Weekend Warcraft General: Tripping Through Time

BRM and its surroundings were once part of the Redridge Mountain chain (Well the northern border of Searing gorge is Khaz Modan technically) When the Wildhammers and Bronzebeards chased the Dark Iron out of Ironforge for the last time they regrouped at Blackrock Mountain where I think they'd already started building a colony, though they'd primarily only inhabited the Ruins of Thaurissan city at first. In a fit of desperation the High Thane (And I think at this point self declared Emperor) Thaurissan and seven summoners of mixed assortment summoned Ragnaros to overwhelm their enemies.

And he did drive them back, but at the cost of enslaving their race and turning their skin black (Going right on back to the ghosts of the ancestors going by the skins used by ALL the Dark Iron Ghosts in Blackwing Descent in Cata only one of which was confirmed to have lived between the first Thaurissan and Dagran Thaurissan the emperor the players kill in Vanilla. It's possible they were royal without ruling the entire clan however.

Their enemies were driven back, but Ragnaros was a cruel master and they'd also lost another army up at Grim Batol along with the Empress so they never had the numbers to push out to Ironforge and instead kept building Shadowforge City into Blackrock Mountain.

The First Horde thought the name "Blackrock Mountain" being the same as Blackhand the Destroyer's clan was prophetic and invaded, seizing the upper reaches.

As the Horde was defeated in the Second War right outside the gates of Blackrock the Darkirons made gains against the Remnants of the Dark Horde. Their biggest push probably came when Rend and Maim's Dragonmaw allies lost the Red Queen, or perhaps when their Lordaeron expedition was destroyed by Arthas and Kel'Thuzad in WC3.

The Dark Iron pushed back HARD against the diehards of the Dark Horde, killing Maim. Then Nefarian and Onyxia came to aid them with Dragonkin minions and lesser drakes, pushing the Dark Iron back.

This started a stalemate with the Darkirons owning the deepest parts and the main Northern entrance (Thus controlling the Searing Gorge) and the Dark Horde owning the upper parts and the Southern entrance thus most of the Burning Steppes, though there were a few Dark Iron spies and Golems in the northern parts of Burning Steppes, that may have taken secret tunnels to get out there.

The Dark Irons had their share of dissidents, in Vanilla that was just the Thorium Brotherhood with their somewhat more goblinish stance of profiteering neutrality and a grudge against Ragnaros and his cronies. Cataclysm added a "Mountain lord Rendan" who didn't like the Thorium Brotherhood OR the main Dark Irons and did love dancing.

Blackrock in the south had their army spread around and could never work up the courage or perhaps magical power to knock down the statue of Anduin Lothar who died so Turalyon could defeat their first horde. (Perhaps Nefarian forbade them to do so to remind them they were nothing without him?)

>and turning their skin black
So dwarves are Mormon...

holy shit, why is the writing for Val'sharah so bad

why are the night elves (and demons) such incompetent stooges who act like Saturday morning caricatures

thousands of years of elven wisdom and experience, and every character's response to anything is get SERIOUSLY MAD GUYS, rush at powerful demon lords alone, and get their shit wrecked (or captured, in the case of Malfurion)

so says the SHADOW of Xavius

Because writers are shit

Malf was a bad case of Worf Effect, to steal a phrase from tvtrope.
He's built up as a big, powerful, wise druid and then gets easily defeated by Xavius. Just a way to say, "Wow! Malf's so strong, but we beat so easy by the bad guy! He must be SO much stronger! OOOOOOOOOOHHHH!"
And then Emerald Nightmare was just a series of loot pinatas, even on mythic.

does that raid have the same kind of godawful back-and-forth you hear every time you go in Darkheart Thicket?

Xavius gloating SO EVILLY, and Malfurion quipping SO DEFIANTLY and talking all sorts of shit, is seriously embarrassing

Luckily, no. You meet up with Malf and he goes along with you and explains the fluff with each wing of the dungeon, but there's no obnoxious banter.

Why did Nefarian and Onyxia help the Dark Horde?

Nefarian saw them as a means to his own ends. Onyxia was Nef's baby mama.

I unironically want a Mongrel Horde expansion because, despite all the raging arguments about the actions of the Horde and Alliance towards each other, both sides treat the minor races far worse.

I decided to level a panda Alliance side when Blizz started that thing where you level a new char to 20 for a skin in Hearthstone and was struck by how callouslly you're told to slaughter the Kobolds. "Oh, yeah, uh there's some dumb rats being annoying in the minds, kill a bunch would ya?"

Plus, some of that concept art was awesome. Mecha-Gnolls!

i fucking love BRM, and all its lore

there is some solid potential, but it would take a deft hand. the mongrel races have been given the comedic relief treatment for so long they're practically a meme in itself by now

I miss when BRM's dungeons were considered hard in Vanilla.
I did a 10-man BRD that started at 10 in the morning and cleared everything in there, finally dropping Thaurrisan at around 6 in the evening. A lot of time was lost to swapping people out, but that was an accomplishment.
And feeling like a total badass when I killed Drakkisath in UBRS with only 7 people.
NuWoW is just too easy unless you go full autism mode, and even that is easily cheesed.

i'm still proud that i know those dungeons like the back of my hand. they really captured the scale of a massive mountain fortress

>10 years after the third war
>there are now 2 factions for some reason
4 factions when?

Yeah. When you were expected to have two to three hours to do a full clear rather than the 10 to 15-minute speed clears.

gameplay before lore has long been blizzard's creed.

Blackrock Depths was, is, and probably forever will remain the biggest 5-man in all of WoW. You're exploring an entire dwarf arcology top to bottom, rampaging through the capital of the Dark Irons on your way to the base of the mountain and the Molten Core at the center.

I liked all the RPG elements of Vanilla that are lacking now. Needing to talk to the ghost in the tomb while dead to start the quest for the key. Or having a Rogue pick the lock.
Or fighting to a certain place to hit a switch to let you progress.
And how every fight had to be done carefully, lest one of the enemies flee into another pack. Making crowd control an essential part of dungeon delving.
As opposed to the "round shit up and AOE down" that has dominated dungeons since Wrath.

Wait for my Bannerlord mod!

If they ever give BRD the scholomance treatment I'll summon Ragnaros in their fucking HQ.

Well, then again at least there will be Classic.

And it's not even the entire thing! there's so much more that either fell to the Horde or isn't accessible. BRM is really amazing and I usually don't like Lava levels.

Yeah, Wrath introduced good quests, but the dungeons were piss. I mean BC dungeons were a little linear but at least they were hard.

That's what we could've had instead of WoD.

I'd see it as a good excuse to take some of the leveling zones untouched by Cata and remake them as end-game.

Again, though, I never really explored that corner of the world, mostly because I was primarily a Horde player and never had much opportunity to really go that far. The Arathi Highlands was as far as Thrall's Horde went in the northern EK until Cata, so if you wanted to explore the Badlands and the whole of the Blackrock Mountain region, you had to go out of your way to really indulge yourself, as that involved going south and crossing the Thandol Span into dwarf country - Wetlands and Khaz Modan - before you got to the Badlands and immediately saw Uldaman to your right. Then you kept going until you breached Searing Gorge. I probably quested through Searing Gorge all of once to completion, and there wasn't much to do in the Burning Steppes.

I have to wait for bannerlord first Q_Q

Sunken Temple did need a map though.

The only one that got totally ignored was Silithus.

>Sunken Temple did need a map though.
Nah. Make these newfag fucking shits get lost going up and down those stairs, just like we used to back in the good old days. Then losing the priest down the hole in the middle of the temple.

To this day, people still don't give a fuck about Silithus. They went there for two things: Ahn'Qiraj and Prince Thunderaan. There's only so much you can do with Old God-touched bugs.

they actually deleted content in Silithus, the quests for that town full of ghosts all disappeared

I've actually heard the Horde had it easier once they got to Kargath. A good place further south than Thorium point and far closer to the usual turn ins for Alliance in Ironforge and SW, though your Ony attunement was hillariously rough.

I'd also love a Mongrel Horde. Give them back the bite they're supposed to have in their lore/fluff (centaurs endangering the tauren, gnolls would be an unending tide if they could only become organized, etc). Update their models, give them a unifying force, and throw out some truly monstrous boss-worthy variants.

On the other hand,

>it would take a deft hand
>modern Blizzard writing staff

I mean, it's cool that they teased the Qiraji in Kalimdor all the way as far north as the fucking Barrens, but you're still just dealing with angry bugs that somehow had a civilization, threw in with the Old Gods and can occasionally mind-control people somehow.

Don't forget the wasted opportunity that was Azjol-Nerub. It was originally going to be an entire zone unto itself, a subterranean city that crossed the whole of the Northrend underground, where you joined the living Nerubians in holding off the Scourge and Anub'Arak on one side, and the Faceless Ones and Old God-touched cultists on the other side.

There was some areas that were touched up in Cata but were still pretty much just... there. Arathi and Winterspring jump to mind.

Honestly, I always wanted to try running a PnP game with home built terrain for it. It would mean however, trying to build all the corridors, walkways, and buildings for it. I figure it would probably take something like a solid month of non-stop building just to do it. No sleep, no potty breaks, and no stopping. Just building endless buildings and terrain blocks for all of it.

I know it's horribly unrealistic, but it's one of those aspirations I can still dream about.

True, Arathi at least had some of the NPCs clearly very pissed off by the loss of their friend in southshore. (The Lesbian couple lost their mage friend in the Plague bombings.)

I will fight for Horde Nerubians to my dying breath.

And what exactly was Nefarian aiming for? Being a right prick while his sister destabilized Stormwind from within?

Wasn't he busy making his mutant baby flight?

An army to protect his experiments in BWL as he kidnapped a LOT of eggs and whelps from other flights.

And Ironically one of the quests you have involves stealing Eggs/whelps from him for some mercenaries in Burning Steppes, then WHUPS turns out they sold them to the scourge, go fix your fucking mistake.

Has anyone got Chronicles V2?

Yeah. Lots of orc shit.

Someone said it had a little chapter about how the Jungle trolls and 1st Horde interacted?

it does but I don't remember what it said

1st Horde fought the Gurubashi for a time, the Gurubashi basically fought the Horde to a standstill and the Horde decided to cut their losses and put the troops back to their main effort.

...

>it ain't me
>it ain't me
>I ain't no fortuante mon

Wait, a Gurubashi attack on Stormwind thrown off by Medivh?

iirc Lothar and Llane? incited a war intentionally amidst bickering of nobles but had no idea it would result in so many human losses that Medivh's hand was forced to come to the defense of Stormwind despite being neutral
iirc.

I really gotta read that but don't want to bother you for more pages.

Does ANYONE have a DL?

I've got them both. In .cbr format.
I'll toss up a mega link as soon as it uploads anyway.

Scholomance is one of my favorite places, from a lore perspective. I even wrote a paper about it. I have mixed feelings about the revamp. It looks nice, and I liked what they did with the encounters but I just hated that forsaken chick. Also, I felt like there wasn't really a reason to go back. At that point your just attacking a school

>Never fight a jungle troll in the fucking jungle
You'd think this would be obvious, but at least in the orcs' defense, they had no clue what the Gurubashi were capable of.

Also they took out most of the damn rooms.

Stormwind basically decided to make a push into Gurubashi territory and the Gurubashi started whooping their ass so hard that Medivh had to come and fight an avatar of Hakkar that he very nearly didn't beat.

Trolls have the most OP lore, but always get made into raid fodder every other expac since there's so many of them.

And even the troll content isn't guaranteed to make the cut. Remember that the Zul'Drak raid in Wrath, the one meant to follow up on the Gundrak dungeon, got cut. They even teased what could've been part of that raid in the dungeon.

Least favorite retcon?

I feel like you posted it, that and Medivh's mom being less of a bitch.

I feel like Northrend really paved the way for them to go all-out with their MMO memery.
It should've been a frozen wasteland with a few societies struggling to survive in the wake of the Scourge; now it's half filled with life and prosperation, all in the name of convenient leveling zones all tied to a single continent.

>having players explore dark tunnels full of spiders would have been more triggering than underwater
Missed opportunity imo

I've come to accept it, but I preferred the Old Gods as their own threat rather than just minions of something bigger.

On the other hand, it gave us Storm Peaks and Grizzly Hills, which, even if they shouldn't really exist, were still hella cool

Balance druids using sun magic

Fuck that shit, not only does it totally change the thematics of playing the class from fae-caster to celestial-caster, it also renders the entire explanation for why tauren priests and paladins exist moot

AND ON THE OTHER HAND, we could've had some dank Nerubian exposition instead of some demigod fantasyshits mirroring Norse myths.

...Or we could have just not had Un'Goro 2.0 and had both storm peaks and a nerubian zone

Un'Goro 2.0 was kinda nice though, other than the dreary "Fun quest text for boring ass killquests" that is anything Nessingwary. It gave us actual payoff on the Un'goro story though I guess you could have had that teleport in Storm Peaks.

>tfw Zandalar joining the horde is just a front for uniting what's left of the troll empires under one banner so they finally stop getting their shit pushed in.
>And when troll territories are finally allowed to grow unchecked, whatever conflict finally decides a concrete winner to the war, the new Zandalari empire comes out of nowhere and steamrolls the broken wreck that's left over from either faction.
Rohk soon fellow Zandalari.

That was a bummer, I agree. They took out Ras who was my favorite

>Scholomance
God I played on a private rp server for the longest time and playing necromantic Harry Potter in Scholomance was the shit.

Could say the same about the Dark Irons.

I still don't trust Moira and her son.

user, user he's a baby.

I think you're being a little paranoid.

So is Anduin, and look what they're doing with him! He aged FAST

I've always been fascinated by the Nerubians, and the Mantid showed that Blizz can definitely make a bug race cool and interesting.

We're running out of places to visit, I hope we go back to Azjol-Nerub and actually explore it like the original plan back in Wrath. There was a really cool fan expansion a guy made a while back with that idea, though I'd prefer (at least a faction) of playable Nerubians to seeing them as main villains.

They should do an expansion after dealing with N'zoth to go and explore these random plot points left all over the place before the Void Lords come down and start waving their dicks around.

A group of bugs that went rogue to the Old Gods seem like a good thing tp put in THIS expansion.

Why does anyone tolerate the presence of undead in warcraft
T. Never played the games

because by the time anyone was in the position to stop them, there was a rebel faction that wanted to open diplomacy

"My father once told me the world was gonna roll me, I ain't the sharpest tool in the shed" -Jaina Proudmoore

edgy teens were a target audience back in 2004

>open to diplomacy and were a vital ally against the scourge
>isolated in an area that was pretty inhospitable, even moreso now
>undead tactics are a bitch to fight against
I remember reading in the original RPG book one of the preferred tactics the Forsaken used was to bury themselves and wait for enemies to walk over them, or dress in enemy attire, hide amongst the dead on a battlefield and kill anyone who tried to salvage them.

The only good thing about the second half of the WoW comic was watching Cho'Gal mutate.
That's fucking dirty. The uniform one is enough to bring down all kinds of hell even in modern war.

>zandalari led by a hydralisk

...

I haven't looked at this franchise since vanilla WC3. What all have I missed?

They had nothing to lose and held nothing back. It reminds me of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie where they walked on the bottom of the ocean to attack a ship.

They even culled their own, which I think gave them some early on sympathy from others. There was a flavor text with Brann exploring Tirisfal that talked about how there was one Forsaken who was basically full on Alzheimers. It was explained to Brann that he was losing himself to the scourge again and as Brann was being shown out the Shadow priest took a knife to the Forsaken.

Isnt the league of explorers alliance only

There's neutral branches of the League, and in the RPG books Brann was actually doing a lot of good diplomacy, was even used re resolve the "Muh tauren sacred land!" plot by talking to Carine and Baine and working out a respectful way to dig before the Kosaklysm ruined things.

And Harrison Jones and the "Jr league of Explorers" had I think an orc and a Troll.

You would think so. I think it was done as more of diplomatic thing before everything became Red vs. Blue. This would have been right after TFT where everyone had just been buddy buddy to fight off the legion. There was even an instance of him helping the Nerubians in Northrend.

A lot.

In name only, if only because there was a Horde equivalent run by the blood elves.

And talking to I think survivors of Arthas's expedition alongside Ice Trolls in Drak'tharon keep.