azshara the zone is actually the remnant of Zin-Azshari, which was the capital of the empire.)
Actually, Suramar was described as being just across the Well of Eternity from Zin-Azshari, which does leave some oddities in the game lore. The Well we saw in the Well of Eternity dungeon cannot possibly be large enough - on the maps of old Kalimdor, the Well was the size of a fairly large in-land sea, and we sure as hell couldn't see Suramar from Azshara's palace in that dungeon.
The other implication is that, rather than most of Old Kalimdor sinking beneath the waves, instead it really does appear that the continents and islands moved very quickly away from each other. The Broken Isles are much closer to the Eastern Kingdoms and Northrend than they are to the continent we now call Kalimdor.
If we accept that you could see Suramar from Zin-Azshari, that would imply that the zone of Azshara and the Broken Isles were once right next to each other, huddled around what is now the Maelstrom.
(Also, I assumed that Nazj'atar was built out of the sunken ruins of Zin-Azshari. Granted, maybe in the continental shift during the Sundering the city was kind of strewn out over a long span, with part of it in modern-day Azshara and part under the ocean.)
Setting this issue aside, let's talk about the Nightwell.
If Suramar, like Zin-Azshari, was really right on the Well of Eternity, it actually seems like the Nightwell would be very closely related to it.
Before Malfurion could detonate the Well and enact the Sundering, Illidan collected seven vials of water from the Well of Eternity. He gave one of these to Dath'remar Sunstrider, who brought it to the Eastern Kingdoms and used it to create the Sunwell on the Isle of Quel'danas. This font of arcane magic fed the people who would become the High Elves for ten thousand years, until the Sunwell was corrupted by Arthas in order to resurrect Kel'thuzad as a Lich. Later, Velen used the spark of the Naaru M'uru to reignite it, now as a font of both Holy and Arcane magic, allowing the Blood Elves to be have their magical addiction sated in a more wholesome manner.
Illidan used another vial to create a well at the top of Mount Hyjal, and in order to contain the magic there (lest it cause a second Sundering,) Malfurion, the Ancients, and the Bronze, Green, and Red dragonflights planted Nordrassil over it, allowing the World Tree to soak in the waters and stabilize it.
Two of the other vials were given to Vashj and Kael'thas much later (players used to have to gather these as part of the attunement quest to get to Black Temple, or maybe the Hyjal raid - I wasn't a raider back then so the only attunement I did was for Karazhan.)
So one might be tempted to think that the Nightwell was created with another one of these vials.
But this doesn't quite add up. The Sundering marked the end of the War of the Ancients, and it was only right before that point that Illidan gathered his vials. Suramar locked itself away before that point. Had the war been won already at that point, it's unlikely that Elisande and her followers would have made such a drastic move.
So we can probably conclude that the Well of Eternity and the Nightwell coexisted for some period of time.
The Nightwell is clearly not as powerful as the Well of Eternity - even the World Tree on Mount Hyjal is not as potent as source of power. But we know where these other wells come from - Illidan, basically.
I suppose it's possible that Illidan might have created the Nightwell as well. He was the leader of the Moonguard, whose headquarters are right outside Suramar City, and given his fascination with the power of the arcane, I wouldn't put it past him to have been experimenting with creating other Wells before the War of the Ancients.
In all honesty, that's probably the easiest explanation - Illidan was from Suramar and so it would make sense for him to want to help out his hometown by giving them a font of incredible power.
But let's consider different possibilities:
The Vale of Eternal Blossoms in Pandaria has been compared with Un'goro Crater and Sholazar Basin as a kind of Titan petri dish for experimenting with life. The Jinyu, for example, are actually Murlocs who underwent a similar transformation that the Dark Trolls and Yaungol went through, only instead of the Well of Eternity, they were transformed by the waters of the Vale. I believe pretty strongly that the Pandaren are in the same category, probably descended from Furbolgs who were empowered by the waters of the Vale.
But the waters of the Vale are something very different from the Well of Eternity.
In Chronicle, we find out that the Well of Eternity is actually a gaping wound in the nascent Titan Azeroth. As the Titanforged were warring against the Black Empire of the Old Gods, Aman'thul grew so worried for his creations that he physically reached down and tore the Old God Y'Shaarj out of Azeroth's surface. This did kill the Old God, but it damaged Azeroth so much that the Titans concluded they could not do the same with the remaining three Old Gods.
As Titans are beings of Arcane magic, the blood of Azeroth was an incredibly potent magical water.
Later, Sargeras would war against the rest of the Pantheon over their refusal to let him destroy Azeroth (he believed it was the only way to spare the universe from an Old-God-corrupted Titan.) Sargeras killed his fellow Titans, but not before they could send their spirits and memories to live on in the Keepers of Azeroth. Each Titan sent their essence into one or two keepers, and one of the Keepers to receive the spirit of Aman'thul was Ra-Den. Unlike the other Keepers, who were unable to make sense of the strange images and power with which they had been imbued, Ra-Den understood that their gods had been slain. Unable to bear the weight of that knowledge, he extracted Aman'thul's power from himself and poured it into the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, creating the magical waters there.
This all happened well before the War of the Ancients.
Could it be, then, that the Nightwell is not actually related to the Well of Eternity, but is instead the essence of a different Titan?
We don't know of any other Keepers realizing the implications of the Titans' final gift (Ra-Den didnt' tell anyone and instead went and sulked in Mogu'shan Vaults for the next several thousand years, until Lei Shen showed up and stole his heart - good thing a Keeper can live without a heart,) so it seems unlikely that the Nightwell would be created by some Keeper extracting the power of whatever Titan had empowered them.
However, recently, I've speculated a bit about the nature of Elune, and this could tie into what the Nightwell is.
My potential theory is that Elune is actually a Titan who pre-dates Aman'thul and never joined the Pantheon. In this theory, Elune is in a somewhat literal sense the mother of Azeroth. She sacrificed a great deal of her own power in order to make Azeroth the most powerful Titan in existence. She diminished in size after doing so, becoming one of Azeroth's moons.
Elune is associated with the Nighttime - which makes sense, as we do the same for our real moon even though technically the moon is just as often on the "day" side of the planet as it is on the night side (more or less.)
So what if the Nightwell is not Azeroth's blood, but in fact Elune's? Perhaps it was actually created not as a source out of which to extract power from Azeroth, but rather was meant to feed power into Azeroth?
Consider this - the Burning Legion's goal is to kill Azeroth's world-soul. Even though the planet is probably billions of years old, the Titan within is still essentially a fetus. If the Nightwell is effectively Azeroth's umbilical cord (which the elves of Suramar have been able to tap into and draw off some relatively insignificant portion of the power to sustain themselves) then if the Legion had control of it, they could pump deadly Fel magic directly into the World-Soul itself.
The Legion wants the Nightwell - has the Nightwell, actually - and is highly invested in keeping it. Perhaps this is the reason why they care so much about it.
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