A setup to a new zone isn’t really what I’d object to, so… 
What I gave were the ones I thought could be candidates for a main plot that wasn’t. If my point is that there is no main plot, I can hardly give you examples.
Going to the Shadowlands, learning how the Cosmos actually works and The Jailor being the mastermind of everything are 3 different things and while I agree they are all bad I haven’t decided which one is worse and I don’t believe anyone wants to have that discussion where we break down all the negatives of all three of these “plots”.
Also you not caring about the characters does not excuse the Jailor. Lots of people do care about these characters and the Jailor existing as he is does hurt the believability and/or attachment those people have to the story.
Now you’re just in denial in my opinion. There was a main plot involving the two new playable races and the conclusion of a WIII story arc involving Illidan, Kael’thas and Lady Vash’j. I’m not saying it was well written, but it was there. The same thing can be said of WotLK and the expansions that followed.
What I can concede – and I already have in a previous comment – is that the game gave you more free room to go around without following the plot if you didn’t want to do it.
Something that went through the whole addon? Could you summarize it? Call it denial, but you’re not giving me much here, and I’m not seeing it by myself. I guess the Sunwell could be seen as finishing the Draenei and Blood Elf story from 2.0, but there was so much stuff in between that had nothing at all to do with it, that I find it hard to call it a main plot. And Illidan, Kael and Vashj? There I see no plot during the addon at all. Just a “By the way, in the time we weren’t there, they became bad guys, kill them, please”. Which is why Illidan’s story could so easily be retconned for Legion. There just wasn’t much of any story to contradict.
I believe this tread has lost the plot. 
The point I was making wasn’t that we need more confined stories - which we - or that we need a competent writer to provide us interesting characters.
It’s that this game is not FF14 in terms of lore or theme and yet it seems we lurch ever closer toward just being anime. Dragonflight has the potential to do all you mentioned above but I doubt it will. Many of its storylines seem childish and melodramatic.
Remember when the dragons of Warcraft were brutal, mighty beasts that regarded mortals as small, insignificant curios? Some deigned them worthy but most were aloof and disdainful.
The dragons now are nothing like that. That is my issue.
Cosmic 
trivia should damn well stay as trivia, because Blizzard does not have the discipline to curate it and stay consistent. (ie. Chronicles being retconned)
Was an underdevelopped, overexposed mess, whose motives, goals and motivations weren’t really revealed, until he was literally dead. The other stuff frankly doesn’t matter, in the face of this, because that’s the key issue with the Jailer. Which were kind of bred from the fact they wrote this story more for people like Pyromancer, who build theories, upon theories, upon theories, upon headcanon than an actual audience.
In all stories you need to establish key elements about the villain.
- What is he trying to accomplish?
- Why is he trying to accomplish it?
- How is he going to accomplish it?
- (optional)When is he going to accomplish it?
- What happens if he accomplishes it?
Even the most vague of spy thriller villains are established around these points, in order to build stakes and dramatic tension. How those interact with the other villains and heroes is hwo you organically build up a story. Something Blizz didn’t do at any point in BfA nor SL.
Has a lot to do with the progression of their story through Cataclysm, which ended with them being severely diminished. That said I agree that the “good” characters have all fit into the same archetype shall we say over recent years.
The ‘good’ guys are all mellow self-inserts. 
I guess we’ll have to see what they turn Nozdormu into. Probably into an anagram. I wouldn’t be surprised if Deathwing comes back to life at some point, the way everybody just keeps popping back from the dead around here. They’ll probably portray him and a tormented soul too if so. “Woe is me… I hurt the innocent…”
Kalecgos has no character, so there could be something to be done there. Ysera and Alexstraza are both ruined. Ysera died… what… twice now and keeps coming back somehow. And the other is literally turned into an anime waifu who gives long emotional speeches because she’s also a surrogate mom for Danuser probably.
The worst offender is gone, for the time being. (Blanduin) But yes, the characters with the mental illness known as protagonitus all fit the template, even if they were fan favorites once upon a time(Thrall) and get dragged into places despite having nothing to do there (Bolvar, Jaina, Thrall, Baine, Anduin) Any any character who disagrees with them regardless of reason is automatically pure evil. No further elaboration required.
Bound to happen eventually that he’ll succumb to the whispers of the old gods and… oh, wait they’re all permadead and the azeroth is cleansed… ffs
Don’t knwo about Deathwing, but the presence of Rafaam does hint at return of the biggest, baddest, the OG.
Most of his development was in TBC era comicbooks he has been mostly on cameo duty since then. The Sunwell trilogy, if I’m not mistaken.
At least Malfurion has to die, in order to bring her back. Not sure why as the green flight had a good successor for her, but w/e
She has always been the sort of matron, in the draconic hierrarchy, who watched over life and did her best to keep the other aspects in line.(It was her flight that put down Malygos and she alone who confronted Deathwing, in Twilight Highlands) The dark stuff for her character was mostly inflicted by others through the Dragon/Demon Soul artefact, from recent events the Dragonmaw clan and the DK player character come to mind.
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The worst offender was indeed Blanduin - I’m adopting the term - but the problem isn’t his character, it’s the tone set by the people writing these characters.
I’m quite sure by the end on DF, people will be dead tired of Alexstraza’s voice moo’ing all over the screen. Thanos… I mean Nozdormu’s vague speeches about time being a timy wimy thing and Neltharion’s - I’m betting on him coming back, did we see the body? - grumbling rumbling Bolvar impression.
It’s not the tone that’s the issue, but the lack of genuine valid opposition. I’m a fan of good characters like Captain America or Superman, when they’re written well they can be amazing, but they need someone to play off, who doesn’t agree with them all the time or praise them for being wise… also all the time. With Anduin nothing was ever earnestly sold as his fault, he was never wrong and he never paid the price for his naivity. HE never had to learn a damn thing, because it was everyone else’s fault.
My favourite example of this is in Val’sharah, in the closing segments, when Malfurion is captured and Tyrande has to choose between him and the temple of Elune. Great pathos. The problem is that the next we see him in a dungeon we can hear him the whole way like “Ohehehe my dude you’re a shmuck Xavius I’m gonna kick your butt!”(parahprased)
You could have a good story, with a different tone, sure. It’s just that the people who liked the old tone, won’t like it as much. Old WoW was pretty Metal. DF looks pretty Disney to me for now. That’s not the same target audience. We had different tones before, though, it’s just that at one point you might have gotten enough of those you don’t particularly like to get grumpy.
If we’re talking TBC;
The main thing was taking out Illidan and his lackeys which culminated into the sunwell where a Kael’thas, disillusioned by Illidan after he was beaten in the black temple having turned to the actual burning legion who convinced him to use the sunwell to summon them to Azeroth.
yeah honestly I feel like chronicles 1 was absolutely perfect in the cosmos it set down.
Everything they have tried to change or add or overhaul (especially shadowlands lore) has just made worse then it originally was perceived.
Chron1 was basically the perfect amount of explaining of cosmic lore without going too far behind the curtain.
It gave you a good enough insight into how the wheels turned to make up your own plots and storylines (esp for RPers) around that field without actually showing you the wheels themselves.
Then Blizzard makes the boast that Steve “Necromancy isn’t exclusive to deathmagic” Danuser is really only getting warmed up and the story they have ready for dragonflight is going to blow old lore out of the water…
I can’t really say it won’t be but there are doubts and I will be ready to critique after such a claim.
We all know that’s just them trying to justify Calia’s existence, which is technically not his fault, but it’s something he still has to deal with. 
Well obviously. They’ve actively undermined the bedrock lore of their setting, while failing to actually have a point or character motivations or most of the pillars of basic storytelling or anything to do for any of the mortal cast besides Tyrande and Shandris.
Did it culminate in that, though? I agree that we killed their underlings, and then we raided their bases. I just don’t see any connective tissue between that. We didn’t stop the mana forges to make the Eye vulnerable, we stopped them because they were dangerous to the world. We didn’t stop Vashj to get at Illidan, we stopped her because she was stealing water. The raid attunments had very little to do with what we were doing on the outside.
Now, to make it clear: I think that’s a good thing. I prefer many closed stories over one big open one. But that’s just what I’m saying, I don’t think we have one main plot in TBC. We have a limited number of raids, of course, but they were pretty much independent from each other, and from the quest lines outside that didn’t directly lead into them.
That’s the other way round for me. The chronicles tying necromancy to some new form of “Death Magic” was the recton. We still have ingame books declaring necromancy to be a form of arcane magic, studied and used by mages like Kel’Thuzad and Meryl Felstorm. Now, retconing a retcon is still a retcon, but I object to lauding the Chronicles on that point, when it was a retcon in the first place.
I had a quick reread of the details because it’s been some time since I’ve dusted off this lore and to correct my earlier post Kael’thas at that point wasn’t really a lackey anymore of Illidan.
We entered TBC originally because a doomlord found an artifact and reopened the dark portal, starting a second invasion which we beat back and it seems that yeah the story zones had us going after the old lackeys of Illidan so there wasn’t really some overarching story no.
Just tying up lose ends of the actual WC3 campaign in hindsight after revisiting lore snippets of some of the raids just now so you’re right there.
I had forgotten about that yeah, my main source of shock was mostly that it was the light of all forces to break that mold, in my eyes thats no better then life magic doing necromancy. In hindsight yeah I’d be more acceptive of arcane doing it keeping the past in mind. But it does feel like it should belong under decay specifically (which is probably why that was the force it was assigned to in my head)
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any form of resurrection is necromancy in D&D and since D&D is the king of fantasy clearly wow must follow suit healing spells are also a form of necromancy i believe
Nah, direct heals are evocation, full ressurection is a transmutation. So the usual healy stuff isn’t necromantic in D&D. Necromancy is a bigger category than raising dead and draining life, though, and it’s not universially “evil”.
And while I’m not particularly impressed by D&Ds systems, it’s hard to argue that they aren’t more consistent than what Blizz has presented. And the WoW P&P based on D20 rules, might be the most consistent version of the world they have created up to this point… except that they blanket retconned it, of course.
i was a bigger fan of D&D until they pulled the whole magic plague thing and ruined tieflings 
Neverwinter Nights 2 was pretty awesome the online version based on some crappy novel was garbage though
Getting rid of that was pretty much the first thing 5e did.
To the greater Necromancy discussion we’ve seen simple skeletons and such nonsense from the void and fel to an extent. (casters transitioning between powers they channel is a known quantity sometimes without the users even realising it.(initially anyway)). We’ve never seen the more advanced and complex variants nor their equivalents like the Darkfallen, Death Knights, Liches and so forth from any source other than death magic.