Well, that’s a crossover I could live without.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/497179828190183425/1008093176818585771/unknown.png
XIV’s content drought brought me here too. It’s okay… 
I got kitty cuddles!
It was cool enough for me to pick him up and cuddle him for a little bit.
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Every covenant’s terrible.
Bastion is what you said.
Maldraxxus: Fight on the arena for all eternity in a wasteful process supposedly designed to train you to protect the Shadowlands from… uh… something. But in reality, you’re just likely to be killed — and when you die in the Shadowlands, you die.
Ardenweald: You probably cared enough about nature to end up here in the first place, so living in a giant forest for all eternity is probably a good outcome to you. Living in a giant forest stuck in the form of a wild animal with no opposable thumbs… probably not so much. And then there are those giant maggots that might harvest you for the good of the ecosystem.
Revendreth: Be tortured for who-knows-how-long ostensibly in the name of redeeming you, though seeing the people who are doing the redeeming will make you wonder what exactly makes them qualified, when, by all accounts, they’re just keeping you around as an anima battery while they’re sipping wine on their endless parties in an insufferably posh manner. But hey, you could become one of them and then torture other unlucky souls!
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Note: Your reputation with the other covenants will be so bad for causing collateral damage that even when they are under threat from “something” they will not call on you, for fear you’ll do more damage than the invaders will.
I don’t remember where that lore is mentioned but it is canon.
Shout out to the Accuser who actually is dedicated to her job properly, unlike most of the other Harvesters.
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Still casually do roulettes with the FC every couple of days and I dabble in a bunch of other MMORPGs, including Guild Wars 2, Star Trek Online, Elder Scrolls Online, Star Wars The Old Republic and Neverwinter.
The reasons include:
- I realised that I had been talking crap about Shadowlands non-stop even though I hadn’t played any content since 9.0.
- I realised that I have frequently been making assertions about roleplaying on Argent Dawn despite having not done so in years.
- I genuinely miss roleplaying on Argent Dawn, as it provides a different (but not necessarily better) experience than other places.
- I was actually given a few ideas by Dragonflight. Not concerning the Dracthyr or anything dragon-related, but really just the time-skip.
So in order to educate myself and figure out if I actually want to roleplay on this server (or play WoW at all) when Dragonflight rolls around, I’m back for a bit.
While there’s truth in that, I found it blatantly obvious with Bastion.
Maldraxxus is a warped version of Valhalla, where the mightiest warriors go to test their might against each other and prove that they are worthy of their renown. Pretty metal, on the surface.
Ardenweald’s role in the spiritual ecosystem of Azeroth fills in a few holes in the lore of the Emerald Dream and makes a lot of sense, at first glance.
Revendreth’s system of tormenting the wicked is monstrous but we’re not meant to believe that it’s a nice or pleasant place. Just like with Suramar, we’re meant to want to reform it.
They all fall apart on deeper inspection yet on the surface, they come across as sort of neat.
Bastion falls apart on first inspection. It’s an idyllic heaven-like place but within the first few quests, you realise that it’s run like a cult.
You think “oh, Bastion’s story is going to be about making it a better place” but it isn’t.
The levelling narrative treats Bastion like it’s actually good and something worth protecting, while raising red flags everywhere.
Two thirds of the way through, the villains of the chapter finally appear and it turns out that their problem with Bastion is… the cult-like behaviour. There’s a big villainous bad guy speech to the tune of ominous music and plenty of evil deeds being done, but everything she says about Bastion is spot on.
The dissonance is painfully apparent right from the start with no need for further inspection. That chapter concludes without even suggesting that there could be something wrong with Bastion that needs fixing.
Every region has a story designed to serve as a hook, something to lure you in and make you interested in the covenant’s campaign. Bastion’s hook is “this cult is being dismantled by bad guys who want to bring it down for all of the right reasons, you should stop them” and I just find that extremely weird.
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The Afterlives shorts set up things a lot better, and then the actual in-game lore took a massive dump ALL over it. Particularly for Bastion.
But typical Blizz with ‘oh no, the pre-ordained system is perfect, divine right of k- uh, I mean, the Purpose is all as it should be! Those nasty, mean rebels!’
Methinks that workplace seeped in like so much toxic sludge long ago 
certainly into Danuser’s brain. if he’s lead narrative dev.
(Devos was right, and we were robbed, robbed I say!!)
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I just jumped through a broken window on a character with bare feet in Elden Ring and I cringed in sheer horror.
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You know bask in the fact that there are more planes on the bottom of the sea than sub marines in the air.
Forum’s gone to the dogs. I’m off for a while.
Worth remembering that this isn’t actually true. The denizens of Ardenweald can swap between animal and humanoid forms; the majority don’t because Blizzard didn’t want to create a bunch of new races just to show as spirits in the Afterlife. The proof here is that Huln Highmountain totters around in his tauren form.
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Thank you, I stand corrected! This does mean that one covenant afterlife is not completely horrible to end up in.
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Turns out Floofa just likes being a stupid idiot squirrel.
While I get the technical side of not wanting to create dozens of different NPC models for different races and all that, especially new ones, that just reminds me of my mild salt about how the ‘Army of the Light’ is all just… Draenei. With neon glows. Oh, and one Nathrazim.
Hardly the ‘united denizens of the cosmos resisting the Legion and its Burning Crusade’. Even if they’d just kitbashed some oddities from existing PC/NPC skeletons. Like what about the Trogg/Spore person rig, could have made some little armoured space people or… something. Anything.
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Honestly all of the shadowlands afterlives sound horrific when you consider the idea of doing a job forever. Quite a lot of fiction (most recently things like The Good Place which is worth your time to watch) follows that idea that eternal unchanging life is just as much torture as any Harvester of Revendreth could manage.
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Gonna be a little snide, and say the thought of “Work Eternal is good, actually” does sound oh so very American
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I’m wondering if the people who voted for Grimrail would vote for Oculus next time.
Would check out with their tastes.
At least vote for something actually funny. Like Stonecore.
Squirrels are cute and have opposable thumbs
And the second Azeroth’s “hero” turns up at your doorstep I also would cease to do basically anything and just wait. The risk of being randomly targeted for loot is way too high otherwise.
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I like Grimrail >:(
I just don’t like the other people who do it.
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Grimrail is based and more dungeons should be set on moving trains
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Go sit back down, peanut gallery citizen >I
Only if you explain the bosses to the randoms.