Can someone please explain too me how wow lore made any sense since day 1

Lore Story
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neither, as I said, agree to disagree

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You think every single gnome and dwarf has a tank?

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no but they clearly know how to make them and well :slight_smile:

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This game is about fantasy… End of the story :slight_smile:

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They already uses them each time, and most dwarves uses gun over melee weapons ( See BFA cinematic )

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As others have said, there is a plethora of magical and wonderful tech in Warcraft. The problem? Nearly all of it is terribly unreliable, hard to make and exorbitantly expensive to produce.

Goblin tech- grenades, rocketpacks, guns… They all in lore are terribly destructive and powerful, but also scarily unpredictable. Sure, you might get to shoot that one guy. Or your gun might detonate and take your hands off. Yeah, that rocketpack might get you to the top of the enemy battlements. OR it might blow up, killing you and the nearest ten people in the vicinity. So, if you’re an elf with a few thousand years practice with a bow - able to hit the eye of a bird in flight from five hundred paces - why are you gonna swap to the inaccurate, loud, potentially deadly firearm that has a MUCH SLOWER rate of fire. Don’t take game mechanics for granted. Rifles aren’t firing at the same speed of bows. You shoot, then you gotta add powder, shot, shove a stick down there to tamp it all down and then you get to shoot again. Look at how the Dwarf Rifleman fight in the BfA cinematic, or the Dwarf in the Vanilla trailer. You got a beast charging you? You’ve got ONE SHOT to kill it or severely wound it. Better hope your gun doesn’t mess up. Better hope you don’t miss.

Gnomish tech? Magical. Wonderful. Can do ALL SORTS of crazy things. But like Goblin tech, it also has a penchant for not being reliable. Sure, it might not explode but that Gnomish mind-control cap? Might also turn you into a chicken. Why? Who knows - certainly not the gnomes. So sure, a spy could mind-control an enemy commander to give bogus orders. Or he might end up as breakfast for the hungry army when they find a chicken amid their tents. Same with their portal devices - might get you where you wanna go - might put you at the bottom of the ocean. You want to take that risk, as a Commander? Wanna send your elite strike squad 100ft under ground instead of into the enemy castle? Probably not.

Now - you DO have a point regarding tanks and the speed of them being produced etc. At this point, I think the game has jumped the shark a bit. We’ve got seemingly DOZENS of airships, tanks, hundreds of gyrocopters. Now, they all do have this ‘ramshackle’ look and feel to them. But gone are the days of early WoW lore where it really made you feel like these machines were potentially deathtraps and thus rare. The Alliance field entire fleets of Gyrocopters now. Back then, it made sense 90% of people would rely on the tried and true Gryphon and Hippogryph, because they wouldn’t spontaneously combust, fall apart or simply stop flying.

So… By this point in lore? I agree the amount of swords, shields and what-not we still see should be declining as super-advanced mechanisation is taking over. The hell is a dude with an iron sword gonna do against an Azerite-Empowered Goblin Reaver? Not much, that’s for sure. You can argue in some cases that MAGIC makes up the difference. Your insanely over-charged Azerite infused can cleave through metal like butter, so go ahead. But footsoldiers? Nyeh…

In short? The only way I can put it together is that game-mechanics and actual tech level is very different. That in lore, the tech is the same as it was shown to be in Vanilla. Rare, unreliable, expensive as hell to make and incredibly difficult to construct requiring a lot of time, specialist knowledge and rare resources (and lets not even get into the maintenance of them). And while it may be more common than they were a decade or two ago, you’re finding more and more people armed with firearms rather than bows among the other races, leading to a decline in conventional ranged weaponry, if not really impacting melee armaments at current (again, see: BfA cinematic. Dwarf rifleman step out, take one shot each, fall back to prime and reload).

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but not all established guns wow lore are musketts where u gotta load gun powder in, some have been established as cannons ffs! like titan guns from ulduar for example? the gnomes wouldn’t reverse engineer this tech?

Also what if you aren’t an elf. Like humans, live normal life, just like real life, guns have been established as a FAR SUPERIOR weapon…

and tech deffo isn’t unreliable now with azerite

and it didn’t seem so bad back then either, they built a tech city after all

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I imagine Gnomes would try reverse engineer Titanic weaponry. But I also imagine they’d meet limited success, as Titan-tech is so far beyond them. So they may have come up with some marked improvements to their tech, but knowing Gnomes, it also still likely comes with severe / unpredicatable drawbacks. For instance, in the Battle of Dazar’alor, Mekkatorque has a Mech based on Titan-tech. And it kicks butt! Until he tries to activate its failsafe… Now he’s frozen in unmeltable, unbreakable ice. Gnomish tech, based on Titan technology, designed by the greatest gnomish engineer, has literally trapped him ad infinitum in ice xD

I agree with you on Humans using guns more predominantly. But from what I’ve seen, most of 'em do use guns. I’ve seen more and more human NPC’s armed with blackpowder weapons. That said, guns are also rare and expensive still - so your average poor human farmer, militaman or hunter might not be able to afford one, so he’s stuck with a bow / crossbow.

Azerite tech is powerful with Azerite, but still somewhat unreliable. Though it makes sense you wouldn’t invest Azerite into a weapon you thought was likely to blow up, so its something of a circular fallacy. You put Azerite in your best, most secure tech, because you can’t afford to lose it. Making Azerite tanks etc the top 1% of their arsenal. Again, I don’t think they’re as common as the game makes out. I mean, we see ONE Horde/Alliance Azerite tank in Arathi. We see two Alliance Azerite tanks attack Zuldazar in Battle of Dazar’alor.

That’s true, I can’t debate the Gnomes built a tech city. But one does have to wonder how ‘practical’ most of that tech was. A lot of it comes across as a Rube Goldberg machine. Like, a lot of unncessary and extraneous stuff to do something really simple. And it was also that same tech that wiped out their city and most of their race, a la radiation.

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I guess my question then would be WHY are they expensive? gnomes seem pretty efficient at making them and surely in a war effort such equipment does not cost?

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Well, firstly it’s much harder to make a gun that is to make a sword and shield. Especially to make a gun well compared to the latter. Remember, only Engineer’s can make these weapons - and only good Engineer’s can make the good versions of them. And these require rare/hard to find resources. So assuming we stick to the most simple version? I reckon you could mass produce a dozen swords for each gun. But I’ve nothing to back that up, it’s just my mental image. Y’know, a lot more smiths than Engineers kinda deal.

And while Gnomes are certainly efficient, remember their race is the smallest one in the Alliance. Dwarves can probably pitch in with their vast foundries and such, but if you’re trying to arm every human, elf, dwarf, gnome, worgen and pandaren with a gun? That is a HUGE and EXPENSIVE undertaking. And if all your engineer’s are making guns, who is making the tanks? The airships? Who is repairing what you’ve already got that gets damaged?

One thing I imagine they can mass produce very quickly is the ammunition. That can be really easily done from simple mold casting. But then they also need the materials for the ammunition. More guns, more ammunition to supply the guns, more blackpowder to let them fire the shot that goes into them…

TL;DR - Guns are complex mechanical constructions. Not a sharpened bit of steel like a sword, or one shaped beaten into a vague disk shape like a shield. They all require metal and skill to make. A lot of the cost will go into the time and skill needed to make such weapons. Plus they also need blackpowder and ammunition to function properly + regular maintenance if they break or jam. Whereas a sword? You just keep swinging. Sharpen it with a rock occassionally, wipe it down after a fight.

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but isn’t that the same in the modern world? It would be easier to make a sword than a gun? but yet we still all use guns?

and don’t the same properties apply too swords and shields as u described the same in real life?

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Absolutely! But we’ve moved to the point where automation and craft is so efficient that we’ve gone beyond the need for swords and shields. We can have machines make a gun in lightning speed - and our guns have little to no risk of spontaneously detonating, jamming or electrocuting you. They also fire at high RPM instead “Fire one shot, spend a minute+ reloading.”

Keep in mind that swords and cavalry were used up until World War 1. That was one hundred years ago - and we were still making use of the ol’ sword and horse. Mechanisation will continue to advance and develop in WoW until swords, shields and plate are made obsolete. But keep in mind, the first guns? They couldn’t reliably penetrate plate armour. They’d just glance off. So now you’ve got a slow firing, inaccurate (and potentially dangerous) weapon that can’t reliably kill someone wearing plate without a very good shot. Why not stick with the bow that can fire 5+ times far more accurately in the time you get one rifle shot, that’s also a fraction of the cost?

But rest assured - firearms will eventually replace swords, shields and bow in WoW. It’ll just take about a century or two of development. Remember, magic is a great equaliser with tech. A magic bow could be way stronger than a rifle. Faster, more accurate, able to melt metal and spontaneously combust its targets etc… But then you get magic rifles… It’s all over the place.

TL;DR - You raise a great point. We’re just at that weird point of history where this stuff has really just begun to catch on in WoW. Magic might delay its spread, but eventually in 100-200 years, tech will rule and war will change.

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I think it is also the case though that bows aren’t very reliable at penetrating plate either, and are generally weaker then guns. Also you could argue some guns we have in wow are actually more advanced then what we have in real life, take guns from ulduar for example. Also chivalry is not used in modern warfare using western military techniques/strategy.

I think your point about the time point of wow is a good one, but it just means I hope they don’t do a time jump in wow for any future expansions for like old anduin for example because if we still using swords that just don’t make sense xD

Also based off the radiation trap set up by that evil leaper gnome guy (forgot name) that wiped out gnomeragon would suggest to me gnomes know how to make chemical bombs that are city wide?

Also can we not forget that we already have widely used shredders that are weaponised MECHS. we don’t even have anything close too that functional and efficient in the modern world…

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I see this kind of thing a lot when other fantasy series are being discussed, and to be honest this line of thinking is the result of an lack of eloquence in the discussion.

I most often see some variation of an argument like this: “ isn’t done realistically!” swiftly replied to with “lol the book/show/movie/game has dragons in it”, which is often delivered as if it was some kind of slam-dunk. However, this is really just a failure for person A to convey what they really mean, and person B is replying to a different complaint.

Usually when someone critiques a story for not making sense, they are doing so from the perspective of the “rule-set” previously outlined by the series. The key complaint isn’t that what is happening doesn’t follow the “rule-set” of real life, but rather that it doesn’t fit the story’s consistency.

Something like Jaina instantly teleporting is a bad example because… well, it does make sense? Kinda. Jaina has been insta-teleporting 3+ people since at least WotLK (the meeting between Thrall and Varian in Dalaran, if not before, I can’t think off the top of my head) so it has long been established. There’s a whole 'nother can of worms about how badly the “rule-set” of magic is established in WoW, but this particular case is rather cut-and-dry.

Instead, I’d point you to a particular fan favourite: “DRAENOR IS FREE!”. Here, we saw a primary villain of the expansion becoming the hero that everyone was cheering for despite the lack of a real redemption arc. Yes, he helped in the fight against Archimonde, but bear in mind that this was without any real build-up, and without the knowledge of anyone actually cheering besides those who also fought Archimonde. This is terrible story-writing in which a character and the way that others perceive that character has done a complete 180 in the last half of the final chapter with very little reasoning. Is it as silly as Anduin destroying a tank with a sword? Probably not. But destroying tanks with swords makes sense within WOW’s universe. Characters changing and getting redeemed on a whim does not.

And unfortunately that kind of writing is rife within WoW. None of the writers critique each other, and the guys who actually hold the responsibility of being the in-house fact checkers are litterally yes-men who are credited with saying “continuity exists to enhance a story, not tie the hands of the creators” - a complete misnomer. A story falls apart the second you take continuity away from it just so that you could do what you want with it, and it’s probably one of WoW’s largest issues in the story department.

So yeah, tl;dr, the lore never made real-world sense because it’s a fantasy and the whole point is to break the rules of real life, but that’s different to not having it’s own set of rules, which it should still follow otherwise there’s just no point to having a story at all.

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continuity sure but some people just don’t like how plots go despite the fact you can do anything if you just say it’s ‘‘fantasy’’. And I am just speaking from a logical sense of why would we be in a medieval setting if there is technology that is basically centuries ahead.

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We could go even further and ask the question why the sword is such a common weapon in the first place. All human kingdoms have access to plate armor. A sword is utterly useless against such protection. Most enemies are stronger than humans and have a greater reach. At this point in time it would make more sense for humanity to rely on the ‘pike and shot’ combat formation with pikes, muskets and halberds.

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I say we are ready for Warcraft 40k.

I for one am looking forward to seeing human Paladins running around in sanctified Power Armor; Night Elf snipers wielding supercharged, environmentally friendly anti-matter plasma rifles; and berserking Orc warriors running around with mini guns and chainsaw axes.

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the idea of a human space marine in wow gets me quite hype won’t lie xD

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tbh i agree with this

just so i should be doing bonus damage against plate wearers on my hunter because im using a crossbow yo.

the fact that i cant is unrealistic!!! wtf!!!

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Guns where/are easier to train people in their use.

It takes YEARS of training and building up the correct muscles to train a longbow man.