[WoW, Spoilers] Did the Wrath Gate quest chain last night...

[Acrozatarim]

Spoilers ahoy for a major quest line in Wrath of the Lich King. I warn you, you don't want what happens spoiled - it's best as a surprise. All I'll say is the key word 'Wrathgate' to let people who have done it know it's fine to read on

So.

Yeah.

The Wrath Gate quest line.

Holy hell.

Finally. Like... finally. One of my major gripes with WoW has always been that, whatever you do, nothing ever bloody changes.

Sure, the Wrath Gate changes are, in the long run, not huge (no dreadlord lurking around Sylvanus anymore, Alexstraza moving) but the whole sequence with the phased Wrathgate, Orgrimmar and Undercity was incredible - MrokGirl and I did this Horde-side, so I'm not sure what the Alliance is like.

Important people die! And people who are pretty nifty too - not just second-raters.

You get to be a hero! A real hero, fighting alongside the key characters of the faction, tearing through renegades and Burning Legion like they are tissue paper. I critted something for 30k damage

The plot of the game actually advances! The whole 'New Plague' thing comes to an incredible end, and it also provides a justification for why there seemed this divide between the image of the Forsaken as a genuine component of the Horde, and all the 'muahahaha' moustache-twirling evil geniuses constantly making verbal slip-ups about how they want to kill the living... er, enemies of the Horde. My gripe here is that Pustrus (or whatever he's called) seems a rather sudden appearance - I don't remember seeing a character of that name around before. Unlike with Varimathras and the heroes who die, there is no real existing emotional link to Pustrus and he then dies off-screen anyway. Seeing that Korkron Elite's face melt did make me want to kick the Grand Apothecary's face in, but it seems only the Alliance get the chance to do that

Areas permanently change! Although I do wish the fleeing stream of soldiers from the Wrathgate would stop now, seeing as, you know, that battle was over some time ago now.


Overall... This is how I wish the entire game was like, and it's great to see Blizzard finally making some real progress in making you feel like you're in the same kind of storyline as from prior Warcraft iterations, doing something significant and interacting with interesting characters and with actual ramifications.

Awesome.

[Belphanior]

Putress appeared previously in Shattrath, during the zombie infestation. That is a little short time indeed but his involvement in plague-research is well known throughout the community.

He doesn't die off screen though.

When you play through the Alliance side of this thing, King Wrynn first has you and Jaina Proudmore go to Thrall to see what the hell is going on. He and Sylvanas explain about the Undercity being taken be traitors. Wrynn doesn't trust the story but he's not about to let orcs avenge the death of his closest friend. Taking Proudmore and some kickass heroes (the players) he personally invades the Undercity and proceeds to tear Putress and his defenders apart.

Of course, the Undercity used to be Lordaeron. Seeing what the Horde has done to the city (you've got to admit, it's a pretty sinister place) and already pissed off beyond believe, he decides Lordaeron should arise anew as a human nation again. When he hears Thrall nearby he wastes no second to attack the "savages" that infest Alliance territory.

Jaina teleports everyone back to Stormwind before fatalities occur, but Wrynn declares war on the Horde anyway. Where that leads to we have yet to find out.

[Ratman_tf]

I wish the Undercity event was a 5 man instance. I felt awfully alone doing that part of the quest.

[Jaakko]

Originally Posted by Ratman_tf

I wish the Undercity event was a 5 man instance. I felt awfully alone doing that part of the quest.

Several other players showed up when I did the big battle, so the instance isn't private or anything. You just had bad luck.

[AndyGuest]

Originally Posted by Ratman_tf

I wish the Undercity event was a 5 man instance. I felt awfully alone doing that part of the quest.

Oh god no, I'd've ended up skipping it until someone told me what it was about then it'd've been spoiled because I'd know what was going to happen.

[AndyGuest]

The chain was fun and the gate stuff was good but I found fighting alongside Thrall to be pretty dull to be honest. I felt like it didn't much matter what I was doing, I was always at full health, near enough, and the masses and masses of mobs made it feel like I was just mashing buttons. Plus Thrall walks so bloody slowly... :-)

Peversely if took too long for the way it worked and it was over too quickly. There was a lot of lead up to this, maybe three or four quests so you could do things in stages and prepare for the final assault would've been more fun but with the phased/semi-instanced nature of th event I don't know if that could've been made to work.

Good overall and for what they tried to do A+ definately. The specifics of taking back undercity, hmm, C maybe C+.

[MadDogMike]

Heh, I went through with a group my time and found out you aren't *quite* invulnerable; one of the minibosses in UC one-shotted a bunch of us. Fortunately you can in fact run back and rez without issues, but definitely gotta let the NPCs take the brunt of it .

And one thing I liked reading about the Alliance-side version was how closely together both versions ran. They really did a good job making both ends come off as having simultaneously occured. Almost wish it'd been set up so Horde and Alliance PCs could actually face off at the end, but that would have been tricky at best.

[Rainbow Trenchcoat]

I just got lagged out until I turned everything down to the absolute minimum in the fight against putress, and even then I still got one-shotted.

And my reaction to this was Varian Wrynn, you fucking idiot. You had a chance to end the war that's been destroying Azeroth for the past score of years at least, and instead you let your personal hatreds and bias doom all of Azeroth to another decade at least of total war while fighting the Lich King. Why exactly do the other races allow the human king to be "leader of the Alliance" again? The first human king lost Azeroth. The king of Loaderon then proceded to lose Loaderon to the Scourge, along with giving birth to the Lich king. The new king of Azeroth then managed to get his kingdom under control by the Black dragonflight, got trapped by the horde, and then declared war on the horde for the entire alliance- despite the fact that it's in no one's interest other than his own to do so.

Honestly, with the breakdown of leadership among the Night Elves and the imperialist tendencies of the Dwarves, I'm somewhat inclined to give the leadership of the alliance to the Gnomes- they still have a functional leadership structure that's already taken revenge on their enemies.

[Mengtzu]

Originally Posted by Rainbow Trenchcoat

And my reaction to this was Varian Wrynn, you fucking idiot. You had a chance to end the war that's been destroying Azeroth for the past score of years at least, and instead you let your personal hatreds and bias doom all of Azeroth to another decade at least of total war while fighting the Lich King.

I unsurprisingly disagree

I think Varian's a great character for a few reasons:

- The game is set up for Horde vs Alliance, it's needed. People like Varian and Garrosh help with that. Blizzard are always going to find a way to keep them at each other's throats.

- Varian was originally a pacifist. While exceedingly well trained, he didn't actually become a warrior until his time amongst the Horde. Everything he's learned about using violent means to achieve ends he's learned from the Horde. I think he's a great character as a living consequence of the Horde's warrior culture, which gives them strength but also breeds terrible enemies.

- The Horde really aren't very great for the Alliance. They shelter malicious forces, are expanding their territory on multiple fronts at the Alliance's expense. The nicest thing we can say about the warlike alien invaders who make up their core is that they are no longer addicted to demon blood. It's not clear (at least from an Alliance partisan pov) that tolerating the Horde is actually productive, even in the war against the Lich King. Wrathgate was a disaster for both the Horde and the Alliance, but Putress and Varimathras didn't shelter and hatch their plot in Stormwind.

- The airship standoff over Icecrown is really cool ^_^

[Matthew]

I was pretty disappointed by the whole thing.

I was disappointed, maybe a little offended, by the game stealing so much of their cinematic from the LotR movies and books. It felt very amateurish.

I was also disappointed that my character wasn't in the cinematics. I know this is a result of the way Blizz's division of labor works, it would have had to be in-engine, but that would have been substantively better.

Then, as I thought about it, I thought there was nothing stopping them from putting my whole GUILD, or at least the officers, in the cinem and then as NPCs in the big battle afterward.

It was a nice change of pace from the usual, and I'd been paying attention to to story, so I know who Putress was, for instance, she was in Shatt. But overall I felt it was derivative and lacking in real drama, or any sense of heroism on my character's part.