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ProfessorCirno posted:Huh. I would've assume BfA, not Legion. Legion is usully very well regarded, and the, uh, event we'll talk about in due time, along with almost every other insanely stupid storyline we've hit in this thread, was explicitly a BfA one, rather then a Legion storyline. Happened in Legion, I'm attributing it to Legion. BFA was just stupid and pointless. The event is, to me, downright offensive. And it's four lore posts away.  I have a schedule of lore posts set for the rest of the undead campaign, assuming that the three-parter mission will warrant a separate post for each part. Then for the Horde campaign it will just depend on how many updates the three missions take.
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Dec 28, 2023 21:06
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Yeah, it happened at the tail end of Legion in the run up to bfa. I can see it being attributed to either.
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Dec 28, 2023 21:08
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Also, I really feel like Argus deserved to be an expansion of its own. I think the draenei/eredar are underutilized in WoW's plot, like pretty much every race that's not the loving humans and orcs, and I feel like Argus could have been so much more than a single story patch. Really, I'm just goddamn tired of humans and orcs.
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Dec 28, 2023 21:38
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There's a lot of interesting ideas that Blizzard speeds past and terrible plots that go on forever, but I think if you switched around which things they focused on and which they forgot you'd get largely the same quality results. That cool idea you had about what direction Blizzard could have taken would have been turned to poo poo in their hands anyway. Really, you're better off that you can fantasize about 'what could have been'.
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Dec 28, 2023 21:49
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I'm both surprised and not surprised by how poorly WC3's story has aged even divorced from everything to come. When you factor in being older, changes in what is and isn't considered cool, experiencing a story in the moment vs an analytical breakdown filtered through someone else, and expectations of videogames then vs now, it shouldn't be a shock that something that almost everyone had high praise for 20 years ago doesn't hold up anymore. But given the way fans at the time talked about it, it does feel like everyone that loved TFT played a different game from the one Cyth is LPing.
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Dec 28, 2023 22:35
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SirPhoebos posted:it does feel like everyone that loved TFT played a different game from the one Cyth is LPing. I suspect two factors are at work. One, now as in RoC it's Arthas' campaign that everyone remembers, and I'm just now digging into that. Two, I'm not touching multiplayer or custom scenarios, which I'm told (including by this thread) were a big part of the game's appeal.
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Dec 28, 2023 23:02
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I think the undead campaign is about the one campaign in TFT I actually liked and I didn't hate its characters or their handling that much either, I look forward to learning that little me was an idiot. The Orc campaign really amused me and to be clear none of that was in a positive way.
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Dec 28, 2023 23:06
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I still maintain that the Night Elf TFT campaign isn't that bad. It's just simply a really good start that trips and falls into the septic tank at the halfway point. Though I guess the Blood Elf campaign is similar, where as another poster mentioned, there's 3 different people inhabiting Kael's body throughout the campaign. But individually, the parts have pretty good gameplay and ok story. It's just a mess when combined. I still view those two campaign parts better than pretty much all of the non-Human RoC campaigns.
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Dec 28, 2023 23:15
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Yeah, when I think back, all I really remember are: 1. Arthas' campaign(s) 2. Epic finale for ROC campaign where you play as everyone in the story so far 3. Orc TFT campaign, which was a lot of fun.
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Dec 28, 2023 23:19
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The biggest surprise so far for me was how quickly Kael flipped, because it sounds like people only remembered him from the first half of his campaign when they complain about him getting retconned in TBC.
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Dec 28, 2023 23:26
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SirPhoebos posted:But given the way fans at the time talked about it, it does feel like everyone that loved TFT played a different game from the one Cyth is LPing.
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Dec 29, 2023 00:55
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Rogue AI Goddess posted:Yes, they played TFT, not 30 Years of Warcraft. Yeah, this is also a big part of it. Most of the truly rancid lore didn't exist, or was religated to the manual. Most people who played this also didn't play Warcraft 2, and probably very few played Warcraft 1. The campaigns as they stand are like...fine? Some stand out as being better then others. Some are just kinda meh. But this was the starting point, not the ending point like it is now.
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Dec 29, 2023 01:37
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Warcraft 3 is also incredibly fun to actually play if you actually like RTS games with a pretty well developed variety of missions.
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Dec 29, 2023 01:42
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RevolverDivider posted:Warcraft 3 is also incredibly fun to actually play if you actually like RTS games with a pretty well developed variety of missions. yeah i remembered gently caress all about the plot, but definitely enjoyed the gameplay
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Dec 29, 2023 01:52
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Cythereal posted:Two, I'm not touching multiplayer or custom scenarios, which I'm told (including by this thread) were a big part of the game's appeal. Yeah, I think I went through the campaign, but I'm not even sure I ever actually bothered to finish it. The custom scenarios were just so utterly amazing that I really had no reason not to. This went doubly because I was in college at the time and could play the game with my roommates for stuff like DotA.
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Dec 29, 2023 01:58
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I'd bet a significant amount of money that most of the people who praised the WC3 story never got further than the human ROC campaign, maybe the first few missions of the undead one. That was certainly true for preteen me.
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Dec 29, 2023 03:07
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Honestly, the only things I remember after all these years from WC3 and TFT were "Human Campaign", "Archimonde leveling Dalaran Cutscene", "Final Mission of TFT"+Ending Cutscene and best effing music of the game. Also it changed the start menu back then. Afterwards, custom maps, all the time.
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Dec 29, 2023 03:09
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sirtommygunn posted:There's a lot of interesting ideas that Blizzard speeds past and terrible plots that go on forever, but I think if you switched around which things they focused on and which they forgot you'd get largely the same quality results. That cool idea you had about what direction Blizzard could have taken would have been turned to poo poo in their hands anyway. Really, you're better off that you can fantasize about 'what could have been'. And yeah, this is true enough. I feel confident at this point saying that my big sticking point with WoW is never going to be resolved to my satisfaction, and that Blizzard is never going to make the rest of the game appealing enough to me for me to overlook that. I had my vain, precarious hopes before Dragonflight, the expansion where Blizzard said they'd slaughter all the sacred cows and turn things around. Dragonflight didn't even make me mad when I read up on the plot, it just made me disappointed. Which fits the mood for TFT, honestly. I wouldn't even call this expansion bad, really, just mediocre and forgettable. There's a giant Illidan campaign shaped hole in the story, and both Maiev's and Kael's stories suffered for it. Arthas, the guy on the box art, only just now showed up. The bugs have remained a persistent issue, notably both Maiev's mission that crashed a ton and the brewmaster not turning up in Kael's campaign. So far, at least, I'm not actively annoyed by TFT like I was by RoC after the human campaign. I'm just tired and this expansion feels like it's just kind of there. Will things pick up in the final two campaigns? We'll see.
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Dec 29, 2023 03:19
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Cythereal posted:Then for the Horde campaign it will just depend on how many updates the three missions take. Speaking of the Horde campaign, never respec past Level 10 - you correctly lose all of your skills, but you only get up to 10 skill points in return.
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Dec 29, 2023 03:59
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FoolyCharged posted:Not gonna lie, I flipped that video on and went, "oh yeah, the battle net lobby theme." Most of the non-race specific gameplay tracks from TFT could play in the battle.net lobby. Given how much time I spent there, they all fill me with pretty insane levels of nostalgia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMkFJ20_bgU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bQELQMMoy4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czZMjGLWvB4
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Dec 29, 2023 10:51
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The one thing that I remember the most about Burning Crusade was how other-worldly the new zones were in comparison to the vanilla zones. That alone has left me with a fondness for the expansion despite it's many shortcomings and missed opportunities.
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Dec 29, 2023 18:10
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Starting to remember why people were so pissed when Illidan got into VGCW. Well, half of why.
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Dec 29, 2023 18:35
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SirPhoebos posted:The one thing that I remember the most about Burning Crusade was how other-worldly the new zones were in comparison to the vanilla zones. That alone has left me with a fondness for the expansion despite it's many shortcomings and missed opportunities. warcraft 3 is perhaps the worst-aged expression of it, and that's before the mess of Reforged, but Blizzard's signature was always art direction and they were on their A-game for Burning Crusade. it's the only thing about Frozen Throne that was a step back: Northrend obliged them to stick with a more muted color palette and you could tell the team that had been told "go weird-rear end 50s-60s-70s psychedelic sci-fi with it" kind of chafed at being told everything was going to be blue, white, grey, and brown now
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Dec 29, 2023 18:42
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SirPhoebos posted:The one thing that I remember the most about Burning Crusade was how other-worldly the new zones were in comparison to the vanilla zones. That alone has left me with a fondness for the expansion despite it's many shortcomings and missed opportunities. Yeah, the aesthetics of it were great. Original Nagrand remains one of my favorite video game visual experiences. I tended to just do the solo stuff in WoW after burning out on Molten Core raiding so I didn't really experience the terrible storyline stuff but exploring this broken alien planet was cool. Of course for the same reasons I also ended up enjoying Warlords, since I got to see the cool alien world pre-apocalypse and didn't even know the story went badly wrong in the raids.
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Dec 29, 2023 18:59
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SirPhoebos posted:The one thing that I remember the most about Burning Crusade was how other-worldly the new zones were in comparison to the vanilla zones. That alone has left me with a fondness for the expansion despite it's many shortcomings and missed opportunities. Yup. The first time I zoned into Hellfire Peninsula, all those years ago, is one of my all-time good memories of WoW.
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Dec 29, 2023 19:33
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Cythereal posted:Yup. The first time I zoned into Hellfire Peninsula, all those years ago, is one of my all-time good memories of WoW. That's Jade Forest for me.
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Dec 29, 2023 19:59
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I just remember entering Felwood and practically screaming in guild chat "WHY DOES THE TREE HAVE A loving FACE?!?"
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Dec 29, 2023 20:01
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Cythereal posted:Yup. The first time I zoned into Hellfire Peninsula, all those years ago, is one of my all-time good memories of WoW. Yeah, from the sky, to the landscape, to the visual of the Horde and Alliance armies standing side-by-side keeping the invading demon army at bay, it's really hard to top.
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Dec 29, 2023 20:04
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BlazetheInferno posted:I just remember entering Felwood and practically screaming in guild chat "WHY DOES THE TREE HAVE A loving FACE?!?" To be fair, that's what I scream every time I enter a rainforest café
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Dec 29, 2023 20:11
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While the idea of playing WoW again (dropped off in 2010) has no appeal to me, I would get something out of installing a private server and just running around the WotLK-era world again. And I think this ties heavily into what makes WC3 and TFT so fondly remembered too. The actual script writing is mostly just functional for the missions, Arthas' corruption arc being the only real standout as a story of its own (although in 2002 I'd say this was still punching above its weight for mainstream computer games in general). But the feel of the world you were in was awesome. Northrend and the Barrens really managed to capture the vibe of setting foot onto foreign, hostile yet beautiful landscapes. Ashenvale is rich, vibrant and mysterious. Blizzard's level designers were at the top of their game in making the maps you were fighting in beautiful and enticing - what really got me into the idea of playing WoW in the first place was just getting to run around in them. When you get down to it, I think that's what it was really all about for me. I don't know how well that's survived into Reforged. It's hard to get a read from screenshots, ultimately, and that's assuming they were even really trying.
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Dec 29, 2023 23:11
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Credit where it's due, all of my five favorite moments with WoW come from my first time seeing some fantastical environment in the game, and all are from vanilla through Cataclysm: Hellfire Peninsula, sneaking into the Caverns of Time in vanilla via glitched surfaces long before TBC added the place to the game properly, exploring the 20-man Ahn'Qiraj raid (no comment on the raiding experience, but the environment itself was wonderful), exploring the Storm Peaks in Wrath of the Lich King, and Vashj'ir in Cataclysm. The entire zone. But especially the first time I realized just how big that sunken night elf city was. And that all five of my most hated moments from WoW involve the community, either the players or the GMs. Warcraft's art team is famed even among WoW's detractors for a very good reason in my opinion.
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Dec 29, 2023 23:25
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Cythereal posted:Yup. The first time I zoned into Hellfire Peninsula, all those years ago, is one of my all-time good memories of WoW. Unlocking Flight Form on my Night Elf Druid and flying around Honor Hold is my earliest WoW memory,
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Dec 30, 2023 04:23
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Weird. I was so disappointed in that place. Orangebrown ground. Orangebrown cliffs. Orangebrown rocks. Orangebrown dirt. Random massive road just leading into a dead end. These maps we had there in TFT were vastly more interesting.
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Dec 30, 2023 14:22
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Undead 2: Breakout Hit Yes, I know my pace of updates lately has been unsustainable. But the end approaches.   Yes. With my powers drained, I can barely command my own warriors. The Lich King warned me that if I don't reach Northrend soon, all could be lost. Fear not, my king. Everything has been prepared for your departure. The ships are waiting at the coast and -Note Arthas' remark about him losing control of the undead as his power attenuates. I'll talk about this in more detail later in the campaign, but it's a major plot point about the Scourge in WoW that it takes a powerful will and magical power to maintain control over large numbers of undead. Without such a will and power, most undead will mindlessly seek out and destroy every living thing they can find. Even sentient undead like death knights have to actively fight this compulsion, and while Arthas has no lack of will, his actual magical power is effectively nil and he relies on Frostmourne and the Lich King's own lent power to maintain control over the undead.  Assassins! It's a trap! You should never have returned, human. Weakened as you are, we have assumed control over the majority of your warriors. It seems your reign was short-lived. There are too many of them, my king! Flee, escape from the city! I'll find my own way out and meet you in the wilderness. All right, lich. Good luck.Much like in Reign of Chaos, I'm quite liking the relationship between Arthas and Kelly. I've always like the Scourge as bad guys in Warcraft, I feel like they're allowed to have more personality and humanity than most Warcraft villains.   Incidentally, the threat of this kind of thing is why Kel'Thuzad wrote the Codex of Damnation, at least in my timeline. The self-perpetuating feedback loop created by the link among the Four Horsemen makes them extremely resistant to outside interference. So not only has Arthas dropped to level 8, this is effectively a dungeon mission. The necromancers are fully upgraded and showing off one of their new TFT tricks, they can now summon skeletal mages in addition to skeletal warriors. Most of the Scourge's magical innovations over the years are ascribed to Kel'Thuzad's research and experiments. In the lore, Kelly has been fluffed as maybe not being one of Azeroth's super heavyweights in terms of raw magical power, but an innovative and imaginative necromancer constantly trying new things and developing necromancy as a legitimate branch of magic.  There are gold coins scattered around the map, but they don't seem to serve any purpose, there's no mercenary camps or bases in this level.   And your generation of the Four Horsemen... destroyed themselves? We served Azeroth during the greatest crises of our era against the Legion, N'Zoth, and the Jailer. When that passed, we decided that Azeroth no longer had need of us. There are always more threats to Azeroth. Always new heroes to rise against them, too. We gave our lives to Azeroth, Highlord, and our deaths. We felt that we had earned the right to pass on for good. It's rarely clear just how much free will any undead have, and the ambiguity of what if any damage undeath fundamentally does to a soul is one of the narrative problems I'll be dealing with in a future lore post. Are these crypt fiends genuinely loyal to Arthas, or is their undead state compelling it? We don't know.  Either way, it's the source of reinforcements in this map.  Very useful.   I still find it hard to imagine you as undead. Alongside Sally Whitemane and... who were the other Horsemen? The night elf Watcher, Naisha. We saw her earlier in this play, actually. In my timeline, since there was no Outland for Illidan to flee to, Maiev instead returned to the Broken Isles later and recovered the remains of Naisha and the others, then gave them a proper burial. The last of us was the Highlord, Finnall Goldensword. A half-elf who claimed she was Jaina Proudmoore's illegitimate half-sister. I never quite knew if I believed her. Obligatory side quest.  So for the record, Finnall Goldensword is from the tabletop RPG and was indeed suggested to be a bastard daughter of Daelin Proudmoore, the product of an affair with one of Quel'thalas' representatives during the summit that founded the Grand Alliance leading into the Second War. Like all RPG characters and ideas, she's non-canon unless WoW indicates otherwise. She is, if nothing else, more ammunition waiting in the wings the next time Blizzard decides that Jaina can't be happy, by revealing that her father had an affair and a bastard child. Especially if, as a half-elf, Finnall were to be loyal to Quel'thalas.  In any event, I am quite pleasantly surprised that my essay about LGBT representation in Warcraft didn't provoke a bout of bad behavior from the thread. When I think about my bad experiences with Warcraft, one that's up there is when I saw a guild in WoW named <Dicks Cure Dykes>, I reported it, and a GM told me that the guild name didn't violate any rules.  +6 Agility item. I later drop them in favor of an item that directly helps Arthas, but it occurred to me when writing this that there's almost assuredly a Sylvanas-centric mission coming up that these were meant for. But, well. Only 6 item slots on Arthas and I don't have another item caddy.  Also quite helpful for sniping necromancers!  Being a death knight, Onyxia, is... quiet. Your heart doesn't beat. You don't breathe. With the Codex, you're perfectly preserved as you were. Your muscles do not tire or degrade. Your senses just don't register as much. There's just you and your thoughts, and nothing so merciful as sleep. Well, you and your companions' for the Horsemen. Even then we learned to section things off from one another. No wonder the undead love Northrend, really. It's cold and quiet. I never did figure out how to activate these pressure plates.  Picking up the orb spawns an ambush by gargoyles, but that's what the crypt fiends are for.  Enemy attacks will regularly spawn behind you.  This mission, sadly, just isn't interesting in my opinion.  So for the record, these are called nerubian towers. They deal less damage than normal turrets but apply a slow effect. I'm told they're very useful in multiplayer against harass play, but the AI just doesn't do that kind of thing.  Be sure to swing west at the gates and destroy some crates for a tome of strength.  Are your memories as a death knight more you're looking forward to forgetting? Some of them. Like learning who and what you really were. ...That's fair. I did love you, you know. But then I learned how you'd lied to me the entire time we knew each other. I don't hate you, Onyxia. If I've learned anything from you over the course of this mess it's that I don't think you ever realistically had a chance to be anything but what you were. I spent much of my life before we met as a waste of space and a shame on my family. More than that... Well, one dragon gave me a second chance to become this. Another called our timeline an aberration, an artificial schism. Oh, how I miss the days when I thought the world was simple. I look forward to the day I can wash my hands of this weirdness. I believe that the woman I loved was a good woman. The rest is a question for greater souls than mine.  Sweet baby Yu-Lon, I thought *we* had a mess of a relationship. At least we were both humanoid mammals. And I'm really hoping Lady Windrunner believed me. The two of us? War heroes? It's Niamh I have the hardest time believing. I'm sorry, I just can't imagine her commanding some captured orc siege weapons. Here's hoping Windrunner didn't mention us to the Exarch. It's only a matter of time until red and blue start playing tug-o-war with claims to Alterac. By the by, I downloaded a :files: version of the official WoW cookbook over the holidays. The 'dragon's breath chili' recipe actually isn't bad at all. Not as good as my family's recipe, but perfectly fine for generic cookbook chili.  But one thing I will take issue with is the sweetened cornbread. I'm a Southern girl. The only cornbread I acknowledge is light, crumbly, and has just a bit of butter.  Now if you will excuse me, I have a date with a skillet, some buttermilk, and a bag of cornmeal.
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Dec 30, 2023 16:31
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To the Bitter Dregs Today's subject, the Scarlet Crusade.  I've talked about the origins of the Scarlet Crusade before, they were the largest and best-organized holdout of Lordaeron's military and people against the undead, and were lead by Grand Crusader Saidan Dathrohan, the last surviving member of the original five Knights of the Silver Hand who remained active and loyal to Lordaeron. Dathrohan had been known for two key attributes: he was a superb administrator and judge of character, and he preferred to not use the Light when he did not have to, seeing over-reliance on the Light's magic as a crutch to be used when your own strength and skill were not enough. Many who interacted with Dathrohan never even realized he was a paladin at all, and he was a prominent voice during the rise of the Scourge in Lordaeron, advocating for immediate and decisive action to quarantine plagued villages and, if necessary, purge them with fire. Dathrohan was deemed alarmist and paranoid by the rest of Lordaeron's leadership, who largely believed that a cure to the plague could be found and extreme measures weren't necessary. Following the deaths of King Terenas and Uther Lightbringer, Dathrohan was vindicated in the eyes of Lordaeron's surviving people, and Dathrohan quickly assumed leadership of what was left of Lordaeron, attracting even many citizens of Dalaran, Stromgarde, and Alterac to his cause, along with dwarves and blood elves as the Scourge's advance continued. It was the blood elves' rebranding, in fact, that gave Dathrohan the idea to name his force the Scarlet Crusade, and his actions were uncompromising to the point of ruthlessness. At his direction, the Crusade imposed strict and merciless standards of quarantine, discipline, and obedience in the name of combating the Scourge and the plague. Under the apocalyptic circumstances, most of Lordaeron's surviving population obeyed Dathrohan's orders gladly, and for a time it even seemed to work. Dathrohan even sent an emissary to Lord Garithos and his forces around Dalaran inviting them to join the Crusade, but Garithos refused on the basis that Dathrohan had snubbed him years ago as not being suited to become a paladin and was unwilling to lessen his own power base. Then, when Dathrohan lead a scouting mission into the ruins of Stratholme to assess the fallen city's viability as a base of operations, the dreadlord Balnazzar ambushed Dathrohan and killed him, then used illusion magic to assume Dathrohan's form and identity.  Under Balnazzar, the Scarlet Crusade descended from ruthless but fundamentally well-intentioned measures of survival in an apocalyptic situation, into paranoid zealotry. Balnazzar's own aims were quite simple: much as Kil'Jaeden had forced Illidan, the naga, the blood elves, and the Broken into serving as pawns against the undead, so did Balnazzar find new pawns for the same purpose. Entire columns of refugees fleeing the Scourge were hunted down by the Crusade and massacred under the justification that the Cult of the Damned was hiding among them and using them as vectors to infiltrate as yet uncompromised settlements, and those who raised concerns over this rise in wholesale brutality and atrocity were subjected to public show trials and executions as 'secret agents of the Cult.' Soon, the Scarlet Crusade became feared even in Quel'thalas and Dalaran for their extremism. When the Forsaken rose to power, a splinter faction of mostly free-willed undead, the Crusade saw no distinction between the Forsaken and the Scourge, and attacked the Forsaken with equal glee, marking the Crusade as a notable enemy of the Horde in World of Warcraft. Relations with the Alliance, though initially positive, also grew cold as the Scarlet Crusade became ever more puritanical and paranoid. Many in the Alliance initially bought into the Crusade's claims to be the last bastion of the living against the undead, and sent funds and supplies north to support the Crusade. As the years went on, though, word of the Crusade's atrocities reached the Alliance, and the Alliance officials who initially supported the Crusade began to question the Crusade's recent activities. The Crusade largely responded to these inquiries by screaming that the Alliance had obviously been infiltrated by the Cult of the Damned and could not be trusted. During the course of launch WoW's story, Crusade-Alliance relations finally hit a breaking point when the Crusade began openly attacking the Alliance, screaming that Stormwind were traitors to the human race for not supporting them. While the years of Alliance support for the Crusade would remain a sticking point between the Horde and Alliance, by the time players on both sides met the Crusade, both Horde and Alliance numbered the Scarlet Crusade as an enemy.  Having pissed off every major power in Azeroth, the Scarlet Crusade was almost completely destroyed over the course of World of Warcraft and its first few expansions, both by Horde and Alliance assaults against Crusade territory and by civil war and defection by those who took the chaos as a chance to escape the Crusade's paranoid tyranny. The defectors would rally to the banner of the original Knights of the Silver Hand, founding a new order known as the Argent Dawn that would become the primary endgame hub for undead territory in vanilla WoW, an order that would then be bolstered by Tirion Fordring emerging from exile to become the new Highlord of the reborn order. Balnazzar, ultimately, was exposed and killed in the ruins of Stratholme, and a second branch of the Crusade that had attempted to invade Northrend and go on the offensive against the Scourge was likewise destroyed and revealed to have been under the command of Mal'Ganis, reborn in the Twisting Nether since his defeat by Arthas. Arthas, for the record, is known to have found the Scarlet Crusade hilarious - he completely disregarded them as a threat, but noted their willingness to attack even the people who should have been their allies against him as a perfect example of the self-destructive idiocy of the living. Like a bad penny, though, the Crusade has just kept coming back in recent expansions. No matter how many times they're wiped out, no matter that their former high inquisitor (and one of WoW's biggest fanservice characters, Sally Whitemane) became a death knight to atone for her actions as a Crusader, the Scarlet Crusade just keeps popping up again and again and again. The most recent incarnation of the group, the Scarlet Brotherhood, is specifically focused on hating the Alliance, claiming that had the Alliance only supported them fully against the undead, they would have won. A group of these lunatics has even invaded Gilneas recently, seeking to punish what they see as a pack of cowards who could have saved Lordaeron had they emerged from their walls to fight the undead alongside Terenas and Arthas. I can't see how pissing off the north country werewolves is going to end well for them, but who the hell knows with these idiots.  Unfortunately, I have to conclude this lore post by talking about WoW's community a bit. The sad fact is, if you spend any length of time in WoW lore circles or Alliance RP communities, you will find people unironically going 'The Scarlet Crusade was right!' and role-playing as Crusaders. All the accusations some people like to level at the Alliance for being CLEANSE PURGE KILL zealots, well, the Crusade really are exactly that. Nevermind that Blizzard has unfailingly portrayed the Crusade as a pack of self-destructive maniacs whose zealotry and paranoia are being encouraged by the Burning Legion. Nevermind that Alliance players in vanilla got a whole questline about discovering that the Scarlet Crusade are a bunch of evil bastards and the Alliance wholeheartedly joins the fight against them once they realize that whatever noble intentions the Crusade once had are long gone. Nevermind that the Crusade has never won a single notable victory and gets crushed into the dirt by everyone in the vicinity every time they show up. They look cool if you're into this sort of thing, they *do* hate some legit evil people in addition to literally everyone else on the goddamn planet, and people are still making porn of Sally Whitemane to this day. And Blizzard just keeps bringing them back.
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Dec 30, 2023 16:31
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One of most persistent memories of WoW was running the Scarlet Monastery over and over to get Whitemane's hat.
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Dec 30, 2023 16:50
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For the curious, those pressure pads involve a semi-hidden path through some rubble that's not hard to assume is impassable. It might also be behind a house one must destroy, but I might be remembering a different secret. Either pressure pad would raise a bridge to get across and access some bonus loot. Worth noting, by the way, as Arthas' levels shrink, your ability levels are taken away in a set order, if I remember right. Level 3 Death Coil gets shrunk down to level 2 really early, I remember. Might even be level 9 or 8 that it happens.
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Dec 30, 2023 16:55
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Trivia bit: while the rest of the world got in-game Monks in Mists of Pandaria, Scarlet Crusade had them since vanilla.
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Dec 30, 2023 17:00
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Arthas losing his power throughout the campaign is a pretty neat combination of mechanic meets story, I thought. Replaces the idea of your hero getting stronger throughout the campaign.
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Dec 30, 2023 17:04
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| # ? Jun 2, 2024 18:59 |
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Did you forget the intermission between the first and second missions? I'm pretty sure there was one involving Sylvanas and the Dreadlords before this.
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Dec 30, 2023 17:05
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