Seriously, everything about the darkspear and a few other clans revolves around spirits, voodoo, afterlife etc. Guess what?, in shadowlands…
SPOILERS
They are relegated to a small side dungeon in Ardenweald. That’s it. The whole troll afterlife is a dungeon.
That fella Hakkar is just a random throwaway boss. To make the trolls even more comical, is the fact half the dungeon is catered to to some gnomes.
Muehzela (God of Death, Father of Sleep, Son of Time,Night’s Friend) gets dealt with in one fight. Ending that piece of potentially interesting lore.
Meanwhile night elves whole lore revolving around wisps and the emerald dream gets reconstructed to fit Ardenweald. The Ardenweald plot line is going to revolve around helping Tyrande, Elune etc etc. The whole Ardenweald aesthetic is night elven and partially drust.
Even if you wanted to pick the Ardenweald covenant as a rp and lore choice for your character , I can’t help but think you would feel completely out of place unless you were a night elf druid.
This would have been a chance to insert some celestial themes for the Pandaren. But anything nature/death base, blizz returns to the default.
TLDR: Trolls are a joke, their whole lore is comic relief, they pray to fairies and furries, roll a night elf.
I mean it’s not like humans, or actually Light believers in general are getting their long-since mentioned “Heaven” either.
Quite the opposite, they’re being told that the Light is an invasive force in that realm, and those who in life did devote their lives to the Light are being made to abandon it (See Uther and Alexandros).
The common theme in the Shadowlands seems to be that everyone was misconceived about what death truly was like (and obviously they were, the whole expansion has been born out of a Chronicles retcon).
Not to mention, the Shadowlands are the plane of death for everyone in the universe, which Blizzard is using as a reason why almost nobody’s beliefs are represented there; it’s too wide-ranging to take in consideration singular races.
It’s kind of odd, if you think about it, we’re given the chance to explore the afterlife and instead of experiencing the many spiritual stories we’ve been learning for the past years it’s…that retconland.
Yours truly, a Night Elf fan who’s completely uninterested with Ardenweald.
The problem is called alliance bias. Plain and simple. If it wasn’t for human potential being shoved into our faces then troll would have collected some victories by now.
Well if every single little mystery around the franchise needs to be uncovered and explained in detail, you are destined to end up with a rather disappointing conclusion to all of your expectations.
I never was a big fan of Trolls beyond them being 08/15 enemies like Gnolls and Ogres, but I can see how a race that has been heavily overused as cannon fodder enemies throughout the lifespan of wow, will end up as a stale joke.
I don’t really see the problem with Bwonsamdi’s realm.
It’s a dungeon, of course we don’t go through all of it, just like we didn’t go through all of Mechagon or Ny’alotha. They increasingly use background art to show that areas are much bigger than the few hallways you run through, and this seems to be another case of that. Is anything below a full zone exclusively for trolls disrepecting them? Well, then the problem most certainly are your expectations.
And lorewise I just don’t see the problem. Trolls believed that Bwonsamdi will take them to his own realm of his own design after their death and deal with them as he sees fit. He does. Where exactly is the disappointing thing here? Did he have to be the one and only death entity above everyone else? I really don’t understand the criticism here.
But sure, troll raids and dungeons are a meme. They have been for more than a decade. Still, they probably made trolls into the race with the richest and most detailed lore in the game. Their tribes, their religion, their philosophy and their culture have only ever come up, because they were related to new content again and again and again. And I don’t see why this is that different.
Of course a full zone exclusively for trolls would have been preferable. But there’s a middle ground between that and what we actually get: namely a literal hole in a tree within a clearly Night Elf-themed zone. And only half of the Other Side itself is troll-themed, too. I mean- there are gnomes in it, for loa’s sake!
True. He even saves as many of his followers as he can from the Maw, which is more than any of the other known deities do. That’s definitely a silver lining.
Apart from that though, they retconned him into a mortal troll who ascended to loa-hood and also made Mueh’zala his evil boss, which was quite the letdown for many troll fans.
Sure, I agree, but the criticism is more about the way this rich and most detailed lore is presented in the game. Most of the time the troll tribes are villainized outright, their grievances downplayed or painted as homemade, and their religion and culture as bad and inferior- especially in comparision to Elves or humans.
At best you have a “good” trolls" vs “evil trolls” plot where the “good” trolls are of course the ones who have seen the error of their old ways of living.
And that’s a damn shame.
well the considering how much troll lore there is through all the expansions, ever since classic, I would say trolls have gotten lore and lots of it realy, might be one of the top races who has gotten lore.
kind of true, but then both do suffer from the thing, that even if they get lore, it is quite shallow at times, where orcs, humans and even the taurens, get lore that is relay good and goes quite deep.
Night elfs got some in BFA, but again it stopped in middle for some reason, and trolls had a good start, but it also pretty much got dropped.
When did that happen?
Or did you mean the Taunka and the HM tauren? I mean I liked those, for sure. But I don’t see them as tauren lore and the tauren impact overal on both was practically nihil.
Haha, I’m not sure if you’re kidding but that’s kind of awfull.
I personally don’t see any baine features as tauren lore, I kind of hope you don’t either, but that’s up to the self.
I also don’t think Night Elf lore is that shallow though, we learned allot about their whole culture and it’s past over the course of WoW, I’ll agree with you that some of it was wasted and could have been beter, I’m am however glad that now since BFA they’re finally focusing on the present times of the race, instead of keeping looking back.
Now the burning of Teldrassil was bad, sure, but you’ll have an active Tyrande for now, which is exciting, I mean it should be and then there’s the matter of finding a new place for the people and rebuilding a future. Sure, it may take some time to get there, but atleast there’s progression and potential to be had there.
The Humans are Anduin Wryn, beyond that very little, that’s what I find shallow.
The Orcs plummeted after Warlords of Draenor, with one of their few remaining lead characters biting the dust at the end of BFA and only having a demasculated Thrall left, I mean, what’s going on there, does he even still Shaman?
When did that happen?