The Queue: Timeline confusion

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

Today we attempt to tackle timelines and alternate dimensions. Attempt being the operative word.

Breadsammich asked:

Something's bothering me about the Warlords cinematic. We see a pitlord, presumably Mannoroth, angered over the orcs' refusal to drink the blood. However, if the legion exists outside time and dimensional boundaries, how could that be Mannoroth? A "new" one wouldn't have been created by the new timeline if he's separate from it to begin with, right? Is this just Blizzard waving it off a little for the sake of the cinematic?

I don't think the Burning Legion actually spans all realities as a singular entity. As far as I know, the only place it's ever mentioned that the Burning Legion reaches beyond our current reality is a tossaway line from Prince Malchezaar in Karazhan: "All realities, all dimensions are open to me!"

That could be bluster or a clear lapse in Malchezaar's knowledge. Could he actually know whether he has access to all realities? Or does he only have access to a subset of them that he knows about? Does Malchezaar alone have that skill or the Burning Legion as a whole? It could be a cool-sounding line of dialogue written for the boss that was, ultimately, meaningless in the narrative.

If the Burning Legion does actually span all timelines and all realities, I think we'd be pretty screwed. If they can access all of that, presumably they can move across them. You must also assume, then, that they can recruit forces from every possible timeline. They wouldn't have set upon Azeroth with the orcs of Draenor. They would have set upon it with the orcs of every Draenor, and then every other Azeroth. Sargeras wouldn't have recruited one Kil'jaeden. He would have recruited every Kil'jaeden, and the Sunwell Plateau encounter would have been an endless flow of multidimensional Kil'jaedens instead of just one.

It's my opinion that the Burning Legion being able to freely cross timelines and dimensions as a singular entity isn't true. There's a Mannoroth in our timeline that is separate from the Mannoroth of the Warlords of Draenor timeline and they know nothing about one another. And if the multidimensional approach is true, the actual implications of that haven't been properly considered.

cambrowarrior asked:

I don't know if this has been asked or discussed, but there should be two Garroshes on alternate Draenor: ours, who should be about 35 years older than we last saw him, and the alternate Garrosh who should be effectively the same age as we saw him during Siege. So two Garroshes. Do they bump into each other? Does our Garrosh kill his alternate Doppelganger? Is alternate Garrosh anywhere to be seen? Will he be an end raid boss, where we have to prevent them from seeing each other so that it doesn't cause a rift in the space-time continuum, thereby ending all life as we know it on Draenor?

I think many people are misunderstanding the timeline here -- which isn't unreasonable, because Blizzard has yet to actually release a meaningful explanation. In our timeline, the orcs drank the demon blood roughly 35 years ago as of the end of Siege of Orgrimmar. In Warlords of Draenor, we are traveling to that point in time -- to 35 years in the past, in another dimension. Garrosh will not necessarily have aged very much. He hasn't spent 35 years there. We don't know exactly how long he has spent there. That universe's Garrosh may never have been born.

HemttTanker asked:

Is Gorehowl a powerful magical artifact like Ashbringer, or is it simply an ordinary weapon that drew it's fame from the Orcs who carried it? Same question with Doomhammer and Frostmourne.

Neither Gorehowl nor Doomhammer have any magical attributes whatsoever. One is a really big axe and one is a really big hammer, famous more for those who held them than the weapons themselves. My understanding is Doomhammer had some kind of prophecy attached to it in Rise of the Horde ... but I know nothing about that, and if it's true, it's a recent thing attached to the weapon and not always the case. Anne Stickney is the person to ask about Doomhammer. She's up to bat Saturday and Sunday.

Frostmourne is a different story. Frostmourne, along with the Lich King's armor, was crafted by the Burning Legion to entomb Ner'zhul as the Lich King. Ner'zhul managed to thrust the blade from his tomb and stick it where Arthas could find it.

@LadyDarkFire asked:

Do you think Warlords has more of an emphasis on single player questing then any other expansion?

It depends on what you mean by that. Group quests specifically? Phasing concerns? Personally, I haven't seen leveling as a "group activity" since roughly the Burning Crusade -- that is, there haven't been any significant areas that require multiple people in questing. There are always a few group quests littered throughout and that remains true in Warlords of Draenor. If phasing issues are a conern, I think Blizzard has been putting effort into making phasing less intrusive.

If you want to quest with your buddies just to have someone to play with (rather than there being a need for it), you won't have many problems there. The points where you have to trek back to your garrison will make things a bit wonky, though. You'll either have to flip back and forth between each other's garrisons or break group for a few minutes while you each do your business there.

@Simple_boo asked:

What will Mankrik do this xpac?

Look for his girlfriend.

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