if you DM RP events where you’re just fighting nasty gnolls or a powerful kobold chieftain then you are 10,000 leagues above any other RPer in the world.
Me… TAKE… candle…
They’ve said that repeatedly. The orcish ancestral plane still exists, with its most recent description being an eternal hunting ground much in line with its Shattering depiction. Revendreth references the Gnomish and Mogu ideals of afterlife. The intro cinematic to Oribos even specifically name drops there being an infinite afterlives and the Arbiter justly sorted everyone instantly into the infinite realms they belonged to.
The 4 realms we currently visit are the main support pillars and therefore fixing them is the important step that we’re currently dealing with. They are by no means the only options for most souls.
There already are. The gates are inactive atm because of the Drought, preventing us players access. You see them in the sky in the Arbiter’s plateau when you visit her, stretching on forever into the horizon.
The idea that “lmao it was the maw all along, your faith is wrong” feels a really disingenuous argument and makes me feel if anyone has ever read a single line of quest text because it’s made very clear at every opportunity that this isn’t the norm, but a recent disaster and we’re meant to fix it and restore it to normal so that there is the security of a wholesome and just afterlife based on your deeds in life. Forces of evil have destroyed the afterlife and everyone is being sentenced to hell right now and we are trying to fix and redeem those lost souls.
If that isn’t the very definition of a good vs evil conflict, I don’t know what is.
While we’re on the topic of Christian themes in the setting, I’d say Revendreth fits the bill of a purgatory where sinful souls are sentenced to atone for their past sins before finding salvation and being delivered to a more graceful existence free of their burdens.
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My point is not the internal logic of the expansion, my point is Blizzard’s approach of claiming there are infinite afterlives and realms but for the content patch we get more of the Maw when the possibilities are, well, infinite. It’s unimaginative and repetitive and that’s without even commenting on the “Look at Anduin, he’s doing an Arthas! Remember Arthas? I do!”
I can’t find where I wrote anything of that capacity.
Although I agree in that I’d like to see more realms and unique afterlives like the ancestral plane that they’ve blue balled me about for years now (although arguably, leaving it to mere descriptions maintains its mystique which I enjoy), in the frame of the story where the Jailer is trying to nuke the afterlife and consume everyone’s souls or something, I feel like that’s probably an issue we ought to address, hence the Maw raid.
I know that Icecrown Citadel was the final raid of the expansion, but by and large the theme of that expansion was still tackling on the lieutenants of the Lich King one at a time (with the obligatory tradition of a side tour in X.2 patch to an adjacent threat) and the upcoming Maw raid seems to be focused on taking down Sylvanas while Jailer himself is the final boss of the expansion.
Hope 9.2 follows the trend of visiting an adjacent threat kind of in theme with the expansion but not directly linked/contributing to the main threat we’re dealing with. See Ulduar, Firelands, Isle of Thunder, Trial of Valor, Uldir, etc.
It wasn’t you who said it but someone else further up the thread. Sorry if I formatted as though it was aimed at you
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Yeah I really agree with this - like everyone going to wow turbohell in the maw is pretty explicitly set up as a problem, the bad thing that we want to stop and not how the afterlife is intended to run.
honestly, more of this - just random side-adventures that aren’t 100% tied in with the Grand Overarching Plot 
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Let’s hope the writers can limit themselves and not staple on an arbitrary world ending threat on the side adventures. Looking at you, Mechagon.
My ideal expansion would be like a Rogues Gallery of adventures like that during a time where the world is recovering from the annual world ending threat. It’s a time of rebuilding (world update) and recovery, acting as a soft reset and the threats we face range from local threats in line with Cataclysm.
We go and deal with the threats which individually may not be the end of the world, but they might stack up if left unattended so best deal with them quickly.
Honestly I just want another Cataclysm expansion without the 2010 era rage comic humour.
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Give me the uncataclysm, instead of all the zones blowing up we go about and repair things and push the local bad guy over.
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PLEASE. Not so much focus on irreparable damage, either. Northshire shouldn’t still be half on fire.
And also make Blood Elves serious again I do not want to have to endure another 4,000 “heehoo elf man looks gay!!!” jokes.
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Before the Storm and Moment in Verse did a good job portraying the contemporary feel of blood elves as a bitter and jaded people who survived a series of scuffed events and came out hardened as a result of it.
To powerslide in my obligatory monthly KOTOR 2 reference, it reminds me of the Dark Side Telos ending:
Telos shall recover, and Czerka shall make it a place for machines and sciences, it will run smooth and cold like a machine. But it shall not forget the time that Saul Karath orbited it and brought fire to its skies. It shall learn to defend itself against war, and it shall never again be caught defenseless.
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8/10 bait. Have an easter egg.
already a thing, chief
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Sand_gnome
A simpler life with simpler goals.
Very good post overall - though WoW’s thematic decline isn’t the only thing that I feel substracts players. There are much more fantasy points that have lost their touch over the years, such as the steady removal of RPG elements because of complainers as well as the gameplay being focused on repetition instead of immersion.
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But isn’t that to some extent how it’s always been, even with the RPG elements? If you wanted to train your character to use a certain type of weapon, you had to go out and hit a bunch of things with said weapon until you had a decent enough proficiency to bring that weapon into a raid, right?
I won’t argue as to if that’s immersive or not, maybe for some it is, but grinding just to be able to use a piece of gear you picked up is absolutely in the repetitive category.
Idk about you bro but I think we have different opinions since that thing might have taken way less time than repetitively spamming the same dungeon for an upgrade of the same item you originally had or people having a major ilvl gap against you in PvP just because they got to a rating treshhold to upgrade their gear and spam around 380RBGs for it before you
Ultimately there are repetitive aspects in both old & new warcraft, though I find old WoW more immersive and admittedly more impactful when you do have to do that repetitive content
Either case I totally see where ur coming from, maybe I’m just out of touch with the game / the gameplay loop feels more diablo-like overall. But it’s just an opinion and it derives further into the issues i have with the game
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It would be if we didn´t have that whole “this world is a prison” thing from Sylvanas, combined with some of darker aspects of Covenants themselves (like Kyrian blindly following their charge even if it empowers the Jailer who they are actively fighting against).
Which is another issue, Blizzard on one hand does good (CHAMPIONS! of Azeroth + friends) vs. evil (whoever we are fighting) story in their questing, but then says “umm, actually, every cosmic force is just as bad as the other and there´s something more going on behind the curtains”.
So even though you are fighting for the good Covenants against evil Jailer, you are actually fighting for the evil system of Shadowlands. And even though you are fighting against the obviously evil Void/Legion, the Light is just as bad because it wants people to follow its vision and that´s by itself something wrong (leading to destroyed planets and enslaved populations).
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The Sylvanas who was so irredeemable that she was instantly judged belonging to the Maw and is now working with the prime evil of the Maw to destroy the afterlife? Who committed genocide for no reason other than to maximise the amount of souls being funneled into the Maw? That Sylvanas?
An excellent judge of character, that one. We should trust everything she says as absolute truth, for there is no way she could possibly be misconstrued as being a villain for siding with the Jailer.
As for the Kyrian, although I’ve never done their Covenant campaign because I never found them all that interesting, the Bastion storyline always gave me the impression that other Kyrians themselves start to recognise the flaw in the system in light of how so many of them fall to the Forsworn, and that something needs to change. Fairly certain I read datamined dialogue from the beta about the Archon herself admitting this, though idk if it ever made it to live.
The only actual sources I can find for the claims of the Light seeking to destroy planets and enslave its populations largely stem from characters like Locus-Walker and the actions of Xe’ra which are narratively framed as not being trustworthy. The Light being used to commit evil deeds is hardly a new take with Scarlet Crusade being an established part of the setting for decades now, and characters doing those deeds are not wholly representative of the Light as a force.
Considering the passive influence of the Void as a contrast is to corrupt and devouring everything it touches, while Chronicles attributes Light as being the origin of all life in the cosmos, it’s not a very big leap to draw the conclusion that the Light still fundamentally represents a cosmic good in the setting when the only people claiming otherwise are deranged cultists, demons, and Void-corrupted people intentionally framed as untrustworthy sources.
Unfettered by the confines of time and space, the Light swelled across all existence in the form of a boundless prismatic sea. Great torrents of living energy flitted through its mirrored depths, their movements conjuring a symphony of joy and hope.
This power was the Void, a dark and vampiric force driven to devour all energy, to twist creation inward to feed upon itself. The Void quickly grew and spread its influence, moving against the flowing waves of Light.
Both of these statements were written at the time when the setting, as proposed in the OP and other comments in the thread, turned nihilistic and away from the fundamental Christian theme of good vs evil that was the foundation of the setting.
There’s also about it being dark vs too dark.
WotLK was super dark. Have you seen Icecrown?
But in a good dark story, there’s also some hope. It not only gives the dark more definition through contrast, it also keeps things interesting. If you slap on nothing but darkness, people just give up on caring for the story. At least I do.
To bring up the WotLK Scourge again, what they did was really dark, but there was hope too. At several points you on-screen freed the souls of the undead so they could go on to redemption. Compare to SL, where your dead grandma goes to an ultrahell where she has since been turned into a sword / a broken husk soldier / anima juice / pavement, or just been tortured until the soul literally breaks apart and unravels. And that’s the whole multiverse’s afterlife, now.
You lose before you even knew you were playing. Aside from it being so edgy it’s almost comedy (it’s like the work of some 14 year old future serial killer’s fanfictions), it feels too much not only in terms of preferences but in terms of expectations - compare to how the afterlife was viewed before this.
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