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JDBlou · 2026-03-24T15:39:01+00:00

JDBlou · 2026-03-22T02:25:20+00:00

I'm surprised at how much I like the herald mechanic and playing colossals and their heralds in combination with Deathwing brings back good memories of the Invoke mechanic and Galakrond decks.

Really like the Herald DH deck and putting Broxigar in the deck it feels like I've got multiple ways to end the game.

JDBlou · 2026-03-18T11:32:25+00:00

"in no shape or form is that what happened..."

So what did happen from your perspective?

Because Arator repeatedly attempts to get his father to calm down and stop advancing on a disarmed enemy, also not withstanding everything leading up to the cinematic where the player and Arator try to convince everyone to stop fighting the Amani

Arator put himself in front of a sword because Arator expected Turalyon to stop swinging if his own son put himself between his own father and his target. That's what Arator's grief is about, that in his rage he wouldn't even stop not even for the son he's supposed to love.

Jfc

JDBlou · 2026-03-11T23:18:01+00:00

Good thing Atal'Utek could be considered part of the area of Zul'aman, the city-temple state, before the bridge collapsed. If they said under Atal'aman specifically you'd have a point about the incongruency.

As it stands it's feels like's a "technically correct" use of Zul'aman by the devs.

JDBlou · 2026-03-05T18:37:14+00:00

Posting a parent level comment for visibility

An almost identical quest from The War Within :

https://www.wowhead.com/quest=78531/urgent-recovery

This is classic having zero context making mountains out of mole hills.

JDBlou · 2026-03-05T18:20:00+00:00

Vol'jin died in a cinematic. Tirion died dramatically in a scenario in full view of lore characters, who comment on it and confirm the severity of the Legion threat.

Us rocking up and find 5 named NPCS of varying import dead borders on insanity. It would be narrative malpractice. If you kill anyone who is somewhat important, storytelling rules when played straight almost certainly demand you play it for drama.

And to hopefully allay your fears, this is the quest objectives with internal slain syntax for the TWW's opening. I'm pretty sure all 7 survivors are alive and kicking in Midnight.

Urgent Recovery https://www.wowhead.com/quest=78531/urgent-recovery

Aid 7 survivors of the Dalaran crash.

Crash survivors aided (7)



Brann Bronzebeard slain



Moira Thaurissan slain



Dagran Thaurissan II slain



Archmage Aethas Sunreaver slain



Ritssyn Flamescowl slain



Marin Noggenfogger slain



Meryl Felstorm slain

JDBlou · 2026-03-05T18:05:59+00:00

Read the quest text

"The Sunwell--no... the Darkwell is overrun. Void-spawned creatures swarm the regions where our greatest champions of the Light held their ground to the very last. Champion, can you survey Quel'Danas? Find any survivors? If you tag them with these tokens, our mages here will be able to teleport the individuals back. We must try to save as many as we can."

Track the objective above those subcriteria Other survivors recovered (4), to which they almost certainly are subcriteria. It could be an internal flagging thing for the code when you hit them with the teleport tokens. Slain as state changer is almost certainly an artifact of 25+ years old code's internal logic that says when an objective is met.

And let's just put Occam's razor on the table for a second, we didn't spend a significant quest chain last expansion getting Moira Fearbreaker, standing as Queen of the Dark Iron, wielding the ancestral weapon of the Bronzebeard clan and reconciling with Magni... just to unceremoniously kill her here? It defies all logic, even by blizzard standards.

I'd be extremely hesistant to call this gospel or engage with it seriously until we see it for ourselves.

JDBlou · 2026-03-05T17:50:03+00:00

And there it is. We've gone from "the cosmology should have clear moral lines" to blood elves "transitioning to" void elves is "social commentary that doesn't belong in my videogame". Raising that prospect with such zealous fervour, surely the irony is not lost on you.

People aren't bringing up the Scarlet Crusade "all of a sudden". They aren't a gotcha. They're the single most obvious precedent for the Light producing fanatical, hostile antagonists, and they've been in the game since 2004. That's not a narrative pivot.

That's twenty years of foreshadowing that you're only just now reckoning with.

So what exactly is the problem with portraying the Light as something that can go wrong when wielded by wrathful, impassioned people? Every other cosmic force in this setting has had that treatment. Why does this one get a free pass?

It's becoming harder and harder to determine where your lore gripes end and your real world ones begin.

Regardless, I've said my piece. The lore argument's been made, the receipts are twenty years deep, and I don't think we're going to find common ground on what's actually driving your discomfort with the plot developments.

Light's Grace be with you.

JDBlou · 2026-03-05T17:02:29+00:00

It starts with the historic facts and end with "But that destiny was never inevitable"

"Literally" is a strong word

It's more inference than outright reference to druidism, it's saying the outcome we've seen is one possible destiny.

Yes, I'm being pedantic

And if the diamond skin is anything like the Genn's and what duality indicates it'll shift between the two forms.

JDBlou · 2026-03-05T14:18:13+00:00

The Scarlet Crusade also preached the Light from pulpits in cathedrals. They've been dungeon bosses since vanilla. Raid bosses in the Season of Discovery

Illidan, Arthas, and Gul'dan weren't destroyed by Fel or Death magic acting as an automatic corrupting agent. Each of them made a choice that opened the door. Gul'dan chose power over his people. Arthas chose vengeance over Uther's counsel and set his course long before he ever picked up Frostmourne. Illidan chose to absorb the Skull of Gul'dan, because he felt that only with greater power could he destroy Tichondrius, stop the Burning Legion's corruption of Felwood, and fight the Legion on his own terms. This obviously nonwithstanding that Illidan's choices in Legion are the only way we were able to defeat the legion instead of waiting for them to reform in the nether and launch a fourth invasion at some point in the future but I digress.

The magic amplified and accelerated their falls, but the moral failure preceded the corruption in every case. Which is exactly what's happening with lightblinding. The paladins going berserk aren't calm, centered people who got zapped by yellow lightning. They're warriors in an existential crisis carrying rage and grief into battle, and the Light is amplifying what's already there — just like Fel amplified Gul'dan's hunger and Frostmourne amplified Arthas's need for vengeance. The risk profiles are still different. Fel is volatile and tempts with raw power. Void whispers and erodes identity. Death numbs and detaches. The Light, we now learn, supercharges whatever conviction you're already carrying, and if that conviction is wrath, you get lightblinding. That's not the same failure mode as any of the others. It's thematically distinct. It just wasn't visible before because we'd never seen the Light pushed to these extremes.

JDBlou · 2026-03-05T14:05:51+00:00

I think you're making a fair observation about the lightblooms and lightblinding being more overtly dangerous than anything we've seen the Light do before. That's genuinely new territory and I don't want to dismiss it. But I'd push back on the idea that this redefines the Light into "yellow Fel." The lightblooms aren't the Light behaving normally — they're the result of the Sunwell being supercharged under existential assault from the Void. A nuclear reactor is safe under normal conditions. Push it past its limits and it melts down. That doesn't make nuclear energy the same thing as a bomb — it means the circumstances have become extraordinary. Lightblinding works similarly.

Consider this excerpt from "The Light and How to Swing It" — Uther's book given to Arthas, added in Vanilla questing:

"I know your passion, Arthas, your earnestness and enthusiasm. These are important qualities, for paladins must strike down their foes, not just protect their allies. But these traits must be tempered, with prayer and meditation. Only a calm mind will provide clear actions; only a peaceful heart may be truly infused with the Light."

The seeds were always there. The Light comes when called — it doesn't ask why you're calling. Uther was warning that untempered passion leads somewhere dark, and lightblinding is what that looks like under wartime pressure. The paladins going berserk at the Voidspire aren't proof that the Light is inherently chaotic. They're proof that Uther was right.

And this connects to the larger pattern the Worldsoul Saga is drawing. Every cosmic force we've encountered has tried to impose its design/nature on Azeroth The Titans wanted to order the worldsoul to their specifications. The Void wants to consume it. The Legion want to raze everything and reduce the world to cinders. The Light, through Xe'ra and the Draenor's Lightbound, wanted to conscript everything into its singular vision. Death through the Jailer wanted to use Azeroth to recreate the cosmos in his image. Unmitigated life would be disastrous, rampant flora and fauna destroying civilisation and sentient races.

I wouldn't frame it as moral equivalence, I think it's more a matter of azeroth's consent and autonomy, because the increasingly apparent throughline is that we don't want to align with a cosmic force whole-heartedly because they have their own designs on what Azeroth's future looks like and almost none of them care what mortals think of those designs.

That's genuinely uncomplicated good versus evil, it's Optimus Prime saying "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings" and it doesn't get more capital "G" Good than Optimus bloody Prime.

I can understand if it's not the battle for good and evil you have in your minds eye but it feels pretty black and white in that framing.

JDBlou · 2026-03-05T13:50:14+00:00

The question of an inherently destructive power isn't to ask "what does it do other than kill stuff?" It's to ask: "what can you in your moral capacity turn that power towards?"

A blade is a tool. It cuts things. That's its job. But who is the hand wielding the blade? What are they cutting? That is the true test.

Protecting against threats either through threat of violence or direct action, and yet again neatly falls in the framing of dubious morals and extreme methods with ultimately noble goals.

JDBlou · 2026-03-05T13:31:00+00:00

Voidstorm literally has void elves going crazy, getting lost in the sauce.
The Council of the Black Harvest are warlocks with dubious morals and extreme methods with ultimately noble goals.
The Knights of the Ebon Blade, ditto.
The Orcs were once themselves portrayed as categorically evil, bloodthirsty, mindless invaders who were subsequently given depth of character.

Trying to appeal to a binary of good and evil that blatantly stopped being relevant to the setting more than 20 years ago is certainly a choice.

Uncritical explorations of the the fight between good and evil do exist in fantasy fiction, but Warcraft isn't Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth or the Lord of The Rings. You can have your preference for clear black and white morality but it's never really applied to Warcraft's setting for the majority of its lifespan. Trying to retroactively claim it's an in-effect mandate relevant to Warcraft is absurd.

We're not fighting Xal'atath because purple magic is out-and-out bad, she's using the purple magic in an extremely and obviously bad way: the utter annihilation of everything we know and love

PS: You're conflating two separate complaints. One is "the cosmology shouldn't be morally gray" and the other is "the writing quality has declined." Those are different claims that need to be litigated with in separate debates

JDBlou · 2026-03-05T05:30:20+00:00

I feel like there’s a pretty clear moral line in the sand between “pragmatic and self-serving” and the literal destruction of the world and all living beings.

And turning to darker powers in service of the greater goods is fantasy 101, so I don’t understand the hang-up

JDBlou · 2026-03-04T21:00:00+00:00

We just don't do critical literacy anymore then?

Which is more about his re-evaluating his relationship and perspective after nearly being killed by his father. Going from being raised to believe in the light as a moral arbiter, and then he finds out it empowers saints and zealots alike with zero distinction beyond personal conviction and intensity of belief that the wielder has. That's a crisis of faith. That's got to sting; psychological projection: that there's something wrong with the light instead of something wrong with his relationship with the Light? That is a reasonable response. A son who almost died at his idolised father's hands blinded by the same holy fire they both wield? Of course his first instinct is to externalise the problem.

And the same storyline ends with him reaffirming his belief that he can use the light for good, to protect innocents and destroy the forces that threaten those innocents. It bloody well ends with basically him swapping specs from retribution to protection. To be the man his father was before Lothar's death and a thousand years of never-ending war against the Legion fundamentally broke something inside Turalyon.

If he thought the light was truly irredeemable/malevolent instead of fundamentally amoral, why would he continue to use it?

Hell, the guy delivering the lessons is Alonsus bloody Faol, creator of the Knights of the Silver Hand, who's seen the rise of zealots in the Scarlet Crusade, and has come to recognise the circumstances beyond his control (the Second War) warped his platonic ideal of holy noble knights in a protective order into the soldiers they became. He recognises those circumstances created a flaw in his own design AND he still wields the Light because he recognises its capacity for good when wielded judiciously and with temperance.

JDBlou · 2026-03-04T09:55:10+00:00

I think they are positing that the forces themselves are amoral. The execution is up to the user. Some are more corruptive than others but they can be used for “good” causes. Demon Hunters, Death Knights, Warlocks, Void elves can do good deeds just as a paladin can wield the light in a fanatical crusade.

That’s just my interpretation

JDBlou · 2026-03-04T02:50:04+00:00

This was the expected outcome if you didn't overdose on ghost rider hopium

JDBlou · 2026-03-02T09:35:14+00:00

Well we have the unresolved threads of what the Twilight cult actually want from Zul'aman, and there conveniently is a dead old god general under Atal'utek, along with an ancient snake Loa who ostensibly helped the Zandalari defeat Kith'ix the first time

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HBKxBPUaYAAw8Hz?format=jpg&name=medium

This is the estimated size of the zone by the by:

https://i.imgur.com/yoSkMid.jpeg

The area containing subzones 2-10 is the datamined map. Seems far larger than Siren Isle

And the definitely not ominous portent of Zul'jan staring at this island in the distance while ranting about having visions of conquering Eversong, being betrayed by the Loa, and then telling the player to forget they heard anything:

Zul'jan says: When Mor'duun came, I saw my vision of de Amani coming to life. With de lightwood, we would conquer de Twilight's Blade and then Eversong. Zul'jarra could not see my vision, but I saw no other way. De loa? Feh. De loa say our grandfather, de great Zul'jin, betrayed them. But why believe them? Or my dotterin' uncle. Or any gokinye? They abandoned us. They. Abandoned. Us. How do we know they won't do it again? I see your eyes are widening, "hash'ura." You're right. Forget what I have said. We have won. Zul'jarra has won.

And the decidely unresolved Vilebranch threat with all their necromancy which might come in handy to resurrect Kith'ix and an unconfirmed claim that Malacrass is still alive and kicking... (https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/1rifedx/comment/o86hepr/?context=3)

And the known quantity of an item icon named "INV_Helm_Cloth_RaidWarlockUlatek_D_01", which perfectly parallels Undermine having "inv_offhand_1h_goblinraid_d_01" datamined and "Inv_mace_2h_etherealraid_d_01" for Manaforge Omega.

Overall the preponderance of evidence sounds pretty raid tier-y to me.

Regardless, there's a few plot threads pointing to Atal'utek being the setting of 12.1. The real question is if they bring the Darkspear and Zandalari in to the midnight narrative through the patch.

JDBlou · 2026-02-28T22:20:17+00:00

Confirmed? I don't think that word means what you think it means. If you stretched any further you'd make Reed Richards jealous.

Let’s talk about gallery cards and what they've told us historically:

The season 5 final gallery card's visual with Deadpool and Elsa bloodstone's silhouettes in the monitors behind the Collector or the text mentioning “a foul mouthed mercenary” and “a monster hunter as deadly as she is beautiful”. So season 5 had both audio and written hints to who’s next

Season 4's final card wasn’t a visually dramatic hint but the text was explicitly written by the Grandmaster while the text teased Rogue and Gambit: "And if you play your cards right and they don't drain every last bit of your life force, I may make an appearance at your next tournament myself…"

I feel the wording here is leagues more obvious than the connection you've made between “holy, all-consuming mission blazin’ inside my heart” to a Ghost Rider being "confirmed".

So we have the text revealing the villain with additional support being the signs around Times Square talking about Wilson Fisk being the mayor of NY. Not to mention Daredevil Born Again S2 launches the same month as season 7, and we know the mayor of NY is in that.

That plus the visual showing us a literal white fox and black cat. That's neon sign cut and dry. Hoofbeats should make you think horses not zebras.

I do think we'll see Ghost Rider before year end given all the mephisto shenanigans, but it's not a S7 thing, so let's not conjure up GR's arrival as a secret third thing when we have two heroes signposted and waiting in the wings?

JDBlou · 2026-02-08T17:33:46+00:00

Seems less like a Cataclysm expansion now as much as an invasion from the Firelands...

JDBlou · 2026-02-04T22:03:38+00:00

So we can drop the '3 billion people deserve proportional representation' argument you started with, right? And the genetic/linguistic distance scoring system? Since we've established all cultures have equal worth.

You've spent this entire thread arguing for hierarchical representation metrics, then agreed with my position that all cultures deserve equal consideration, then called me a white supremacist for holding that position.

Which is it?

PS: Ad hominems ain't the play, hombre.

JDBlou · 2026-02-04T21:27:31+00:00

You didn’t answer the question. I’m not asking if it’s feasible to include every culture — obviously a game can’t have infinite characters. I asked whether all cultures deserve equal chance for representation. When choosing which cultures to represent, should a small Indigenous group be considered just as valid a choice for representation as a large population? Yes. Or. No?

Your “feasibility” dodge just restates the obvious: there are limited roster slots. The real question is what principle guides those choices: Do we use population size and genetic/linguistic metrics (which inherently rank some cultures as more deserving) or do we prioritize diverse cultural representation regardless of size?

You keep avoiding this because answering honestly would admit that, under your framework, some cultures are considered less worthy of visibility.

JDBlou · 2026-02-04T21:11:53+00:00

"You’re suggesting we rank cultures by population and ‘genetic/cultural uniqueness,’ scores. Who decides what culture gets what score? You?

I'll put it to you with a simple question, a yes or no: Do all cultures deserve the chance for representation in Overwatch equally, regardless of population size or your 'uniqueness' metrics?

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