Nov
13th
2014
Chapter 35 Soon To Be Completed, and probable delays for the next · 7:26am Nov 13th, 2014
So, quick thing; Justice Itself chapter 35 is pretty much done, and good thing too! With the release of Warlords of Draenor for WoW in...35 minutes, I'll be dead to the world for a while, and it may impact on my writing.
Oh yeah, but otherwise I'm focussing on Justice Itself to get it finished, so my other story Bloodlines will be stalled for a bit until I'm all done with everyone's favourite Archangel of Justice. And now, I return to killing time on Heroes of the Storm alpha until WoD is out. Ta ta.
Long story short, nobody will see hide nor hair of our favorite aussie till well after winter has thawed
2591890 Winter thawed MONTHS ago, you fool.
2591924 Heh, wish you a blast with all this, wow never clicked for me, even with friends.
I want to complain and force you to write more, but let's be honest, the only reason I'm not playing it myself atm is that Amazon weren't allowed to pre-ship my collectors edition :P
Lok'tar Ogar. For the Horde.
2591947 That's a strange way to say "For the Alliance".
Which reminds me; remember when they were saying Thrall was a neutral figure in Cata? Certainly didn't take him long to go 'back' to be Horde.
2591948 Well, Malfurion did his stint with neutrality in Cata too. It's almost as if they're people with conflicting loyalties or something.
Also, that would be a strange way to say "For the Alliance". Thankfully, that's not what I meant. What I meant was "for the Sin'Dorei!"
2591949 My main problem was that Thrall was really pushed as the main character of the expansion. He was basically green Jesus, except it wouldn't take him three days to respawn. Malfurion worked with the Horde for one zone, and as far as I was concerned he was always more of a neutral figure anyway. His connection to Tyrande made that a little awkward, but he had always been the head of a neutral organisation.
I get the whole 'conflicted loyalties' thing, but he's a firmly Horde figure, always has been and always will be, and the way he was used and treated during Cata certainly made me and many other Alliance players I know feel like Alliance story and progression had been sidelined. Look at the worgen, their storyline just up and vanished on the Alliance side as soon as you left Gilneas.
Admittedly, I might just be bitter over how fucked the Alliance got in terms of Twilight Highlands intro, and a few other things. WoD looks amazing so far though, and with the Draenei the Alliance has certainly got it's fair share of
2591955 Twilight Highlands? Are you kidding me? I found the whole "mayor of Stormwind is evil, team up with Prince Andiun and see how he's matured since Vanilla" to be way more interesting than a few scenes of Garrosh being an idiot and then killing some random guy who just introduced anyway.
As for the Circle of Cenarius being neutral....well, so are the Earthen Ring. Always has been. And I don't think leading the Circle makes Malfurion any less of an Alliance figure than Thrall being a Horde Figure. Thrall has always been closely tied with parts of the Alliance, especially Jaina.
Having said that, I can understand feeling a little side-lined in cata. Again, it was mostly just Garrosh being prolific or Thrall being neutral. And yeah, I really wish the whole Gilnean storyline had been picked up, rather than just turned into a battleground and perpetual status quo. (I also wish the writers would remember that the Worgren are supposed to a minority among the Gilneans. After the intro you never see any non-worgren Gilneans again).
Also, no WoD spoilers, please :) I probably won't be able to play untill some next week. (Just in time for Dragon Age to come out....I'm not getting any sleep the new month or so, am I?)
2591964 Wasn't going to spoil, I know to avoid that. But let me say, so far, Shadowmoon is beautiful, bloody spectacular.
Right, except then you don't uncover the thing with the Archbishop. You get barely any hint to that, instead finding out about a random city guard/watch guy who is a cultist, and then in Hour of Twilight it's just randomly revealed at the end of a dungeon....by Thrall. Forgive me, but I really do feel that should have been dealt with in the Alliance quests, not least because they could still have used him in that dungeon. He was meant to be a major figure for the people of Stormwind, and the discovery he was evil could have been really, really interesting if done so IN Stormwind. The Horde got its own little quest for finding their traitor too, don't forget, but when the Horde head to the Twilight Highlands, they helped along a coup, built a grand base and set about on the business.
The Alliance arrived to find their base on fire thanks to an apparently overpowering Horde attack, and the majority of the dwarven settlements in the Highlands totaled. I have more Alliance characters than Horde, but I always do both factions, and the Horde side story was frankly much more compelling than the Alliance's.
This is my view, side by side, on how it went:
Horde: enters Twilight Highlands, attack Deathwing, rally a tribe to a coup against its leaders, dominate some black dragons.
Alliance: enter Twilight Highlands, put out the fires of your burning base, gather up scattered dwarves, be treated rudely by dragons you've only ever helped.
Malfurion is more Night Elf/Cenarion Circle than Alliance, at least as he appears to me. In World of Warcraft, he's taken part in very little Alliance based stuff since his return. Most of his story has been about his druidicness, and not at all focused on the Alliance. He's had little impact on the Alliance itself. Nearly all of his 'onscreen' time as been neutral. Thrall, however, rebuilt the Horde and led it. You can't take the leader of one faction, say he's now neutral, and not have it, in the minds of players, "Thrall, warchief of Horde" in their minds.
It's less about whether Thrall was actually neutral or not, and more about the perceptions of the players. He was Horde, even when he was Earthen Ring. His mythos is fundamentally built into that of the New Horde, and they shouldn't have expected Alliance players to be all that happy about it, especially without a character of their own to emphasis with. We were told "Here's this guy who has led the other faction for the entirety of this game and most of his storyline. Help him out and do what he says. Oh, and the guy he left is charge is fucking your shit up all over the place and being a generalised dick. Have fun!"
So, basically...it was annoying and frustrating as fuck, especially with the Gilneans, oh, and the gnomes couldn't even get their city back. They could make a new little town on the surface, but they still don't have their city. Bloody gnomes.
2591982 I think the main problem with Benedictus was not so much an Alliance/horde thing, but a book/game thing. Namely that, yet again, an important bit of the world building was done in the books (1). Same thing with the Sunwell (Who's that girl? Or that dragon? I dunno, apparently important), the Rhonin/Windrunner marriage (honestly, the whole Siege of theramore thing was handled awefully. At least have him die onscreen...), Jaina becoming head of the Kirin Tor, Jaina and Kalecgos being lovers, Baine and Anduin being friends...
I did remember we got to hunt down out traitor. I even mentioned it before XD. But as I said, at least the alliance traitor was someone who'd been in the game since vanilla (even if he didn't do anything), and you got to hang out with Anduin and see how he'd grown. The Horde? We just killed a guy who'd only been there since cata.
As for not having a new character to identify with, you did have Vari*breaks into laughter*Okay, I couldn't get through that sentence with a straight face. I do agree that Thrall should not have been made into a neutral character in Cata. It always seemed like Blizzard went "Oh, people find the Horde leaders deeper and more interesting than the alliance. Let's make Thrall Neutral and give the Horde a bad leader like the Alliance has! Surely that will solve everything." What Blizzard -should- have done was put more focus on how the Alliance are different. The Horde is a hierarchical dictatorship, if a benevolent one. And most, though not all, of it's leaders are strong characters with interesting internal conflicts. The Alliance, however, is just that. An Alliance of nations, equal in power, and the stories there should have focused on that. Having scenes where Tyrande, Varian and Mekkatorque tried to judge their own interests versus that of the Alliance as a whole, and maybe finally seeing Varian emerge as the Alliance's leader through merit would have been far more interesting than "Varian is new and awesome and so totes kawaii, he'll be the Alliance's leader". So yeah, they really should've just kept Thrall as Horde and put more focus on the Alliance as a whole :/
Oh, and if the gnomes had had their cities back, we would have lost one of the most annoying instances in the game! Or had to move its entrance to the Caverns of Time. But youknow, that would be hard. It's not like the entire expansion involved redoing the world-map from the ground up anyway
(1) At least, I think the reveal of this happened in the book. I didn't read it, and if it wasn't made clear he was Twight's Hammer there, then yeah, I can deffo see where you're coming from.
2591999 It was made clear Benedictus was in the cult in Twilight of the Aspects, yes. I love books about WoW, so I've read them all, but I know others haven't.
I think you got the whole thing right just now. I mean, I actually liked/like Varian. He had room to grow, and he's done so. I thought his reasons for not trusting the Horde were perfectly valid. He's had little to no contact with the Horde that hasn't involve intense pain for him. He's grown to be a better and different character, but I always liked him more than Thrall because he seemed far more realistic a character. I'm not one of those 'realism equals good/the best' people, but I still found him easier to connect to than Thrall. The problem in Cata was that Varian didn't DO anything. If he had been front and centre, fuck yeah, that would have been much better, but they saved his character development for later.
Gah, Theramore, don't even get me started. The 'launch event' was just...ugh! You go in, Theramore is blown up, no explanations! Just...argh! Whatever problems Cata had, it's launch event, with the Elemental Invasions and all, was great.
I was amazed and thrilled when I heard how Blizzard was FINALLY doing something with the draenei for WoD. You know, in one of the books, it turns out they've done nothing IN-UNIVERSE as well as in-game all those years since BC? Tyrande thought they had all fucked off back to Outland! No one realised they were even still around!
I think, in the end, Blizzard look at the previous stuff they'd done bfeore Cata and thought "We've done more stuff for the Alliance than the Horde!" and panicked, resulting in that instead of balancing it, they overcompensated and just did the same thing they did but swapped who got more stuff. WoD so far seems to be a far better balance, and in fairness to them with all the orcs, I think WoD will firmly shut the book on orcs for a good long while. This will be sort of the end of the orc plot arc. Cata was them beginning to change, and conflict appearing in their main culture. Mists was them confronting it, both as a race and in the larger context of the Horde. WoD is an external representation of what they could have been had they not done what they did in Mists, and defeating the Iron Horde will cement what the Horde, and the orcs within the Horde, have chosen to be.
Now we just need an expansion where the Arathi Highlands are reclaimed or fought over, with Danath Trollbane returning from Outland, someone gives Sylvanas the Bitch-Queen a good backhand, Genn Graymare goes back to Gilneas and trolls. Always trolls. You can't lose with trolls. They're everywhere.
2592018 I'm not sure Blizz can really be said to have done more for the Alliance than the Horde, pre-cata. I mean, BC was pretty much all about the orcs and the blood elves, both Horde. In fact, the most moving storyline in BC, the first one with Garrosh that ends with Thrall coming home, was Horde-only.
Likewise, the most moving storyline in WotLK was the Battle for the Undercity, and you seriously can't tell me you guys killing Putress was anywhere near as interesting, foreshadowed and consequential as us killing Varimathas.
2592102 Oh, I'm not saying I think they did more for the Alliance than they did the Horde, I think THEY think that.
2591924 It is absolutely not my fault that you can't tell winter from summer.
Ya forgot to mark Bloodlines as "on-hiatus".