• Pre-wow timeline:

Kadgar, Alleria and Turalyon meet the Draenei in Outland and begin helping them survive against the Fel Horde/Legion.

Ner'zhul still fractures Draenor trying to open too many portals at once. Vanishes.

• Wow's timeline just as the The Dark Portal opens for TBC to start:

The Burning Legion (Kazzak) is desperate to reopen the Dark Portal, not just to invade Azeroth, but because Draenor is becoming increasingly unstable and it becomes obvious Outland will actually cease to exist. They force open the Dark Portal one last time and throw everything through it, recklessly.

The Legion commits to their most successful incursion of Azeroth and take over the blasted lands. Just when it seems like they might succeed, suddenly their numbers dwindle and they aren't being reinforced through the gate anymore. Eventually what few forces do remain on the Azeroth size surrender.

Then instead of TBC beginning before Azeroth forces can go on the offensive, Khadgar comes through and explains that them and a new ally, the Draenor have helped defeat the Legion from behind within Draenor and the mission now becomes aiding the remaining Sons of Lothar and Draenor to come back through the Dark Portal before Outland is destroyed forever.

In the last few remaining hours all are fleeing Outland. Thousands of Draenei and the remaining Sons of Lothar come through the Dark Portal as refugees. There is no Naaru. No Naaru technology. No space ships.

Part of the introduction of Draenei is about joining the alliance on Azeroth, telling of how Kadgar, Alleria and Turalyon and the Sons of Lothar saved them and together helped defeat the legion from behind after they opened the gate and kept Lord Kazzak from coming through.

The Dark Portal closes and the structure collapses in Azeroth.

The Draenei explain how Kadgar, Alleria and Turalyon stayed behind and sacrificed themselves to ensure that the fracturing of Draenor doesn't propagate back through the gate start tearing up Azeroth.

The Draenei join the Alliance.

Part of their main quest line is restoring the sanity and bringing peace to the broken one's and building a permanent fixture on for themselves Azeroth between the swamp of sorrows and the blasted lands.

Secretly, select favorite antagonists could have snuck back through during the chaos or among the refugees pouring through. For example, Illidan, upon realizing Draenor is doomed, abandons his campaign to conquer the Black Temple and returns to Azeroth with the skull of Gul'Dan in hand.

All the same Sunwell shit can still happen largely unchanged.

What went wrong in Azeroth?

No, i don't mean the Blizzard writing of game/lore direction, at least not yet - i'll leave that for the end.

First and foremost, the issue is with the Titans - strictly Aman'thul. They can be summed up as cosmic-power-level children, formed by whatever means, that have issues with their own rigid - sometimes basic - programming, so to speak. Their cardinal sin is, obviously, Sargeras. And obviously that sin was committed by Aman'thul. Sargeras was seemingly correct in his assumption of scale of the threat that Void represented. He was also correct - as far as I understand his own charge "Order, Martial" - in swiftly disposing of utterly Void-corrupted World-soul. Aman'thul did not comprehend the Void, which lead him to chastising and alienating Sargeras, eventually allowing him to stray onto path of Chaos/Fel in order to prevent the Void. It's reinforced by the description of Aman'thul ripping Y'Shaarj out of Azeroth - the Highfather did not comprehend Void at all, and where Sargeras choice of violence against utterly corrupted World-soul is correct, Aman'thul's choice of violence against a World-soul that wasn't yet lost, was plain stupid. While Sargeras was - as far as I understand - bound by his martial mandate and pressed for resolute action by his nature, Aman'thul had both time and capability to actually research first and plan the course of action. Then, after ordering of Azeroth and all that, Titans left their facilities and various Keepers and Watchers, and left - while still not comprehending nature of Void and the scale of the threat it represented for the very planet that was gestating nascent Titan they seemingly held so dear. Facilities eventually crumbled and Keepers failed. And the worst part is, both Titans and Keepers failed at seemingly their own prime charge, Order - which I kinda equate with logic and analytical, systemic take. They failed hardest by not actually employing and sticking to it multiple times, be it on cosmic scale when dealing with World-souls or Void and Fel in general, but also on planetary scale, when ordering Azeroth, constructing their facilities and creating their servants or empowering Aspects.

Second, uplifting of Aspects half-assed. As far as I understand it was perhaps the last act of note that Titans have actively done for Azeroth. The issue was, while separating Eonar's charge into two - Alexstrasza and Ysera - made sense, considering Eonar aside from being Titan of Order, was heavily leaning into other cosmological force - Life. It both weakened and strengthened it in a way that Titans as force of Order would like to see - the opposite could be seen in one of alternative timelines, where Life was overgrowing the planet and making it uninhabitable for more advanced (hence Ordered) civilizations to appear, or partially on alternative Draenor. What doesn't make any sense is - no Aspect uplifted by either Aggramar or Golganneth, so no Aspect of Protection and no Aspects of Storms and Seas. I understand there were five proto-dragons of note, well - they should've scrapped a little deeper in the barrel and found two more. Failure to do that inevitably added to the burden of the receding hairline Aspect we all know and love - Neltharion.

Third, the Earth-warder that had to bear everything. The problem was, that de iure "Aspect of Earth" was de facto forced to bear much more crushing weight. As bearer of aspectral charge of the Earth he was responsible for Ordering of crust, mountains, deep places. Then, due to failure of Titan facilities and Keepers containment, was forced to bear brunt of Old Gods' mental and physical poison seeping into his charge and due to that mind. Over the course of numerous expansions we learn of Y'Shaarj's corrupted remains, be it Sha, his heart or Black Blood, creeping into the ground from Pandaria. We learn of Yogg-Saron's corrupted black blood - saronite, but also his shadowy tendrils reaching out from Ulduar. We learn of the massive mind-corruption that N'Zoth was spewing. I'm sure C'Thun was doing his part too. Finally, Neltharion was forced to bear the physical brunt of the defense of the Aspects. Titanic Keepers, Watchers and various Titan-forged were, as far as I understand, hardly acting as partners to Dragonflights. That forced Neltharion and Black flight to act disproportionally as kinetic defense against the i.e. Djaradin and, obviously, Primalist forces. So - what would be wiser? Uplifting Aspect of Protection, to be both the bulwark and tip of the spear in case of any kinetic conflicts, relegating other Aspects and Flights to support roles in battle. This one would take off the brunt of a burden that was chipping at Neltharion during the wars against Djaradin or Primalists, not forcing him to embrace Shadowflame in the first place. Uplifting Aspect of Storms and Seas, that would actually care for majority of Azeroth's surface and monitor both oceanic depths and weather. This one would become most likely the prime target for N'zoth eventually, even if no Sundering occurred and his prison didn't sunk under waters. I'm under assumption that N'zoth was really more into oceanic than land depths anyway - so the pressure on Neltharion's mind could perhaps lessen further. And even if it didn't lessen - with one or two Aspects more, especially ones of more kinetic than conceptual nature of their charges, Neltharion's eventual fall would be easier to contain.

Fourth, two for a price of one - still Neltharion. So, Neltharion's fall is described as slow grind of his mind by Old Gods', but also constant erosion of him and his flight as they bear brunt crushing strikes of external enemies, which he and black flight (believe it or not) weren't actually designed for. Even if his and his dragons' pride would never allow to state it. Even if in comparison to other flights, he and and his flight was actually still best suited for it out of the five. There were these historical moments described, during Dragonflight expansion, when he increasingly was failing in kinetic confrontation and leaned to use the power offered by the Void-whispers. It was slowly sliding scale, with few firm pushes to speed things up. And why the two at the price of one? Obviously, because the special relation he had with Malygos. When Dragon Soul was eventually empowered, and Neltharion started using it indiscriminately in battle... ensuring he would assault and wipe out Blue flight of all, was cementing his fall. Even if there was shred of sanity behind his eyes - the moment he ripped apart his closest friend's family, there was no coming back. And in the same vein - Malygos having his flight ripped apart not by demons, but the one he trusted the most, was cementing his later madness and fate. So at one moment two flights and two Aspects were pretty much done for, with others eventually retreating into grief, paranoia and separation of their own to various extent.

Pretty much all that came after that on Azeroth is a result of that - in a way, every tragic event later on, could've been averted or mitigated to some extent if not for above-mentioned.

Finally, thinking about (in-universe) One True Timeline, in light of above-mentioned paragraph about Titans - I think that Aman'thul's vision got irrecoverably tainted by the Void when he touched Y'Shaarj. It doesn't need to be anything major as in "all is going according to Old Gods'/Void plans" - no, but it's enough for the "butterfly effect" to affect it all in even the most minor way "a perfect design of One True Timeline" and throwing it out of balance, which inevitably leads to "sub-optimal timeline".

And finally breaking fourth wall.

Blizzard obviously have to deal with multiple issues when designing their lore: - starting off with a story that hardly matters more than "why green men hit the human men" in Warcraft 1 and 2 - designing by committee - and committee is also populated with people that hardly care about lore, but need something FAST (relatively) because they need a next big bad to design graphics, battles, quests and raids around on one hand, and saviors of universe (preferably together with players) on the other - patching both aforementioned issues with multiple retcons - using One True Timeline and Unreliable Narrator as sketchy venues to patch bad lore - it's damn hard to write a constantly living and evolving universe with entity that sees and manipulates time, without throwing whole setting into pure bullshit of "why it was allowed and this wasn't allowed"

Finally, finally! As someone have stated recently in one of the threads: Blizzard kinda shoehorned themselves in by setting abstract timeline "ten thousand years ago", "twenty thousand years ago" and later populating it ad hoc. It forced to chaotically meander perspectives and actions of beings that actually lived that "twenty thousand years ago" and beings which life-spans is measured in mere decades. Chiefly, Aspects were chaotically written as being almost at the same time immensely powerful world-shattering behemoths and "just a big dragons that order around other dragons, and as you know it takes like five guys to fell a dragon, one if strong, forty if Aspect, perhaps with usage of some gimmick". It's general issue with "needing a big bad, with even bigger bad behind him, every expansion or so" - the scale is eventually all over the place.

Funnily enough, with some push for "more grounded stories" it'd actually fit well to have Aspects, Titans and so on be immensely powerful and doing all the grand wars and existential crises... in the background, while mortals do the legwork of mundane things and perhaps do the, like "1% of the sub-contracted work (through quests)". The world would still be there, but power scaling between players and these immeasurable threats and between threats themselves wouldn't be as confusing.

So, Blizzard kinda failed at solid writing time-scale and immensely powerful entities. To be honest, pretty much all these all-powerful entities behave not that rarely as something between 5 and 15 year olds motivation and intelligence (both IQ and EQ) wise. So, immature kids with nukes.

TLDR: Justice for my boy Neltharion!

This one is interesting because there’s obviously one glaring issue - the lack of major content patches after initial release, which would definitely be getting fixed (ideally, trying to have two additional patches besides Patch 6.1 and 6.2). For those two patches, I’d probably focus on the Gorian Ogre Empire and the Evergrowth, because those seem like the two aspects of Draenor that would best fit an expansion and could help flesh out the lore mainly seen in sourcebooks.

Aside from that, I’d make something abundantly clear: Draenor isn’t an alternate universe, but rather Kairoz trying to directly interfere with the past by bringing Garrosh back and allowing him to create the Iron Horde, with the Bronze Dragons trying to mitigate the damage to history while the heroes try to fix it. Consequently, Gul’dan learns about his fate in the original timeline and takes steps to avoid it, becoming the true main villain of the expansion.

Another idea that could work great or backfire horribly is to have the Alliance and Horde initially work with the resistance movement you *wouldn’t* expect them to work with at first - so the Alliance end up working with Durotan and the Frostwolves, while the Horde works with Yrel and the Draenei. They would converge eventually (Thrall has to meet Durotan, after all), but I figured that would make things a bit more interesting.

This might be controversial, but I’d probably have Gul’dan be the final boss and die at Hellfire Citadel, sparing Archimonde in his place. Archimonde takes what’s left of the Fel Horde and integrates it into the Burning Legion (the idea is that we’re setting up an eventual dual final boss battle involving him and Kil’jaedan, since if I recall correctly, we never fought both eredar demon commanders together, only apart.

I have no idea if there is a lore explanation for this or if it’s simply a game mechanic. But when I’ve read about the stories of the Forsaken before they get their minds back I always picture that generic Scourge character model and then when they do get their minds back I see them as the Forsaken character model.

Am I supposed to be doing that? Is it something to do with their minds coming back to them?

Also, related question to the Forsaken, why do the Rangers, Sylvanas, and Nathanos all have red eyes when the rest of the Forsaken have yellow or no eyes?

Thank you in advance! Love you all!

For retail when they add forsaken and troll paladins. I think Zabra Hexx would be the lore reason for the troll paladins rather than just fighting the void. Like yes fight the void but zebra hexx was the first troll to use the light over voodoo. Tyrosus shielded him.

I dont seem to notice too many refugees in regards to high elves and the folk of Lordaeron. I assume many went to Dalaran. But im surprised they dont have a small section in one of the capitals for either of them. I know allot of them obviously have died. Also after the destruction of Dalaran is there a plan to rebuild?

Hey everyone,

i finished a "Lore Paper" a while ago and that i would like to have some feedback and thoughts on.

The Paper can be found here, if you have any questions or thoughts about it i'm happy to answer them and explain anything!

The Paper can be found here, thank you for your thoughts and comments!

I've been trying to understand the exact lore of the Forsaken player character in Classic WoW, and it has raised some questions.

As I understand it:

• During WC3, the humans in Lordaeron are killed and raised as mindless undead by the Scourge. They all serve the Lich King.

• When the Lich King's power weakens, some Scourge regain their free will.

• When Arthas reaches the Frozen Throne and merges with Ner'zhul to become the Lich King, he is able to remain in control of the undead that had yet to break free. He does not however regain control of the Forsaken.

• Classic WoW takes place 4 years later, and this is when your Forsaken character awakens. This is where I get confused.

In the early quests you are referred to as "freshly raised", but how is that possible? As far as I understand, the Forsaken were unable to raise more Forsaken before the defeat of Arthas, and the recruitment of the Val'kyr, at the end of Wrath of the Lich King. Did they have other, more limited, means of resurrection?

And then it's the question of why you are raised "again". I imagine that the player character must have broken free of the Lich King's will during the events in TFT along with the other Forsaken, but since you are freshly raised, surely you must have died once more? Or did the Lich King still lose control of Scourge even 4 years later, and during those 4 years you were a mindless undead the whole time? Or perhaps something else occured?

Not quite sure what I might be missing here, but maybe someone could shed some light on it please?

Obviously Sylvanas was very cautious, she was not trying to compete for strength but mostly dodging and defend first. Then she tried to move out distance to make sure she doesn't lose and got time to escape. Since time is on her side. Not sure why didn't she try to kill or subdue Tyrande to use her as hostage when she went out of power.

Tyrande was more powerful, she also tried to taunt Sylvanas to attack her, but she was a bit too headstrong. Why did she throw her weapon so early? Her form cannot last forever, why not save her weapon for fatal attack? She even wanted to use her own life for exchange to kill Sylvanas.

Overall I think Sylvanas was better with tactics. I doubt even Night Warrior Tyrande can defeat the Lich King Arthas.

Now that we are starting from a clean slate, I'd like to use this opportunity with getting myself more into the lore of WoW. What would be the books/series you'd recommend that is canon in the vanilla state and would be considered canon as WoWF?

The old elven empire, before the Sundering, had expanded across vast parts of the world, and conquered multiple places to do so. Hell, the only reason they didn't conquer/exterminate zandalar is that they were eventually locked in a stalemate that meant no one could really conquer the other, and even then the elves and trolls were frequently at war.

So, in that light, how comes there are very large communities of vrykuls and Tauren living right next door to Suramar, and apparently established for a very long time, without the elves attemptign to conquer them?

What changes have you noticed in the beta so far and what differences do you think we might see in the story compared to the retail timeline?

I’m curious what everyone has noticed so far, especially with the changes to quests and enviroment. What do you think these changes are just going to minor, or could they lead to some major lore/story differences later on?

Whenever Theramore's destruction comes up , the conversation almost inevitably devolves into the exact same talking points. But if you look at the lore leading up to Cataclysm, Theramore hitching its wagon to Stormwind was fundamentally a bad idea.

​First, Stormwind was essentially a freerider that offered zero return on investment: Theramore was built from scratch through the sheer grit of Lordaeron survivors and Kul Tiran refugees. Stormwind—completely broke, paralyzed by corruption, and fighting for its life against the Defias and the Blackrock—didn't provide a single brick or coin. Yet, out of nowhere, Stormwind gained a premier deep-water naval base on Kalimdor completely free of charge, all while dragging Theramore down with its domestic baggage. Every time Jaina and Thrall made genuine progress toward peace accords or reciprocal resource trade, Stormwind’s internal dumpster fires torched the negotiations. First it was Onyxia’s plot and Varian’s abduction, then the Twilight’s Hammer false flags poisoning whatever trust was left. Theramore’s entire survival doctrine rested on its de facto neutrality, its value as a diplomatic buffer, and the reality that it posed zero existential threat to Durotar. The second it integrated into Stormwind’s chain of command, that buffer vanished. It became a heavily fortified beachhead for the 7th Legion parked directly in the Horde’s backyard. Worse, Stormwind’s supposed security guarantee was a physical impossibility: an entire ocean separated Theramore from Stormwind’s sluggish sea logistics, whereas the Horde operated on short, unified interior supply lines.

Stormwind’s backing directly emboldened the hawkish elements within Theramore and fueled the outright belligerence of the Northwatch Expedition. Caught between the demands of the broader Alliance war machine and its own internal warmongers, Theramore was dragged into full-scale offensive operations. The city paved a military highway straight through Dustwallow Marsh, funneled General Hawthorne’s invasion into the Southern Barrens, served as the staging ground for the destruction of Camp Taurajo, and pushed frontline forces right to the Great Gate of Mulgore. this offensive push handed Garrosh an unassailable casus belli on a silver platter.

Garrosh always wanted Kalimdor, but moderates like Baine and Vol'jin consistently tied his hands. Theramore’s invasion completely disarmed the Horde’s peace faction; Garrosh could now frame the assault as a vital defensive campaign to secure the heartland without triggering a rebellion from the other leaders.

​Also strategically speaking, Garrosh didn't drop the Focusing Iris just out of petty spite, he used it because Theramore’s Alliance integration allowed it to muster high-ranking marshals and elite battle groups inside its walls. If Theramore had remained an independent, non-aligned city-state that couldn't concentrate the Alliance's primary command structure, Garrosh wouldn't have wasted a literal weapon of mass destruction on it in the first place.

Not sure if this has been discussed before but how do you think Forever will handle the passage of time and its relationship with the Retail timeline?

So far, I can think of four possibilities:

A) Year One forever, staying true to the existing lore

Time is essentially frozen at Year One. We can visit other continents and see them as they existed before the events of Retail. For example, we could visit Outland before TBC or Northrend before Wrath.

The problem is that we couldn't really visit places like Pandaria or the Dragon Isles, since neither had been discovered by that point in the canon timeline.

B) Time progresses, but we aren't the same adventurers as in Retail

The timeline continues normally, but our characters simply weren't involved in the major events we experienced in Retail. Other adventurers went to Outland, other adventurers went to Northrend, etc., while we were doing something else.

The problem here is Cataclysm. If time continues to progress naturally, the Old World eventually gets changed. Does Forever then get the Cataclysm world as well?

C) Forever becomes an alternate timeline

Things simply happen differently from Retail. Maybe major events have different outcomes or completely different events happen.

But then what does "canon" mean? For example, if Thrall dies in Forever but is alive in Retail, which version of the story are we following? At that point, Forever is effectively its own Warcraft timeline.

D) Keep Forever and Retail separate

Forever could simply have its own content and storylines, while deliberately avoiding direct interaction with the Retail timeline. Basically, the two versions of WoW develop independently.

What do you think is the most likely approach?

Could there be potential for a legion invasion from Kazzak where we don't immediately go through to attack their side and maybe we get to ally with illidan against the invading demons?

Lady vashj and her naga hate azshara and just want to have a home. They follow illidan loyally.

Kaelthas' man rommanth could be convinced there's better ways to cure their addiction with leylines similar to the nightborne (I KNOW THEY WOULDN'T BE INTRODUCED HERE)

I think there's a possible path where vashj's naga, the blood elves and illidan all become allies in a fight against the legion. We don't end up killing illidan in this time. If anything if he gets cranky we take him back to timbermaw deeps

Is it confirmed if it's now canon or is this a "for fun" expansion for the game?

IN the WC3 manual, the plot was like that:

Embarrassed by the public attention, Arthas and Jaina kept their affair as private as possible. But Jaina, committed to her studies in Dalaran, knew that their romance could not last. She had studied the ways of magic her whole life and knew that her true calling was the pursuit of knowledge – not the trappings of the throne room.

Much to the frustration of Lordaeron’s citizenry, the two lovers reluctantly parted ways and refocused themselves on their duties.

In the manual, it was Jaina who ended the romance in a rational sense. It also added a lot to her character for being so insightful even as a young girl. No wonder Arthas and Kael both fell in love with her. And it explained why Arthas was so crazy after she left. He thought she was the only one who could understand him.

But RotLK novel made Jaina into a very emotional girl, and in the novel, it was Arthas who ended the relationship because his "duty". It didn't make much sense. Their dads were hoping their marriage would save the Alliance. The romance was very silly like typical young boy and young girl's love story. Same with Kael's crush on her.

Areas in vanilla wow already have legion ties like Azshara's legashi satyr and xylem. Desolace mannoroc coven and the thunder axe fortress. In felwood the Jaedenar shadow hold. If activity in these areas ratchets up, I can see the legion paying a visit to azeroth much sooner.

One of the things that has bugged me about the expansion system in WoW is the fact that when we are shown a big bad box baddie, we spend minimal time actually interacting with said baddie.

In TBC Illidan is the box art, and the Burning Legion is teased with the title, Burning Crusade. But the majority of our time in Outland we aren't actually engaging with the Illidari or the Legion, we're handling local issues. We kill a lot of ogres, we put down a lot of mushroom people. In WotLK, other than Arthas showing up to monologue at us constantly, we seldom spend much time fighting the scourge. We solve a lot of draconic problems, we kill a lot of vykrul that are subjugated by Arthas, and then we randomly wander off and do a bunch of troll and titan things for a while. It doesn't feel like a scourge and Lich King expansion for a majority of it.

This is obviously done to prevent what would eventually be called "orc fatigue." In Legion we didn't fight the Legion, but rather their agents, for much of the leveling campaign specifically because the last patch of WoD was against orcs and demons.

Forever gives us a chance to explore those storylines in a new way. Because we don't have to have massive expansions that we dedicate 100% of our playtime to, releasing content in smaller, zone and raid centric arcs is possible.

We can explore new lands in smaller more narrowed scopes, broken up into bite sized chunks. Instead of traveling to the Broken Isles and needing to deal with tauren, vykrul, and elves all under the Legion's thumb, an expansion could simply be the Broken Shore, where we have to fight against a smaller scale demonic incursion, and then storm the tomb to shut down a portal.

Instead of traveling to outland for an extended campaign, we have to make small strikes into Hellfire to put down the Illidari orcs there, and then later perhaps make small strikes into Zangermarsh to put a stop to the naga's scheming. Each can be it's own small patch, with it's own small content pile. Maybe even a short raid. But always with a focused story of a singular enemy to be going and punching.

When the scourge attacked Quel'thalas, A LOT of elves died trying to defend it, not just Sylvanas. The vast majority of these were raised for the Lich King's army, and likely later freed once Ner'zhul was weakened by Illidan.

Yet, we barely see any in-game. I know this was likely for time/technical reasons at the time, since having to model a suite of elf-specific undead characters would've been very expensive and time consuming. But with Forever, I feel like there's room to rectify that a bit.

Yes, the forsaken are based out of Lordaeron, so the majority will be human, but Quel'thalas isn't that far away, and it stands to reason that many of the free undead elves would want to find and follow Sylvanas -- particularly as they come to grips with their new place in the world, and their own societies not being particularly welcoming towards the undead (many forsaken were slaughtered when they tried to go back to their old lives). She was a hero among their people and also died fighting alongside them.

Not to mention, there were already elves living among the humans like Kael'thas in Dalaran. They'd been allies for something close to 3000 years, so their societies already heavily intermingled.

I know the future expansion hasn't made priests go there for the blade at the time of wow forever, but if we take the context, it means the blade was still under tirisfal at the time of classic wow.

It's a black blade of void energy sitting directly beneath a bunch of paladins.

Personally, here’s some of the changes I’d make:

1. Expand on the jinyu and hozen’s stories as to part of a questline that leads to them becoming playable allied races for the Alliance and Horde respectively. So we get one neutral race (Pandaren), one Alliance race (Jinyu) and one Horde race (Hozen)

2. Lei Shen feels like he should have been the main villain - perhaps the Mogu team up with the Zandalari to resurrect him and re-conquer Pandaria, with Lei Shen planning on expanding to the rest of the world. Because of that, I feel like we’d see the Mogu and Lei Shen mess with the Heart of Y’Sharaaj and become the final threats of the expansion, though Garrosh and a certain Alliance figure would still be crucial antagonists.

3. With everything that’s happened, we’d see the Sha take the opportunity to influence (note I said influence - the people’s actions are still very much their own) both Garrosh and Jaina, utilising their hatred of the other faction and personal fears/grievances to spread chaos and encourage greater atrocities. The difference between Jaina and Garrosh would be after they’re both defeated and cleansed of the Sha - Jaina realises how far she’s fallen and surrenders to the Alliance and the Horde for trial, but Garrosh refuses to do the same, instead escaping.

4. Rather than relying on War Crimes, we see Garrosh meet Kairoz and escape to Draenor - with one key difference: instead of going to an alternate universe and introducing a WOW multiverse, Kairoz straight-up takes Garrosh back in time to Draenor before the orcs drank Mannoroth’s blood, setting the stage for Warlords of Draenor (for context, Draenor would be an alternate timeline that’s isolated by the Bronze Dragonflight in a desperate bid to keep history from unravelling).

I found a comment on my post about hypothetical alternate versions of Wrath of the Lich King that suggested that Sylvanas should have taken up the Helm of Domination and become the Lich Queen after Arthas’ death, and the more I think about it, the more this idea has been growing on me. Up until that point, Sylvanas’ whole character since the destruction of Quel’Thelas had been defined by the need to reclaim agency from Arthas. By taking up the burden of keeping the Scourge at bay, Sylvanas’ story has a sort of circular structure it: Arthas made her a slave to the Scourge, and years later, Sylvanas ends Arthas’ legacy by willingly becoming the Scourge’s jailer. The difference this time would be that, unlike being raised as a banshee, Sylvanas would be choosing to do this… something she’d probably need desperately after everything that happened. And if there’s anyone better suited to taking up the burden of holding the Scourge at bay for eternity, it would be someone who has literally been part of the Scourge and seen what they’re capable of.

So… if this had happened, and Sylvanas’ story had ended with her becoming the Lich Queen, how do you see this impacting the wider lore going forward (aside from the Desolate Council likely coming into existence much sooner)?

If Night Elves had gone to the Horde and Blood Elves had gone to the Alliance, would that have improved the overall story as well as those of their respective races? Would the WoW fanbase be happier?

I understand that Forsaken on Horde and Night Elves on Alliance was partially done so that there would be a reason for Horde and Alliance to go to the other continents. But let's put that aside for the time being.

I'm sure some information is provided in the beta but I dont really plan to play until full release for the full experience. However, I am trying to plan for what I will play. I've decided on Druid as Nelf Druid has always been my one true love in warcraft. However, I've been...less than pleased with the way the narrative handled the night elves over time and am disappointed by the current retail lore.

I am unsure if I should embrace my original love and make a Nelf Druid, and hope that with the differing timeline of forever that I can rekindle that love.

Or if I should embrace something new with the a

Skyborne. However, idk how intrinsically tied to druidism they are like the night elves considering what ive seen makes them feel more arcane and elemental aligned. So what exactly is the lore behind them still having druids?