The trailer shows the Horde arriving at Zul’Aman to presumably sack the city, you even see some of the same Horde characters inside of the raid itself in the following scenes.
They did, yeah. Zul’jin is revered by all of the forest troll tribes, but since the end of the Second War, all of the tribes in the Hinterlands that actually remained loyal to Zul’jin’s memory have actively attacked and raided the Revantusk. We can only assume they were fine enough with the blood elves, since they joined the Horde after the elves did.
Remember that time there was a big magic black hole inside the nexus in coldarra and the best we could do was slow the inevitable? That’s a concern. The hole was still there around Legion when we got our artefacts.
I come bearing magical lore, my friends. This time from Night of the Dragon. Some highlights:
To dispel a spell, one must find the right thread which unravels the pattern of the spell’s matrix to expose its source, then disperse it. One could simply ‘rip it apart’ but the more powerful a spell is, the more they resist this and it takes an equal amount of power to undo it. Methodically unraveling the pattern is the surest way to dispel something that’s too powerful to brute force. The description of the process reminded me of the arcane web thread world quests in Nazjatar. Every mage weaves their spells differently on some level, and this is reflected in the pattern of their spells when perceived through arcane senses. Understanding how someone weaves their spells helps you undo their spells in the future, as you’re already familiar with their pattern. This also helps identify who cast a spell from the latent energies, through the Law of Sympathy.
There are arcane scrying wards that don’t block the scryer from peering in – but they prevent the scryer from leaving, essentially trapping their mind in the location, exposing their body to harm. A mage as powerful as Krasus couldn’t escape the trap once he triggered it, leading to him almost getting owned by a crocolisk that found his body in the Wetlands. In a similar vein, some creatures who devour magic only need to access the spell link to drain their victim, so if your mind is trapped with a ward like this in a room with a devourer and you’re unable to sever the link? Dead mage.
Related to the passage above, the longer the distance and larger the area you’re trying to see at once, the more powerful the scrying spell becomes and therefore more mentally taxing. Exceptionally powerful scrying spells can fry the minds of the weak willed. The more powerful the scrying spell becomes, the easier it is for others to sense your invisible eye. The meta would be to get as close as possible before scrying.
There is a curse which affects the victim’s perception of time, tricking their mind into believing that they’re frozen and minutes turn into an eternity. Your body is still fine, you live and breathe as normal, but your perception of events is slowed down to an excruciating eternity. We see something similar happen in Fallhaven in Drustvar where the villagers are trapped in time – but the world moves on around them as normal. Rats eat their food, pigs go about their business, but the villagers perceive themselves frozen in time. I headcanonned it the name ‘Curse of Eternity’.
For a dragon to disguise themselves as a mortal in a way that passes the detection of a mage’s arcane sense, they must actively suppress their aura and only maintain their disguise. Any active spellcasting will reveal their massive aura and expose them for what they are, lighting them up like an invisible beacon. Masking a dragon’s magical presence is not an easy task.
The black dragons worked on an artificial disease which sterilises mages from magic, deafening them to it – picture the Tranquil from Dragon Age. They planned to release it on Dalaran, but it backfired on Sintharia. Dragons are described as being living embodiments of magic, so sterilising a dragon off of magic basically folded her out of life. The plot is believed to have been foiled and no further attempts have been made since then.
There’s a herb called Morrowgrain which is usually used as an ingredient in primitive curses to slowly erode someone’s body to death. By itself, the herb is quite a potent if insidious killer that’s difficult to detect and identify as the source of the ailment (and therefore making an antidote difficult) – druids can sense it in their bodies (but even then Malfurion almost missed it), and magically concentrate it to a single point which can then be vomited out.
It’s also possible to magically enhance the properties of Morrowgrain to guarantee a “slow but certain death”. It took Elune’s power to keep the curse at bay long enough for Malfurion to come to and purge the poison from his body, though it’s noted that even Elune can’t keep it at bay forever, and eventually the herb would have won through attrition.
Druids can also sense if a toxin they’ve been infected with is lethal or not. When Broll got drugged by poisoned thorns summoned by druids loyal to Fandral, he could sense the poison was only intended to incapacitate him before he lost consciousness.
In the same novel we also get introduced to Steelgrass, a type of leaf that druids weave magically to create cloth, and this cloth is so durable it can’t be cut even by a Sentinel’s glaive. As we saw in Wolfheart, a Sentinel’s glaive possesses some sort of enchantment that allows it to penetrate armour easier. The only way to undo a Steelgrass weave is to sing the song that was used to weave that specific cloth – thankfully Broll and Fandral were both taught by the same teacher, so he could guess Fandral still uses the same technique and thus Broll knew Fandral’s weaving song, implying it’s personal to every druid.
Druids also make armour out of ironwood that like its name suggests has a bark that’s as tough as iron*, but they prioritise using naturally fallen trees for this purpose instead of chopping them down so as to preserve the balance and create no waste.
I have probably said it before, but I like to mention it again.
In Eversong woods, early one in fact, you help a researcher by the name of Apprentice Mirveda in collecting samples from the dead scar.
she mentions the energy in the soil draws the undead to it, and it has disrupted the lay lines, already making it clear the dead scar never was just a case of blighted land, but something far more damaging. Never the less you collect the samples, because she wants to know if the soil can be cleansed.
Sadly this is not the case and she concludes the soil itself has been altered to such an extend that it cannot be reversed.
One could perhaps argue one apprentice to a wizard could be mistaken and the soil can be fixed, but we haven’t heard of anything else since (to my knowledge) so as far as the canon is concerned the dead scar will never be healed.
Anduin is apparently in his early 20s, according to the new Sylvanas book. He was born in year 15, and WoD started in Year 31, so he would have been 16 years old at the time.
So, that indicates that Legion, BFA and Shadowlands lasted a bit longer than a year each, at a minimum.
