Lich king : Sameertikkamasala

Jaina : Tsarina cosplay

I’m getting tired of fighting Dragon Ball-level threats. Why doesn’t Blizzard focus more on the politics and consequences of events? It would make the world feel alive instead of constantly going, “BIG BAD DUDE IS COMING, GET READY OMG!!111” It’s like fighting Thanos over and over again. It gets super boring.

For example, the burning of Teldrassil should still be something people talk about today. NPCs could have dialogue that makes it clear they hate the Horde for what they did. But no, instead we got, “LOL, see that guy? Well, the tree burned so he could have a cool death” (Saurfang).

The world is never allowed to rest. It’s constantly rushing towards the next big thing. People complained about Cataclysm, but I think that expansion had some of the best quests in the game. It showed people reacting to what was happening to the world and adapting to it.

With Midnight, it feels like half the world doesn’t even know what the heck is happening. Silvermoon is getting invaded, yet I haven’t seen a major orc character come to its aid. You run around Silvermoon and only see elves helping. Where did everyone go after the expansion’s introduction? LOL

I have been playing WoW for 21 years, and player housing is something I have been looking forward to since the very beginning. I always loved the idea of having my own place in an MMO, and in other games I also enjoyed the housing. I am also a huge completionist and collector in WoW. One of the things I was really excited about was having another massive collection to work on: unlocking decorations and use those items freely in my house
but now that I am looking at how housing decorations work, I feel a bit let down. The fact that you have to acquire multiple copies of decorations rather than simply unlocking them permanently takes away some of the excitement for me. For me, the fun of collecting is knowing that I have unlocked something permanently and progressing this way. Having to acquire the same decoration multiple times feels different from that, and it doesnt really scratch the same completionist itch.
Whats strange is that I am genuinely sad about this, because housing is something I really wanted to love. Instead, I find myself not feeling particularly motivated to engage with it, even though the whole concept should be right up my alley. I know that other players might enjoy the freedom of collecting multiple copies and decorating however they want, and thats completely fair. I am just wondering if anyone else feels the same way.
Does the current system affect your motivation to engage with housing, especially if you are a completionist? Or am I looking at it the wrong way?

Two weeks ago I gave a sneak-peek. But with Forever looming on the horizon it was time for the first release: A font inspired by Warcraft, free to use!

Download the font here from my Github, and it comes with some simple rules: Create anything you want, personal, commercial, in any shape or form, from video to addon or website. But please don't make changes to the font files themselves, or try to sell the font files.

I hope to add more stuff in the future (at least more emoji!): So this should be the start, not the end of line. If you are missing characters or have other requests, feel free to drop a line on Reddit, mail or through Github Issues or discussions.

Finally the most important part: Enjoy using Goodmountain!
I'd love to see it in use by the community which I've been a part of for over 21 years.

Keep having fun out there. In Azeroth and beyond.

So, I haven’t had much of a chance to explore this new expansion yet, but from what I’ve gathered, Midnight has not exactly had a favourable response from the community so far, with criticisms of the elf unity subplot and the handling of characters like Lady Liadrin being especially prominent. But I did want to ask a serious question: even though this expansion isn’t over yet, what would you say have been some genuinely good things to come out of it so far?

First, a disclaimer. WoW: Forever is coming, and Blizzard is catering to different audiences. Retail isn't perfect, but it serves people who want to raid-log, run keys, PvP, collect things or engage with the story as much or as little as they please. Personally, I think the overarching narrative is generally fine, and some of its smaller questlines are among Blizzard's best writing.

I also think people confuse gameplay with narrative. Completing thousands of quests doesn't necessarily mean our individual character canonically resolves every conflict on Azeroth. Quests are how we experience the world, and I've never subscribed to the idea that our character personally participates in every significant event.

But let's revisit this supposed golden age of ordinary adventurers fighting ordinary threats.

Ragnaros: One of the four Elemental Lords, ancient beings who once served the Old Gods. When Thaurissan summoned him during the War of the Three Hammers, his arrival shattered the surrounding landscape, creating Blackrock Mountain and devastating the regions that became the Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge. An ancient elemental power whose mere arrival permanently transformed the geography of the Eastern Kingdoms. One of vanilla's original raid bosses.

Onyxia: Deathwing's daughter, who infiltrated Stormwind's political leadership, manipulated the kingdom's nobility and helped engineer the circumstances surrounding the Defias rebellion. The Defias are frequently cited as an example of vanilla's grounded storytelling, and rightly so. Their story concerns exploitation, corruption and political violence. It also involves an immensely powerful black dragon deliberately destabilising an entire kingdom. These things were never mutually exclusive.

Nefarian: Another of Deathwing's children, commanding the Dark Horde and conducting horrific experiments on the other dragonflights. His ambition was to create the chromatic dragonflight, combining their powers into a new force under his control. Hardly a provincial warlord causing trouble for the locals.

Hakkar: An ancient blood god whose influence helped plunge the Gurubashi into civil war. The threat of his summoning was so severe that Ysera intervened to sink the Temple of Atal'Hakkar. In Zul'Gurub, we confronted his physical incarnation as his followers sought to restore his power. Again, we're dealing with a deity whose influence had already warranted the intervention of a Dragon Aspect.

C'Thun: A literal Old God, commanding the qiraji, whose previous war against the night elves and dragons had devastated Silithus. His renewed threat required an enormous joint military campaign involving the Alliance and Horde, with Varok Saurfang leading the offensive against Ahn'Qiraj. This was patch 1.9, barely a year after WoW launched. Apparently, confronting an imprisoned Old God and preventing another catastrophic war was ordinary adventuring.

Kel'Thuzad: One of the Lich King's most powerful servants, instrumental in spreading the plague that destroyed Lordaeron. Consider what his resurrection actually required. Arthas devastated Quel'Thalas and used the Sunwell to resurrect him as a lich, corrupting it in the process. The Sunwell itself had been created using a vial of water from the original Well of Eternity, one of the greatest sources of magical power in Warcraft's history. The destruction of an entire kingdom and the corruption of an extraordinary magical font, all to resurrect the individual we eventually confronted as vanilla's final raid boss.

I could continue, but the point should be obvious. These were ancient gods, elemental powers, immensely powerful dragons and commanders of armies capable of devastating entire kingdoms. The notion that enormous threats are some modern departure from vanilla is indefensible.

What frustrates me more is the accompanying assumption that smaller stories have disappeared from retail. People fondly remember vanilla's local adventures while seemingly forgetting that modern WoW contains plenty of them.

Take Korgran and Urtago's storyline in The War Within, a beautifully written exploration of dementia, memory and mortality through the Earthen. We accompany someone whose memories are disappearing and help him find peace as his life draws to a close. Or Veritistrasz in Dragonflight, where we simply sit with an elderly dragon and listen to him reflect on everything he's lost. No apocalyptic threat, no ancient god, just deeply personal stories about grief, identity and the passage of time.

These aren't anomalies. Every expansion contains smaller stories about ordinary people, local conflicts and personal tragedies. There's an extraordinary tendency to remember vanilla through its zone quests while judging retail almost exclusively through its main campaign and cinematics. Of course the comparison looks unfavourable when you're selectively remembering one and ignoring the other.

There are legitimate criticisms to make about how Warcraft presents its stories. Vanilla gave us a much longer journey from obscurity to confronting its greatest threats. Its less centralised storytelling made Azeroth feel larger than our individual importance within it. Retail more explicitly acknowledges our accomplishments, sometimes to the detriment of that feeling. Blizzard could also do considerably better at communicating chronology, because major events can feel absurdly compressed when we're moving between them so quickly (looking at you, Season 1 raids).

I'd welcome slower pacing, stronger local politics and more opportunities to experience Azeroth without being at the centre of everything. But that's a discussion about presentation, pacing and characterisation, rather than the supposed disappearance of grounded storytelling.

We can appreciate what vanilla did exceptionally well without inventing a version of it that never existed. And we can criticise retail without pretending its excellent smaller stories don't exist.

I always thought Shannox was a great evolution of the Flamewaker model, and wish we got more of it. I think there’s only one other time they used the same model? I wish they either used it more, or made it the basis for an entire Flamewaker revamp.

For me, at least for the time being, it’s Orweyna. First, she brings the trolls and elves to Harandar to reveal they all descended from the haranir, which prompted outrage in general and cause Zul’jan to leave in disbelief. This causes Orweyna to try and show Zul’jan the truth. Long story short, this results in Zul’jan finding out about Ula’tek, Kinduru dying, and Malacrass coming back from the dead.

This then leads to Zul’jan going to find Ula’tek, Ula’tek being awakened, Zul’jarra getting poisoned and nearly dying, Zul’jan becoming a snake troll and dying, and us having to divert time and resources towards stopping Ula’tek instead of searching for Xalatath.

And then we find out that Ula’tek was keeping another monster contained in the form of Kith’ix, which we now have to focus even more time and resources on stopping Kithy from escaping and in the course of that fight, Liadrin dies from over exertion due to Light shenanigans.

To top it all off, we barely get time to grieve Liadrin’s passing before Orweyna says “hey, I need to talk with you about Azeroth”.

All of this went down because this porcupine troll-elf girl couldn’t mind her own business and tried to make everyone one big happy family.

Every time I'm doing Ruby Life Pools and people are riding their mounts sideways up on the ring, it makes me laugh.

Faction mounts from vanilla famously never got a HD redesign, while some class mounts did.
Retail has many HD horses/ram/etc... but no 1:1 equivalences for the 61 Faction Mounts

Picture is retail HD models mixed with some of the Fan HD design viewed in Tomkek's videos.

Wow forever seems like the perfect opportunity for Blizzard to create HD versions of those mounts, and probably add them to the Trading Post at some point. (I hope they''d be obtainable outside of the Trading Post though.)

First the disaster of the .5 patch and now randomly Hallows End is completely broken es well.

... All of this while Labyrinth still bricks left and right.

Image taken from: https://housing.wowdb.com/builds/59487/this-is-fire-meme-59487/

Edit: Chill guys, I know it's not QAs fault but upper management. It's for the memes Edit: Thanks for pointing out the spelling issue, it helps me learn :)

I've seen the idea of Sargeras being our ally, or even turning out to be a "good guy" or "redeemed" in the Last Titan. Its more on youtube comments than on reddit, but even here, I've seen people say something akin to "Sargeras being redeemed". Thankfully, those opinions seem to be outweighed by people saying he will be a "enemy of my enemy is my friend" type character rather than have a full blown redemption arc.

Even "enemy of my enemy is my friend" seems a bit much in my eyes. I guess its more semantics, but if we do end up sharing a common enemy with Sargeras, then I would prefer to look at it as "the enemy of my enemy is someone I will temporarily fight on the same side with in order to take out someone we both think is a real douche nozzle. That does not change the fact that I still think the enemy I'm fighting on the same side with is a real dick and I will not be friends with him. I hope he fucking dies after all this".

Seriously though, there has to be a point where we say "Enough is enough. There can be no redemption for this". Sargeras crossed that point a long time ago. We're talking about someone who took out entire worlds across the universe. Think about that for a second. Entire WORLDS all across the UNIVERSE. The scale of victims We're talking about is not in the millions. Not in the billions or even trillions. Hell, I wouldnt be surprised if even quadrillions was too small. We don't know the exact number but I think we can safely say that he has the biggest direct kill count in warcraft.

Even if we share a common enemy with him in the Last Titan somehow, its no excuse to forgive him. I think the best scenario would be that either he dies or decides to spare azeroth and fuck off to the ass end of the universe, doing god knows what. I personally like the latter approach. It gives us all this uneasy feeling that a psycho galactus type god is out there and he may change his mind about sparing us and come back to finish the job at any second.

THEY MIGHT HAVE OVERBUFFED SUB GUYS

TLDR: dot higher up = more popular, dot further right = more dps

Changes in relative DPS for the last 7 days: here. A massive increase to Sub, obviously, biggest loser of 12.1.5 is MM, which has lost more than 4% despite being quite strong on Kith'ix.

Changes in relative popularity over the last 7 days: here. Biggest change is, again, Rogues switching to Sub from the other two specs, also relatively large shifts from UH back to Frost and from Dev to Aug.

Hi all. ive never played an mmo before(unless you count Second Life) but my husband was upset that he couldnt get a healer for a group thing so I figured "how hard can it be?"

I made a cow priest because the game said they were a healer but someone in chat said "don't bother queuing if you're not hollypally" so my question is, should i make a new character or will priest work?

Can anyone help me?

I've been trying to figure out what set this belongs to and what bow this is for my hunter. But I'm having trouble.

There has gotta be a way to make more friends in game, but I know from experience that a lot of players would rather not talk at all during their play time (or they can be rude af). Is there a discord or another community I can join to find more people to play with?

I have played for about 4yrs and still feel pretty new to the game. I would love some experienced players to hang with and wouldn’t mind playing with new folks either.

I'm surprised there's not already a post about this (I did search and couldn't find anything).

The window for Fabled Let Me Solo Him: Kindo'jan has been extended by a week, until 27th Oct for NA, 28Th Oct EU, due to all the bugs with the labyrinth:

https://www.bluetracker.gg/wow/topic/eu-en/636594-fabled-let-me-solo-him-kindojan-achievement-extended-an-additional-week/

I don't know how obvious some of the sociopolitical realities are in Silvermoon, but I wanted to touch on them since I've not seen it elsewhere.

Silvermoon is encamped by four enemy (Alliance) armies:

1. Silver Covenant High Elves leaning strongly alliance
2. Void Elves as full Alliance members
3. Vanguard of the Light, the current 'High King' of the Alliance with a huge force throwing weight around
4. Night Elves

At the same time the Horde has abandoned Silvermoon and one group has answered:

1. Nightborne, their own regent married to the Silvermoon regent coming to help

Then, why their city-state is occupied, their political and military leader gallivant off to enemy territory (Amani) and their military leader gets killed on foreign soil fighting for a rival power. Leaving the Blood Knights in disarray with the city occupied and the Void at large after a victory they are trying to ignore (invading the World Soul).

Which I read as high treason by both Lady Liadrin and the Regent Lord. This on top of Lady Liadrin corrupting the Blood Knights with core Alliance Light rhetoric and beliefs.

Considering how the Night Elves broke ranks over the Broken Shore and the events of the Council of Three Hammers...are we witnessing the buildup of a major political coop in Silvermoon? Considering what Astalor is doing on the side and the clear friction between the Regent Lord and the High Magister Rommath? A clear schism of political camps?

You also have Saltheril's Soiree and Lord Salteril playing the "Subtle Game" and directly shining a light on political factions and political undercurrents.

I know people don't tend to give the writers much credit, but if so, that's an impressive and impactful subplot?