So I’m just incredibly confused and need help to get sources as my leveling was great but now it is just jarring.
I got to 60, choose my covenant and rescued Baine from Thorgast.
Cool so now onwards doing the other story quests I thought. When suddenly Jaina and Thrall are back who I never saved which is apparently a removed questline. This seems to be fine as it was just two easy quests to go into Thorgast again, just a mention or somehting would have been nice. Maybe instead have them chained together with Baine so we resuce all 3 of them, but whatever.
But also now Denatrius is apparently captured and I have also seen Uther being lead around Elysium. When did that happen? Is that story still there? Can I actually do this?
Are there any sources that list me what I should do when, because right now I feel like I have watched S1 of a show and been thrown into S3. I don’t care about it being kinda unnecessary. I just want to experience the story right.
If that is not possible anymore, are there at least videos that summarise what we are doing in detail?
This is an issue in older expansions too.
Blizzard are so obsessed with catch-up mechanics and getting players into the grind as quickly as possible that they seem to have forgotten that people might still want the option to play through an expansions story in the order it was intended to be played.
Not only is the shadowlands story a steaming pile of manure but they also cut the story up between the 4 covenants. So when you see Uther then that is the story that was told in the kyrian covenant campaign. Also a lot of the covenant campaigns are copypastad across the board so if you want to do all 4 of them then be prepared to do a lot of the story steps multiple times because Blizzard pretty shamelessly just took parts of one covenant campaign and used them in other covenants campaigns. It’s a mess.
Blizzard managed to duck this up already with 9.1, when the rest of the Torghast storyline was removed. They felt it was this important to have Jaina and Thrall up and ready for being 95% AFK through the Korthia storyline that they didn’t even bothered to phase Oribos and maintain the 9.0 story.
For not to mention the different Covenant Campaigns… This is twice as messed up as BfA was. Then it was story split between 2 factions, now it is 4 covenants. with Korthia and ZM mixed in making it as painful to try to relive the story in chronological order.
Seeing as you haven’t had much in the way of help so far, I’ll do my best.
As far as I’m aware, you can still do all this stuff, even the Torghast questline, although it is kind of pointless at this stage. (At the start of SL, the quest chain rewarded soul ash, which was scarce back then, and limited to one new quest a week.)
Denathrius was captured at the end of Castle Nathria raid. You might (small might) get lucky and manage to pug the fight if you want to see it for yourself. Alternatively, just search for Denathrius defeat on Youtube.
The Uther quests are part of the Kyrian campaign. The other covenant campaigns are worth doing as well if you want to fill in story. You can do them all on the same character (get one to 80 renown, which is easy now with the amount of catchup renown available, and then you can switch freely).
Also, for the sake of story, and to help 9.2 make more sense, it’s worth doing the Korthia campaign.
The end of the Sylvanas fight in Sanctum of Domination raid is also relevant to the current story, and worth watching on Youtube.
Blizzard should add a Story Mode to the game to have some sort of Main Quest Campaign like TESO or FF14.
It should be easy; a Story Mode would consist of the following.
Blizzard does not need to do anything new to make Main Quest Campaign, only encadenate existing and removed Quest Chains one after another
When you are playing on Story Mode, one Quest Chain hides any Quest from future quest chains that are available due to Catch-Up mechanics. That so people playing in Story Mode will know that there is no harm in picking a quest from a later patch with a big spoiler
When playing in Story Mode an expansion hides any quest from other expansions, previous ones, and future ones too. This is easy, every expansion has a quest id starting on numbers biggest from the previous one so Blizzard can hide for example in Pandaria quest before the first quest id and after the last quest id of Pandaria.
Include on that Story Mode any removed quest chains like the ones for Thorgast but also on previous expansions have things like MOP and WOD Legendary quest chains or War of the Thorns quest chain. Remove rewards from Story Mode if they want, just like rewards are removed from Part Sync, but let people enjoy the story.
Include on that Story Mode a new optional quest for any dungeon or raid that currently, when playing the existing quest, is not clear when it makes sense to do it. Most dungeons and raids have a quest that tells the player, “now the story continues on the instance,” but some are important to the story and have no leading quest to it. I said optional mostly for people leveling up that have no chance to find groups to previous expansion raids, but for people playing the story at level 60 that can solo old raids is good to know that is the time the raid makes sense for the story.
When repeating quests, make items that drop that start a quest that the player has at least completed once to drop with a 100% chance, and in case those items were not BOP makes it BOP while playing Story Mode, so people don’t abuse this mode to obtain more.
Make quest objectives that require paying with gold or materials to be automatically completed without expending anything when repeating quests. That way, people will only need to expend gold and materials the first time.
The same for quest objectives makes it time-gated, like waiting to make some building on WOD garrison or waiting for some mission table. Repeated quests should not be time-gated.
I would also love that repeated quests from raids can be completed on one lookup of the raid, increasing the drop if necessary. It will make those quest chains more enjoyable because most of the time it take weeks and it is easy to enjoy the story doing it on one go.
Make all Story Modes start from Chromie, allowing people to select the expansion they want to play. Chromie already explains the expansion order; the only part hard is following the story inside an expansion.
But even so, Chromie could give an Insane option to a player to play all the Story of all expansions in order on the same character, in which case it will start from the first expansion and encadenate expansion after expansion in order. With this option, people will start with the first expansion available in Story Mode, and they will encadenate expansion until reaching the last one, without ever returning to Chromie.
It would be good on Story Mode when not playing on Insane Story Mode of all expansions to have the last quest to return to Chromie for expansions that are not the current one. That way, people will know they have already finished the expansion. In Insane Story Mode, that last quest will lead directly to the next expansion.
Insane Story Mode could also be started on any expansion, not only the first one available. Maybe people don’t want to play all expansions in order, but there could be returning players that maybe leave the game back in WOD and want to play the Story in order from that expansion
Allow people to repeat Story Mode anything they want. It’s just like Party Sync does, but that option can’t be used when playing alone. Party Sync works by syncing our completed quest with another character by temporally marking any completed quest that the other has not completed as uncompleted. For example to simulate a repeat of the Story Mode at the start of an expansion they will need to have a template character with no quest completed and sync with him. To simulate a repeat of the second point of the Story to repeat an expansion they only need a template character by the first quest chain is completed, and so on. Just like there are no rewards in Party Sync it won’t be rewards in repeat Story Mode.
Make phases for the main cities with the appropriate leader that makes sense when playing in Story Mode. So if people are playing Pandaria they will see Garrosh and Varian, without any anachronism. Keep the current leaders on non-Story modes. This will solve the mess of the Horde leaders in Orgrimmar.
Of course, all of this should be optional. I want to enjoy the Story myself. I don’t want to force people into it. Catch-up mechanics should not be removed. People should not be forced to play all the stories in order. Just let us those we want to do it to be able to do it.
Some of this suggestions require more work that others. But there is no need to go from no good Story Mode to a perfect one. Blizzard court start to develop the Mode just encadenating one patch quest chain to the next one and over time develop more options like repeating quests and so on.
A large part of the problem is that there are four covenant campaigns that are very lore-heavy with regards to the overall story of SL. I’m currently doing the Maldraxxas campaign on my DK alt and part of that covers the Uther story. My main is Night Fae so I hadn’t seen that bit before. I’ve only just started the Kyrian story on a pally alt but not done much of it and haven’t done any of the Revendreth story.
In Legion we had different stories told through the Order Hall campaigns but they were relatively self contained and what little impact they had on the overall story was usually told to us in a simple easy to understand way something like as a shaman we might get a quest where they said something like “The Paladins have done X so we can now do Y”.
BFA had this to a degree also with two separate faction stories. I did them both but concentrated on Alliance so I did miss out quite a bit of story as I didn’t do all the main campaign as it was rep locked and I wasn’t grinding Horde reps just to see a bit of a story.
I do want there to be different stories available so my alts can have different leveling experiences but these different stories should not be the main lore-heavy expansion wide story. They should be world building side quests etc. The side quests in SL were half a dozen quest lines in each zone and weren’t that world building or character developing.
Granted, someone going through Legion or BfA now will be “in the timeline” as at the end of the expansion, where everything has already happened, leaving inconsistencies. But we didn’t have these inconsistencies in anything like the same way while those expansions were current.
Even having played through it all from the start, I notice that Shadowlands quest/event sequence has been horribly disjoiinted, and I’ve commented om this several times. And when we add in the skips and removals, which ain’t great anyway, it all becomes a completely incoherent jumble.
And I am really surprised that Blizzard went this far off the rails in Shadowlands. Granted, they had lost Metzen, but enough people had years of experience with making story work in a gameplay environment that SOMEBODY should have been able to stand up and point out the problems.
As with so many other problems of Shadowlands, I look to Danuser as a major creator of the problems. It feels like he was so determined to push his story, ahd his personal pet peeves, into everybody’s face that he ended up making a structure that just didn’t work with the game.
Every expansion story has big problems. Sure, if not the same on the previous one as in Shadowlands, nor it has never been a problem on the current expansion until now, but previous expansion also has problems.
For example, on expansions like Legion and BFA, when you reach the max level, suddenly all quests from all patches are available simultaneously. Sure, in this case, you can play all the quests in order if you look at a guide on the internet, but the game does not guide you in order as it should. You need to manually avoid, for example, any 7.2 quests from Legion if you are doing quests from 7.0.
And then we have the problem of removing quest chains. That usually never happens in the middle of an expansion like in Shadowlands with Tortghast, but if you try to play, for example, the story of Pandaria, the lack of the Legendary Quest chain leaves a big hole. It is even possible to play all the stories available in Pandaria without realizing Garrosh has a major role until playing SoO raid because most of the role of Garrosh during Pandaria happened on that removed Quest Chain.
The story as a whole requires a big fix, both current and previous expansions.
I feel the opposite. I don’t want the quests that give the story depth and flavour pushed to one side, where I have to choose between doing those and progressing my character for endgame content. If that happened, progression would have to win because you can push harder content in raid and mythic plus without story quests but you can’t do it without progressing your character.
I’ve done all four covenant campaigns multiple times across different characters, and I’m amazed to discover there are people (other than new or just-returning players) who haven’t done them at least once.
But you can still do them all (like you did all four covenants).
I hate having to repeat every quest in the exact same order. The way covenants worked in Shadowlands put me off alts pretty badly this time.
I wish I could have leveled four characters through the different campaigns but instead I would have to repeat the same campaign to level and then get the chance to do the other campaigns.
In Wrath there was no real campaign although some quests were more lore heavy than others. You choose which ones to do in order to level. You could choose to do DHETA quests in Borean Tundra if you wanted or you could skip them on alts. You could skip whole zones in Wrath as you only needed about three or four zones to level. Made alts much more enjoyable.
I have spent hours on Wowhead for different characters, figuring out and working backwards to see where an alt (not played for a while) is currently at within an expansion to try unlock stuff.
(eg. Mechagon, Antorus, Order Halls, Legendaries, Nazjatar, Korthia, the list goes on…)
There are often multiple sections of long quest chains, each relying on completion of previous sections in order to unlock stuff.
It is even worse trying to catch up with a friend on quests (and work out who is in front, how far etc and hope party sync doesn’t confuse the issue) it can feel like a lot of time spent just getting going.
It is complex and a messy to me, with insufficient direction in game.
I could do with being able to click an objective and the game offering a questline map, with a ‘You Are Here’ type marker
You didn’t have to level every character through the same campaign. After you’d done the first one, you could choose to opt out of the campaign entirely and do threads of fate.
With hindsight, I didn’t enjoy the levelling experience in Wrath (and earlier expansions in general). I didn’t feel like I was following an expansion wide story when I did it, and I still don’t really know the story of Wrath. It was just doing stuff for the sake of gaining XP and levels. Much nicer to have a straightforward, linear story that you can choose to opt out of on alts later if you want to. Exactly what we have in SL, in fact.
If you’re saying it would have been nice to have the option to level subsequent alts through the chosen covenant’s campaign as an alternative to either the main story or threads of fate, then I agree. I’ve said that before, and I’m disappointed that they didn’t provide it as an option for levelling alts. I also would have liked to be able to do the main campaign zones out of order on alts. I liked doing Revendreth, but only managed to get that far on 3 characters before I got bored and switched to threads.
I did this. On my DK I opted for Threads of Fate. I did the first fill the bar quest in Maldraxxas as that zone fitted my DK best. So after the Maw (not skippable at the time) and the first fill the bar I was around level 53. I did the Revendreth fill the bar quest and then I was 54 and already bored of doing a fill the bar with WQs. I level my DK to 59 in Pet Battles and did 59 - 60 with Bonus Objectives and Side Quests in Maldraxxas.
Threads of Fate is a good idea if only there were enough quests out there for it to work. There should have been enough Bonus Objectives and side quests in Maldraxxas for eight levels, the other two could be from the campaign stuff you had to do for the covenant to open up.
Apart from Danuser’s personal neuroses, I blame this on Blizzard’s … what is it? it’s like an imposter syndrome. When they feel challenged by another game, they seem compelled to ape something from the other game. When Wildstar was being hyped, gnomes were destroyed and made creepy. Now, when FF is ascendant, they feel the need to add a single. long, rigid story.
At their best, Blizzard built the story in non-linear segments. Each zone had its own story, and they all contributed to creating the world in which the main characters’ arc made sense, without trying to fit so closely together as to create inconsistencies. IMO, Wrath and Mists were the pinnacle of this form. Cata was a bit loose; Warlords a bit tight. They actually succeeded pretty well in Legion as well, because each class story didn’t impact the overall expansion story, and BfA wasn’t bad, in that they created strong storylines at max level. But in SL, they - if you’ll excuse the pun - lost the plot entirely.
That is of course in addition to the crude retcons that destroyed so much that we loved about the original lore.
I need to stop on this subject; it’s putting me into a bad mood.
Agreed, but that’s not a small thing. When Blizzard is focusing us on “play the expansion, not the game”, screwing up the story sequence wirhin an expansion is pretty egregious.
I do wonder how MOP would have felt joining quite late though?
Most especially around the Vale of Eternal Blossoms which was gutted as part of the Sha’s destruction of so much.
Or was this phased well? Don’t think I played through the whole of MOP on an alt, I’ve played parts of it while leveling some alts but never a complete playthrough the whole story.
No. You have put your finger on the one inconsistency in Mists, AFAIR. There’s all this stuff about opening the beautiful Vale, but when you get there, it’a already open and corrupted, and this would have been the experience of someone joining in 5.4, so it was within the expansion. I forgot about that. Still, it’s not a patch on the awfulness of the Shadowlands story glitches.
This is even worst given that recently during BFA, the Vale was restored and we can play again on the original version of the map. Yet they didn’t reintroduce a phase with the original story from Pandaria about the Vale, so we have now a corrupted version of the Vale and an uncorrupted version from BFA, but not the original uncorrupted from Pandaria.
So, someone playing today Pandaria while playing a story about opening the beautiful valley, see a corrupted version only, and some levels later found that the beautiful valley is in-game, it has been un-deleted (one of the few occasion they do that), just Blizzard forget to reintroduced it on the part of the story when it was used originally.
There was also a big point in the story of Pandara that happened during Patch 5.3, the one that has content in the Barrens that was removed once the next patch launched, 5.4. Basically, all story content from 5.3 was removed when 5.4 launched except the Legendary Quest Chain part (that was removed at the end of the expansion). What is even worst is that part of the things from Barren 5.3 are still in-game, they removed the quests but forget to removed Pandaria enemies from the Barrens to pretend it has finish.
Also, I believe that with the removal of the Legendary Quest Chain in Pandaria, new players doing that expansion could not be aware that Garrosh takes a big role in that expansion. I think excluding the SoO raid and some mentions in scenarios, there is no longer any Garrosh scene in Pandaria anymore. Blizzard literally removed the big villain of an expansion to the story of the expansion.
