X.X.5 Patches have started to take on greater significance in WoW, sort of taking the place of Mists's odd-numbered patches in giving us new story content. 8.1.5 saw the arrest of Baine and the return (or infiltration) of Derek Proudmoore.
With datamining flooding the usual sites, these are some intriguing hints at what the future could hold.
Wrathion's return is particularly exciting, given that we haven't actually seen him in person since Mists. Wrathion's last public act was to free Garrosh Hellscream from the Temple of the White Tiger aided by Kairoz, some "True Horde" loyalists who would go on to help form the Iron Horde, and a number of Infinite Dragons. He then lost favor with the Iron Horde and was a prisoner in Admiral Taylor's garrison, where he tried but failed to warn the Admiral of the treachery in their midst (which, but the way, we've never fully unraveled. We still don't know who Ephial's master was.)
Given that his stated reason for trying to push the Alliance and Horde into an all-or-nothing war was the hope that, should one side simply conquer the other and absorb its people into its ranks, that Azeroth might stand united for the impending threat of the Burning Legion, it's ironic his actions indirectly gave the Legion a new Gul'dan to kickstart a full invasion. On the other hand, divided or not, Azeroth managed to pull off a victory - though the massive sword in Silithus makes the victory a little less complete.
But one could easily ask where the hell he's been. Well, perhaps we'll get an answer, or at least find out where he is now.
Calia's probably the one I'm most excited about, given the implications for future stories relating to the undead. As what people have been terming a "Lightbound Undead," Calia is not decayed and rotten like the Forsaken, but she's also clearly not strictly human anymore.
I suspect that Calia will be key to deprograming whatever sleeper agent commands Derek has been seeded with, but her future role in the world of the Alliance, Horde, and Forsaken remains to be seen. Personally I really hope for an undead allied race for the Alliance that serves her as the True Queen of Lordaeron, but I'll have to wait and see what happens with her.
Valeera is a bit more surprising. Her primary role has been as a kind of neutral figure, pointedly not choosing sides in the Alliance/Horde conflict, even as she has maintained friendships with important members of both - particularly the late King Varian. The hope for this expansion is to see a meaningful peace forged between the factions, and she's in a pretty good position to help that happen.
Naturally, any patch is going to be a source of excitement. As far as I know we don't have models for the Goblin and Worgen heritage armor, but I'm both very curious about that and also wondering how motivated I feel to get my Goblin from level 100 to 120 in order to unlock the armor.
Thursday, August 1, 2019
What Would Class Skins Look Like?
New classes tend to be very exciting for WoW. Your preferences will certainly vary, but of the three classes added after vanilla WoW, two of them are among my favorite to play (it's the two hero classes, Death Knights and Demon Hunters.)
However, while I was very happy we got Demon Hunters, I also recognize that there's a problem with just adding class after class, beyond the obvious need to come up with new gameplay mechanics.
And that's one of theme.
Demon Hunters had precedent in the lore, but in the earlier iterations of the existing classes, some elements of the Warcraft III hero were redistributed to other classes. Most notably, Metamorphosis became the absolute core to the Demonology Warlock spec. In Mists and Warlords, Demo Locks were all about building up Demonic Fury and then transforming, getting a burst of power that they then spent before going back into the building phase. Indeed, Mists saw Warlocks get a radical redesign to the old Soul Shard system, giving each spec its own cool secondary resource, which was then walked back to making Soul Shards a more relevant resource regardless of spec (they were originally a special inventory item you'd make special bags to hold.)
So when Demon Hunters came along, and given how Metamorphosis was one of Illidan's most iconic abilities, it made perfect sense for them to take that from Warlocks, forcing Demonology to be totally redesigned and even reconceptualized. While I really enjoyed the Mists/Warlords version of the spec, I thought the Legion incarnation to be a good idea executed not so well (Demonic Empowerment was a dumb spell,) and at this point I'm mostly happy with how the spec plays (give or take a baseline Implosion.)
But the whole reason this was an issue is that Demon Hunters, like Warlocks, use demonic, Fel magic. And in order to make a clear distinction, Blizzard had to take away the idea that Warlocks were truly embodying the Fel in their own bodies via Metamorphosis, and instead make them purely magical practitioners while Demon Hunters were the ones who had effectively become demons.
To be fair, there's precedent for having two takes on the same basic concept. Priests and Paladins both have a holy, divine style of magic, but Paladins use it in conjunction with martial prowess while Priests are purely magic practitioners. In recent expansions, they've even shifted Priests to be less specifically about Holy magic, and more about the spectrum of lightness and dark - primarily by giving Discipline access to both.
In a vacuum, I think a Necromancer class would be a really cool one for WoW. You could imagine it as a ranged caster, even potentially with a healing spec (theming your healing around Necromancy's ability to revive the dead.)
But it does run into the following problem:
When you think of Necromancers, you generally think of them as summoning undead minions - sure, there's harmful spells that sap the life from your enemies, but the really iconic look for "necromancy" is a spellcaster with a bunch of skeletons or zombies fighting for them.
Creating such a playstyle for a ranged caster - the magic ranged DPS with a swarm of undead minions - sure sounds a lot like the way Demonology works, doesn't it?
And naturally, Death Knights also use necromancy as their primary magical power - from Blood's ability to sap life from enemies and Unholy's undead minions (done differently than Demonology, of course.) Frost, to be fair, is the least obviously necromantic, but given Warcraft's long association between necromancy and cold places (Northrend,) it makes sense.
So are we just not ever going to get Necromancers as a class?
The answer could very well be yes. The fact of the matter is that the two most obvious aspects of the class - a caster that summons lots of minions and a class themed around necromancy - are both already represented.
But what if the class wasn't actually a new class? What if it was just a change in flavor?
In Blizzard's pure multiplayer games, Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch, the "heroes" that players embody come with a large number of cosmetic skins. Sometimes these change the look and feel of a character. For example, Torbjorn in Overwatch is a diminutive Swedish engineer who drops a powerful turret as his primary feature. However, there's a skin that dresses him up like Magni Bronzebeard, changing his look from sci-fi blacksmith to dwarven king. This changes nothing about how he works as an Overwatch character, but you get a different feel from him.
Could a similar thing be done with World of Warcraft classes?
Allied races went farther than simply changing the cosmetic look of existing races - they have unique racial abilities and sometimes different class options. But racials are only rarely the defining characteristic of a character's power, so one could see Allied races as essentially new "skins" for existing races.
Perhaps we could see Necromancers introduced, not as a new class, but as a variant on Warlocks. Imagine, for instance, that a Demonology Warlock is instead a Corpseraiser Necromancer, replacing imps with skeletons, felhounds with geists, and maybe the felguard with an abomination minon. Mechanically, it'd be identical to Demonology (except perhaps the creature type of the minions you summon, making it easier for priests to CC them but harder for warlocks) but you'd get this new flavor.
And then, yes, you'd get some thematic overlap with Death Knights, but their mechanics would be totally distinct.
Then, the question becomes how easily you can find similar class skins for other classes.
I could see Paladins getting something akin to D&D's Eldritch Knight - all the defensive and offensive abilities but themed as arcane magic rather than holy devotion.
But when you come to, say, Hunters, I can't say I have a ton of ideas. Ranger is basically just another term for what a Hunter is.
So it's an idea with some merits, but it's not obvious it could be applied universally.
So far, we've gotten a new class with every other expansion. But these patterns don't always hold - take Mists and Warlords, for example, where we got Pandaren right after we got Worgen and Goblins, but then got no new race in Warlords. And of course, BFA hasn't given us any brand-new races (though Kul Tirans and to a lesser extent Zandalari Trolls aren't the sort of palette swap the other allied races are, model-wise) but we have gotten a full eight allied races - the same number of races WoW started with.
So I really do wonder to what extent we can simply assume that this Blizzcon we'll be hearing about a new class. I often hear skeptics say we shouldn't expect them, but I heard similar ideas in 2015 before Legion was announced, so while I do think that there's less room now for new classes, it's also such a popular and buzz-generating feature that I wouldn't dismiss the possibility.
However, while I was very happy we got Demon Hunters, I also recognize that there's a problem with just adding class after class, beyond the obvious need to come up with new gameplay mechanics.
And that's one of theme.
Demon Hunters had precedent in the lore, but in the earlier iterations of the existing classes, some elements of the Warcraft III hero were redistributed to other classes. Most notably, Metamorphosis became the absolute core to the Demonology Warlock spec. In Mists and Warlords, Demo Locks were all about building up Demonic Fury and then transforming, getting a burst of power that they then spent before going back into the building phase. Indeed, Mists saw Warlocks get a radical redesign to the old Soul Shard system, giving each spec its own cool secondary resource, which was then walked back to making Soul Shards a more relevant resource regardless of spec (they were originally a special inventory item you'd make special bags to hold.)
So when Demon Hunters came along, and given how Metamorphosis was one of Illidan's most iconic abilities, it made perfect sense for them to take that from Warlocks, forcing Demonology to be totally redesigned and even reconceptualized. While I really enjoyed the Mists/Warlords version of the spec, I thought the Legion incarnation to be a good idea executed not so well (Demonic Empowerment was a dumb spell,) and at this point I'm mostly happy with how the spec plays (give or take a baseline Implosion.)
But the whole reason this was an issue is that Demon Hunters, like Warlocks, use demonic, Fel magic. And in order to make a clear distinction, Blizzard had to take away the idea that Warlocks were truly embodying the Fel in their own bodies via Metamorphosis, and instead make them purely magical practitioners while Demon Hunters were the ones who had effectively become demons.
To be fair, there's precedent for having two takes on the same basic concept. Priests and Paladins both have a holy, divine style of magic, but Paladins use it in conjunction with martial prowess while Priests are purely magic practitioners. In recent expansions, they've even shifted Priests to be less specifically about Holy magic, and more about the spectrum of lightness and dark - primarily by giving Discipline access to both.
In a vacuum, I think a Necromancer class would be a really cool one for WoW. You could imagine it as a ranged caster, even potentially with a healing spec (theming your healing around Necromancy's ability to revive the dead.)
But it does run into the following problem:
When you think of Necromancers, you generally think of them as summoning undead minions - sure, there's harmful spells that sap the life from your enemies, but the really iconic look for "necromancy" is a spellcaster with a bunch of skeletons or zombies fighting for them.
Creating such a playstyle for a ranged caster - the magic ranged DPS with a swarm of undead minions - sure sounds a lot like the way Demonology works, doesn't it?
And naturally, Death Knights also use necromancy as their primary magical power - from Blood's ability to sap life from enemies and Unholy's undead minions (done differently than Demonology, of course.) Frost, to be fair, is the least obviously necromantic, but given Warcraft's long association between necromancy and cold places (Northrend,) it makes sense.
So are we just not ever going to get Necromancers as a class?
The answer could very well be yes. The fact of the matter is that the two most obvious aspects of the class - a caster that summons lots of minions and a class themed around necromancy - are both already represented.
But what if the class wasn't actually a new class? What if it was just a change in flavor?
In Blizzard's pure multiplayer games, Heroes of the Storm and Overwatch, the "heroes" that players embody come with a large number of cosmetic skins. Sometimes these change the look and feel of a character. For example, Torbjorn in Overwatch is a diminutive Swedish engineer who drops a powerful turret as his primary feature. However, there's a skin that dresses him up like Magni Bronzebeard, changing his look from sci-fi blacksmith to dwarven king. This changes nothing about how he works as an Overwatch character, but you get a different feel from him.
Could a similar thing be done with World of Warcraft classes?
Allied races went farther than simply changing the cosmetic look of existing races - they have unique racial abilities and sometimes different class options. But racials are only rarely the defining characteristic of a character's power, so one could see Allied races as essentially new "skins" for existing races.
Perhaps we could see Necromancers introduced, not as a new class, but as a variant on Warlocks. Imagine, for instance, that a Demonology Warlock is instead a Corpseraiser Necromancer, replacing imps with skeletons, felhounds with geists, and maybe the felguard with an abomination minon. Mechanically, it'd be identical to Demonology (except perhaps the creature type of the minions you summon, making it easier for priests to CC them but harder for warlocks) but you'd get this new flavor.
And then, yes, you'd get some thematic overlap with Death Knights, but their mechanics would be totally distinct.
Then, the question becomes how easily you can find similar class skins for other classes.
I could see Paladins getting something akin to D&D's Eldritch Knight - all the defensive and offensive abilities but themed as arcane magic rather than holy devotion.
But when you come to, say, Hunters, I can't say I have a ton of ideas. Ranger is basically just another term for what a Hunter is.
So it's an idea with some merits, but it's not obvious it could be applied universally.
So far, we've gotten a new class with every other expansion. But these patterns don't always hold - take Mists and Warlords, for example, where we got Pandaren right after we got Worgen and Goblins, but then got no new race in Warlords. And of course, BFA hasn't given us any brand-new races (though Kul Tirans and to a lesser extent Zandalari Trolls aren't the sort of palette swap the other allied races are, model-wise) but we have gotten a full eight allied races - the same number of races WoW started with.
So I really do wonder to what extent we can simply assume that this Blizzcon we'll be hearing about a new class. I often hear skeptics say we shouldn't expect them, but I heard similar ideas in 2015 before Legion was announced, so while I do think that there's less room now for new classes, it's also such a popular and buzz-generating feature that I wouldn't dismiss the possibility.
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Story-Based Character Changes in D&D
One's class in D&D can come in very different forms. Most are about a player character developing some sort of expertise. A Monk, a Fighter, and a Wizard are all ultimately training and conditioning themselves to perform more effectively. One could say the same about every class. But the route to becoming that class in the first place can vary widely.
Clerics, for example, can come in different forms. Is a Cleric just someone who has tuned their faith with remarkable devotion to the point where they can channel the power of their deity, or are they chosen by their deity, with powers bestowed upon them in order to serve a great destiny?
While Bards are sort of the fourth in this category, generally three classes are considered the "Arcane Casters": namely Wizards, Sorcerers, and Warlocks. When introducing new players to the game, it's important to break these down as the names don't make their differences entirely obvious. Essentially: Wizards gain their magic from study and practice. Sorcerers' magic is inherent to them either from their ancestry or some magical event that imbued them with power. Warlocks bargain for their magic with a powerful entity, forging a pact that grants them their abilities in exchange for some transactional service.
The reason I think Warlocks, and to an extent Clerics and Paladins, are the most inherently story-rich class is that this inherently sets up a potential conflict. The Warlock is forced to perform a duty in order to retain their powers.
Now, to be fair, you can run Warlocks in a less demanding way. In some cases, you can have it so that the Warlock's service has already been performed, and that the transaction is complete, and the patron no longer requiring any further service. I could also imagine running it such that the Warlock has not finished performing the service, but that the patron cannot actually take back the powers - perhaps using the threat of sending monsters after them or something to encourage compliance rather than taking powers away.
But if we assume that most players would find the more compelling story to be one in which the Warlock continually has to deal with their patron's demands, honoring the pact even as it may come into conflict with their own interests, there is a great potential for conflict and drama around the desire, and potentially the need, for the powers the patron grants, and the enormity of the services the patron demands.
I'm going to put up a general story spoiler warning, but I'm not going to say what I'm spoiling given that that would kind of give everything away.
Clerics, for example, can come in different forms. Is a Cleric just someone who has tuned their faith with remarkable devotion to the point where they can channel the power of their deity, or are they chosen by their deity, with powers bestowed upon them in order to serve a great destiny?
While Bards are sort of the fourth in this category, generally three classes are considered the "Arcane Casters": namely Wizards, Sorcerers, and Warlocks. When introducing new players to the game, it's important to break these down as the names don't make their differences entirely obvious. Essentially: Wizards gain their magic from study and practice. Sorcerers' magic is inherent to them either from their ancestry or some magical event that imbued them with power. Warlocks bargain for their magic with a powerful entity, forging a pact that grants them their abilities in exchange for some transactional service.
The reason I think Warlocks, and to an extent Clerics and Paladins, are the most inherently story-rich class is that this inherently sets up a potential conflict. The Warlock is forced to perform a duty in order to retain their powers.
Now, to be fair, you can run Warlocks in a less demanding way. In some cases, you can have it so that the Warlock's service has already been performed, and that the transaction is complete, and the patron no longer requiring any further service. I could also imagine running it such that the Warlock has not finished performing the service, but that the patron cannot actually take back the powers - perhaps using the threat of sending monsters after them or something to encourage compliance rather than taking powers away.
But if we assume that most players would find the more compelling story to be one in which the Warlock continually has to deal with their patron's demands, honoring the pact even as it may come into conflict with their own interests, there is a great potential for conflict and drama around the desire, and potentially the need, for the powers the patron grants, and the enormity of the services the patron demands.
I'm going to put up a general story spoiler warning, but I'm not going to say what I'm spoiling given that that would kind of give everything away.
Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Dragons, Undead, and/or Old Gods
With the end to the Eternal Palace raid now known - even on Mythic - we have the stage set for what, if history's precedent holds, should be the final patch of Battle for Azeroth.
What happens?
Well, in defeating Azshara, we see the power of the Heart of Azeroth used to break the chains in the Circle of Stars, which is a Titan facility that has apparently served as the seal on the prison of N'zoth. Jaina and Lor'themar, representing the Alliance and Horde respectively, may have teamed up to beat Azshara, but this seems a pyrrhic victory at best, given that not only is N'zoth unleashed, but even Azshara does not seem to be dead (or at least isn't dead anymore.)
There's a big question to be asked about where, exactly, the expansion is heading for its final patch.
Two threads need to be addressed in some way:
One is N'zoth, whose release from imprisonment could naturally have disastrous consequences for the world. The Old Gods have not been free since the Ordering of Azeroth, and we don't have any Titans around to build a new prison. N'zoth must be stopped, or the terrible fate that Sargeras wanted to burn the universe to avoid might come to pass.
The other is Sylvanas. We've watched her reign as Warchief snowball into war atrocities and totalitarian tactics that threaten to make the Horde even worse than it was under Garrosh. Sylvanas appears comfortable with genocide, and the fate she seeks to inflict upon the Alliance is one of undead compliance. We are now seeing dissenting members of the Horde rise up against her, but Sylvanas is also playing a subtle game with stratagems and even goals that we have yet to comprehend.
Either of these characters would be logical final bosses for the expansion. The real question, though, is who has the upper hand. Who is the better plotter?
I'm inclined to think N'zoth is, given that his entire identity is that of the ancient master manipulator who always seemed to come out ahead even when he was theoretically losing.
That beings said: who could you trust more than N'zoth to have our killing him turn out to be part of his plot in the first place?
Thus, I'm leaning more toward the belief that N'zoth will be BFA's final boss, but it's not clear that he'll actually "lose" even if we beat him in a fight.
After all, the goal of the Old Gods, even if they had this vast Black Empire and millions of soldiers at their command, is not for themselves. It is to corrupt Azeroth and make a Void Titan. It's not even clear that the Old Gods are expected to survive this process - indeed, given how mad and horrific they are, it might be their goal to go out in one last nihilistic blaze of glory once Azeroth emerges from the planet as the creature of darkness they want her to be.
Now, I don't know to what extent the Old Gods may have evolved past their original purpose, but perhaps they have never strayed from what the Void Lords made them to be, and so N'zoth might have no problem whatsoever with dying.
I've written before about how, one possibility for the expansion's end is that N'zoth dies completing the corruption of Azeroth, and we are forced to mercy kill her (maybe using the Heart of Azeroth itself) and that the next expansion could then focus on the repercussions of living on a literally dead planet - hopefully finding some way to resurrect her free of the corruption, but forcing us to brave the Shadowlands to recover the World Soul.
But a lot of this could happen without Sylvanas, and it would seem narratively wasteful not to do something with her.
One variation on the aforementioned story is that Sylvanas is the one who unilaterally decides to kill Azeroth, and that for this (necessary) crime and her many other (unnecessary) crimes, we pursue her into the Shadowlands.
One theory floating around is that N'zoth will travel to the Shadowlands, where Ny'alotha is (in this theory - its actual location is unknown,) and try to harvest the souls of the dead to resurrect C'thun and Yogg-Saron (and maybe Y'shaarj?) Part of this theory is that Sylvanas has been working with Helya (who might have died, but that's not really a big deal for someone like her, and it's already confirmed in game that she's still active) to combat the Old Gods' efforts - essentially setting up an Undead vs. Old Gods expansion in which we're with the undead.
In this case, Sylvanas' actions might be revealed as part of a greater good effort, though one wonder why she couldn't be more up front about that.
Baine's return to Thunder Bluff has set up the possibility for a major conflict at the Tauren capital. I am, however, skeptical that we'd see another raid based around a Horde capital, given that we've already ended an expansion with the Siege of Orgrimmar, and Dazar'alor is technically also a Horde capital now.
One element that has been particularly conspicuous in its absence is Wrathion, the Black Prince. Given that his warnings in Mists were about the invasion of the Burning Legion, one really has to wonder why he didn't show up at all during Legion. And now, we're seeing the occasional Blacktalon Agent scoping out Nazjatar, which means that Blizzard has certainly not forgotten about him.
Indeed, the dragons' stories seem far from exhausted. We had the Blue Dragons play a role in Azsuna, and Ysera's death was a massive climax to the story of Val'sharah. Also, the Deathlord massacred Red Dragons in the pursuit of their 7.2 class mount, so dragons in general are still an important part of WoW lore. And that's not even taking into account the fact that the first essence you can unlock with the Heart Forge is dragon-themed.
Indeed, since vanilla, one of the areas of the game that has been rumored is the Dragon Isles. There are even explicit references to it in-game as of BFA. Given the five dragonflights, the Dragon Isles would be a no-brainer continent to set an expansion on, with a zone dedicated to each flight. Set it south of Northrend along the Path of the Titans.
Given their primal connection to Azeroth and the Keepers, the dragonflights might be integral in healing or reviving the World Soul if all the previously mentioned stuff happens.
So, to my mind, there are two likely expansion settings to follow BFA.
The Shadowlands could give us a spooky, horror themed expansion in a creepy land - though I'd imagine Blizzard would find ways to break up the monotony of a bunch of different Halloween zones (perhaps leaning into the notion of a shamanistic spirit world in some areas.) Personally, because I'm multiclassed in goth (I've got like two or three levels) I'd love to see this.
The Dragon Isles is, I think, an easier thing to work with conceptually in that it would be part of Azeroth's primary physical plane and you wouldn't have to do much to justify, like, how the sky works or whatever. But I also think the connection to current events is not as obvious.
The big caveat to all of this is, of course, that I'm basically never right. I think BFA is the closest I've come, and that was with a bunch of legit leaks already out. (Humorously, I remember people who found out about BFA and concluded that we were never going to get that South Seas expansion people have been talking about since Vanilla. But when I look at Kul Tiras, Zandalar, Nazjatar, and the Island Expeditions, I have to ask: "in what way is this not that expansion?")
Anyway, I'll look forward to the various "leaks" that come out in the coming months. I'll point out that when I saw some poorly-translated leak from China claiming that we would get Demon Hunters for only Night Elves and Blood Elves, and that we'd see yet another turnover in Warchief, with Sylvanas leading the Horde this time, I called BS. Whoops! Guess I was wrong.
So Blizzard clearly knows how to zig when you expect them to zag. For example, after the Legion-heavy stuff at the end of Warlords, I expected them to go a different direction and focus on Azshara. So for the same reason, I think it's not unreasonable that they might have BFA be the "subtly Old God-themed" expansion while the follow-up will be the real Black Empire one.
Blizzcon is in November, I think, but that means it's only about three months away. Get the red yarn and cork boards ready!
What happens?
Well, in defeating Azshara, we see the power of the Heart of Azeroth used to break the chains in the Circle of Stars, which is a Titan facility that has apparently served as the seal on the prison of N'zoth. Jaina and Lor'themar, representing the Alliance and Horde respectively, may have teamed up to beat Azshara, but this seems a pyrrhic victory at best, given that not only is N'zoth unleashed, but even Azshara does not seem to be dead (or at least isn't dead anymore.)
There's a big question to be asked about where, exactly, the expansion is heading for its final patch.
Two threads need to be addressed in some way:
One is N'zoth, whose release from imprisonment could naturally have disastrous consequences for the world. The Old Gods have not been free since the Ordering of Azeroth, and we don't have any Titans around to build a new prison. N'zoth must be stopped, or the terrible fate that Sargeras wanted to burn the universe to avoid might come to pass.
The other is Sylvanas. We've watched her reign as Warchief snowball into war atrocities and totalitarian tactics that threaten to make the Horde even worse than it was under Garrosh. Sylvanas appears comfortable with genocide, and the fate she seeks to inflict upon the Alliance is one of undead compliance. We are now seeing dissenting members of the Horde rise up against her, but Sylvanas is also playing a subtle game with stratagems and even goals that we have yet to comprehend.
Either of these characters would be logical final bosses for the expansion. The real question, though, is who has the upper hand. Who is the better plotter?
I'm inclined to think N'zoth is, given that his entire identity is that of the ancient master manipulator who always seemed to come out ahead even when he was theoretically losing.
That beings said: who could you trust more than N'zoth to have our killing him turn out to be part of his plot in the first place?
Thus, I'm leaning more toward the belief that N'zoth will be BFA's final boss, but it's not clear that he'll actually "lose" even if we beat him in a fight.
After all, the goal of the Old Gods, even if they had this vast Black Empire and millions of soldiers at their command, is not for themselves. It is to corrupt Azeroth and make a Void Titan. It's not even clear that the Old Gods are expected to survive this process - indeed, given how mad and horrific they are, it might be their goal to go out in one last nihilistic blaze of glory once Azeroth emerges from the planet as the creature of darkness they want her to be.
Now, I don't know to what extent the Old Gods may have evolved past their original purpose, but perhaps they have never strayed from what the Void Lords made them to be, and so N'zoth might have no problem whatsoever with dying.
I've written before about how, one possibility for the expansion's end is that N'zoth dies completing the corruption of Azeroth, and we are forced to mercy kill her (maybe using the Heart of Azeroth itself) and that the next expansion could then focus on the repercussions of living on a literally dead planet - hopefully finding some way to resurrect her free of the corruption, but forcing us to brave the Shadowlands to recover the World Soul.
But a lot of this could happen without Sylvanas, and it would seem narratively wasteful not to do something with her.
One variation on the aforementioned story is that Sylvanas is the one who unilaterally decides to kill Azeroth, and that for this (necessary) crime and her many other (unnecessary) crimes, we pursue her into the Shadowlands.
One theory floating around is that N'zoth will travel to the Shadowlands, where Ny'alotha is (in this theory - its actual location is unknown,) and try to harvest the souls of the dead to resurrect C'thun and Yogg-Saron (and maybe Y'shaarj?) Part of this theory is that Sylvanas has been working with Helya (who might have died, but that's not really a big deal for someone like her, and it's already confirmed in game that she's still active) to combat the Old Gods' efforts - essentially setting up an Undead vs. Old Gods expansion in which we're with the undead.
In this case, Sylvanas' actions might be revealed as part of a greater good effort, though one wonder why she couldn't be more up front about that.
Baine's return to Thunder Bluff has set up the possibility for a major conflict at the Tauren capital. I am, however, skeptical that we'd see another raid based around a Horde capital, given that we've already ended an expansion with the Siege of Orgrimmar, and Dazar'alor is technically also a Horde capital now.
One element that has been particularly conspicuous in its absence is Wrathion, the Black Prince. Given that his warnings in Mists were about the invasion of the Burning Legion, one really has to wonder why he didn't show up at all during Legion. And now, we're seeing the occasional Blacktalon Agent scoping out Nazjatar, which means that Blizzard has certainly not forgotten about him.
Indeed, the dragons' stories seem far from exhausted. We had the Blue Dragons play a role in Azsuna, and Ysera's death was a massive climax to the story of Val'sharah. Also, the Deathlord massacred Red Dragons in the pursuit of their 7.2 class mount, so dragons in general are still an important part of WoW lore. And that's not even taking into account the fact that the first essence you can unlock with the Heart Forge is dragon-themed.
Indeed, since vanilla, one of the areas of the game that has been rumored is the Dragon Isles. There are even explicit references to it in-game as of BFA. Given the five dragonflights, the Dragon Isles would be a no-brainer continent to set an expansion on, with a zone dedicated to each flight. Set it south of Northrend along the Path of the Titans.
Given their primal connection to Azeroth and the Keepers, the dragonflights might be integral in healing or reviving the World Soul if all the previously mentioned stuff happens.
So, to my mind, there are two likely expansion settings to follow BFA.
The Shadowlands could give us a spooky, horror themed expansion in a creepy land - though I'd imagine Blizzard would find ways to break up the monotony of a bunch of different Halloween zones (perhaps leaning into the notion of a shamanistic spirit world in some areas.) Personally, because I'm multiclassed in goth (I've got like two or three levels) I'd love to see this.
The Dragon Isles is, I think, an easier thing to work with conceptually in that it would be part of Azeroth's primary physical plane and you wouldn't have to do much to justify, like, how the sky works or whatever. But I also think the connection to current events is not as obvious.
The big caveat to all of this is, of course, that I'm basically never right. I think BFA is the closest I've come, and that was with a bunch of legit leaks already out. (Humorously, I remember people who found out about BFA and concluded that we were never going to get that South Seas expansion people have been talking about since Vanilla. But when I look at Kul Tiras, Zandalar, Nazjatar, and the Island Expeditions, I have to ask: "in what way is this not that expansion?")
Anyway, I'll look forward to the various "leaks" that come out in the coming months. I'll point out that when I saw some poorly-translated leak from China claiming that we would get Demon Hunters for only Night Elves and Blood Elves, and that we'd see yet another turnover in Warchief, with Sylvanas leading the Horde this time, I called BS. Whoops! Guess I was wrong.
So Blizzard clearly knows how to zig when you expect them to zag. For example, after the Legion-heavy stuff at the end of Warlords, I expected them to go a different direction and focus on Azshara. So for the same reason, I think it's not unreasonable that they might have BFA be the "subtly Old God-themed" expansion while the follow-up will be the real Black Empire one.
Blizzcon is in November, I think, but that means it's only about three months away. Get the red yarn and cork boards ready!
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Questionably Evergreen Mechanics in WoW
I don't remember if Blizzard uses this term, but in Magic the Gathering, there is a term the designers use called "evergreen" when referring to mechanics that appear in the game. (By the way, their lead designer Mark Rosewater's weekly article "Making Magic," which he has been writing for over a decade, is really, really interesting if you have any interest in how game design works. Seriously some of the most insightful and entertaining reading out there.)
Magic, like WoW, is an iterative game. In Magic, the company comes out periodically with new sets of cards, often introducing a new chapter in the story, setting things on a new world, and then introducing gameplay mechanics that reflect the themes that they're exploring. Take Ravnica, probably their most popular setting (so popular that they made an official crossover with Dungeons and Dragons - which is also made by Wizards of the Coast - with an official sourcebook for running D&D campaigns set in Ravnica,) which was born out of the idea of making a set that encouraged players to build decks out of two of the five colors - thematic and ideological divisions within the core mechanics of the game. Ravnica built its world around these two-color combinations, imagining a world ruled and fought over by ten mega-powerful guilds - representing each two-color combination.
In Ravnica, each guild was given a keyword ability - a mechanic that is given a shorthand name when it appears frequently enough to warrant such a thing. (There are also "ability words" that are used similarly, but the word itself is not meant to carry the rules of the mechanic within it, but instead point out that the mechanic described afterward is a recurring one.)
Magic has many different types of cards, but probably the most common are creatures - representing anything from human soldiers to massive dragons to semi-real illusionary monsters, all that the player has "summoned" to fight for them. Many keyword abilities are found specifically on creatures, though others will appear on different kinds of cards.
I'd argue that the quintessential keyword ability is "flying." In Magic, when combat begins once a turn, the player whose turn it is chooses a number of creatures they control and declares them as attackers. The defending player then can select creatures they control and assign them to these attackers as blockers. The creatures then assign combat damage to whatever they're hitting, and creatures potentially die and players lose life when they take damage.
Flying is a very easy-to-understand mechanic because one can visualize it. A flying creature can only be blocked by a creature with flying. Naturally, your soaring dragon is just going to fly over the zombie your opponent controls and get to its target. But if your opponent attacks with their zombies, your dragon can easily swoop down and intercept the zombie's advance.
Flying has been in-game since the very beginning, and has appeared in every single card set.
Now, speaking of Ravnica, we can look at a mechanic called Transmute. Each of the guilds in that setting got their own ability (either a keyword or an ability word) and in the first set, the Blue/Black guild House Dimir got Transmute. This allowed you to pay a cost and discard the card with the ability to search your deck (called the Library in Magic) for a card that cost the same to cast. For a guild that was built around secrets and gathering information, it was thematically appropriate.
But while Flying has been and probably always will be found in every set, Transmute was short-lived. Strong or not, the mechanic didn't pop as inherently intuitive or fabulously popular, and so we haven't seen it since then - even in sets that returned to Ravnica and its ten-guild structure.
Now, to pull a bit of an Alice's Restaurant here, I'm not here to talk about Magic. I'm here to talk about WoW.
Just as Magic has card sets that come out in annual blocks, WoW has a two-year expansion cycle. While we are playing the same characters we have been since 2004 (potentially - your Lightforged Draenei Monk might have been very rare in vanilla WoW) there is this cycle in which everyone is basically brought down to zero by raising the level cap and having us do new quests, run new dungeons and raids, and undergo a new cycle of gear progression before we can be the god-slaying badasses we had been previously.
Stuff that had been previously very important, like maxing your acquisition of veiled argunite, is now rendered totally irrelevant.
Some mechanics do involve this sort of a soft reset while remaining basically the same. Reputation, for example, is not lost when one outlevels an expansion's content, but the addition of new reputations means that even if I'm exalted with everyone from Northrend to the Broken Isles, I'm still starting at neutral with whatever factions I'll encounter in late summer or fall of 2020.
Thus, reputation is an evergreen mechanic. Indeed, any iterative game needs evergreen mechanics for it to feel like the same game. If Blizzard were to announce that classes, as a thing, were no longer going to be a part of WoW, it wouldn't be World of Warcraft anymore. It's not apparent how such a transition could even work.
But there are mechanics that are introduced and then left aside when we move on.
Take Scenarios in Mists of Pandaria. While the technology has been used to more effectively allow for big set-piece quests that used to be handled with Phasing (see the Battle of Undercity - or rather don't, because you haven't been able to do that quest since 4.0,) in Mists Scenarios were presented as an alternative to dungeons - being role-agnostic, unlike dungeons that required the standard 1-3-1 mix of tanks, dps, and healers. While the rewards were just randomized and often not great, it was far, far quicker to queue up for these and get a group easily.
But then they went away. Today, we have Island Expeditions, which are, secretly, basically just scenarios, but where the "game" of the scenario is always the same, just in different environments.
But in Warlords and Legion, we had nothing like this 3-player quick gameplay option.
Of course, mechanics and content are sometimes blurred.
Suramar was the most sophisticated max-level zone we've seen in WoW (granted, there was little precedent - the Vale of Eternal Blossoms was the only other such zone to appear in an X.0 patch.) While the zone was not really new in any mechanical way - it had quests like any other zone, and some quests were unlocked by increasing your reputation with the associated faction, similar to Operation Shieldwall or the Dominance Offensive in 5.1 - it seemed to signal a new commitment to long-term, story based content that we'd get after hitting the level cap, when in previous expansions we've tended to simply shift focus to running and re-running instances to gear up.
Perhaps not a mechanic, exactly, but Suramar seemed like an evergreen concept's first iteration. However, even starting in Legion's later patches, with the introduction of Argus, and certainly in BFA's endgame, we've instead tended to get short-term story quests that can be played through in just a week or two, which primarily just serves to introduce areas designed for repeatable content like world quests, dungeons, and raids.
I do wonder if they'll ever do something like Suramar again. I certainly hope they do (and hopefully have a follow-up that is less frustrating for one faction - I know that any player who went through Suramar would feel that they'd earned some personal loyalty from Thalyssra and crew, but allowing Alliance players to have that whole experience only for the Nightborne to join the Horde felt... not great.)
Meanwhile, there are other mechanics that are perhaps more surprising to see returning.
In Warlords of Draenor, the Garrison was pitched with the concept that players had to establish an outpost and recruit allies. While mechanically they couldn't prevent people from going back and forth from Draenor to the rest of the world, story-wise one was meant to be isolated and cut off from support. Additionally, by this point players had been through so much that they were starting to get respect as powerful members of their factions. As such, the idea was that you were actually the ranking member of your faction on Draenor, there to serve the High King or the Warchief directly.
So sending people out on missions made sense.
Mechanically, however, it was a bit dull. And especially given the dearth of really rewarding content in Warlords, and the fact that you could attain raid-quality gear simply by sending followers out on missions, the mechanic is sort of a perfect example of what didn't work about Warlords.
So it was perhaps shocking to see Legion bring the mechanic back. Legion scaled it back significantly, and pointedly made sure that, rather than giving you actual gear, it would instead give you items that pushed you to run content and then give you bonus gear as a reward.
It worked a hell of a lot better, and fixed some of the problems with the original system.
But was it fun? And did it deserve to return in BFA? Is this a mechanic that is actually worthy of being an evergreen part of WoW?
The only real effect that it has is that players can now engage with their WoW game remotely via mobile apps. The mission table system is simple enough to work on an app.
But does that make it good? And worthy?
I sometimes think that Blizzard has a problem of coming up with really good solutions to problems that don't exist. Take the profession buildings you could make for your garrisons. These were meant to allow you to more efficiently craft things with your professions. They even added a mine and an herb garden where you could, daily, reliably get a bunch of resources for most of the professions (leatherworkers and tailors still had to go outside the house, even if they'd get more stuff using the Barn.)
But to make the efficiency of, say, the Engineering Works feel more useful, they then came up with this limitation on professions by having some material that every other recipe would require be limited to a once-a-day production. You could make your Truesteel or whatever the hell it was for Blacksmithing, but simply using the profession would mean that it would take a very long time to simply make a sword. And even getting the recipe for that sword would also mean grinding out some currency that was similarly time-locked.
So now, phew, there was a problem that this great solution could help solve. The Blacksmithing Hut would now let you make more Truesteel over time.
Which wouldn't be a problem if you could just make as much Truesteel as you had the materials for (I might be getting the name wrong, but whatever.)
In Legion, we got artifact weapons. Here's what I loved about artifact weapons - they each had a story to them, and were built to have an iconic appearance. You could unlock new appearances that played with that iconic look, keeping the fundamental aspects of it (usually) while changing elements of it. The Ashbringer, for example, always had that sort of disk of light and the Lordaeron L as part of its crossguard, but you could have a version made of fire, or one seemingly corrupted by the Scourge.
They also came with a sort of talent tree, but to begin with, this was something you'd just fill out eventually. It allowed them to add a new resource - artifact power - that was sort of a godsend for the designers.
As a generic currency that players would always want more of, it was an easy thing that could be tacked on as a reward to any activity they came up with.
In BFA, we got the Heart of Azeroth, which took this idea from artifact weapons, but while we got exciting visuals and world-building storytelling with our weapons, the Heart of Azeroth is nothing but a McGuffin with no history and clearly no real world-building implications associated with it. And every character has, essentially, the same one.
But we now have things like Island Expeditions and lots of World Quests that are built around the idea of gathering this resource.
It seems clear to me that Islands were something Blizzard was excited about. Given that this is the big High Seas expansion, it made sense to go raiding remote islands for treasure. But how to motivate people to do this when they could be running dungeons or raids or doing world quests?
Azerite power (which they renamed artifact power given that it was mechanically so similar) became the solution.
But should this be an evergreen mechanic? Should every WoW expansion henceforth have mission tables and artifact power to grind?
Personally, I don't think so. I loved artifact weapons, and the fact that I managed to get the mage tower challenge appearance on Truthguard is a big gaming accomplishment for me (I am disappointed I didn't get it on any other artifacts.) The mechanic on its own is not really that compelling, and served more to reinforce the thrill of having these legendary (well, beyond legendary if we're talking item quality) items at our disposal.
Basically, just as Transmute sort of worked for House Dimir, artifact power worked for the Ashbringer. But that doesn't mean we need to have it all the time.
Magic, like WoW, is an iterative game. In Magic, the company comes out periodically with new sets of cards, often introducing a new chapter in the story, setting things on a new world, and then introducing gameplay mechanics that reflect the themes that they're exploring. Take Ravnica, probably their most popular setting (so popular that they made an official crossover with Dungeons and Dragons - which is also made by Wizards of the Coast - with an official sourcebook for running D&D campaigns set in Ravnica,) which was born out of the idea of making a set that encouraged players to build decks out of two of the five colors - thematic and ideological divisions within the core mechanics of the game. Ravnica built its world around these two-color combinations, imagining a world ruled and fought over by ten mega-powerful guilds - representing each two-color combination.
In Ravnica, each guild was given a keyword ability - a mechanic that is given a shorthand name when it appears frequently enough to warrant such a thing. (There are also "ability words" that are used similarly, but the word itself is not meant to carry the rules of the mechanic within it, but instead point out that the mechanic described afterward is a recurring one.)
Magic has many different types of cards, but probably the most common are creatures - representing anything from human soldiers to massive dragons to semi-real illusionary monsters, all that the player has "summoned" to fight for them. Many keyword abilities are found specifically on creatures, though others will appear on different kinds of cards.
I'd argue that the quintessential keyword ability is "flying." In Magic, when combat begins once a turn, the player whose turn it is chooses a number of creatures they control and declares them as attackers. The defending player then can select creatures they control and assign them to these attackers as blockers. The creatures then assign combat damage to whatever they're hitting, and creatures potentially die and players lose life when they take damage.
Flying is a very easy-to-understand mechanic because one can visualize it. A flying creature can only be blocked by a creature with flying. Naturally, your soaring dragon is just going to fly over the zombie your opponent controls and get to its target. But if your opponent attacks with their zombies, your dragon can easily swoop down and intercept the zombie's advance.
Flying has been in-game since the very beginning, and has appeared in every single card set.
Now, speaking of Ravnica, we can look at a mechanic called Transmute. Each of the guilds in that setting got their own ability (either a keyword or an ability word) and in the first set, the Blue/Black guild House Dimir got Transmute. This allowed you to pay a cost and discard the card with the ability to search your deck (called the Library in Magic) for a card that cost the same to cast. For a guild that was built around secrets and gathering information, it was thematically appropriate.
But while Flying has been and probably always will be found in every set, Transmute was short-lived. Strong or not, the mechanic didn't pop as inherently intuitive or fabulously popular, and so we haven't seen it since then - even in sets that returned to Ravnica and its ten-guild structure.
Now, to pull a bit of an Alice's Restaurant here, I'm not here to talk about Magic. I'm here to talk about WoW.
Just as Magic has card sets that come out in annual blocks, WoW has a two-year expansion cycle. While we are playing the same characters we have been since 2004 (potentially - your Lightforged Draenei Monk might have been very rare in vanilla WoW) there is this cycle in which everyone is basically brought down to zero by raising the level cap and having us do new quests, run new dungeons and raids, and undergo a new cycle of gear progression before we can be the god-slaying badasses we had been previously.
Stuff that had been previously very important, like maxing your acquisition of veiled argunite, is now rendered totally irrelevant.
Some mechanics do involve this sort of a soft reset while remaining basically the same. Reputation, for example, is not lost when one outlevels an expansion's content, but the addition of new reputations means that even if I'm exalted with everyone from Northrend to the Broken Isles, I'm still starting at neutral with whatever factions I'll encounter in late summer or fall of 2020.
Thus, reputation is an evergreen mechanic. Indeed, any iterative game needs evergreen mechanics for it to feel like the same game. If Blizzard were to announce that classes, as a thing, were no longer going to be a part of WoW, it wouldn't be World of Warcraft anymore. It's not apparent how such a transition could even work.
But there are mechanics that are introduced and then left aside when we move on.
Take Scenarios in Mists of Pandaria. While the technology has been used to more effectively allow for big set-piece quests that used to be handled with Phasing (see the Battle of Undercity - or rather don't, because you haven't been able to do that quest since 4.0,) in Mists Scenarios were presented as an alternative to dungeons - being role-agnostic, unlike dungeons that required the standard 1-3-1 mix of tanks, dps, and healers. While the rewards were just randomized and often not great, it was far, far quicker to queue up for these and get a group easily.
But then they went away. Today, we have Island Expeditions, which are, secretly, basically just scenarios, but where the "game" of the scenario is always the same, just in different environments.
But in Warlords and Legion, we had nothing like this 3-player quick gameplay option.
Of course, mechanics and content are sometimes blurred.
Suramar was the most sophisticated max-level zone we've seen in WoW (granted, there was little precedent - the Vale of Eternal Blossoms was the only other such zone to appear in an X.0 patch.) While the zone was not really new in any mechanical way - it had quests like any other zone, and some quests were unlocked by increasing your reputation with the associated faction, similar to Operation Shieldwall or the Dominance Offensive in 5.1 - it seemed to signal a new commitment to long-term, story based content that we'd get after hitting the level cap, when in previous expansions we've tended to simply shift focus to running and re-running instances to gear up.
Perhaps not a mechanic, exactly, but Suramar seemed like an evergreen concept's first iteration. However, even starting in Legion's later patches, with the introduction of Argus, and certainly in BFA's endgame, we've instead tended to get short-term story quests that can be played through in just a week or two, which primarily just serves to introduce areas designed for repeatable content like world quests, dungeons, and raids.
I do wonder if they'll ever do something like Suramar again. I certainly hope they do (and hopefully have a follow-up that is less frustrating for one faction - I know that any player who went through Suramar would feel that they'd earned some personal loyalty from Thalyssra and crew, but allowing Alliance players to have that whole experience only for the Nightborne to join the Horde felt... not great.)
Meanwhile, there are other mechanics that are perhaps more surprising to see returning.
In Warlords of Draenor, the Garrison was pitched with the concept that players had to establish an outpost and recruit allies. While mechanically they couldn't prevent people from going back and forth from Draenor to the rest of the world, story-wise one was meant to be isolated and cut off from support. Additionally, by this point players had been through so much that they were starting to get respect as powerful members of their factions. As such, the idea was that you were actually the ranking member of your faction on Draenor, there to serve the High King or the Warchief directly.
So sending people out on missions made sense.
Mechanically, however, it was a bit dull. And especially given the dearth of really rewarding content in Warlords, and the fact that you could attain raid-quality gear simply by sending followers out on missions, the mechanic is sort of a perfect example of what didn't work about Warlords.
So it was perhaps shocking to see Legion bring the mechanic back. Legion scaled it back significantly, and pointedly made sure that, rather than giving you actual gear, it would instead give you items that pushed you to run content and then give you bonus gear as a reward.
It worked a hell of a lot better, and fixed some of the problems with the original system.
But was it fun? And did it deserve to return in BFA? Is this a mechanic that is actually worthy of being an evergreen part of WoW?
The only real effect that it has is that players can now engage with their WoW game remotely via mobile apps. The mission table system is simple enough to work on an app.
But does that make it good? And worthy?
I sometimes think that Blizzard has a problem of coming up with really good solutions to problems that don't exist. Take the profession buildings you could make for your garrisons. These were meant to allow you to more efficiently craft things with your professions. They even added a mine and an herb garden where you could, daily, reliably get a bunch of resources for most of the professions (leatherworkers and tailors still had to go outside the house, even if they'd get more stuff using the Barn.)
But to make the efficiency of, say, the Engineering Works feel more useful, they then came up with this limitation on professions by having some material that every other recipe would require be limited to a once-a-day production. You could make your Truesteel or whatever the hell it was for Blacksmithing, but simply using the profession would mean that it would take a very long time to simply make a sword. And even getting the recipe for that sword would also mean grinding out some currency that was similarly time-locked.
So now, phew, there was a problem that this great solution could help solve. The Blacksmithing Hut would now let you make more Truesteel over time.
Which wouldn't be a problem if you could just make as much Truesteel as you had the materials for (I might be getting the name wrong, but whatever.)
In Legion, we got artifact weapons. Here's what I loved about artifact weapons - they each had a story to them, and were built to have an iconic appearance. You could unlock new appearances that played with that iconic look, keeping the fundamental aspects of it (usually) while changing elements of it. The Ashbringer, for example, always had that sort of disk of light and the Lordaeron L as part of its crossguard, but you could have a version made of fire, or one seemingly corrupted by the Scourge.
They also came with a sort of talent tree, but to begin with, this was something you'd just fill out eventually. It allowed them to add a new resource - artifact power - that was sort of a godsend for the designers.
As a generic currency that players would always want more of, it was an easy thing that could be tacked on as a reward to any activity they came up with.
In BFA, we got the Heart of Azeroth, which took this idea from artifact weapons, but while we got exciting visuals and world-building storytelling with our weapons, the Heart of Azeroth is nothing but a McGuffin with no history and clearly no real world-building implications associated with it. And every character has, essentially, the same one.
But we now have things like Island Expeditions and lots of World Quests that are built around the idea of gathering this resource.
It seems clear to me that Islands were something Blizzard was excited about. Given that this is the big High Seas expansion, it made sense to go raiding remote islands for treasure. But how to motivate people to do this when they could be running dungeons or raids or doing world quests?
Azerite power (which they renamed artifact power given that it was mechanically so similar) became the solution.
But should this be an evergreen mechanic? Should every WoW expansion henceforth have mission tables and artifact power to grind?
Personally, I don't think so. I loved artifact weapons, and the fact that I managed to get the mage tower challenge appearance on Truthguard is a big gaming accomplishment for me (I am disappointed I didn't get it on any other artifacts.) The mechanic on its own is not really that compelling, and served more to reinforce the thrill of having these legendary (well, beyond legendary if we're talking item quality) items at our disposal.
Basically, just as Transmute sort of worked for House Dimir, artifact power worked for the Ashbringer. But that doesn't mean we need to have it all the time.
Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Do We Win the Battle for Azeroth?
It's pretty obvious that the title of the current WoW expansion is a play on words. Yes, the Alliance and Horde are fighting for supremacy on the world of Azeroth, but the true battle is for the fate of the Titan Azeroth, and whether she survives the damage she has sustained since Sargeras plunged his sword into her.
As a side note: I know that not every character can be a master schemer - this isn't Dune - but I do sort of wish/hope that Sargeras was cleverer. Legion was my favorite WoW expansion (it's been close to a year since Legion ended but it still feels weird to say that after considering Wrath the hands-down best for so long) but I do feel somewhat cheated out of a full-on fight with Sargeras himself, and frustrated that he only appeared in his full glory during the post-final-boss cinematic. That Sargeras stabbing the planet would just serve the Old Gods' purpose is... I don't know, maybe it's ok. Sargeras is allergic to thinking things through anyway.
I think the Alliance/Horde war is a distraction, ultimately. Even with full-on warfare going, we're already seeing even figures like Jaina, who post-Theramore (really post-Divine Bell incident) has been on the hawk side of the Alliance, deciding that they're going to need to end this conflict and find some peaceful balance given the bigger threats.
It seems that the real question is what will happen to Azeroth, the Titan.
(Other side note: while coming up with my homebrew D&D setting, I decided that the world the players lived on was actually the physical body of one of the proto-god creators of that universe - this was not long before Chronicle Volume 1 came out, so I guess that the folks at Blizzard and I were having similar ideas. Also, we both renamed the Shadowfell the Shadowlands.)
Now, we've been told that empowering the Heart of Azeroth is how we're going to save her, but at the end of the Eternal Palace, we find that instead, it has been used to unlock the seals on N'zoth's prison. Magni has been mislead.
One wonders - was the Heart of Azeroth ever going to help fix the world? And then one has darker worries - has Magni simply been hearing N'zoth whispering to him the whole time?
I'd argue that he probably has been hearing the real Azeroth at least some of the time, given that he shows a similar ability to hear Argus (another critique for Legion - we never really understood exactly what Antorus did for the Legion.)
But what we've been doing this expansion is clearly not entirely good and healthy for Azeroth.
The Titan is dying. Sargeras' sword caused a life-threatening wound. Now, maybe that's been fixed for the most part, but now we have another problem to deal with - for the first time since the Titans ordered the planet, an Old God is loose upon the world.
Now, the Old Gods were not sent there to kill Azeroth. That was Sargeras' initial plan, and while he clearly flirted with the idea of instead converting her to his cause, his final act before his imprisonment looks like a last-ditch effort to kill Azeroth like he did Telongrus (which I'm assuming would also be the name of the Titan who was so thoroughly void-corrupted... it's where Void Elves have their little home base, on fragments of the world destroyed by Sargeras)
The Old Gods are supposed to pump the Titan full of void in the hopes of creating a Void Titan that would spread their madness across the cosmos.
With N'zoth loose, he is probably better-suited than ever to accomplish that goal.
Which raises an interesting question:
What if we don't save Azeroth?
What if we kill her?
Sargeras wanted to destroy all of creation (though mission-creep might have changed his goals to more of a vision of an intergalactic empire of demons) to deprive the void of things to corrupt. What if we realize that we're going to have to do a far more limited version of that.
If Azeroth is corrupted, we might have to destroy her.
And if the World-Soul at the heart of a planet is dead, what does that then mean?
There are a lot of foreshadowing hints that the Shadowlands will play a major role in the next expansion, possibly even be its setting.
If a World-Soul dies, but the world is intact, could that manifest as a massive explosion of death energy? Might we see the Shadowlands become far more powerful, and might we see the undead raging across the world?
And could that be Sylvanas' plan all along?
Sylvanas has decided at this point that she wants to convert all of humanity into the undead. She's started making undead Night Elves as well. If she wants everything united (preferably under her control) as undead, might she even want Azeroth herself to be undead?
As a side note: I know that not every character can be a master schemer - this isn't Dune - but I do sort of wish/hope that Sargeras was cleverer. Legion was my favorite WoW expansion (it's been close to a year since Legion ended but it still feels weird to say that after considering Wrath the hands-down best for so long) but I do feel somewhat cheated out of a full-on fight with Sargeras himself, and frustrated that he only appeared in his full glory during the post-final-boss cinematic. That Sargeras stabbing the planet would just serve the Old Gods' purpose is... I don't know, maybe it's ok. Sargeras is allergic to thinking things through anyway.
I think the Alliance/Horde war is a distraction, ultimately. Even with full-on warfare going, we're already seeing even figures like Jaina, who post-Theramore (really post-Divine Bell incident) has been on the hawk side of the Alliance, deciding that they're going to need to end this conflict and find some peaceful balance given the bigger threats.
It seems that the real question is what will happen to Azeroth, the Titan.
(Other side note: while coming up with my homebrew D&D setting, I decided that the world the players lived on was actually the physical body of one of the proto-god creators of that universe - this was not long before Chronicle Volume 1 came out, so I guess that the folks at Blizzard and I were having similar ideas. Also, we both renamed the Shadowfell the Shadowlands.)
Now, we've been told that empowering the Heart of Azeroth is how we're going to save her, but at the end of the Eternal Palace, we find that instead, it has been used to unlock the seals on N'zoth's prison. Magni has been mislead.
One wonders - was the Heart of Azeroth ever going to help fix the world? And then one has darker worries - has Magni simply been hearing N'zoth whispering to him the whole time?
I'd argue that he probably has been hearing the real Azeroth at least some of the time, given that he shows a similar ability to hear Argus (another critique for Legion - we never really understood exactly what Antorus did for the Legion.)
But what we've been doing this expansion is clearly not entirely good and healthy for Azeroth.
The Titan is dying. Sargeras' sword caused a life-threatening wound. Now, maybe that's been fixed for the most part, but now we have another problem to deal with - for the first time since the Titans ordered the planet, an Old God is loose upon the world.
Now, the Old Gods were not sent there to kill Azeroth. That was Sargeras' initial plan, and while he clearly flirted with the idea of instead converting her to his cause, his final act before his imprisonment looks like a last-ditch effort to kill Azeroth like he did Telongrus (which I'm assuming would also be the name of the Titan who was so thoroughly void-corrupted... it's where Void Elves have their little home base, on fragments of the world destroyed by Sargeras)
The Old Gods are supposed to pump the Titan full of void in the hopes of creating a Void Titan that would spread their madness across the cosmos.
With N'zoth loose, he is probably better-suited than ever to accomplish that goal.
Which raises an interesting question:
What if we don't save Azeroth?
What if we kill her?
Sargeras wanted to destroy all of creation (though mission-creep might have changed his goals to more of a vision of an intergalactic empire of demons) to deprive the void of things to corrupt. What if we realize that we're going to have to do a far more limited version of that.
If Azeroth is corrupted, we might have to destroy her.
And if the World-Soul at the heart of a planet is dead, what does that then mean?
There are a lot of foreshadowing hints that the Shadowlands will play a major role in the next expansion, possibly even be its setting.
If a World-Soul dies, but the world is intact, could that manifest as a massive explosion of death energy? Might we see the Shadowlands become far more powerful, and might we see the undead raging across the world?
And could that be Sylvanas' plan all along?
Sylvanas has decided at this point that she wants to convert all of humanity into the undead. She's started making undead Night Elves as well. If she wants everything united (preferably under her control) as undead, might she even want Azeroth herself to be undead?
Friday, July 12, 2019
Showdown at Teh Hevuarga, Take Two
For the first time, I ran an adventure a second time.
I wrote about the first time I ran this before, but now I've run it with a different group of players, with the same ultimate result (they won, in a hard-fought bout.)
Anyway, it was interesting to see how these players did things differently.
The premise of the adventure is that of a wild west showdown (though ironically, the lawless frontier in the nation of Nephimala is actually in the east) in which the party needs to find a safe place to keep a young aasimar girl and the half-orc nun accompanying her while the party scouts out the town of Teh Hevuraga looking for allies and staying wary of secret gang members who wish to capture the girl and sacrifice her to the infernal powers that lead the Red Rattler Gang.
The first party did a lot of work to meet all the major figures in the town, while the second never explored the Temple of Coran (God of Glory and Heroism) or the local brothel - which is actually where the first group chose to keep the girl during the fight.
Neither group used the dynamite they could buy. Also neither group figured out the owner of the general store (who sold the dynamite) was a Rattler. Both did chase the card-cheat out of town, though neither figured out he was also a member of the gang.
The Sheriff's deputy, who is the third and final town resident with the gang, had very different fates in the two runs. The first time, the tiefling bard seduced him, got him to warn her to leave town before Galero (a Barbed Devil) and his crew showed up, and then tied him up so he couldn't flee. The second group did not suspect him and he wound up shooting the sheriff in the middle of the fight, only for good old Sheriff Tom Clauron to turn around and blow his head off.
Anyway, I think there's tweaking to be done - maybe incentivize the party to explore the town a bit before sundown. I was also a little disappointed that neither group reinforced the doors or buried dynamite in the road to use as a trap. A single stick could potentially take out or at least severely injure one of the eight regular gang members (and half of them are carrying dynamite themselves, which would go off an almost certainly kill them in the chain reaction.) Maybe it needs to be clearer that they can do these sorts of things.
I wrote about the first time I ran this before, but now I've run it with a different group of players, with the same ultimate result (they won, in a hard-fought bout.)
Anyway, it was interesting to see how these players did things differently.
The premise of the adventure is that of a wild west showdown (though ironically, the lawless frontier in the nation of Nephimala is actually in the east) in which the party needs to find a safe place to keep a young aasimar girl and the half-orc nun accompanying her while the party scouts out the town of Teh Hevuraga looking for allies and staying wary of secret gang members who wish to capture the girl and sacrifice her to the infernal powers that lead the Red Rattler Gang.
The first party did a lot of work to meet all the major figures in the town, while the second never explored the Temple of Coran (God of Glory and Heroism) or the local brothel - which is actually where the first group chose to keep the girl during the fight.
Neither group used the dynamite they could buy. Also neither group figured out the owner of the general store (who sold the dynamite) was a Rattler. Both did chase the card-cheat out of town, though neither figured out he was also a member of the gang.
The Sheriff's deputy, who is the third and final town resident with the gang, had very different fates in the two runs. The first time, the tiefling bard seduced him, got him to warn her to leave town before Galero (a Barbed Devil) and his crew showed up, and then tied him up so he couldn't flee. The second group did not suspect him and he wound up shooting the sheriff in the middle of the fight, only for good old Sheriff Tom Clauron to turn around and blow his head off.
Anyway, I think there's tweaking to be done - maybe incentivize the party to explore the town a bit before sundown. I was also a little disappointed that neither group reinforced the doors or buried dynamite in the road to use as a trap. A single stick could potentially take out or at least severely injure one of the eight regular gang members (and half of them are carrying dynamite themselves, which would go off an almost certainly kill them in the chain reaction.) Maybe it needs to be clearer that they can do these sorts of things.
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