The Queue: This site has such a bias against my faction.

It’s a day ending in y, so let’s fight more about the conflict of the Alliance versus the Horde!

Yep! It starts at 11 a.m. PST, about an hour from the Queue’s publication if I have my math right. I’ll caution you that I’m a traditional writer so my idea of complex math involves sonnets.

It’s a WoW Lore-related Q&A, so I’m really curious what we’ll be hearing about. Although Senior Game Designer Steve Danuser is going to be there, so will Terran Gregory, who leads the Cinematics department. With all the datamining going around and a new raid waiting in the wings, I wonder whether we might see some new cinematics from the raid. The Blizzard team has occasionally pushed in-game cinematics straight to their YouTube channel, but they also don’t like presenting those cinematics without context. Terran and Steve could provide quite a bit of context.

Conversely, it’s not like they don’t have a history of randomly posting new cinematics now — we’re looking at you, Old Soldier.

So, what I’m saying is, you might want to do your own math or stay off social media because this Q&A could be prime for spoiler alerts.

First of all, Mitch this is why we can’t have nice things in this house.

Let me preface this with the statement that I’m not Anne or Joe. I’m also not Rossi, who will undoubtedly also have to spend tomorrow’s queue correcting any misstatement here on my part, so I apologize for that. However, though I’m not an expert in WoW lore as such, I do know quite a bit about writing and storytelling in general, and the poetic devices employed to make a story engaging.

So, that said, here’s my tiny tinfoil hat on the whole burning of Teldrassil episode. Buckle up.

The roots of the World Trees dig deep into little baby Titan Azeroth. We’ve seen before that these Trees can become corrupted with Old God taint — Druids pulled down Andrassil because of this. The tree Shaladrassil in Val’Sharah is tainted by the Nightmare, as is the unnamed tree in Un’Goro Crater which only exists in the Emerald Dream. After being destroyed Nordrassil regrew on Mount Hyjal, but doesn’t have the same magical presence as a true World Tree anymore. The only one left is Teldrassil.

So, keep in mind that this is a story being written by people who are trying to bring about a specific end. While I don’t think burning Teldrassil was outside of Sylvanas’ character per se, without some kind of corruption-related Deus Ex Machina, she’s the only current character who’d destroy the tree. The writers could’ve had Nathanos do it but he answers so directly to the Banshee Queen, and the force required to truly destroy a living tree of that magnitude would be so massive, she may as well have struck the match herself. To me, the debate over Alliance vs Horde is about to take a back seat real quick over whatever it was the World Trees were trying to save — or trying to imprison — by value of their magic. In other words, the Tree had to go to set the stage for the true Battle for Azeroth. “Five torches to light our path.”

The writers needed that Tree gone, and only one character has the guts to do it for them. Being that character is kinda Sylvanas’s thing, anyway.

The War Campaign has these things called Outposts over on the other continent to unlock flight paths. Once you get Honored with The Honorbound, you can buy two scouting missions, with another five at revered — Diretusk Hollow is one of the five. After you complete the mission, you go to your War Campaign leader. Then, you have to go to the area of the outpost to plant the Horde flag there, which unlocks the flight point. Lok’tar Ogar!

Vice versa with the 7th Legion for Alliance, of course. Except the Lok’tar part.

Beyond the emotional attachment people randomly form with inanimate objects, it still boggles my mind some of the lore behind these weapons of awesome power we’re supposed to just have in our bank forever. I say “have in our bank forever” because I’m definitely never just /deleting Doomhammer. I fished for Ashbringer for hours off the whisper of a rumor, and I’m going to just toss it aside because something something Azerite? Get out.

Khaz Modan limits you to Dwarves and Gnomes. With the restrictions in place in Vanilla, I’d say your best bet would probably be Paladin. At low levels juggling seals and judgements was somewhat entertaining, and it’s real tough to kill a Paladin. The main issue is that it takes forever to kill anything, but then compared to live the pace is so glacial for any class it’s a question of whether you’d like to be slow or slower.

You did rule out Hunters because of juggling pets, but good news! Hunters don’t do their quest to get their first pet until level 10 anyway. No, really. You have to do a long, involved quest line to get it too. The downside is, you’re still squishy as heck so you have to kite things with Wing Clip. It’s… let’s just say slower.