I mean, Astral Glory apparently is a plant with Light that can purify Fel, so Elune could probably just make the blooming plants that combats Fel. Emerald Shimmercap is a mushroom that seems to purify Fel as well, apparently.
The true orientation of all cosmic powers is whatever the person writing the new lore decides it is. It´s pretty much pointless to discuss the magic system of WoW because it´s basically a soft magic system that got hit with the case of multiple writers who each want to do their own thing, meaning we aren´t ever going to get fixed rules that the story will abide by.
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Honestly, even leaving aside their association with the worst expansion in WoW’s history, my problem with the First Ones is that they’re boring.
Dull. Non-evocative. Simultaneously explaining too much for our analytical brains and revealing too little for our imaginative brains.
In this way, they’re the exact opposite of the Titans. Those were clearly inspired by familiar divine archetypes — the Greek and Norse pantheons and the Valar (whom Tolkien based on the Greek and Norse pantheons). Inscrutable celestial beings above our mortal concerns who ordered worlds for unknown reasons and were seemingly benevolent, but had a cold, mathematical “needs of the many” side to them, ready to press a reset button on a world at a moment’s notice if it means purging runaway Old God corruption.
That was what made them cool, and their alien morality and unclear motivations made them mysterious. They were an enigma that you wanted to find an answer to, and they and their technology had evocative visual designs. They were also connected to the similarly evocative Burning Legion through Sargeras, a fallen Titan.
The First Ones… apparently 3D-printed all of reality on six cosmic factories. We don’t have any named examples of them, we didn’t have a single hint of their existence before Shadowlands, they aren’t rooted in any mythological archetypes, and overall we know almost nothing of them. They’re not mysterious, they’re vague. Their aesthetics are also visually boring, consisting of geometric shapes that feel like a pared-down version of Titan facilities, generic robots, and water you can walk on. The greatest mystery about them is what exactly is both six AND seven, whatever that means.
The First Ones simultaneously manage to be too mythological for a naturalistic setting and too naturalistic for a mythological setting, and yield the worst of both worlds.
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Something something gift horses and mouths I know, but it kinda stinks to me that we’re getting an Elune-blessed weapon that comes with unique effects for your spells and it’s for demon hunter.
Like, people have been clamoring for elune-y spells for priests for longer than demon hunters have been playable.
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First Ones remind me of the Reapers as of Mass Effect 3.
Which… sucks?
In what way?
The only thing the First Ones reminded of, (or more specifically, their execution,) is those cop-out endings for storylines someone who’s just gotten interested in writing would come up with after spinning a yarn far too large and messy.
“Your stuff is all fake” should be placed in the pedestal of shame, right next to “and then he woke up.”
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Warcraft has genuinely suffered from a revolving door within the CDev team. You can quite easily mark when the O.G crowd, Kosak, Danuser etc came and went.
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I think this is honestly the greatest sin of the current writing team. They don’t understand that a desire to have an answer when it comes to cosmic/mythical events is usually far-more interesting than any answer that can actually be concoted to handle it.
Up until WotLK the most we could ever gleam about the Titans was from Uldaman, a destroyed ruin with 90% of its history and secrets lost-to-time where a few archaeology NPCs scattered across the vanilla world wanted people to delve into the remains of the Titan city and uncover anything they could - and then when you return with the information they all have relatively different interpretations of it. That’s great. That’s fantastic worldbuilding for starting a setting. Knowing that Gods once walked the same earth you do and yet. . .they are now gone, silent, and their once continental cities are nothing but dusty ruins with some metallic and rocky versions of the playable races roaming them to protect them.
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I mean, you can’t tease the audience forever. Mysteries should eventually be resolved, but new mysteries should appear in their stead. And in the Retrospective series, I’m currently covering how that used to be the case for early Warcraft games. Mysteries were unraveled, only to reveal deeper mysteries behind them.
Players: Why did the orcs invade Azeroth?
WC1: Because they ruined their own world and were manipulated by the Shadow Council.
Players: Who were the Shadow Council?
WC2: They were warlocks led by Gul’dan, who was taught by the demon lord Kil’jaeden, himself an apprentice of Sargeras.
Players: Who are Kil’jaeden and Sargeras?
WC3: Kil’jaeden is an eredar lord of the Burning Legion, a demonic army formed by Sargeras, a fallen Titan. The Titans are ancient celestial beings who ordered many worlds, including Azeroth.
Players: How did the Titans order Azeroth?
Vanilla WoW: By creating mechanical servants and imprisoning the Old Gods beneath the earth.
Players: Who are the Old Gods and where do the Titans come from?
Chronicle: The Titans are world souls awakened by other Titans, except for Aman’Thul, who awakened by himself for unknown reasons. The Old Gods are parasites embedded in planets by the Void Lords so they could corrupt a world soul towards Void and thus allow the Void Lords, locked in their dimension, to manifest in the material world.
Players: Where did the world souls come from?
Answer pending.
Meanwhile:
Nobody:
Shadowlands: The afterlife is a gigantic mechanism where blue winged memory-wiped former mortals carry souls so they can be judged by a robot as they pass through a filter tube tower. If the judge robot is down, souls go to turbohell by default. The entire realm was created by unknown ancient beings on a cosmic factory, where they forged the gods of the afterlife, who are robots with organic shells. Somewhere else are five more factories where these same ancient beings created the rest of reality, too.
8 Likes
Expansion-idea after the World Soul saga: We go to destroy all the Zereth facilities and free ourselves from Danuserverse, wiping any and all memory of it away forever. No more Zereths, no more First Ones… just the Titans ( depending on what the “GRAND CONSPIRACY” of the Last Titan will be).
I’m more interested in what parts of the old world will they revamp next.
Honestly, if I was in charge of current lore, I’d play an Uno reverse card on the Shadowlands writers’ unreliable narrator excuse, and declare their lore unreliable narration.
In my hypothetical revision, the First Ones only created the Shadowlands, but wanted its denizens to believe they were responsible for the whole cosmos, so they would be venerated by the denizens of the Shadowlands as the supreme gods of all creation in their eternal and unquestionable Purpose. The other Zereths were a lie — there was only Zereth Mortis. Then the First Ones disappeared, leaving their creations to unquestioningly go through the motions.
If I felt particularly spiteful, I would say they were an advanced ancient civilization that created the current (artificial) Shadowlands as a replacement for the original afterlife, which is where mortal souls would naturally go after death if not for their design. The kyrian’s purpose, unknown to them, is to snatch souls and bring them to the artificial Shadowlands before they get the chance to pass on to their proper, natural afterlife.
This wouldn’t undo the damage, but it would contain it to the corner of the setting that most players don’t care about. The more radical version would also present a way to restore the universe’s proper afterlife later; the Shadowlands as we know them would remain a separate plane of existence, allowing the already-dead to continue to exist there in peace if they want to, but would no longer function as an afterlife.
7 Likes
It’d atleast remove the Shadowlands stuff from other parts of the setting.
Still, I suppose I cannot completely slander Shadowlands, it did allow me to earn gold by selling legendary plate belts…
If it had been up to me, I’d have entirely snipped Shadowlands out of the canon. After N’zoth was defeated ( seemingly) and Sylvanas was either killed or locked up forever, I think I would have Dragonflight follow after BfA immedeatly. The world takes time to heal, the Incarnates appear and the story plays out mostly as it did ingame, though any mention of “Order magic” is rigorously removed, and the Old Gods are actually mentioned again ( Dragonflight seemed to have an odd thing where they just outright refused to mention them at all, even when speaking about the corruption of Neltharion).
Shadowflame would have a proper origin as being a creation of either N’zoth or another Old God, and rather than seeing Deathwing just reach out to the powers of the Void to smite Raszageth, we’d delve deeper into the whispers that he was receiving from N’zoth, how that room/portal full of Void appeared underneath Aberrus ( They did mention it was the place where he supposedly first heard N’zoth).
We’d also delve deeper into the relationship between Iridikron and the Void, who would’ve succumbed to the Void’s whispers in similar fashion as Neltharion. After all, the both of them are closely tied to the earth in which the Old Gods were shackled. ( I dont know if this question is answered in the DF novel, havent bought or read it.)
Murozond’s coming is stalled, but it’d be made clear that he has not been stopped.
From here on the story mostly plays out again as in the current game: Fyrakk goes nuts from snorting too much Shadowflame, Vyranoth switches sides, Iridikron missing after escaping with Galakrond’s Hunger ( escaping back to the present through Deios’ last act of magic, as I have no idea how a Void portal can allow time-travel).
I would however look more into how Smolderon joined Fyrakk other than “Oh they’re both fire-guys, it totally makes sense.” Atleast the Druids of the Flame were somewhat explained.
And after Fyrakk’s defeat and Amirdrassil’s blooming, we roll into the World Soul Saga, without Shadowlands ever having reared it’s ugly head.
2 Likes
Shadowflame is not that much a fuss in itself. Frost mage’s legion artifact was a piece of shadowfrost on a stick, and it didn’t feel like an inherently bad, corrupting influence like Xal’atath or the warlock skull. Any mage or warlock that knows both arcane and shadow magic can replicate either with no issue, and it’s so bad in DF because it’s more about dark shamanism than a discipline not disapproved by the Kirin Tor. Old Gods or whoever created the pool in Zaralek likely has simply turned the power and corruption of the shadowlava there to eleven, probably adding Void to it.
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I’ll take your “remove Shadowlands from the expansion cadence” and raise you “remove both BfA and Shadowlands from the expansion cadence”.
Dragonflight would work far more naturally as a direct sequel to Legion without a faction war in the interim, as a vibrant and optimistic “breather expansion” between the demonic gloom of Argus and the voidy gloom of TWW. An interlude between the actual end of the story that began in WC3 and the Worldsoul Saga.
If you wanted to tie them together, you could say that everyone is aware of the sword and how it’s hurting Azeroth — but the massive release of Azeroth’s titanic energy from the wound reawakened the dormant Dragon Isles because of [magibabble], and the Aspects believe they would be the key to healing the world. And then once we take care of that problem, we can go explore the underground realm revealed by the sword.
Of course, hindsight is everything.
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Can’t write BfA out of it now, though. Unlike SL, it gave a whole lot of new lore along with the mess of the story we know now, so for us it’d mean leaving Zandalar and Kul Tiras in shade yet again, despite their importance for the setting.
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Mhm, which is one of the reasons I’d left it in. Who knows though, maybe I would’ve removed Ny’alotha from the raid and make it a full-on faction war, leaving N’zoth, Azshara and Nazjatar for another time ( Nazjatar should’ve been it’s own expansion).
Then we’d still have faction war, we’d still have Kul Tiras and Zandalar, preserving the good parts while making BfA look less like multiple stories crammed in one expansion.
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I just submitted PTR feedback asking for the Amirdrassil moonwells to be usable in tailoring, such as for purifying Felcloth into Mooncloth, like vanilla moonwells.
It’s a minor flavor thing and I don’t expect them to actually do it, but hey, I tried!
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I could leave N’zoth in
but under the impression he was gently pushing us to even further acts of depravity towards each other.
the final patch would then not be about killing him, but rather beat back his growing influence after a small part of it was unleashed.
afterwards we take the time skip to DF, horde and alliance are still not friends but without N’zoth pushing them to warlands levels of violence some form of peace is established, but the kind where both sides are holding a gun to each others head, neither of them willing to be the first to pull the trigger.
and the DF expedition is a joined attempt to ease tension between the factions.
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