The Queue: Reflection

Welcome back to The Queue, our daily Q&A feature for all of Blizzard’s games! Have a question for the Blizzard Watch staff? Leave it in the comments!

I really liked Blizzard’s newest short story. I gotta say I wasn’t expecting Nathanos Blightcaller’s story to take a Mulan detour, but I was delighted that we got a canon explanation for his sudden model change. I mean I remember fighting Blightcaller back in vanilla, and he was just another mildly horrifying Forsaken model. It was a little weird to see him suddenly emerge as a strangely beautiful corpsified man with no acknowledgement of the change.

Okay so here’s the deal — the Emerald Nightmare is completely an Old God thing, created when Fandral Staghelm inadvertently opened a door for the Old Gods to access the Emerald Dream way back in the day. In present day, Xavius — a former Highborne Night Elf who was transformed into a satyr by Sargeras originally — has pretty much taken control of the Nightmare as a figurehead of sorts for the Old Gods. He appeared to be working with the Burning Legion, but his loyalties were really with the Old Gods.

The naga were former Highborne that were transformed by the Old Gods way back just after the Well of Eternity was destroyed at the end of the War of the Ancients. Their allegiance has always been with the Old Gods — but they have their own splinter factions. A contingent of naga allied with Illidan during the Third War, and followed him to Outland. These naga were loyal to Illidan alone, and there’s a small group that still follows him to this day. On Azeroth, small groups of naga appear to have sided with the Burning Legion — which is why you see some fel naga on the Broken Shore.

In Legion, Azshara’s after the Tidestone of Golganneth. We don’t quite know why she’s after it, other than the Tidestone is an object of enormous power. Presumably Azshara and her naga are still allied with the Old Gods — the naga on the Broken Shore are outliers, they don’t represent all naga on Azeroth. I say “presumably” because we don’t really know where Azshara’s head is at. She could still be a loyal follower of the Old Gods, or she could have given up hope that they would accomplish anything, given the end results of Cataclysm. During the War of the Ancients, Azshara was willingly working with the Burning Legion. She supposedly isn’t anymore, but…well, it’s not like the Old Gods were really effective in Cataclysm, and if Azshara is looking for power, maybe she’s pondering just who has the most at this point. Who can offer her the most.

Sargeras is dead-set against the Old Gods and the Void. Whether or not he’s actually informed the rest of the Burning Legion of this is unknown. However, since the Legion seems to think they’re going to conquer the universe, and Sargeras’ actual plan is to just destroy everything in the universe, Legion included…well, it tends to make one think he hasn’t exactly filled everyone in the Legion in on what’s going to happen once all this conquering is done and over with.

Just Seals of Broken Fate, and the usual whatever you happen to spend while running Order Hall Missions. We’re quickly reaching the point where Order Hall Resources are beginning to outlive their usefulness. I sort of wish we could spend them on bind-on-account reputation tokens — maybe not right this second, but a little later on. Make it a little more convenient for people that are leveling alts, you know?

Well…they already tried their Legion invasion there. We soundly kicked their butts in the Nightwell, and got rid of the Nightwell as an end result. There’s nothing left for them there anymore, Gul’dan’s plans ultimately failed. I mean I guess they could technically invade just to give us some payback, but the Nightborne have proven themselves a force to be reckoned with — I doubt the Legion really wants to mess with them right now. They’ve got better things to do — there’s all the time in the world for petty revenge once they’ve accomplished what they’re up to on the Broken Shore.

Yes, it’s Alliance-only — head to the Broken Shore and you should see a new quest marker on your map, if you haven’t done it. There is a brief turn-in portion, and then after server reset there’s a follow up portion. On the one hand I totally get it — Horde got two cinematics at the beginning of the expansion, while the Alliance only got one, so this is kind of a catch-up and make things fair.

On the other, it’s kind of a bummer that Horde players only got a 30-second (well, if you had the Nethershards already) quest for the week. It didn’t feel quite so bad on Alliance at the beginning of Legion because there was simply so many other things to do at the time, you know? I mean yes, it stung, but I was pretty quickly involved in zone quests and leveling. But Horde players on the Broken Shore are looking for things to do at this point — there’s not exactly an abundance of things to distract at the moment. So it doesn’t feel very good.

But I think the Alliance really needed to see what was presented, and it was beautifully done. If you’re a Horde player, I totally recommend knocking it out on an Alliance alt if you happen to have one.

I kind of loathe quests that have absolutely no point. This quest had no point — it was a setup for a joke that referred to a legendary available in an expansion that, let’s face it, a lot of us would like to just forget about. There was no followup to it. We didn’t even see what Khadgar wanted the shards for. Chances are, we’ll never see another reference to said shard again. And as mentioned above, for Horde players, this was all they got to see this week. This was the “story quest.” That’s it. Just that.

At the same time, it’s quite easily the fastest Legionfall rep I’ve gotten on the Broken Shore so far. I mean, I had the shards already in my bags, so I literally took the quest, turned around and handed back in. Rapid fire reward, that’s not exactly a bad thing, right? So I guess there was nothing wrong with the quest itself, per se — it’s that people were hoping for more, and they didn’t get it (unless they were Alliance, in which case they got one of the best chains so far this expansion).

That’s it for today’s Queue — if you have any questions you’d like to see answered, be sure to leave them in the comments below!