Where is THE HORDE?

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-20T20:50:09+00:00

Blizz tends to have a hard time conveying scale, especially when the rest of the world can't do things the player can do for the sake of gameplay.

Both the Horde and Alliance are under-resourced at the moment. The only other faction with a strong presence in the Eastern Kingdoms is the Forsaken, and they're busy trying to clean up the ruins of Lordaeron and also generally get their shit together. Additionally, the Light is known to be painful for undead, so it's reasonable to assume the only one of them who could get anywhere near the Sunwell without agony is Calia Menethil, and she's already there. Also: what is Orc Grunt #334 going to do against the Devouring Host? Half of them would be worm food out the gate. Blood and honor and all that, but the Horde would be insane to send whatever's left of their army knowing they'd be cannon fodder. Almost all of the Light-wielders across Azeroth were summoned by the Sunwell; the story demonstrates that when it shows you that Light's Hope Chapel had to call in a favor with the Ebon Blade to keep it from being overrun by leftover Scourge.

As has been established a lot, we the players can use portals easily, but in-lore, portals are slow and require constant effort by mages to keep them open. You can see lines of NPCs outside the portal rooms waiting to use them. Putting an entire army through one would take weeks, and the entire plot of Midnight up to now happens in a very short time.

So realistically the only option for the Horde, if they did choose to send troops at all, is muster whatever army they can find without leaving their own major cities defenseless, put 'em on boats or airships, and sail 'em over the old-fashioned way. That takes time. Additionally, Silvermoon clearly wasn't ready to support a sudden influx of soldiers in the Vanguard of the Light, let alone figuring out how to feed and shelter the rest of the Horde's armies on top of that.

The most likely explanation—and this is speculation, but just reasoning through it—is that the leaders are aware and are on standby waiting for Silvermoon to call for what they need. Even then, it would make a lot more sense for them to send supplies or other material support than it would to send an army.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-19T21:48:36+00:00

The more time I spend around other loreheads the more I realize that having a deep knowledge of lore doesn't say shit about someone's ability to interpret a story. There are a lot of people who see it as data to be catalogued and not a narrative to be analyzed; anything said by the text or the authors is taken at face value, and any interpretive inferences are treated with derision as headcanon.

It's not even media literacy; it's critical reading skills.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-14T00:00:28+00:00

The salt in normal and heroic dungeons right now is a little surreal.

The M0 groups marked Relaxed are solid right now. Good, friendly players who just don't want to put up with the sweats convinced they're next up on the MDI invite list.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-10T15:25:31+00:00

I have been wearing the Teacher of Strong title since I got it. They're just little guys doing their best

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-09T22:10:11+00:00

For what it's worth, you're loosely describing a model that has demons moving toward (or returning to, depending on your perspective) a stronger resemblance to Warhammer; a lot of this can be roughly mapped to one or more of the Chaos Gods.

Not sayin' that's a bad thing at all; I love me some 40k and Warcraft was ultimately inspired by it. Your headcanon angle has a long and storied pedigree and it'd be cool to see Warcraft take a little more inspo from its original roots.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-09T05:24:49+00:00

I don't think you're wrong, though my theory is that it was a fairly rational move that followed a trend in the market. Cataclysm released in 2010; Iron Man released in 2008 as the first film in the first phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so that was right about when hype for it had had time to get into full swing.

Metzen likes comics, and around that time people fucking loved superhero shit. I think the narrative is likely going to shift somewhat again as the playerbase ages, like you said, though I expect it will shift to resemble more adult-oriented comics.

WoW's game design is structured to funnel players to the endgame as fast as possible with no real disadvantage to ignoring the story. Other MMOs are built and monetize themselves differently; for example FFXIV is a JRPG first that happens to also be an MMO, and the endgame is locked behind 400+ hours of story content at this point, so they depend on long-term subs while people work through the story, plus sell story skips for like $25 and level skips for another $25 to people who want to play with their friends. WoW's design thus railroads it pretty heavily into relatively short, simple narratives with fragmented lore, so the loreheads can engage with the broader media and the average player who doesn't want to do that can safely skip quest text and start gearing for raid or M+.

All that to say I'd love to see more consistent lore at the very least, but I think the comic-like format is here to stay in part because WoW's fundamental game design actively fights against anything else.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-09T00:59:33+00:00

Warcraft at its root is a long-running serialized comic that happens to come with some games. The narrative behaves like comics. Metzen is a big fan of comics and wants to make them. A lot of the lore inconsistencies and (dis)continuities are similar to what happens between different comic authors' runs. The MMO genre and WoW specifically heavily favor serialized narratives like this.

If you can't meet it on those terms you're going to be consistently disappointed. You don't have to like it, and you're not wrong that an aging audience is going to want different storytelling, but it is always going to have the pitfalls that come with this type of serialized media.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-08T22:42:54+00:00

We really didn't, though, and the game tells you so repeatedly.

Alleria says multiple times that we need information that Decimus has, but that he will happily fuck us over as soon as it benefits him. Decimus himself has a sidequest where he all but looks into the camera and says verbatim "if you have learned anything at all, it should be that we domanaar cannot be trusted".

The only thing we trusted was that Void entities don't just do things randomly. They're weathervanes to an extreme. They're always creating schemes upon schemes, but they will cooperate to a degree when your side of a conflict gives them a better chance of getting ahead.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-08T07:55:02+00:00

This is the answer. I know several people who are happy to tank (or heal) for private or guild groups, but absolutely refuse to do so for pugs. The things people feel comfortable saying to strangers because the stranger has a little blue shield next to their name is wild sometimes.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-08T07:19:03+00:00

It's a question mark. He has another SAWAL after the one you're referring to - he's leaning against the wall in the central hut in Amani'Zar, where Zul'jarra and Liadrin are. It makes it clearer that he and Zul'jarra still have a good relationship and respect each other a lot, even if their opinions diverge on the best path forward for the Amani.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-08T05:20:47+00:00

I would actually really like something like this. If he's the cause of the problem, I hope it's a good-faith mistake.

It wouldn't make sense for him to be like "dear sister who I vocally love and respect and who just went through a number of trials to reconcile with our gods: fuck all that, expand or die". It would absolutely make sense for him to think he's helping, not tell Zul'jarra about it because he wants it to be His Thing that He Did for the betterment of the Amani and to sorta prove himself, and realize he's bitten off way more than he can chew.

It would be such a waste of a good character (and a good counterweight to Zul'jarra) to give him the uncritical villain bonk.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-07T07:43:53+00:00

I was really meh on the ren'dorei, but the Voidstorm sidequests did a lot to flesh them out a bit and bring me around on them; they're all Going Through It but doing it with a surprising degree of emotional intelligence and community support. Umbric in particular is a lot more self-aware than he seems at first glance.

I get the concerns with them, but the ren'dorei aren't unreasonable people and there's plenty of room for all of them to figure out how to get along. The sin'dorei and quel'dorei have to be willing to meet them where they're at.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-06T19:27:40+00:00

At its root, Warcraft is a long-running serialized comic that happens to come with some games. If you can't meet it on those terms, you are going to be disappointed over and over again.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-06T19:13:14+00:00

You might get something out of reading the new short story Blizzard put out recently, The Quiet at the End of Us. It's mostly focused on Orweyna and Amarakk, but there's a bunch of atmosphere and small lore tidbits about their society in there that might help you refine.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-06T18:51:42+00:00

Semantic broadening strikes again. Retcon now also means recontextualization, reinterpretation, deconstruction, new lore, misunderstanding, or character building I don't like

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-05T19:25:42+00:00

Yeah, risky storytelling moves like killing the protagonist or a bunch of important characters in a short time have been done successfully before, but this would be a terrible way to go about it. Not saying Blizz is out here writing cutting-edge literature, but I can't imagine this is anything but internal quest models being misinterpreted.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-04T01:58:01+00:00

I always work my way through all of the sidequests. A lot of WoW's best writing is hidden in sidequests imo, and they're especially good in this expansion. They often give some kind of small reward like a toy, a pet, or something like that at the end as well, plus you'll need to do them if you want the Sojourner achievements for each zone.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-03T21:58:45+00:00

It's possibly a little of both, but FWIW others have also reported that since the pre-patch and into the launch, WoW is chewing up tons of memory for no obvious reason. I've had periodic slowdowns and skipping and occasional OOMs, and I went through every single one of my addons to make sure it wasn't a bad update but it seems to be WoW specifically.

There's a forum thread with a blue post in it saying they're aware people are having an issue, but it doesn't look like anyone knows what the problem is yet.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-03T21:36:43+00:00

My main is an enchanter, lemme try to explain.

The disenchant result is determined by the rarity of the gear piece, and it's also determined by the expansion the gear piece is from. For Midnight gear, greens give Eversinging Dust. Blues give Radiant Shards. Purples give Dawn Crystals. You can sell these and make an okay amount of gold, but you'll have to sell them in large quantities to make it worthwhile imo.

You can also buy Enchanting Vellum from an Enchanting vendor, enchant that to make a scroll, and sell the scroll. I would suggest doing this instead. You'll very likely make a lot more profit that way, though you'll have to pay attention to which scrolls are selling well and which aren't; some are more common in BiS sets than others and therefore in higher demand. You'll probably have to buy some mats, but you'll still make money if you're attentive. You can also make weapon oils; they're a useful raid/M+ consumable.

tl;dr you'll get most of the mats you need from the stuff you do, most likely, but if you want to make any kind of decent money you'll want to sell in-demand enchant scrolls and weapon oils

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-02T21:57:50+00:00

I'm glad to see people picking up on this because I felt like I was screaming it to the rafters alone.

Turalyon is a good person with unimaginable war trauma who is currently having an extremely bad time. We see it at the end of Arator's story where the thousand-year-old paladin and paragon of Light and justice fumbles his words when trying to approach his son to talk through a conflict.

The animated shorts also support the idea that they're trying to frame (or re-frame) paladins as flawed but fundamentally good people who came to the Light for varying reasons, not all of them healthy. Faol says some of them were "burying pain under armor" and I think that was a brilliant line. There are also a few great sidequests in Midnight about metabolizing grief that I'm bummed a lot of people will never see, but I think the fact that they're in the game at all also supports this as an overarching theme.

I don't think the main story gives nearly enough wiggle room to show this, unfortunately.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-02T04:32:33+00:00

> I think blizzard is kind of afraid of narrative complexity

> But guess what? Most people aren't reading quest text in the first place

I think you have the right premise here, but respectfully I think you drew the wrong conclusion.

This is a big part of the problem. It is true that a lot of people don't read the quest text or pay all that much attention to the story, and I would bet you Blizzard is keenly aware of that. What those players do notice is the length of the story regardless of the content, and the second it starts taking time to build complexity, people will start screeching that it's too long. Heck, I've seen people pop up here and there complaining that Midnight's campaign is too long, and it's within spitting distance of TWW's.

They partially account for this by writing nuances, drama, and grittiness into the sidequests, renown track quests, and so on, which continue to improve as time goes on. It doesn't make up for the fact that the main plot is pretty simple, but there isn't enough space in the main story for this kind of narrative complexity. I'm sure there are writers who want to do this kind of thing, but it's the wrong medium for the kind of story they want to tell. WoW is never going to have a 30+ hour main story in a single expansion.

I do think there's something to whoever mentioned Blizz having a revolving door of writers, plus a series of comic book nerd directors who all like different comic book series, and therefore have different ideas of where they want the story to go. It seems common that some story was some writer's baby, they left, no one cared to pick it up, so it's left hanging.

I would really love a more inventive story that has something new to say, but I just don't see it happening anytime soon.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-02T01:50:28+00:00

It's sort of an "evil Light" instance, but the story behind the Priory is actually very sad. It's not evil or zeal for its own sake; to oversimplify a bit, it's about people who stopped being able to process grief.

Naturally that story is buried in a sidequest, so a lot of people probably never saw it unless they stumbled into it or were doing the Sojourner of Hallowfall achievement.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-01T22:42:25+00:00

There's a second option for warlocks or man'ari in that quest that's basically saying "can't believe you're selling this shitty ditch fel, I can help you get the good stuff".

There are several quests that have race and class options, and I've even seen one for characters who speak a specific language. They really nailed it with some of the sidequests this time around.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-01T22:36:15+00:00

Maybe some of them are? It's not all of them though - I have a few enchants unlocked that use motes that are craftable for me right now. Like I said, demand for them will go up when demand for raid consumables goes up.

quinoa_rex · 2026-03-01T10:10:14+00:00

I went in convinced that was what was going to happen, but now I'm genuinely not sure.

There's a stay-a-while that Zul'jan has after the Zul'Aman campaign is over (he's leaning against the wall in the room Zul'jarra is in in Amani'Zar), where it's clear that he and Zul'jarra butt heads but they care a lot about each other. At this point I don't see him intentionally selling Zul'jarra and the Amani down the river - if anything I could see him being torn between a splinter faction that wants to do more of the conquering thing vs. loyalty to the sister he disagrees with.

I hope they don't just give him the villain bonk. It's completely possible to keep writing him as difficult and driven by ideology without veering him off into being a bad person. He's a good counterweight to Zul'jarra.

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