"Draenor Pathfinder is a bitch and a half, especially the rep grinding. Instead of grinding rep with all the factions we care about and have been playing alongside for the entire expansion, we're introduced to three new factions toward the end of the expansion, which can only be grinded via dailies and weeklies. To me this just seems like a time waster."
Pathfinder has somehow stuck around, requiring players to fill out a new arbitrary shopping list of goals with each expansion. It remains a hated part of the game (LINKS TO REDDIT) by most, though some players have come to embrace it. Blizzard keeps toying with the idea of removing flight completely, only to add it in a later patch. It has become just another part of the cycle of life.
Half-finished Stories – Yrel and Maraad
Cutting several zones, raids, and entire patches had a serious effect on the characters who were meant to develop over the course of the expansion. None suffers more due to cuts than Yrel – particularly unfortunate since she is the only significant Draenei in an expansion which is technically meant to be half Draenei, half Orc. She’s introduced at the start of the expansion as a native of Draenor, and is intriguing by virtue of how normal she is, in a game-world where everyone with any importance is either ultra-powerful, royal, or both. She is immediately likeable.
The plot of Shadowmoon Valley focuses heavily on her and AU-Velen, and ends with his self-sacrifice. It’s a great cinematic, but it fails to hit emotionally for reasons this blogger explained better than I could.
"…making an alternate reality your story is BAD, especially when you’re revisiting characters that exist/existed in your main reality.
You know why? Because those characters had their shot, or are currently having their shot, shall we say. Those MU characters are YOURS. See, the Velen on Draenor that died? Well, what did it matter? That wasn’t OUR Velen. Our Velen is still doing nothing in the Exodar, so the AU Velen’s sacrifice comes off as almost false or not as horrible. Emotional, yes, but something easy to shrug off when you remember that our Velen is still okay. Therefore the emotional connection to the AU characters is more or less carved in half with this in mind."
She appears again in Gorgrond, in the company of the other main Draenei, Non-AU-Maraad. Accrding to the writers, Maraad had originally been married to Non-AU-Yrel, but she died, so he has a whole big story with AU-Yrel, who doesn’t know him (AU-Maraad died before he could meet her). Gorgrong’s story was meant to focus on their relationship, with the two gradually falling in love. That whole backstory and love affair was cut, so they never get beyond acquaintances. Maraad still gets his climactic death in the next zone, but it’s hard to care because he was such a minor character.
Yrel skips Spires of Arak, but comes back for Nagrand, where she is suddenly wearing Maraad’s armour (one size fits all, I guess) and using his ceremonial title, and multiple characters are talking about how ‘Maraad would be so proud of you’. Presumably some important stuff was cut there. Then in the Garrison questline, Yrel goes through a series of trials to become an Exarch – one of the three people who lead the Draenei on Draenor. It’s sudden and inexplicable. There’s even a quest where she emotionally lays Maraad’s ashes to rest and says goodbye to his spirit – even though they only knew each other for like an hour.
When the player investigates her backstory, they learn she has a ‘dark secret’ with enormous consequences, but that part of her story was cut too. When she was added to Heroes of the Storm (Blizzard’s tactical game tie-in), one of her flavour dialogues referenced this.
“You want to know what my dark secret is? I see dead people. Kidding! About that being my secret, that is. We Draenei see dead people all the time.”
Yrel appears in the final raid and has a speaking role in its cinematic. Another character foreshadows the following expansion, and she says ‘If you ever need us, we will be here,’ and then expresses her intention to rebuild Draenor alongside the Orcs (a goal she never mentions prior to this, presumably because it was cut). But any future she might have had is cut too. Yrel doesn’t appear in the next expansion. Like almost all of Draenor’s characters, she’s simply forgotten.
She gets a cameo in the one after that, however, when it is revealed that time has sped up on Draenor, thirty years have passed there, and Yrel is now ruling the continent as some kind of Holy Hitler. Despite how major that sounds, it is never expanded upon in much detail.
Half-finished Stories – The Warlords
The seven Warlords of Draenor are Kargath Bladefist, Blackhand, Kilrogg Deadeye, Durotan, Grom Hellscream, Ner’Zhul, and Gul’dan. They all appear briefly during the introduction at the Black Portal, but after that, their fates become a little scattered. Almost all of them fell pray to content cuts. Also, as far as I can tell, no AU-character meets their non-AU counterpart, ever. Blizzard didn’t want too much time travel in their time travel expansion.
Arguably the most important Warlord was Ner’Zhul. His non-AU version had been responsible for turning Draenor into Outland, and had become the first Lich King. Despite barely appearing in WoW, he had been pivotal to the entire game’s narrative. But in Warlords, he comes to a pathetic end. After a foiled attempt to create an evil Naaru (light god), he gets killed off in a dungeon.
"What pissed me off (LINKS TO REDDIT) the most was they bring back all of these iconic and cool characters, then we literally just steamroll all of them."
Kargath comes to an even more inglorious end. After barely appearing in the questing zones, he becomes the first boss of the first raid, Highmaul, and you can really tell he was thrown in because they couldn’t think of any other way to get rid of him. Considering he had gotten a short film and everything, players were unimpressed at his death.
Blackhand appears multiple times over the questing of Gorgrond, gets a cool cinematic, and becomes the final boss of the raid Blackrock Foundry, which is dedicated entirely to him, and is arguably the only Warlord who gets a satisfying ending in this expansion. He’s literally the only orc in this expansion that no one complained about.
As the leader of the Iron Horde, Grom Hellscream is the most fleshed out Warlord before the expansion begins. He fills the cover of the game, but barely appears until the Hellfire Citadel raid, where he was originally meant to be the final boss until he was ousted by rewrites.
In the raid trailer, he is shown having a random and inexplicable change of heart, and now totally supports the players. He is freed in the raid, and lives on to make the Iron Horde good. It’s an incredibly jarring transition which can only be the product of cut story content. He proudly lifts his weapon at the end and declares ‘Draenor is free’ as if the Iron Horde was never even a thing. There’s no talk of him facing consequences for trying to genocide the Draenei or take over Azeroth. The Iron Horde never even officially disbanded, and he never stood down as its leader. It’s all nonsense. He is one of the most butchered characters of the expansion.
"What in the world? GROM gets to have the victory salute while yelling “Draenor is free!” ? Grom, who TERRORIZED Draenor by slaughtering Draenei, threatening annhilation on the orc clans who wouldn’t join the Iron Horde, and transforming various parts of the continent into his own personal war machine so he could slaughter even more people on a world he’d never been to?
???
And just because Gul'dan is the “bigger bad,” we suddenly have collective amnesia and go: oh yeah! Gul'dan had Draenor in his clutches the whole expac… not Grom for the majority of it."
[…]
"Now this utter lack of commentary about Grom’s villainy would be better (but still horrible) if we got some hint – ANY hint – that Grom is remorseful for his actions. That he saw what his absolute greed for conquering and war had done to his people (sounds familiar, I’m sure.) But instead, we get nothing. Grom only allies with us because he got captured and Gul'dan got the best of him. If Gul'dan hadn’t happened, Grom would have kept pushing back with the Iron Horde despite his heavy losses. Victory or Death, and all that. Hundreds, if not thousands more, would have died – both his soldiers and ours, and innocents besides."
As the only ‘good guy’ of the lot, Durotan gets more development, especially since he’s Thrall’s dad. Most of Frostfire Ridge is dedicated to his story, but he accompanies Horde players throughout the expansion. At the end, he is promptly forgotten about for multiple years. Two expansions later, we’re told he was killed by Nazi Yrel.
(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)
Kilrogg becomes a demonic follower of Gul’dan and becomes an early boss in Hellfire Citadel. The dude is basically an extra in his own expansion.
Gul’dan himself ends up being the primary antagonist of Warlords, by summoning Archimonde, one of the two generals of the Burning Legion. Not AU-Archimonde, just Archimonde. Apparently there isn’t a different version of the Burning Legion for each timeline, there’s just one, because their home in the Twisting Nether exists outside of space and time. But this time when he’s killed, it’s for good. It’s confusing and rife with plot holes (LINKS TO REDDIT). A lot of players joke that the only purpose of the expansion was to introduce him to the story, so that he could set up Legion.
While not technically one of the warlords, Orgrim Doomhammer was a major character in the original timeline and was promised to be significant in Warlords. He ended up being written almost completely out. As one reddit user put it, his story became. "I follow the Iron Horde! Wait, the Iron Horde is bad! Agggh, I am dead!"
So out of seven Orcs, one gets a solid story with a good ending. These are literally the people they named the expansion after. How could it go so wrong?
It was mentioned in one of the art blogs that the expansion was originally designed to focus entirely on the Iron Horde. Each zone had a clan, each clan had a warlord, and each warlord had a story. However at some point during development, Blizzard realised this caused, in their own words, ‘Orc-itis’. They expected players to get sick of the constant Orcs.
Halfway through the alpha, large parts of the story and zone design were scrapped, and new threats were brought in to make it all feel more varied. Gorgrond was almost entirely remade. It originally had an entire functioning train system (which is still inexplicably present in the Grimrail Depot dungeon) but it was changed to focus on Primals (sentient plants). Nagrand became Ogre-centric, Tanaan got its demon makeover, and the Iron Horde invasion of Shadowmoon Valley from the trailer was removed entirely.
Draenor pivoted from a theme of all-out war to a focus on exploration. The Iron Horde got pushed to the background. There was no time to rewrite the warlords to make their stories fit around this new premise. Instead, we are left with small snippets of their original plot lines, and hastily thrown-together resolutions.
#Half-finished Stories – Garrosh and Thrall
Perhaps the most hated writing choice was Garrosh’s death.
He had been the main antagonist of Mists of Pandaria, and its final boss, but had escaped and set the plot of Warlords in motion. You might expect his ending to be climactic, and involve the player heavily. But you would be wrong. He runs into Thrall, the two have a mak’gora – an Orcish tradition of ritualistic duelling. On its own, that sort of works. Garrosh had actually had a mak’gora with Thrall before, during Wrath of the Lich King, and Garrosh began his ‘downward spiral’ during a mak’gora at the start of Cataclysm, during which he dishonourably killed another major character, Cairne Bloodhoof.
The cutscene that follows is wildly controversial. Not only does Thrall steal the kill for the second time in a row, not only does he blatantly cheat in order to win, he also completely dismisses any responsibility he holds for making Garrosh into a villain. But since it’s Thrall, and as we established in the Cataclysm write-up, Thrall can do no wrong, he is treated like a hero.
[…]
[…]
#The Legacy of Draenor
Warlords did basically nothing to forward the main plot of Warcraft, outside of the final boss of its final raid. It was a pointless diversion that existed purely to familiarise players with the characters in the movie – which was delayed twice and hadn’t even come out by the end of the expansion.
This sentiment is echoed in an article on Gameskinny:
This expansion left behind a troubled legacy. It’s a scar on the history of Warcraft, spoken about in the same tones used by cliche Vietnam veterans. It has become the benchmark for bad quality, the low-water mark against which all other disappointments are compared.
[…]
Blizzard had long established a system in which three expansions were always in production. At any one time, they were working two expansions ahead – or so they claimed. But nothing about Warlords matched up with that.
When they unveiled their next expansion, Legion, it was with the promise that things would be better. You live and learn. At any rate, you live. But they had been making this game for a decade, with development often led by the same faces. How was it possible they were getting worse with practice?
No one was quick to trust them there.
(Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama)