Weekend Warcraft Lore General

Time-Lost in the Storm Peaks Edition

Discuss the lore of the Warcraft franchise and its application in and around traditional games.

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Why does anyone tolerate the Forsaken?

Life of the flame, call her by name~!

Third for endless faction shitflinging

Because no one really knows they exist considering their isolation. Kul Tirans would never risk travelling to Lordaeron for fear of the plague.

Yes he is.

Storm Peaks was the best zone in Northrend, followed by Gundrak. Fight me, bitch.

I really didn't have any issue with Rhonin and very much enjoyed his interactions with Krasus and Illidan.
War of the Ancients is my favorite Warcraft series, though I haven't read any since like 2005.

Off to a great start.

What's your favorite zone from a lore stand point?

Mine's Old World Barrens. It was the first time I realized just how huge the world really was, and I liked being some rando who was exploring it and helping secure the frontier.

Ratchet in specific has a special place in my heart. Back when I was playing, there were times when I'd just go there and hang out, turning off the default Wacky Goblin Muzak and instead playing the old school jungle music from the good ol' days.

Anyone else looking forward to neeting it up and plugging yourselves back into the system?

You had ten years to flounder in a questless society with a lot more than 2 factions, now it's time to come home.

Icecrown > Zul'drak > Sholazar > the rest

Can't fight you when you're correct.

Do RP servers have auto-flags? I'm thinking about a plot involving a void elf coming home and coming to grips with what her family had to do to survive after the invasion of Quel'Thalas. I'm not sure if I can even get said character into Quel'Thalas if its Horde aligned now.

I don't really know why but I hate exposition. I hated the Vrykul, and I fucking hated the titan keepers.
I demand more mystery.
Also a large in-tact troll empire in the north is a stretch.

>large in-tact
It really wasn't by the time we got up there though.

Unknown, although it was mentioned somewhere that RP-PvE servers will be the first and only servers to break down the language barrier, meaning Alliance and Horde characters will finally have official cross-faction banter they can understand.

The fucking light is now evil, god fucking dammit.

All this fucking years of "The light will help us", "Have faith in the light" and "The light will show you the path", Velen must want to cut his tail.

But its makes sense that the light is neither good or bad.

it might as well be when you compare it's in-game scale to shit like Stormwind

Unless they changed it yep. Waltzing into an enemy faction's city or even start zone automatically flags you for PvP, and even if it didn't the Guards will definitely try to have a "Word" with you

Yes, they're the same as any other Normal or PvP server. If you enter a Horde area you're KoS for the guards and players can attack you.

Unless it's an RPvP server, you'll only get flagged if you literally try to march in the gates of Silvermoon or attract the attention of a town guard.

>what if ...?
So instead of the Burning Crusade we have the Radiant Inquisition. Great.

Da powah of mojo, mon.
And also the power of being made several years later after Blizzard had gotten a lot better at making zones.

STV always felt larger and more mysterious because the mobs were 10 levels higher down south. Slowly players would trickle from north to south, and the opportunity to hunt them was a precious past time. Sometimes they flee right into a group of ?? crocodiles and have to die several times to get back. This game was magical.

This will be cool.

Understood. Thanks for the info.

The idea of Zul'Drak was expressed perfectly by that Zandalari NPC near one of the flight points:
>Pay close attention. You are witnessing the death of a troll empire firsthand.
The entire story of Zul'Drak was how the Scourge was encroaching upon the troll empire and how desperate times called for desperate measures to hold them off. You got to witness the Drakkari butcher their patron loas to feed on their power and the backlash this cause. You shouldn't feel too bad for them, though, because the Drakkari were extremely savage and bloodthirsty EVEN BY TROLL STANDARDS, hence why they were exiled to Northrend.

Velen knew about the dark parts of the Light. Turyleon didn't have a clue about Naa'ru going void.

It isn't that the Light is evil. It's that absolutes are evil. Any absolute. Absolute dark. Absolute light. Absolute life. Absolute order. Absolute chaos.

Absolutes are bad. Naaru embody an absolute. Turns out Prime Naaru embody absolute absolutes.

I mean you can definitely argue the merits of the addition of a strong troll faction, especially when it builds on established lore of ice trolls existing in the region.
I just wanted to tie it into the whole Northrend retcon where a wasteland suddenly supports a fuckton of life, especially when surrounded by Nerubians and Undead Scourge.

STV is a close second for me.

I still remember the first time I hopped on the Zeppelin to Grom'gol and looked out at that deep, dark rainforest.

Jungle zones in general are my kryptonite. Same with desert zones. Big part of why I played Horde, really.

FIVE TORCHES TO LIGHT OUR PATH

She's next. Odyn was right. Dragons were a mistake. They're all pawns of the Old Gods.

Well, the Gundrak raid being cut didn't help it out.

aight I guess I might like Zul'drak now
it's been a long time

The savannah of the Barrens really helps get across just how rough and untamed Kalimdor is and helps give a sense of scale to the world.

Like, a Warlock that summons babies to sacrifice demons is an absolute evil. A Warlock that summons a succubus and that de-corrupts her into an honest, productive member of society is still using the same magics, but is not a cackling bastard.

Honestly, if I had to choose, the Nagrand night ambience is my favorite track. There is a certain bias, however, because I stopped playing mid-BC.

Gundrak's the dungeon, Zul'drak's the zone.

But you are mostly correct, though questing in Zul'drak dragged a little for me other than the one where you spy on the Scourge, and the constant haze in the air sorta marred how great the zone looked I did love the trolls though.

Almost all the zones in Wrath were good, I even have a softspot for Boring Tundra if only because I like hotsprings, tar pits, and had interesting ideas about a black market trade in Bloodspore plants (Fungi? They have spores but they could be Fungi, Ferns, or Lichen) as drugs.

I can understand that, but by the time Wrath rolled around I felt like we'd earned the exposition. What I hate is post-Cata Un'Goro giving you a fucking exposition dump, that shit should have waited till the Sholazar teleporter quest.

I wonder if it will work with /y or if /y range will be the same as /s range for cross faction.

>You shouldn't feel too bad for them, though, because the Drakkari were extremely savage and bloodthirsty EVEN BY TROLL STANDARDS, hence why they were exiled to Northrend.
Which is weird because by the time you get up there they'd become the protectors of a Wolvar village.

Barrens, Stonetalon, Ashenvale/Darkshore/Teldrasil, and Hillsbrad/Alterac are my personal favorites in the old world. Hard to decide beyond that.

STV and Vanilla Un'goro are also amazing.

Old Ashenvale and Feralas. I like forests, I like jungles even better. A pity the former was destroyed and is a bugged mess, and the latter has barely any quests.

Do Forsaken even have lore other than sucking Sylvanas' futa dick?

A bugged mess? I remember hearing some of the phasing in Cata Ashenvale is buggy, or do you mean on private servers?

Also: TFT Founding of Durotar Dustwallow Marsh is one of my favorites, a great mix of tropical desert, and swampy, with lots of mysterious places like the old flooded pyramid ruin and various caves.

Also the Ogres make you fight a thirty foot tall boss quilboar.

I mostly can't stand anything involving the Night Elves but Nightsong was fucking awesome. When I was leveling Archaeology on my shaman I made a point of doing their stuff as often as possible just so I could explore those old ruins.
youtube.com/watch?v=HEK4OXIx9NE

Post-cata is a bugged mess. Phasing problems, quests not ending properly, all sorts of things that exist to this day. The Eastern Kingdom alliance questlines don't have any of those problems, so I think they just half-assed the Alliance Kalindor questlines and never bothered to QA them.They are in my option the worst part of the questing revamp.

This is a difficult question. I agree with you about the Barrens (old); the sense of scale was just wild, especially for that time. I'm going with the Plaguelands. The Plaguelands were, at least back in Vanilla, the closest thing to hell on earth. There was a sense that, even at maximum level, you had to be careful. You weren't safe unless you were with an army and even then - at least that was the feeling I got. It's difficult to pick a favorite zone. I remember jumping off Stonewrought Dam, for instance.

I actually liked the old songs (Enchanted forest/Magic) possibly even better, Nightsong gets TOO enthusiastic for just exploring the mysterious woods full of twinkling lights. They felt more dreamlike.

Shalandis Island is good too, it's like a musicbox/Harpsichord version of a Nightelf song.

I wonder if we'll ever get the Dragon Isles gigamolusc Wat. They came so close to finishing the model on Dev island too.

Of course. Try looking a tad deeper than from a trailer from 2017.

IMO, the best music by far was the old school jungle music.
youtube.com/watch?v=gCWpmSEgew8

As mentioned earlier I loved Ratchet especially, partially because of this music. Going down that hill to the town the first time is etched in my mind forever. I can't stand how they replaced this with those dumbass Goblin meme themes.

Second only to the Barrens, my favorite area was the Echo Isles in Durotar. I loved just surfing between the islands, listening to this music and occasionally turning around to look at the mainland.

Sometimes they blow their load all over her.

Speaking of, know what's totally unfair? There's no option to buy Godrey a drink instead of fighting him.

Wow would be better off if at release it had the 4 wc3 factions instead of just the horde and alliance.
It would also open-up the possibility of grouping with players of different factions and doing their factions content, since instead of it being like allies vs axis it's instead like "You're not my bud, but most of the enemy factions arent yours so feel free to help out and buy shit"
If you want to change your race's faction to a different faction that makes sense for the race then you could permanently switch.
A new faction could be added each expansion, yadda yadda yadda, I've said this all before.

What do you think tho?

Yes and no.

I don't think four factions would have worked, players in general tend to prefer two factions against each other. Most MMOs with more than two factions have issues with PvP.

However, the factions should have stayed in cold war for the most part and players should have stayed as elite mercenaries. "Put the WAR back in WARcraft" was a mistake. There was more than enough adventure without red vs blue.

>pic related: better times

>Most MMOs with more than two factions have issues with PvP.
They do?
The main "PvP MMOs" are either player neutral or self-balancing 3 faction systems.

I always liked the idea the player characters were basically above petty faction politics. Whether it was because they were too busy, too ambitious, or too stupid doesn't matter.

Basically, my general approach to my player characters is they're actual player characters. I think a lot of RPers lose sight of that and instead treat their guys like NPCs. I would rather shoot the shit with randos in front of the Org bank than spend another minute watching people stroke their Faction War cocks in the Wyvern's Tail.

>stroke their... cocks in the Wyvern's Tail
Okay, now that is a lewd way to put faction conflict.

You clearly didn't spend much time in the Tail

To further elaborate my point, my general perspective in the early days of the game was the only thing really stopping me from entering Stormwind was the NPCs were all just faggots. Player characters were more or less indifferent to that sort of thing and only fought in the Battlegrounds because they were getting paid.

Now though, seems like it's just Proud Orc Warrior and Noble Human Paladin flinging shit across the border while fellating their boring NPC faction leaders.

Don't forget the Forsaken whining about humans while talking up how they'll kill all life one day, or Night Elves complaining about how all other elves should die because their faction leaders say so and are cunts (wonder how this is going to work with Void Elves around.)

Those two are probably at the second tier of faction conflict wanking after Human and Orc players.

I don't think you're right about 2 being better than 4. Any issues with pvp can be solved by either simply splitting each 2 factions across different teams (eg in warsong gulch the Nelvs can either have Undead or Humans on theri side), or just have faction have not effect as to what team you're on.
Do you mean that world-pvp things with territory-control would get messy? That seems like something that would take effor to solve, but that's only a specific subset of pvp.
Granted that there's many more examples of 2 faction mmos than 3+ factions, but that seems to just be a matter of noone having tried it yet, rather than it being tried once or twice but failing.

Those old magazine screenshots are good at instilling a sense of mystique/mystery/mysteriousness, partially because of the graphics not being dreamworks-tier yet, and the simple fact that its mysterious since I've never gotten to play that version of Wow.
I read and reread that one screenshot where 2 orcs are having a conversation, where one is going on about how honor in battle is the most important thing and that anything else is disgraceful, and another orc argues that peons are the backbone of society and insults the previous orc by saying that he'd kill his own mother if he thought it would bring him glory.

>Whether it was because they were too busy, too ambitious, or too stupid doesn't matter.
You forgot "Too broke."

Both ESO and GW2 from what I'm aware had issues trying to make sure PvP was a constant affair.

Well PCs were just murderhobos in vanilla and in Wrath you were just "oh shit, you survived Outland, niiiiiiice" but people still treated you like a hired gun. Cata made you more like an elite soldier and then MoP just went CHOSEN HERO OF PANDARIA.

Completely agree. In terms of pure faction skub assholery, the worst Hordeside are Orc and Forsaken players. Humans and Night Elves are the worst Alliance players.

Though personally I'd rate Human players as the most poisonous. But that might just be projecting Veeky Forums's Male Human Fighter crowd onto them. Orc players just barely come second.

Troll master race.

That's true. Camelot unchained, planetside 1 and 2, and ???.
I don't actually know any others, but 3 team free-for-all doesnt make sense in an rts where you dont want to waste a single ounce of wood or gold on an attack, but in a pvp game there your only resources are health ammo and vehicle-points a 3 team game helps prevent one team snowballing into unstoppable victory.

Neither ESO (at the time before criminals or whatever the fuck) or GW2 had open world PvP, and generally would be better balanced than a comparative 1v1 scenario rather than 1v1v1.
Most imbalances found in ESO match-ups had to do with ecelebs/communities joining a single side, making the other 2 sides irrelevant. This wouldn't be solved with a 2 faction system.
GW2 moved into a tiering system so the top 6 servers were generally well balanced in terms of fighting.

But despite that, and as much as I enjoy RvR settings with 1v1v1 match-ups and I'm glad so many games took so much inspiration from DAOC and how I oh, so look forward to Camelot Unchained... making the player neutral presents the most amount of interesting, potential PvP content in an open world.

Huh, fair enough then!

>Troll master race

Ahhhhh, my tazdingo.

I miss the old human Mage tower, the new one from WoD is way too fucking small. I also liked the Orc mage tower as well and the outside of the Orc Fortress (The insides of those were shit however, no access to the towers, one floor, one ring hallway and one small round room old alliance barracks buildings were far superior.)

>and in Wrath you were just "oh shit, you survived Outland, niiiiiiice"
There was also a dialogue bit in the Alliance Dragonblight town where someone's reassuring another by saying that *THE* Scarab Lord is on the field somewhere.

Speaking of which, I had a weird idea for a setting. The foothills of the Stonetalon mountains where Grom forced Thrall to fight through a bunch of Alliance. (Or further up near Medivh's cave [What ever happened to that cave anyway? I'd have expected a dungeon there by now.]) local miscreant species have moved in to the ruins left by the battle and there are newly grown Quilboar thornvines running through them.

An interesting place for mercenary meetups in an RPG? (Assuming it's set after Quilboar becoming at least semi-sane.)

Storm Peaks, Grizz, Boring Tundra

Icecrown is the worst and has bland music

oh no it's in my head again

Hillsbrad Foothills and Ararhi Highlands for me I think

>Cata made you more like an elite soldier and then MoP just went CHOSEN HERO OF PANDARIA.
The sudden change in attitude towards Player Characters was weird but I kinda understand it I guess. By that point you were presumably a veteran of several incredibly dangerous campaigns. Makes sense they'd treat you with more respect. But you're still basically a PMC, so treating you like a Knight or Warlord or whatever just felt weird because again Player Characters always seemed too self-involved to care about faction politics.

But then you reach WoD, where you're Supreme Commander of Horde/Alliance Forces in Draenor, alongside literally millions of others. Then in Legion you're King of the Class, again alongside millions of others. It just doesn't work. What I find is really weird is despite the increased focus on the role of PCs, the game story still keeps shoving this boring ass soap opera between all these uninteresting, unlikable lore figures. Who for some reason just inspire massive, venomous skub arguments. I don't know if this is shitty writing or all part of Blizzard's keikaku of starting an IRL faction war to boost sales.

I wish Blizz would get rid of racials, or change them to be talents. PvPfags get mad if you show up as a panda for arena tiem.

Also Tuskarr are underrated.

Reading up, Pandaren racials are indeed pretty fucking bullshit.

I think Saurfang also called you Scarab Lord.

They're actually pretty sweet for PvE, but unfortunately i only do token PvE(lfr, solo stuff) for lore etc. The rest of the time i'm in queue for arena. So missing out on those high mmr meta racials is a no go.
I rolled my sham to a panda, and now instead of invites i get "lol u fuk go orc noob", it sucks my man.

Because there wouldn't have been anything to talk about in lore threads for the past 10 years if they didn't.

MAKE WAY FOR DA BAD GUYS.

You know what would be fun? Instanced player housing where you could invite anyone.

I remember wanting this in 2005.

I wish. Unfortunately the failure of garrisons and WoD made Blizzard even more terrified of investing resources into it, even though garrisons completely missed the point of what people wanted from housing or guild halls.

I remember when we all thought we could choose where our Garrison went. I was so pumped about setting up shop in Gorgrond.

Look to WildStar if you want to see how to handle player housing.

I also remember when we were supposed to get Karabor and Bladespire as capital cities before they stopped caring.

*kookily breaks 4th wall in every quest*
No, you will need to spell it out for me.

Or SWG, it was too damn comfy to stroll down your player made city and invite people over to rate and bate in your house.

I didn't really care about Bladespire but I did legitimately feel bad for Alliancefags for getting cheated out of Karabor.

the general wow audience very strongly dislikes wildstar, though almost none of them ever played it to 50 or knew anyone who played it to level 50. Truthfully, I would love to have a WildStar TTRPG. I love the setting. I love the story. I love the art.

example of what I mean:

I was in the WildStar open beta and I was impressed by what the devs did for player housing. Many options. I visited a friend of mine's house and he had a giant obstacle course set up in his front yard, a cooking area, an amphitheater, etc. Apparently there are neighborhoods now with five player house plots in one instance.

You got a plot in the sky, and you essentially got dev tools to place whatever you what wherever and however you want. You could straight up terraform your plot with the tools provided to you. You could even change the sky/horizon, the lighting, the weather, even the fucking music playing indoors or outdoors. It's nuts.

I would love to see more done with WildStar in general. It is a crying shame how it was handled, and I would hate to see the IP go to waste.

So whats gonna happen with AU Azeroth?

>Sargeras is still in Medivh body
>Old Gods
>Deathwing
>no Alliance
>Ragnaros
>The Legion
>Uldum
>Hakkar

and more.

If the utter lack of Yrel and Durotan in WoD after "when you need us, we will be here" is any indication, nothing, because they're pretending WoD didn't happen due to what a disaster it was for them.

*in Legion, I mean

I'd like to see something about AU Arthas. With AU Nerzhul dead, there would be no scourge.

RIFT's housing is even better. Though, I prefer WildStar as a game.

IIRC, the way they explained it is AU Draenor effectively exists in its own pocket dimension. There is no Beta Azeroth because the portal fuckery means Beta Draenor intersects with Alpha Azeroth and there is nothing else.

also
>no paladin

I actually wondered at first if wod/legion was an attempt to "redo" the burning crusade, and the next expansion would either be an AU Wrath of the Lich king or else some kind of "The New Lich King is Butthurt and now we must fight more undead" followed by and expansion to fight Wrathion, and then one with strong eastern themes (maybe focus on orc blademasters instead of pandas this time?)

If WoD did better, it probably would have been like that.

>Story forums is full of ebin whiners and gobs who take blizzard's writing extremely seriously.
>someone mentions that warhammer fantasy had better characters than current warcraft
>everyone dogpiles on said person saying that warhammer is grimderp and only the worst people thrive while good people die.
>unlike warcraft where morally good people can come up on top.
What the absolute fuck is wrong with blizzard's story forums? Its literally people tearing each other to shreds over faction conflicts

If you got to design the Horde and Alliance, which races would be in each faction?

/wcg/ isn't much better. The faction shitflinging is just as poisonous here as it is there. The simple fact is anyone who takes this game's lore seriously is a loser. Like most large-scale modern day RPGs, the best elements of the lore are the small things, not the overarching "plot".