Dragons are a very, very common theme in many metal songs. What is “metal” even supposed to mean if Dragons are not “metal”?
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I quite like the quests as they are! Glad there isn’t so many bloody and gory quests. I play wow to get away from all the terrible, depressing news of the real world, so this works for me just fine 
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Totally metals
Ams metal all the way baby
And burtal!
Murderface and pickles cant join right now but they are on their way
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100% with OP here. It is WAR-craft after all. The darker quest lines were some of my favourites, whereas a lot of quests seemed a bit fluffy of late.
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Happy Metal noises
Would be a sad day for power metal for sure.
What defines dark for you ?
Gore ? Only shown violence? Does it have to be the cata undead KZ ?
Like is the Tyr questline dark ? Or what example questline you think off ?
For me personally, it’s the ones where you get a spine chilling sense of unease that things aren’t what they seem, and evil is at play, and it grows to a crescendo where all hell breaks loose. Not necessarily gore, in fact some times no gore at all. OP mentioned Stalvan. I loved that one, and Duskwood/Darkshire in general. Lots in Drustvar, e.g. the little girl that’s having a picnic in the woods. Grizzly Hills and the lumberjacks questline.
Also things where it doesn’t end well, and there’s a huge battle, but the heroes don’t get to go back for cake and medals, like the Wrath Gate.
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Deathwing is metal, DF is disney
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Spoken like someone who never held a Blind Guardian CD in their hands.
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New metalheads these days. All about the core stuff.
Compare Deathwing to Spyro the Dragon. One is metal, the other isn’t, but both are dragons. 99%+ of all dragons and dragonkin in Dragonflight are much close to Spyro than Deathwing.
A questline where our actions are not benevolent or even neutral. For example, during some Horde invasions in Stormsong Valley in BFA, there can be a task to execute Horde soldiers that are lying on the ground and pose no threat. That is dark. In fact it’s the most brutal quest I remember in all of WoW. On the traditional Character Alignment chart it’s Lawful Evil (you follow orders to the word and perform an evil act)
But something can also be dark without requiring action from us. For example (Dragonflight spoilers) the burning of Loamm Niffen is a dark event, even though it was disneyfied with the inhabitants running around and us helping them.
Sometimes a character’s passive actions can be metal. For example, when Fyrakk arrives and the whole sky turns dark red, the music becomes ominous, everyone near him gets heavy damage and he yells “SOFT! WEAK! FLAMMABLE! YOU WORMS WILL ALL BURN!”, that is quite metal.
Neltharion: “I am the whisper in the dark”. This always bring a chill down my spine.
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Precisely this.
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OK, long((ish) rant incoming.
As with many bad things, IMO this “narrative redesign” has started with Cataclysm. Cata removed the “lore heavy” style we had before and replaced it with a much more theme park feeling string of quest hubs you move along on your way to max level. This has meant that - probably in order to keep the Teens/PEGI 12 rating, they had to tone down on a lot (a lot lot) of the disturbing horror elements WoW had before, like the original Scholomance. It was still comically violent (because it was still 2010) but WoW already slightly felt less “mature” back then and inched closer towards “teenage edgy”.
The biggest shift in tone for me happened somewhere around the BfA era. At this point many of the characters began to feel slightly “off”, and with Shadowlands this has only gotten worse. Characters started to behave more “with modern audiences in mind”.
Now, Dragonflight is the narrative equivalent to BfA’s class design issues in that BfA took all the criticism for the failed class designs because the artefact system in Legion hid the pruning so well. After the artefacts had been removed, the cracks in the design became apparent.
In the same way, Dragonflight only removes the “protective layer” and makes the issues in WoW’s modern writing visible to anyone. While BfA and - to some extent - Shadowlands still maintained some surface level tension to distract players away from character level issues, Dragonflight has now removed this tension and basically lays all the bad narrative decisions bare for everyone to notice. The “why show when we could simply tell” form of writing doesn’t help, but it’s not the cause.
My biggest gripe is that we do not have actual characters anymore. We have archetypes instead. Every character acts like their specific identity group is supposed to behave. It makes the writing predictable, and with that boring and bland. You already know a character’s personality just from looking at them.
I was never a fan of Blizzard’s “metal” storytelling. It was always one sided, very puerile at best and complete cringe at worst. But at least it had character. The modern, corporate approved writing has all the flavour and wit of a bucket of paint. And reading through it is just as exciting as watching the paint dry. And I am afraid I am making the paint look bad with this comparison.
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I don’t even know what to say to this, these dragons look nothing like Spyro, they’re classic high fantasy dragons. Deathwing was one of them at some point. The only thing making Deathwing more “metal” than Alexstrasza are the literal metal plates tacked on his body.
Many metal bands were inspired by fantasy stories like Dragonlance. I think the wow dragons are very comparable to the Dragonlance ones, they even have the humanoid forms.
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Man…they look like lizards with wings and feet.
There’s nothing metal about them.
Deathwing was metal AF.
From the voice to the name.
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Don’t look at their appearance, look at their heart and their actions.
You mean to say that they don’t hoard enough gold and burn enough villages?