What does Veeky Forums think of the Warcraft franchise in terms of the lore and it's influence on tabletop gaming?

It's influence on ttg has been in my experience limited to 4e's mechanics being sorta MMO-ish and it's visual design being more about huge pauldrons and glowing inexplicably hovering gems in an attempt to draw in the wow kiddies.

Maybe Warcraft's lore was pretty dank once, but I basically lost track and interest of it around Wrath of the Litch King, and by the time the Deathwing era retcons occurred I'd no longer a clue what everyone was even on about.

Their race designs and aesthetic never really appealed to me, being as I am a low-fantasy grognard; the high tier armours were always too glowy and ridiculous.

The GAME was good; I played vanilla for a couple years on my prehistoric toaster, but I never played it for the lore, and I always found the roleplaying scene pretty anemic; and believe me I TRIED to roleplay on the EU servers but niggas always be breakin' kayfabe.

Mind you, I'm a pretty autistic sorta fella; I've nhot been in an mmo guild for a long time, and I've basically lost all of my old online social skills that I cultivated during my days playing WOW and Guild Wars Prophecies.

Speaking of GWP; that game had dank lore, I didn't follow that much after that oriental expansion either, and haven't delved into much of the GW2 lore at all.

The fall and exodus of Ascalon quest chain is still my favourite arc of any MMO's overarching plot that I've played; nothing in WOW can hold a candle to those feels.

>Now it is beyond repair.
Unless they retcon everything after TFT.

Tbh you don't really need to retcon Vanilla WoW. It'd probably be the best point for a tabletop RPG, really.
Vanilla mostly just filled in stuff that hadn't really been covered in the RTS games, and didn't really make any major changes or additions to the lore beyond the (admittably pretty dumb, but from game-mechanics point pretty much inevitable) decision to add the Night Elves and the Forsaken into the Alliance and Horde factions, rather than them being separate factions like in the RTS.

>the (admittably pretty dumb, but from game-mechanics point pretty much inevitable) decision to add the Night Elves and the Forsaken into the Alliance and Horde factions, rather than them being separate factions like in the RTS

That's just the thing, though; Vanilla WoW already enforces the two faction bullshit that is the root cause of most of the stuff that goes wrong with the lore down the line.

There's good stuff there for sure, but I would definitely retcon all of it and then cherrypick what to reintroduce, rather than make my cutoff post-vanilla.

Even vanilla WoW was fine. Everything starting from Burning Crusade is when the cracks started showing and getting wider and wider as time went on.

I think it's a tad contrarian, since WC1 and 2 are pretty down to earth or generic settings. There's nothing wrong with that though, since I thought they executed it pretty well. It's the same reason I like Demon's Souls setting better than Dark Souls. I know the latter has more thought and effort put into making it's unique setting, but there is something about the simplicity of the former that I just adore.

Warcraft 3 in general had GoAT characters, GoAT campaign, GoAT OST, GoAT fluff expansion, and GoAT moments. It had so many GoAT's it was like a goddamn petting zoo.

> I've basically lost all of my old online social skills

I know that feeling, I had no problem being able to hop into other people's RP when I was back in middle school or high school. But that I'm out of college, all my old RP friends are long gone, and I've become ridiculously shy.

A little, but WC2 was the best, so you're right at least.

First two had solid gameplay, not enough lore. Never played Dark Portal, but I've heard that helps WC2's.
WC3 was really good. TFT was 11/10.
WoW's problems only really started in BC, when the devs began the TFT shit-parade, seeking to ruin everything I liked. Zul'jin, why??
WotLK wasn't THAT bad, but continued to shit on everything forever. Cata had some really good stuff, but also fucking Orc Jesus.
Didn't care as much though, because they'd already killed off everyone I liked.
Never did MoP and WoD, but I've heard they're dank and dung respectively. Hopefully, Legion will fix everything by restoring all the characters from TFT.

Too much of it felt like you're the big bad hero come to save the day, up until you get together with 25-40 other heroes, and then get the spotlight stolen by the real main characters.
Honestly, if they had just made you feel like a single shitty footman/grunt rather than a god-slaying murderhobo, a lot of WoW would have been redeemed.

no, but it does mean you're wrong

MoP is generally considered to be pretty good, mandatory forced faction war nonwithstanding. Helps that it's effectively a "filler season" plot, with little connection to existing lore.
Wod has a dumb premise (Orc Hitler goes back in time to creat an army of Orc Nazis! Are you bad enough dude to stop him?), but aside from that had potential (you get see what things were like on Draenor before the end of WC2, and to be honest I liked going back to basics and fighting villanous orcs for a chanse, without needing to come up with contrived situations to justify orcs and humans beating the shit out of eachother while some far nastier enemy is trying to kill both). It also introduced some pretty neat lore (like more stuff about Arakkoa). Too bad they pretty much gutted the expansion to start working on Legion, leaving a lot of content out and making the ending kind of contrived and unsatisfying.

Lord of the Clans novel was pretty much my introduction to the fantasy genre. So I'm definitely biased in liking Warcraft but I haven't been really digging the lore lately. Like Cataclysm I liked some some of the stuff that was going on, honorable Garrosh leading the horde,Vol'jin wanting to secede, the elements are out of whack but the thing that I started to dislike was the focus on Thrall. He used to be one of my favorite characters but taking down Deathwing was more or less him using Dragonsoul. As much as I hate Ronin that should have been him or a group effort with the two of them. Also fuck the ending cutscene that the Aspects lost their powers because they fullfilled their duty and protecting Azeroth and announcing Aggra was pregnant. I don't know if I hate Aggra because her purpose is to serve as Thrall's waifu or because I shipped Jaina Thrall when I was in middle school. Then MoP made Garrosh hitler which was ugh and when Thrall and Garrosh finally throw down in WoD, Thrall refuses to acknowledge the Garrosh situation was kind of his fault.

...

I guess that explains why I fucking hate Aggra.

It's cartoony and shit.

And it's success is making everything else cartoony and shit.

Alright Veeky Forums it's 2004 and Blizzard has hired you as writer for WoW. This is your chance to save the lore right from the beginning, how do you do it?

make thrall orc jesus from the very beginning. the orc and troll opening cutscenes show your character eating bread and drinking wine while kneeling to him.

So what about Tauren and the Undead?

>wow rpg
>gives reasonable explanation to everything
>has awesome flavor, the world feels really well put together
>come cata, it becomes non-canon
>even though it's been falling apart since tbc
>now everything is random
>on top, they're rewriting the lore AGAIN
fucking piece of shit desu.

It wouldn't surprise me if Activision was behind it. Since the Warcraft RPG and WoW RPG had Northrend fleshed out, and to a lesser extent Outland, I bet Blizz was working with the tabletop devs.

Then after the Activision buyout, they probably chose not to continue business with them, as the last WoW RPG supplement was Dark Factions, and that was in 2007. The Activision buyout was 2007 or 2008.

I think everything post-Wrath is when the lore became Metzen's personal baby.

Maybe this is just leftovers from my time as a jealous teenage waifufag, but I never liked the idea of Thrall and Jaina as a couple. Strong friends and diplomatic allies, absolutely, but I never really sensed much romantic potential between them.

Hell, I liked Jaina's push for peace with the Horde for a long time. But, after a while and the constant forced excuses for the Alliance and Horde to be at war, her attempts at getting everyone to work diplomatically started sounding kinda whiny to me; probably because no one was listening, which is really more due to the contrived writing than it being "her" fault, but it still came off as that way to me.

Honestly, when Theramore was bombed and Jaina went full zealot, I loved the change. It seemed like a logical character development after being ignored for years despite (or in spite of) her making a lot of sense, and then seeing almost everything she loved get vaporized in front of her eyes finally pushed Jaina over the edge. That, and her becoming a hardass was just kind of awesome.

Aggra is still lame, though. If nothing else, because she came out of fucking nowhere. If she had been more previously established, I'd accept her more.

I'm hoping that this new lore revamp was done because the writers are aware of how much the excessive retcons bug a lot of fans. Sure, the new book itself has retcons in it, but I figure it's derived from them making sense of things established so far in order to establish a new status quo to work from.

Blizzard said, as of WoD, that they had the storylines of the next three expansions planned out, so I'm assuming we'll get some consistency at least for that long.

I really dislike it. It has plenty of neat flavor and even some fun stories, but the franchise outlived its original scope in the RTS days. Overly sympathetic Horde was the first sin, but it was kinda interesting to see where it was going so it was accepted. Continued/subsequent constant bastardizations of both main factions makes it impossible to really give a shit about either, certainly not with the kind of investment Blizz is fishing for. Every expansion of WoW now feels like nonstop excuses for "development" ignoring any kind of integrety of story or character, and glowing floating weapon bloat (though as vidya they have a much longer list of unforgivable sins).
How much influence has it actually had on tabletop? I don't know anyone who played the RPG and it looked kinda shit to me. The flavor of orcs, gnomes, and other races may have held some magnetic pull in determining where other games/editions portrayed things, anything else?

The "holy trinity" dps healer tank infects my fantasy games far too often.

>tank complaining because he can just get slapped with debuffs
>tank complaining because aggro isn't a mechanical system and a sufficiently cool-headed attacker can in fact just disengage from him to attack the cleric who has given no though to defense beyond scale mail with Dex as a dump stat
>damage wizards in general