Okay so I am very curious about this and think about it a lot as I’m spending time doing transmogrification runs especially.
Khadgar, Illidan, Gul’dan etc. Are described as mighty magicians in the game and books and audio dramas and in game we work alongside them but they seem to do the big stuff (Destroying bridges with meteors, Naruu, opening portals, teleporting anywhere and often large groups etc…)
I get that this is done for the sake of storytelling and to look cool but my question is:
If not for obvious gameplay restrictions, what would a high level character be capable of?
One reason I loved Legion so much is because all of my characters felt very powerful. Going into BFA and I felt like I was doing grunt work again and fighting witches and pirates etc when I had just taken down a Titan…
Interesting question.
Gameplay-wise, a Lich King would get totally obliterated when facing a normal everyday pirate of a new expansion. Therefore, expansions are incoherent meaning each tells an own, seperate story of strength.
An answer to what the player is capable of is measured by the point of an encapsulated story you’re interested in.
If you compare WoW to Dragon Ball we would probably be Krillin, while important charas like Illidan, Khadgar, or Queen Azshara would be the Saiyans:
Among the less important charas we are the strongest. But we still have no chance of wining against the main protagonists/antagonists in an 1vs1 fight, even though we sometimes have our strong moments against them.
But I think in this regard Legion handled us pretty bad. MoP and WoD were good, where we were treated as some of the more important soldiers in the Alliance’/Horde’s army (it seemed pretty normal after classic+3expansions where we proved our worth).
Then came Legion where we were the ultimate heroes with some of the strongest weapons in existance. I just pretend that Khadghar needed some people serving him without questioning anything and he told everyone to treat us like we were some big deal.
And in BfA we again are the important soldiers of our factions, just that this time Magni needed some i̶d̶i̶o̶t̶s̶ champions.
But at the end of the day we are and will always remain just in the middle between canon fodder nr 164 and ultra strong protagonist when it comes to power.
I agree although I liked the feel of my character in Legion but where do you go from there?
For example my DH is described as being ‘almost as powerful as Illidan’ and each class hall story arc has you becoming the leader of your respective class. Then comes BFA and on the one hand I feel like the ‘important soldier’ as you say and on the other a saviour of Azeroth…
Guess I’m saying from an RP perspective, I am unsure of where my character stands.
Your story ends when another story begins. There are 2 worlds and your job is to connect them for your enjoyable experience.
As an example: While it may be true that your particular character is incredibly powerful, it could be that he or she does not always have access to that power. It could be that his or her spirit is weak (beliefs, feelings), or a broken body, or temporarily imbued power.
If you choose no intrinsic world to overcome, you measure growth by sheer outside strenght alone. So of course, you will get confused by the starting & ending points of each seperated story of strength/expansion because you lack plenty of inner tools to connect them with your character.
Just to be clear: I’m also not happy about how much effort a player has to invest to make all that work. But that is another topic.
I would say that is pretty much a given. However I think leaving so much up to the player to create their ‘intrinsic world’ can be both a setback and an advantage depending on how much you want to invest (but you have already kind of said that).
My point being that I can make connect with my character and I do but I was more interested in where other people and where the development team feel the characters are at in terms of absolute power.
Reading Illidan’s book you can see that even he has struggles and weakness as you mention above.
Depends on the class you play I guess.
The player warlock for example, is considered the strongest warlock or one of the most powerful on azeroth, considering past feats (green fire Q). Even without the power of the artifacts I’d say the player character warlock could put up a decent fight against certain big lore figures, and I’d extend this for classes like mages, death knights and druids also.
During Legion I felt the player fantasy they were going for was that the Artifact Weapons elevated us to the level of the Hero characters in the setting. The Death Knight reforges the shards of Frostmourne into a pair of two new blades and becomes a direct subordinate of the Lich King. As such, it seems fair to me to assume that the Death Knight Player in Legion is comparable to Death Knight Arthas during the Undead Campaign in WC3 RoC.
BFA toned the stakes down from Legion, but with the Jailer being comparable to a Titan in the Shadowlands and future expansions probably diving deeper into the cosmology chart, I think it’s fair to assume that the Player Power Fantasy will be more akin to Legion going forward.
