Me neither. Deepholm feels like one of those grandiose Metzen ideas: “What if EVERYTHING WAS ROCK?” It seems like his modus operandi, right there with “What if the night elf starting island was a GIANT TREE?” and “What if the Titans were LIVING PLANETS?”
It’s a rock zone where rock people and rock creatures rock around among very samey rock scenery and everything is grating rock-themed puns.
…Rock.
It’s my least favorite Cataclysm zone by far, not helped by Aggra’s grating voice acting.
Would you say it’s aggrating?
Aggra-vating.
That’s what I was looking for.
Peeve: quests you can only do once having these scripted exhanges of lines between characters but they cut each other off because the script is sped up(?) and you never get to hear the full sentence.
I mean, what would you expect in the elemental plane of Earth then?
The answer is to not make visually and thematically repetitive parts of lore into entire zones. Deepholm would work nicely as a dungeon or raid, but spending an entire long “collect three pieces of a macguffin” questline there…
Meanwhile Metzen was against an Emerald Dream expansion because he felt that an entire expansion’s worth of nature-themed zones would be boring. Never mind how diverse nature is, and how the game itself now has four different aesthetics related to Emerald Dream lore (10.2 Dream, Ardenweald, Thros and the Nightmare) and the ideas for many more practically write themselves.
Zaralek serves as evidence that Deepholm could’ve been done in a more interesting way.
Yeah… in that regard, Nazjatar could’ve been so much more aswell rather than just one waterzone with night elf ruins… even inside the zones there was varying landscapes, from dark caves with old god squids to the more open stuff.
I reckon Deepholm could’ve perhaps had a bit more too.
Each of these expacs had exactly the same amount of human focus, if not more, so where was the beef about that?
Do people actually remember how much Thrall was in Cataclysm? Like, actually in it? Because I promise you it wasn’t that much. He showed up in the goblin starting zone (second half only, and not that much), he showed up for his marriage and elemental-broken quest in 4.2 (which he shared with the **entire Molten Front and Firelands), then the Hour of Twilight 5 man dungeon, and then the 4.3 raid.
So you’ve got a half dozen quests, at the expac start, a single quest chain in 4.2, then a dungeon and a raid (which he shared with a bunch of other NPCs). That actually sounds like a perfectly reasonable amount of time to have a character be in the expansion, especially if their story arc is leading to him helping out at the end. Hell, if anything he was underutilised in the game for Cata.
idk the “orc fatigue” stuff starts coming across as “I don’t want Horde races prominent” after a while. Like, yeah, the central race of the Horde does get some attention, as does their most prominent face. About the same as humans, in fact.
“Human fatigue” hasn’t stuck around as a meme for a decade or so, even though you literally can’t go a single expac without one of them being a main character. TBC might’ve been the only exception to that, actually.
Got the leggo axe on my paladin last night.
The grind beings.
You WILL enjoy another Jaina soul-searching episode. You WILL enjoy Anduin solving all of the Alliance’s problems.
To be fair, I think Deepholm visually looked interesting enough. Zaralek Caverns is actually Deepholm but worse to me.
I guess I don’t remember any rock puns, but Blizzard makes naming puns every single time everywhere. After all, the only time you step into Deepholm somehow is when you deliberately have a reason for going there, as you need to take a very deliberate portal to get in there.
I think direct experience is probably hard to remember, but Thrall was heavily complained about during Cataclysm that we had to follow the Green Jesus everywhere and watch him get married etcetera. I’d say it’s somewhat disingenuous to say Thrall wasn’t featured as much and also say Night Elves do get featured too much.
Both of these very much have been a meme as well. Both Horde and Alliance should give the major focus of the story (including main characters) to other races. Night Elves haven’t actually been a major focus of any expansion story, funnily enough, as the closest they’ve gotten is a B-story or a pre-patch event.
My main wish moving forward is that the less represented characters of the Warcraft universe get the major spotlight as well. Let’s move it away from humans and orcs (and not place it adjacent to night elves) so the world can also evolve from its Warcraft 1-2 days. A lot of people react in a funny way to this suggestion, as Warcraft 1 was just humans and orcs. But World of Warcraft hasn’t been just orcs and humans for a long time.
I was really expecting to see a heavy Dwarf focus with The War Within, and by a heavy Dwarf focus I don’t mean just Magni. Instead, we get Anduin, we’re probably going to get Jaina and whoever else made cameos at Amirdrassil, Stromgarde humans, and…
There’s an entire separate kind of Earthen we’re going to meet.
The takes in this thread are unreal sometimes 
I absolutely don’t think it’s disingenuous. I just listed how much Thrall showed up in Cata. It was less than Malfurion.
He showed up in Darkshore and Hyjal’s questing, he showed up at Thrall’s wedding, his younger self in the Well of Eternity dungeon, and the Molten Front, and then also shows up to save the day in Firelands raid.
Ain’t no one talking about “Bird Jesus” in Cataclysm with Malfurion around, or how sick they were of seeing him.
Give over. No one out here talks about “human fatigue” when this stuff is discussed. It’s always referring back to orcs - specifically, it always refers back to Cata Thrall and WoD.
You don’t have people saying “man, night elf fatigue is real, just like how I was tired of Varian and humans in Mists of Pandaria after they had so much attention in Cata and also White Jesus Tirion in Wrath.” That’s just not a thing that gets said.
Except by me, right now, for the purpose of this discussion.
We are.
Unfortunately they apparently are just like surface dwarves culturally, if this thing is to be trusted:
https://warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Khaz_Algar
A contingent of earthen was sent by the titan keepers to investigate a geological anomaly in a fissure detected on Sector AR-938. In time, these earthen began to display behaviors similar to those who had fallen under the influence of the flesh, despite being separated by a great distance and sharing no cultural ties whatsoever. To the keepers, the similarities were uncanny. Although both groups remained physiologically distinct, the earthen had started to refer to Sector AR-938 as Khaz Algar, and their behaviors, language, and demeanor showed many similarities to other former earthen groups.[1]
like they could still change their minds but from what we know at the moment the Earthen in TWW are literally just “surface dwarves, but rock”
Not really. That thing says that they have cultural similarities with dwarves, but The War Within deep dive goes into their culture, and they’re divided into three groups. One of these groups is very ‘dwarf-y’, but the others are quite different, with one of them straight up having a culture similar to that of tech priests from Warhammer.
Then again, this report (Observational Report: Earthen) is from when that facility was active, which means that it was likely written a long, loooooooong time ago before these cultural developments took place.
I wouldn’t argue that was the case for Mists of Pandaria or the Burning Crusade. In my opinion, both of those featured orc stuff far more heavily than human stuff, though you’re correct that humans are very prominent as the face of the Alliance.
A novel, one of the worst quest chains that Blizzard has ever made (imo) and a dungeon and raid which put him front and centre as the primary protagonist who ends up being responsible for the defeat of the primary antagonist. It’s not that much, but the low quality of the content plays a big part in shaping the opinion of players. The narratives of Elemental Bonds and Hour of Twilight were both very poorly received, and I understand why.
Big difference when it comes to humans is that we’re humans, y’know. Not only that, but Stormwind humans are some of the most generic humans in any popular fantasy franchise. It’s hard to get tired of them when there’s basically nothing to them, it’s like getting tired of drinking water. They work perfectly as a baseline, whereas the orcs (and night elves) have way too much flavour and aren’t nearly generic enough to work as a prominent race without a lot of people getting sick of them.
In fact, I’d say that the lack of a vanilla white bread race for the Horde is a design issue. Blood elves came close to solving the problem from a visual perspective, but even they have too much flavour and they aren’t prominent enough to work as the face of the Horde. All of the Horde races just have too much personality to linger in the spotlight for long without people growing sick of them.
The Horde needed its own version of bland old humans that people could just project themselves into and play without having to deal with any particularly unique aesthetics or culture. Something as generic, dull, soulless and devoid of personality as Stormwind, that could just serve as a vehicles for the players.
So instead of being our dwarves, they’re our Mechagnomes?
Idk, I’m just disappointed that they’re apparently ‘displaying fleshy behaviour’ at all. Feels weird. I didn’t want Earthen in the first place, but I’d still rather have Earthen instead of reskinned dwarves (and, apparently mechadwarves).
Varian literally had multiple scenarios dedicated to how important he was. More than Garrosh had (he had none). Anduin and Jaina showed up almost constantly as the main focus in the 5.1 campaign, whereas Horde had to split their time between orcs and belves and trolls.
Jaina (and the Silver Covenant/Kirin Tor) was the main focus of 5.2 for Alliance, with…yeah, BElves for Horde again, not orcs.
Humans were absolutely a major focus of MoP.
So orc fatigue was never real, it was about “I didn’t like this character’s writing” then.
I have to be honest: I don’t.
Frankly I’m not sure I ever did. Elemental Bonds is fine. What’s the beef with it? The actual problems, I mean. Not the problems you remember, but what actually happens.
'cos like, the only real issue I have is the line where Thrall says he almost became “a thrall [negative]” to his emotions and it’s a little cringe.
But sine he keeps being called Thrall all the time it clearly didn’t stick and actually he’s fine with it.
The very hard truth that WoW twitter will one day have to accept is that 80% of the races get 0x attention and 0x story and never will simply because globally Human/Elf players make up like 80% of this game’s entire playerbase, so Elf stuff will always have people who enjoy it, similar to Human stuff. It’s not good, but its an observation the WoW community seems to be in deep denial about pretty often, or maybe its just a case of a very loud minority vs a very quiet majority who knows.
…
[raises hand slowly]
A major focus, yes. But in my opinion, humans did not have “exactly the same amount of focus” as orcs, who not only served as the face of the Horde but were almost the sole focus of the entire 5.3 patch, no matter what faction you played.
“I didn’t like this orc character’s writing” can absolutely contribute to orc fatigue. And to be fair, I have similar issues with the writing surrounding Illidan in Legion, which also contributes to my distaste for the attention that night elves get.
If you’re asking for objective, irrefutable problems with the Elemental Bonds quest chain, I can’t give them. All I’ve got is my own opinion, and my anecdotal statement that I believe a lot of other people reacted poorly to that quest chain.
For me, some of the issues are:
You’re welcome to disagree with any and all of these points, they’re just my personal opinion and my personal experience of the Elemental Bonds quest chain. I’m not stating any of the above as factual, it’s just my feelings about that part of Cataclysm.