Sylvanas: Everyone will serve death!
Two patches later: “I will never serve, and enslaving people is bad!”
To be fair, SL wasn’t just bad: it was a disaster. SL literally took decades of lore and tried to subvert them without any care or love for the original material.
JUST BAD YOU SAY?! - sorry I got carried away
Out of the top of my head:
it rewrote the cosmic chart again with game-changers like the First Ones (another layer of divine beings as if we did not have enough);
destroyed the idea of afterlives and azerothian religions;
Whatever thing was that the helm of domination arc
Retconned the nathrezim, destroyed a lot of the Scourge’s lore, now it was all part of the Jailer’s plan somehow. What is the relationship between the Legion and the Jailer, seeing how they are kinda stepping on each other’s masterplans here? Not explained ONE BIT.
It introduced the Jailer who tried to sell a big chess plan that had no sense and each detail is a masterpiece of a nonsensical disaster (oh, Icecrown’s machines were meant to carry anima to Torghast cool, but mr Jailer you’ve left Torghast, the place we raided in the previous patch, and reached the First Ones’ main temple, how the heck does the anima go from Torghast to the Sepulcher? HUH?!)
And all of the established character arcs were a swing and a miss*:
Whatever the heck was the night elf / night warrior dragonball arc.
The Sylvanas “I will never serve” arc,
Anduin mind control arc, who did evil actions against his will that ended up having no consequences aside from him doubting himself (just like in Legion).
Jaina having no arc whatsoever and just carrying the player everytime she was on the screen
Thrall and Baine… were there, also.
The only three characters who had something of a decent arc were: Ysera, Uther, and Denathrius.
I am placing the last one out of popularity because frankly I can’t stand Revendreth, Blizz can’t sell me that place as a working afterlife, sorry, and not a single being of the “Pantheon of Death” looks remotely like a god-like being. Denathrius is funny but come on, if anything he looks like a downgrade from dreadlords (smaller, more humanoid, no wings etc).
I also find the whole original denizens needing anima kind of bad, and gives me the vibe of the most soul-deprived, uninspired clockwork universe I have ever seen.
Huh. With what out of the way…
On top of that, it really did not do away with dailies.
The system was still incredibly bad: it forced you to pick a covenant and farm it massively. For example. In order to get good, you had to empower your covenant’s soulmates or whatever they were called, which was an awful obscure feature that hugely impacted on a character’s performance, and that literally nobody wanted in the game; and after initially stating that Covenant renown would not be needed, they ended up having it increase your STA, which you would require for high end game activities.
Shadowlands absolutely kept borrowed power, it just made it less obvious.
I’d like to say I watched the BFA intro cinematic, blacked out, and woke up going to the Dragon Isles.
That’d be the preferable option.
But hey.
Like I said, in a way because it was ‘Meh’ from start to finish, SL is Bad™. BUT BFA is almost, kind of, worse for starting with Potential and an OK enough concept (Between Genn and some members of the Horde, there was plenty of excuse-looking for another war, and they could have tied it into the Old Gods better and made it work) and then absolutely dumpstering even that possibility after about 1/3 of the way through, and committing mass character Assassination.
Again.
TWW has had a number of systems - the Ring, the Belt, Corruptions that are kind of secondary borrowed power similar to Artifacts/Azerite/Corruptions. That said, they’re comparatively they’re much much less impactful and can be maxed out trivially with even very casual play.
As far as I can tell, the “borrowed power” of those systems is relatively minor and used exclusively as a method of catching up to more dedicated players in the .5 and .7 content lulls. From my personal experience, they confer very little advantage when the next major content patch comes around.
It’s borrowed power as a spice, instead of the Legion, BFA and Shadowlands approach of borrowed power as the entire dish.
" there must always be a lich king " was always silly.
Mindless Undead aren’t that big of a threat. How are they going to swim from Northrend to Kalimdor or EK? How are they going to build siege weapons or structures?
We already bruteforced our way through Northrend, it’s totally unbelievable we’d lose to a mindless Scourge
As others have already said, the systems and borrowed powers are minimal but it is back in some form.
What is more concerning in my eyes is the general scarcity of the currencies and reputation… At least for a time.
The 20 years anniversary sets and Flame’s radiance for example, combined with a pretty buggy release makes a painful first 8-14 days.
Back to the topic at hand
I find it strange that the guy who assumed direct control of all the Scourge couldn’t just have gathered them all up in a single place and have the living all cast a massive pillar of fire and light and purge them all. It shatters the credibility of Bolvar seeing as how many of his undead units are breaking their shackles from him such as the Val’kyr and San’layn.
Yes, but if your race will happily (and gleefully) commit genocide and other attrocities because “big boss told me to”, then that race is fundamentally evil and monstrous. That doesn’t stop from exceptions like Durotan to exist, but the vast majority of orcs are very happy to engage in violent behaviour.
This has been shown multiple times in the setting. Blizzard clearly intended to show the orcs as noble savages, but dropped the ball and here we are.
Tauren are a much more better example of a noble savage race. They have had multiple recent instances where there was -clear- push for their culture to adopt a more violent and bloodthirsty way of life, but they did not. Centaur, Quilboar, Alliance (Mulgore dwarf excavations, Taurajo, etc), coup attempt by Magatha (which was thwarted by one of her own). Hell, Baine has been shown visions and witnessed scenarios (e.g. tauren heritage questline, emerald dream incident, Spiritwalker death in DF) multiple times where he’s been prompted to choose a more violent path for his people, and still, they have not done it.
Burning Legion exists across the multiverse as one entity yet has not conquered 38565042 alternate worlds for the highly specific ends we’re trying to thwart to say nothing of alternate Azeroths.
Zovaal’s grand nonexistent plan spanning aeons(???) explaining all lore up until this point and nothing.
The Gods were robots all along (okay, cosmic spirits in robot bodies so titan keepers we know that already, gosh).
Me’dan.
Nathrezim being agents of the maw for ages rather than particularly devious demons in the upper tier of the Legion hierarchy poised to rule after Sargeras.
Breaking time several times by travel and stepping on butterflies.
Sylvanas doing all she did before hit with her trigger word, not realising(?).
About 214 abandoned plotlines.
All the other stuff I repressed as a trauma response.
Ironically that would have worked better without the one legion/SL in all timelines.
Besides, imagine that mo’arg enforcer: “hm’kay, we conquered the whole universe boss!” Kil’jaeden: “Good, now let us do it infinite times, over and over, in various timelines.”
Ignoring the fact that the “gleeful” monsters are also exceptions to the rule, this logic could be used to declare humanity as it exists in the real world fundamentally evil, with the numerous cultures throughout history that have happily committed genocide and other atrocities because their leaders demanded it with some weak justification for it.
But I can agree that the tauren are better handled than the orcs, as a whole.
It was consistent at being bad. And that carried the whole way. Thus internally consistent.
Ok that is hyperbolic for bad humour. Shadowlands had some redeeming features but… honestly the fact we still talk about shadowlands is testiment to how awful it was generally. It left such a scar that we just can’t collectively let it go.