Quite frankly massive parts of Arator’s questline need a revamp and massive oversight because the amount of timeline and lore inconsistencies is absolutely atrocious. I don’t even say this from a point of spite, like there are literally fundamentally lore-breaking aspects in several parts of his questline with relation to WC2 and WC3 lore, its kind of insane.
2 Likes
This is such a lukewarm and previously well established thing in Warcraft though so I don’t see why the Light would be a special mention. Garrosh’s entire arc is about losing track of the goal through violence.
4 Likes
I didn’t pay too much attention to the timeline stuff, but the core lessons are sound enough. That series of quests makes it clear how the Light can be used for ill and how it can be used for good, and that it’s more than just a case of nebulous nihilism.
First of three points, it might be to highlight and hammer into the skulls of the audience that those who wear shining armour and wield the Light aren’t always in the right. It’s one thing to make an orc warlord like Garrosh into the bad guy when orcs like him are traditionally the bad guys in most media that features them, it’s another to explore that with characters who look like traditionally heroic good guys. Yes, it’s that hated subversion again.
Second, I’m personally enjoying the schadenfreude of seeing Alliance characters go through all of the soul-searching nonsense that Horde characters had to deal with in the 2010s. Such is the downside of being caught in Blizzard’s spotlight.
Third, Blizzard recycles storylines all of the time. This is just yet another case of it. Nothing new there.
For me though, the worst part of this particular quest line is the Arcantina. If that thing becomes a staple of WoW’s storytelling, I will be grumpy.
4 Likes
Also so much for the Horde expansion.
segregated to 1/3rd of their own city
Lor’themar is a glorified quest-hand-in NPC and doesnt do anything
Liadrin is almost entirely not present ???
Halduron shows up for 3 quests
Rommath leaves the expac almost immediately and might as well not exist
There’s no other horde ppl
Main Quest Zones all follow Alliance lead or “““neutral””” lead characters.
Voidstorm army is just Humans, Draenei, Vanguard of the Light + some Velves.
Personally I think a 
story is and we should call a turd a turd even if it feels “nice” to have 1 side also endure a rlly story just bcus u also had too. Idk. I say this as someone who was religiously Horde for over a decade.
3 Likes
But people were called nay sayers and doomers for correctly predicting this.
If you can’t see Blizzards pattern right now that’s on them coz anyone could have called this happening
4 Likes
TBH the absolute disaster of the opening night and the frantic patchwork attempts to fix and get info out on Midnight at the very start should have been a very clear indication of just how utterly mangled this product is.
2 Likes
The monkey paw curled all those fingers at once to deliver that fancy looking Silvermoon this time. I can only imagine how badly delivered and story pruned Last Titan will be.
3 Likes
The entire Arator stratholme part of the questline has already been completely cut from Midnight it seems so. . .
2 Likes
I think what bothers me and lot of others is that it feels like it boils down to this
”A gun can be used for both good and bad”
”The Light is a gun?”
”Yeah sure whatever”
6 Likes
But… that has kinda always been true, since WC3/Classic? The Light was very much always shown as a semi or non sentient Force of the World, that predominantly was used for good but could be missued too? It didn’t really have an agenda, unlike the Void or Fel/Burning Legion.
Sure, I’d like it if they stopped wombo-ing on their own lore (god knows we have enough sources for them to look back at, reading is not hard…) but the overall concept isn’t that bad tbqh?
It’s been a consistent goalpoast nudging since WoD though.
Yes the Light can be misused. This has never been in doubt (shoutout to ogre creeps casting Heal in WC3).
But now we’re closer to “The Light corrupts you through exposure”.
So instead of “Light can be misused” we’re at “Light will be misused” as some sort of foregone conclusion closer to how a chemist handles volatile materials.
We had “The Light frees souls from the undead”, now we got “The Light makes undead”.
8 Likes
The newest Buzzword of the expac, ‘Wrath’, is also being inconsistently applied in ways that are making me scratch my head at the theo-philosophical foundation Blizzard is trying to come at it from.
Wrath is, partially, part-and-parcel of retribution in the sense that WoW takes the word: a form of divinely-inspired righteous anger. The Arator questline covers this verison of Wrath, stating that the Wrath he felt inspiring him at the Sunwell was his Own Personal Wrath at the injustices and situations unfolding; makes perfect sense really, the entire universe is 0.5 seconds from being blown up by the Void at the moment, so being a bit angry about that, wanting retribution is quite obvious.
The Voidstorm questline, however, then gives us a completely different usage and version of Wrath. Lothraxxion has Wrath. His Wrath is from the Cosmic Force Light, making him Wrathful, so that he can mete out Wrath on the Void as it slowly turns him into a blind zealot filled with Wrath. His final words are about [The Cosmic Force Light] showing everyone Its Wrath and how we need Wrath and its corrupting people to make them Wrathful.
The very obvious problem here of course is:
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On one hand, we have characters stating and uncovering that the Light has no plan, it doesn’t directly involve itself in affairs, it doesn’t even seem that it has a conscienciousness or will of its own and is more akin to a pervasive energy binding the universe together.
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On the other hand, the Light does seem to have a Personal Will and Demands and those are that you become Wrathful and give into your Wrath to fulfill the Great Plan with copious amounts of Wrath to make sure you Wrathfully Wrath all over the place in the name of Wrathing.
6 Likes
This would be fine on its own but the issue is that these cosmic powers such as the Light and the Void have living avatars in the form of the Naaru, Void Lords and Old Gods. They’re born entities, transcient and metaphysical manifestation of these powers with untold aeons of being so. You could just as much see them as prophets or heralds in a sense with the direct word of God and now we’re supposed to think that they are just… All wrong?
See, I could accept this if this was some kind of Pokemon style power countering thing. If the Light was an unconscious force that is just naturally hostile to the Void and quite hostile to Necromancy but is otherwise totally neutral to everybody else. Paladins get Light juiced when they fight for compassion and retribution in general but get Turbo juiced when fighting against the LK forces and Void Incursions. It having an agenda, makes you question whether or not it’ll just not respond anymore one day because “Not enough Wrath”.
To add to the already amassing silliness, Gamon shows up with a quest that states the warsong and orcs in general regularly go to the site of Garroshs death in AU Draenor to steal rocks from his grave or to spit on it.
So by Maghar unlock AU draenor is canonically as hard to access as the Shadowlands are now but by Midnight apparently no anyone can go back there to take a break from the apocalypse to ptoeey on Garrosh. Consistency baby
11 Likes
Blizz remove /spit from players but let NPCs do it smdh.
Gonna go back to AU draenor to kill Yrel in the past timeline to save Durotan from the Lightbound 
1 Like
This is the way.
Also the planet is totally fine, spirits still just chilling and no Lightbound in sight.
It’s a strange win and a weird way to retcon the maghar scenario but I’ll take it Blizzard
3 Likes
Honestly I’m fine with it, it was a shame to waste some good hubs like Wolf Home, Karabor and Pinchwhistle point
The monkey paw’s fingers fell off due to narrative leprosy.
WrAtH. BlAcK bLoOd. oRdEr. DoMiNaTiOn. The fact that the stories since slands seem to revolve heavily around a single buzzword or buzzphrase tells me that everything is being written by commitee.
3 Likes
The difference is, their NPC’s don’t spit on Whales.