expansion-speculation
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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.
Possible Blizzard trademark: "Heroes of the Storm"
A potential new trademark for Blizzard Entertainment has been filed in New Zealand, according to posters over at MMO-Champion. The trademark, Heroes of the Storm, is currently listed as being under examination on the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand's official website. This means that the trademark has not been officially filed as of yet -- and given the back and forth about the legitimacy of the supposed trademark filed for "The Dark Below" that turned out to be a hoax, one should probably keep that in mind when discussing the possible legitimacy of this trademark. However, the trademark is filed for computer game software, and we still haven't heard a peep as to just what the next expansion is going to be. Does Heroes of the Storm sound like the next Warcraft project? Or perhaps an upcoming expansion card set for Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft? It certainly doesn't sound like a title for anything Diablo or StarCraft related, and Wrathion's made his fair share of references to fire raining from the sky, which sounds pretty stormy to me. While we don't have a definitive on whether or not this trademark will be approved and filed, it definitely gives us some more food for thought.
Know Your Lore, Tinfoil Hat Edition: The Dark Below
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. I see them! A million worlds glittering in their perfection! One above all others! We have fallen, we must rebuild the final Titan! Do not forget. Wrathion may have just finished chowing down on the heart of the Thunder King when he rattled off that strange speech about this bizarre "final Titan," but what he said seemed to indicate there is far more going on in Pandaria than we'd thought. Or, on the other hand, there is far more going on in Azeroth than we thought. Things that must be taken care of, things so urgent that Wrathion is attempting to set the war between Alliance and Horde on fast-forward so that we can skip that part and simply jump to what he thinks is the important stuff. Earlier this week, Blizzard appeared to be trademarking something called The Dark Below, and many have speculated that it's the name of the next WoW expansion, largely because of the existence of Ozumat and his title, Fiend of the Dark Below. The trademark was later revealed as a possible hoax -- and later still, revealed to be a trademark in Europe. So is it WoW? If it is a WoW trademark, what could possibly be in an expansion with that title? I have absolutely no idea. But that makes for some excellent Tinfoil Hat speculation, so why don't we look at what could potentially be lurking in The Dark Below? Today's Know Your Lore is a Tinfoil Hat edition, meaning the following is a look into what has gone before with pure speculation on how it happened. These speculations are merely theories and shouldn't be taken as fact or official lore.
What If: Shadows of the Assassin
When we last left off with the what-if challenges, Rossi wrote up a perfectly delightful idea for the premise of Shandris Feathermoon being a main antagonist for an expansion, then left me with the notorious half-orc assassin Garona Halforcen for my next challenge. One would think it'd be easy enough to build an expansion around someone who makes a habit of stabbing people, but Garona has essentially been a non-entity since we last saw her, briefly, in the Twilight Highlands. Her absence from the final fight with Cho'gall was noticeable. One would think that she'd be more than happy to pitch in and help defeat the creature that had been controlling her the majority of her life, forcing her to do things that colored her fate in such a way that she's been forced into hiding. Yet ... Garona wasn't there. In fact, she's all but disappeared. Which makes one wonder ... how much of Garona is, in fact, Garona -- and what would she do if given the unique opportunity to change her fate?
WoW 6.0: A case for dual class dual spec
Please note that this article is 100% speculation! Many people have wondered whether Blizzard may add a fourth spec to the existing classes in the next expansion. They've talked about a tanking spec for warlocks, a ranged DPS spec for paladins, a healing spec for mages, etc. It would be an amazing addition to the game for patch 6.0, and I would fully support it. However, fourth specs also seem highly unlikely. Blizzard would have to implement and then continually balance 10-11 more specs (depending on whether druids get a fifth). That's a big kodo to rein in. It's almost like adding three new classes to the game. We only have a sample size of one, but Blizzard chose not to add another class in the expansion following Wrath's death knight. It wouldn't surprise me if they chose not to during the next expansion, either. With declining subs, if they aren't adding another new class in the next expansion, they need to add a flashy new feature to our existing classes. The next expansion has to get players excited about playing our classes. One new spell per class won't cut it. Talent trees are probably staying the way they are. Blizzard seems hesitant to add tri-spec, and I'm not sure tri-spec is a good thing for WoW anyway. What could this new feature be? The radical new system I'm proposing would not just energize players -- it could also solve one of the game's longstanding problems. I'm going to call it dual class dual spec, or DCDS for short.
What If: Purge of the Aspects
In case you missed it earlier this week, Matthew Rossi and I are playing a little game that Sacco brought to attention on the latest podcast. In the game, we choose an unlikely figure for the antagonist of an entire expansion, and try and puzzle out what that expansion looks like. Rossi went first, so he got to choose his own antagonist and went with Velen -- and then decided to drop Alexstrasza on me for the subject of mine. It's okay. I'll have my revenge a little later. But how does the former Aspect of Life, the Lifebringer, the Dragonqueen Alexstraza suddenly turn to evil? Oh I guess we could go with the corrupted by Old Gods route ... but that would be far, far too easy. Instead, let's look at the interesting premise of the Aspect's charge -- and what happens when we fail our duties as mortals.
What If: Velen the villain
The other night, while recording the podcast, Sacco came up with a little game that caught our fancy -- he threw out a random lore figure, said "you have ten seconds to detail how you would use this person as the main antagonist for the next expansion" and let myself and Anne have at it. Since it was an enjoyable exercise, and since the next expansion announcement is a few months away, we figure why not and so, here we are now. What are the rules to this game? Well, we're going to stick to lore figures who are alive at the moment (no resurrections of dead figures) and we're going to try and keep them short. Well, short for Anne and myself, anyway. This inaugural edition will take a look at the most unlikely figure I could come up with for the main antagonist of an entire expansion. So here we go, ladies and gentlemen, with my rampantly untrue, completely made up, based on nothing but my own ideas speculation for what we could see in an expansion around the idea that the main bad guy is none other than the Prophet Velen. Yes, that Prophet Velen.
