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The Queue: Snakes in Zangarmarsh
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. It's finally starting to get uncomfortably warm here in southeast Wisconsin ... and my air conditioning breaks. Awesome! Let's do this thing anyway. AndyM.Axe asked: Will the Adventuring Supplies vendors that sold the lower ilvl green gear return in WoD?
Know Your Lore: Gul'dan, the soul of evil
The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft. Every villain in the Warcraft universe has a story behind why exactly they're a villain. For some, it was the corruption of the Old Gods that slowly drove them mad. For others, it was the promise of great power by agents of the Burning Legion. But it's rare that we see a villain that is simply a villain without any kind of outside influence. Garrosh Hellscream is one of the better villains in Warcraft solely because he does evil things, but doesn't believe that they are evil -- instead, he believes that they are simply the right thing to do. But before Garrosh Hellscream was an orc who pretty much represented pure, unmitigated evil in its most concentrated form. He knew the corruption of his entire race was at stake, and he went ahead and traded it for the one thing he craved above all else -- power. Gul'dan may not have come from bloodlines that boasted glory, but he was ridiculously intelligent, cunning, and cruel. To Gul'dan, it wasn't about performing evil deeds. It was about amassing as much power and prestige as he could -- and the rest of the world could burn, for all he cared.
What If: Clash of the Frozen Thrones
I love doing lore columns, and I really enjoy doing Tinfoil Hat Editions of Know Your Lore -- I like the process of finding all the loose threads from expansions past and pulling them together in a way that is just weird enough to feasibly work. Sometimes, however, I come up with ideas that are just a little too far out there for a Tinfoil Hat Edition. Certainly they're interesting enough, but feasible? Not in the slightest. When it comes to Warlords of Draenor, there are a lot of questions that haven't been answered. This is to be expected. We haven't even seen the beta for the expansion yet. We have absolutely no idea where that story is going to lead, other than commentary at BlizzCon suggesting that it will directly feed into the expansion following. Yet that tiny little comment, along with some thinking about Warlords itself gave me a theory regarding the next expansion. No, not Warlords -- I'm talking about the expansion after that. It's entirely implausible of course, which is why I'm not sticking it in the Know Your Lore column. But what the heck, let's take a moment and ask ourselves what if -- and consider the possibility of Azeroth's greatest villain reborn.
Hi Arthas! Want some help slaughtering the innocent?
A guildmate of mine was healing a Culling of Stratholme run last night and finally broached a question that seems to have occurred to everyone who's helped Arthas take his utilitarian moral perspective on the road: "Why are we helping this guy?"It's a question that people used to ask about Black Morass a lot too (indeed, the first boss, Chrono Lord Deja, will ask you that himself), but Black Morass was a little more cut-and-dried. Medivh unquestionably cost many lives in bringing the first Horde through his portal, but if the orcs never set foot in Azeroth, then the world would have fallen to the Legion. The Bronze Dragonflight is unusually blunt about the cause-and-effect; war breaks out among the human kingdoms, the Alliance never occurs, the new Horde is not present at Hyjal to defend against Archimonde's forces -- indeed, the Legion may very well have swept the world without Hyjal ever occurring. So, despite the destruction wrought by the first Horde's entry into Azeroth (and you could argue, because of it), Medivh must succeed in opening the portal.I'm not sure it's quite that straightforward with "Old Strat" -- and questions about whether it is prompt some thought-provoking questions concerning Azeroth's past, present, and future.
The legends of non-Legendary items
Blizzard has a torrid history with the Legendary items in World of Warcraft. The first such item to raise a stink was probably Ashbringer, the sword of Highlord Mograine of the Scarlet Crusade. Though stats have been found in the game (and a Corrupted version is available), the item itself isn't obtainable by players at all (though it still may be in the future). And reader Scott recently brought another one of these not-quite-Legendary items to my attention: the Skull of Gul'dan. This is probably one of the most powerful items in all of Azeroth-- it's been used to close and open the Dark Portal, it's responsible for tearing apart Felwood, and it turned Illidan from just an emo elf into a superpowerful demonic badass. And yet, it's no more than a rare trinket in the game.Shouldn't an item with that much legend behind it be called Legendary? Illidan's twin blades are labeled legendary, but they're hardly the stuff of modern legend-- Illidan took them from a doom guard commander 10,000 years ago, and they've done nothing but sit in his whirling hands since then (heck, they couldn't even take down Arthas). I agree with Scott-- there's no reason those blades should be Legendary when the skull isn't. Sure, the skull might not be as powerful as it used to be, but it's still got a load of legend behind it.And the Legendary debate isn't over yet, because there is one more big item looming on the horizon: when we head to Northrend, we'll all, Horde and Alliance alike, be looking to find the item that kicked off this Arthas trouble in the first place: Frostmourne. Will that be wieldable by players, or labeled Legendary? If Blizzard's previous experience with Legendary items is any indication, the answer may not be what you expect.
