Temple of Sethraliss

I am creating a short series of posts for Mythic+ dungeons to provide notes to the team. We are just beginning our journey in this system and are not pushing high keys yet.

General

• Gurdrid: Remember to Beacon the tank
• Zaduss and Melyyn: Remember to resummon your pets
• Opma: Believe it or not, health over mechanics!
• Vireo: I just don’t want to leave you out, so…

Crowd Control and Kill Order

• No traps in sand clouds or on the riding crolusk dudes, or the big guys in the first area
• Kill the healers first: Charged Dust Devils, Faithless Tenders, and plague doctors

Galvanzz, the Jerk

• 8 stacks is easy peasy – 12 stacks make Gurdrid panic
• Don’t assume anyone has that beam
• communicate stacks/which beam
• Markers can help communication

Travel puzzles

• First one – follow an orb where you plan to go.
• Second one – as soon as the left/right moving orbs pass, use movement speed to weave through
• Bridge – once someone gets to the end it’s interrupted

Orb Room

• Cannot pass orbs over trash
• Stun the Orb Guardians

Best Key: +5 over time, +3 in 34:13

Tour #20 and 21: Shadow Wing

We’ve taken all of the printed and in-game material and arranged it into a roughly thematic order within each expansion and we plan to go through the story using a number of thematically appropriate toons. We’ll be discussion our impressions here. Be warned: our discussions will contain spoilers for all currently published Warcraft material. This isn’t meant for first timers, but for old timers like us to experience it in a new way.You can find our tentative list here.

Note: Shadow Wing is a duology consisting of the two Manga titled The Dragons of Outland and Nexus Point.

Sonaira says:

In the kindest possible terms, this wasn’t for me.

It was confusing, repetitive, failed to hold my interest, and wasn’t improved at all by the art. The main plot is the mystery that the eggs Deathwing had sent to Draenor in Beyond the Dark Portal turned into nether dragons. Treating it as a mystery is one of the biggest disservice the plot does, however, as it seems this would already be known to the readers (maybe), so it’s not a mystery so much as a slog.

It’s position in the timeline is a bit murky, though. The books take place following patch 2.4 Fury of the Sunwell, easily evident by its prominent mentions of Kalec and Anveena. Which means we mis-placed this in our reread and should have read it much later. If that’s the case, then the readers would likely already know the big “mystery.” But.

The story also contains Draenei and Broken who apparently don’t know who the races of Azeroth are and are astounded to see a group of Paladins. It also heavily referenced the quest chain in Shadowmoon where you end up killing Zuluhed and rescuing Karynaku. That apparently hasn’t happened in the manga’s timeline and I genuinely wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a callback or foreshadowing to that questline, which is one example of poor craft in a story full of them.

You may notice I’m talking more about continuity than contents and that’s because figuring out the puzzling timeline is the most interesting part of this duology. It’s full of characters the author cares about but that readers aren’t given any reason to. There’s a cute little stinger with Malygos at the Nexus, but that again just brings me back around to where you can place these books.

And…all the…characters talk like…this.

I’m no stranger to either comics or manga, and I was really looking forward to this. Unfortunately, it leaves me with a sense of ennui and dread for when we do get to The Sunwell Trilogy.

(NB: I have an acknowledged dislike of Knaak as an author, and I attempted to account for that and read with an open mind. I’m not perfect, though, so if you do like Knaak’s work, you may well enjoy this.)

Shoryl says:

I’d like to start by getting some issues I had with the design choices out of the way:

• I understand the desire to have narration in a different font than dialogue, but the narration needs to be in a readable font. The small type combined with the faux Olde English font made it very difficult to read.
• Art is a huge part of manga, as it should be telling at least half the story. While I might enjoy a piece or two in the art style presented here, I found it distracting. It may have worked as a style for color work, but this was black and white, and there just wasn’t enough variation or texture in the images to work for me in that format.

Now, on to the story itself. I thought I might appreciate this a bit more than I did because I like dragons, I was curious about what Deathwing was really up to in Beyond the Dark Portal, and I suspected it had something to do with the nether dragons. But the writing was lackluster, the story didn’t have any particularly interesting beats, and the characters were just none I’d ever heard of. By this point, I should have heard of somebody!

While I was quite pleased that this story had very little to do with orcs, I was disappointed that there wasn’t really much to it. It was mostly a dragon acting like a petulant child and a paladin who was infatuated with her to the point of distracting him from his duties.

Tour #19: Unbroken

We’ve taken all of the printed and in-game material and arranged it into a roughly thematic order within each expansion and we plan to go through the story using a number of thematically appropriate toons. We’ll be discussion our impressions here. Be warned: our discussions will contain spoilers for all currently published Warcraft material. This isn’t meant for first timers, but for old timers like us to experience it in a new way.You can find our tentative list here.

Sonaira says:

I really, really want to like this story. I feel like I should like it, but when I’m finished reading it – which I’ve done several times now – it simply doesn’t have the effect it should have. In part, I think it’s that I simply can’t let go of the meta. I know this was written to explain the Draenei/Broken retcon. And I know that it was to introduce the shaman class to the Alliance. And so I can’t help but see it through that lens. And the thing is…the Broken make no sense. Here, it’s an evil red mist that something-something no longer can feel the Light. On Argus, it’s…what? Is it the same red mist? Was that tested on the Draenei who remained before being used on the Draenei on Draenor? Maybe! But it doesn’t really hold together on its own, and it’s more of a headcanon than anything. I’m usually fine with retcons, but this one doesn’t sit right at all. Why and how would the Legion even figure out how to separate the Draenei from the Light? So. Many. Questions.

The other problem I have with this is that Nobundo is tormented by the thought of female Draenei – and only female Draenei. The framing here is just so unconsidered that it just throws me completely off. Why are the orcs only tormenting women? Why are the women not fighting? Why is Nobundo only tortured by the thought of women dying? It’s a sad, tired trope, and I’m not pleased to see it here.

Shoryl says:

There was a lot that was good that came from this story, but in and of itself, there were some problems. First was the use of “red mist” to cause illness in the Draenei. With the way the orcs worked at the time of taking Shattrath, this would have been used everywhere.

I found it a bit hard to think of the very proud and enlightened Draenei being so prone to such a level of bigotry. Especially treating those who had stayed behind to fight so poorly. I can’t imagine that they didn’t figure out that everyone who became broken had been at Shattrath during that battle.

Random Thoughts

• Here we see Akama before he was retconned for Warlords of Draenor. There’s no way someone like Nobundo wouldn’t have known the Exarchs’ names, if not who they were.
• The ideas of how the elements helped Nobundo are fascinating, particularly in contrast to Harbinger: Gul’dan. I do think the parallels here are intentional.
• I am also annoyed at the whole thing about there only being female Draenei being tortured, and thus torturing Nobundo, but I don’t have anything more to say than Sona already did.

Tour #18: Beyond the Dark Portal

We’ve taken all of the printed and in-game material and arranged it into a roughly thematic order within each expansion and we plan to go through the story using a number of thematically appropriate toons. We’ll be discussion our impressions here. Be warned: our discussions will contain spoilers for all currently published Warcraft material. This isn’t meant for first timers, but for old timers like us to experience it in a new way.You can find our tentative list here.

Sonaira says:

I ended up liking this quite a lot, though mostly the Alliance side. That’s probably not surprising, since I’ve not been shy about my very clear biases, but it’s more than that – until we get to it in the Tour, I will have never done TBC Horde-side. There’s no resonance for me there, particularly since this is the umpteenth retread of “Orcs Behaving Badly.”

Metzen briefly mentions trying to tie Beyond the Dark Portal the Warcraft II expansion with what they were developing as the actual world beyond the dark portal for TBC, and I think that’s really where it shines. You meet Danath Trollbane and Khadgar extremely early on, and I had literally no idea who they were. This is a fantastic book for those who came into the Warcraft universe with Classic or Burning Crusade. It would have saved a lot of me wondering why I was following around some old wizard’s pink elemental. As I’ve mentioned earlier in the Tour, the only thing I knew about Turalyon and Alleria is that people were upset that they were “missing.”

And if you’re curious, this book does absolutely nothing to change my opinion that Ner’zhul is a thrice-damned fool who never learns. Here he’s played by both Gul’dan (again!) and Teron Gorefiend. I mean, I’m pretty much okay with Ner’zhul being tortured, though I shouldn’t be. And I still don’t get quite how it went from this to Kiljaeden dreaming up the scourge and the making him the Lich King.

Random Thoughts

• The rifts bug me for some reason. It’s like they needed a reason for the portal to open again, and couldn’t come up with anything better than “um, guess we didn’t really close it last time?”
• Oh, hi Genn
• I had never really wondered where the Skull of Gul’dan had gone after he died in the Tomb of Sargeras but before Illidan…ate him, I think.
• They seem to be setting up a lot further down the road than I realized. Here we see Genn for the first time, and set up Garrosh appearing in TBC proper (which I’ve only heard about).
• Even further down the line, I could easily trace the evolution of the bloodthirsty, death-seeking Alleria with the Alleria we meet again in Legion.
• So. Teron Gorefiend. This is the first quest I can recall that made the character into a fool. And in this first installment, I wasn’t yet tired with the conceit. (I had no idea who he was when I was doing his quests, and my character wouldn’t have had either.) That would change as more and more quests reduced the character into a gullible caricature, but here it served to make you really, really want to head into Black Temple and kill him.
• The titular Warlords of Warlords of Draenor make a strong showing here, and I’ll be interested to revisit this once we get to that expansion. As I recall, they are much more interesting in this original timeline than they end up being in the expansion.

Shoryl says:

This one took quite a while for me to warm up to it. I believe I’ve already mentioned Orc Fatigue? Well, here’s another book full of orcs vs humans. I’m beginning to realize that my problem here isn’t specifically the orcs, though that is a piece of it. It’s that just about every piece of writing has to have more than one paragraph explaining everything I’ve read or witnessed what seems like 100 times now.

Once we actually went through the dark portal it got a lot more interesting. I really enjoyed meeting the Draenei for the first time, as well as seeing orcs being afraid of something. It was nice to see “monster races” as friends of the Alliance.

It was also interesting to read Turalyon and Alleria being quarrelsome, since I knew how that would end. Though it was painful to watch Khadgar fumble with not being able to fix it, even though he wanted to.

Random Thoughts

• Teron Gorefiend is both an interesting and annoying character. Interesting because this isn’t the last we’ll see of him; annoying because he will make a fool of the player character in TBC. At least, as Sona mentioned, it was one of the first times it happens (The first time I recall is in the night elf starting area, where you help a satyr.)
• While Turalyon and Alleria were at least somewhat known to me, I didn’t ever understand why there were dwarves in Shadowmoon Valley until this reading. Nor why they got tattoos and we couldn’t have them.
• There’s also the entire side point of Deathwing going through the portal as well… and what the heck he was up to.

Tours #16-17: Ahn’Qiraj

We’ve taken all of the printed and in-game material and arranged it into a roughly thematic order within each expansion and we plan to go through the story using a number of thematically appropriate toons. We’ll be discussion our impressions here. Be warned: our discussions will contain spoilers for all currently published Warcraft material. This isn’t meant for first timers, but for old timers like us to experience it in a new way.You can find our tentative list here.

Sonaira says:

Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj

It starts out promising enough – you fight Rajaxx, who made a rather importance appearance in War of the Shifting Sands. Killing the killer of Valstann was triumphant – except he was only the second boss (an issue that will continue to be a theme). After that … well, who knows? You get the incredibly beautfiul models of the tol’vir, but then a string of bosses with no particular lore attached to them. I did, while making sure I wasn’t missing something, find this link on Wowpedia for the Monsters of Ahn’Qiraj, which at least helps fill in the lore around the raid.

t adds a lot of depth, for instance, to know that Moam drew on the power of Arygos, Merithra and Caelestrasz, or that Ossirian is so wanted (even having a head retrieval quest!) because he was able to defeat Grakkarond. There may be hints to this in game, but if so, I completely missed them.

Temple of Ahn’Qiraj

More of the same, here, but without the lore backing it up from off-site. The most interesting thing of course is that this is the first time we would encounter an Old God. It had been teased by very few quests in Silithus, but lore was still thin on the ground. We knew it was a Old God, and that it had corrupted Mara’lith’s wife … and that’s about it.

It’s not surprising that C’Thun is the first Old God in the game, since Cthulu is easily the most recognizable Lovecraftian horror (though in reality it more closely resembles the description of Shoggoth, but okay).

Did the thematic tour help with appreciating this zone?

In general, there’s simply not a lot to hold Ahn’Qiraj together, lore-wise. Ahn’Qiraj, instead of being the culmination of lore, really serves as the beginning of the lore of the Old Gods, which we’ll continuously keep coming back to

Shoryl says:

Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj

The Ruins of Ahn’Qiraj did not, in themselves, have much lore. As Sonaira mentioned, we (Sona and I) learned the lore of many of the bosses much later, even after reading the information we’d learned existed outside the game. I think one of the difficulties was that in that time, it was rare to see bosses with RP elements to them. Oh how that would change!

Temple of Ahn’Qiraj

Much like the ruins, the temple of Ahn’qiraj didn’t have much lore. We wondered aloud why there were dragons inside, and read their quest text, to learn that we were looking to see if their buddies who’d been trapped along with the Qiraji were around. While those dragons are in the Temple (and friendly), their essence is being used by a boss over in the ruins.

And then there’s the random old god at the end. Which would become an interesting tendril into so much more of the lore of WoW, but in its first kernel felt more like a last ditch effort at putting one more Easter Egg in for Lovecraft fans.

Did the thematic tour help with appreciating this zone?

The biggest help was that we went hunting for information and learned a whole lot that we didn’t know about what happened to Arygos, Merithra and Caelestrasz; and also that the Anubiseth are more or less war machines

More Pictures

Tours #14-15: the Silithus War Effort

We’ve taken all of the printed and in-game material and arranged it into a roughly thematic order within each expansion and we plan to go through the story using a number of thematically appropriate toons. We’ll be discussion our impressions here. Be warned: our discussions will contain spoilers for all currently published Warcraft material. This isn’t meant for first timers, but for old timers like us to experience it in a new way.You can find our tentative list here.

As uploaded to WoWHead by user Maylin

Sonaira says:

I wasn’t playing WoW before the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj, and they were all long opened before I joined. I’ve said before, though, that I would have liked to have experienced it and that that’s one of the things I’m looking forward to in Classic. It’s interesting that we have two short stories and one trailer that choose to highlight the effort of entire realms to open the gates. It turns the war effort into it’s own piece of lore about the game. It makes me realize that WoW has been around for 14 years, easily long enough to have generated its own oral and written storytelling.

The War Effort

This is a neat little short story that made both Shoryl and I miss classic Menethil. There’s not much here – just and old fisherman supplying the troops, but it was an excellent conceit to take something so momentous and allow the whole server to experience some part of it – even if only one person would ever be the Scarab Lord on their realm. It actually does a pretty good job of expanding the feeling of Silithus out into the larger world.

Patch 1.9 The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj Trailer

Whew, this is an old one. It’s interesting to look back at a trailer that was entirely filmed in game. And yet, for all it’s lack of finesse, it’s exciting. It’s exciting to see a bunch of characters milling around. It’s exciting to see a small shot of the scarab gong being rung and the gates to Ahn’Qiraj opening. Given the ad copy, I actually wonder if what we were seeing was from a friends and family pilot, or from the opening on Medivh. I would assume the former, but the fact that it makes me wonder shows how charming it is.

Did the thematic tour help with appreciating this zone?

In this case, again, not as much as we’d like, partially because there’s no way to experience this war effort in game. However, I do think reading the two short stories and watching the trailer so close together do create some resonance between the three descriptions from three very different directions. It does help to show what a huge effort this really was.

Shoryl says:

The War Effort

This charming little story really reminded me of server identity from prior to the entry of cross-realm anything. There were people on servers who you knew you could go to for fish or herbs or ore, and not only would they have them, they would always offer you a fair price for their goods… not unlike how you knew good tanks and good healers and DPS who would stick it out when things got rough. This would have been the guy we all bought fish from when we didn’t have time to fish before raids ourselves.

Patch 1.9 The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj Trailer

Now this was a real throwback moment for me. As I said in our last post, I remember the crashing servers during the Opening of the Gates, and I also remember preparing for and doing these raids. All that milling about outside is perfectly normal.

Did the thematic tour help with appreciating this zone?

While these did make me think wistfully of days gone by, and gives us a glimpse of understanding of why we were fighting Qiraji, and then… an old god? these stories didn’t really do much more than give us a sense of the proportion of what raiding was.

Tour #13: Silithus

We’ve taken all of the printed and in-game material and arranged it into a roughly thematic order within each expansion and we plan to go through the story using a number of thematically appropriate toons. We’ll be discussion our impressions here. Be warned: our discussions will contain spoilers for all currently published Warcraft material. This isn’t meant for first timers, but for old timers like us to experience it in a new way.You can find our tentative list here.

This is the only “classic” zone we’ll be doing (until Classic itself launches), and we chose to do it because it was largely untouched by Cataclysm. If you tell the nice bronze dragon that you’d like to go back in time, you’re right back to an embattled Cenarion Hold, trying to figure out what’s woken up the silithid and the qiraji.

Sonaira says:

Questing Experience

Sadly, you only get hints of what’s really going on while you’re questing. If you know your science fiction, though, you’ll be a little suspicious when you see Commander Mar’alith and a quest named “Into the Maw of Madness.” The very final quest – the turn in for Into the Maw of Madness, in fact, is the only time you’ll hear C’Thun mentioned by name, though the letter you find from Brann Bronzebeard (as a drop quest) does mention that he’s found a real Old God. Shoryl and I actually had a discussion about this, because nothing directly leading up to this (the short story), nor after it (the war effort and the raids) actually mention Old Gods. And if memory serves, Old Gods weren’t widely mentioned in the classic zones either. Was this the first mention of the Old Gods?

It’s also interesting trying to figure out what the Twilight’s Hammer is up to. I recall encountering them briefly during Classic, but not extensively. Here, they go from being a nuisance in the beginning to gradually becoming more of a concern to the people you talk to. It’s clear that there’s something going on, what with wind stones that talk to “Dukes” (they won’t talk to you) and whatnot. It was also interesting to run into Highlord Demitrian, tucked up behind some cultists, who would like to tell you about his lord Thunderaan. This would be well-known to you if you were playing a shaman during Legion, but was a random bit of lore in the middle of nowhere for us. We’ve gotten so used to the Twilight’s Hammer, though, that it’s interesting to see a lot of NPCs running around asking just exactly what they’re up to.

Character Selection

We originally chose tauren because we needed to be a race that existed during classic, and we had already picked our Alliance race, which didn’t. It went something like this:

Shoryl: I want to play a shaman
Sona: Well, we can play draenei then. But we should have Horde toons who are a different class.
Shoryl: … Tauren or trolls?
Sona: Tauren could be druids back then. Want to be druids?

So tauren it was. While the tauren aspect didn’t bring much resonance for this zone, it was an excellent, if unintended choice to bring druids. It felt like we were sent there for a reason – not just because we were “adventurers,” but because we were there to help out the Cenarion Circle. Good choice for this one.

Did the thematic tour help with appreciating this zone?

Not much this time. There simply wasn’t much leading up to it, just the short story, which served more to illustrate important facts about Fandral before Cataclysm than telling the full story of the War of the Shifting Sands. In the end, the only lore information here came from the zone itself: the bugs are restless, the land is being destroyed, and there are weird warlocks everywhere. Go figure out why and fix it. I do remember there being quests in Un’Goro and Tanaris about why there were silithid hives so far outside of Silithus, but I believe those are gone or mostly gone after the Cata revamp. The “old” Silithus really is a zone out of time now.

Shoryl says:

Questing Experience

This really illustrated the questing experience from classic, in comparison with how we quest today. There was one central hub, with three sort of secondary places you might get quests; and a ton of back and forth. I don’t think the questing really did a very good job of conveying the mystery of the Silithid becoming more active, though.

Character Selection

Being a druid really helped me feel like there was a reason for my character to be here. Otherwise, the small Horde area had so little in terms of questing left that it felt more like a token presence.

Did the thematic tour help with appreciating this zone?

One of the other things Sona and I discussed while we flew back and forth was game design, and how this zone was designed to always be traversed on “foot”. The zone was small and flat, and anything in the mountains surrounding it had fairly clearly defined paths from the main flat area. Sticking to the roads in this land would have, indeed, been safer.

But while Silithus, in general, gave us a glimpse into the past, I don’t think the story was provided in a compelling way. In general, it threw into stark relief how important the revamp of the old world was to the game in Cataclysm.

Tour #12.5: Patch Notes

Sonaira says:

We just had a great show on Girls Gone WoW talking all about our Thematic Tour of Azeroth (and Surroundings)! (You can find that show at GGW #355.) During the show, I opened The Grand Spreadsheet for the first time in a long time.

Oh.

Oh my. I appreciate the love everyone has shown the list, I do. But as an inveterate list-maker, I knew I could do so much better.

So in the grand tradition of WoW, I’d like to give you the Thematic Tour of Azeroth (and Surroundings) v.2 patch notes:

Silithus no longer appears both right before The Burning Crusade and right before Cataclysm

New! Additional List Items:

• Animations that should have already been there but inexplicably weren’t!
• A list of the thematically appropriate toons that will be going on each part of the tour
• Updates for Battle For Azeroth Patch 8.0 and 8.1
• Links to previous posts (in the Title column)
• Links to online media sources (in the Type column)

Interface Changes:

• The numbering system has been unborked
• The list is now an actual spreadsheet instead of a PDF, so now you too can sort and filter to your hearts’ content

When we post Tour #13, the intro text will contain the link to the new, improved spreadsheet.

Tour #12: War of the Shifting Sands

We’ve taken all of the printed and in-game material and arranged it into a roughly thematic order within each expansion and we plan to go through the story using a number of thematically appropriate toons. We’ll be discussion our impressions here. Be warned: our discussions will contain spoilers for all currently published Warcraft material. This isn’t meant for first timers, but for old timers like us to experience it in a new way.You can find our tentative list here.

Sonaira says:

I thought I had read this, but while I remember the events, I couldn’t have said where I first learned it. It might not have been until we discovered we’d been complicit in poisoning Malfurion, but it’s hard to say. At any rate, I found the flashback parts of this story to be a little weak and rushed, with one exception. In Chapter 2, we get this nice bit of possible foreshadowing.

Shiromar watched as Fandral stood guard, looking out from Fire Plume Ridge, the steam of the volcanic vents rising behind him, the orange lava glow illuminating his face[…]

I just finished reading Before the Storm and I feel like there’s an interesting discussion that could have happened between Fandral and Velen and tragically dead sons.

Overall, I actually liked the framing chapters a bit better. I wasn’t playing during the Scarab Lord race, but it was nice to see the nods to it here. I thought it was also a nice choice to have the POV character be a night elf who would have been here for the original conflict. The Opening of Ahn’Qiraj is actually one of the things I’m most looking forward to in Classic WoW.

Also, there are too many Warcraft characters who (1) are willing to believe their dead loved ones are speaking to them, and (2) have suddenly become evil. (See also, Ner’zhul)

Shoryl says:

It took me a little bit to realize that this is a story framed to explain the players’ perspective of the opening of the gates. I remember when this happened on my server, and feverishly trying to stay connected because the entire server population was in Silithus.

On my list of characters that I dislike because of their shallow reasons for being evil is Fandral Staghelm. In this one moment, his grief is reasonable. But 1,000 years later, he could give it a rest.

Tour #11: Cycle of Hatred

We’ve taken all of the printed and in-game material and arranged it into a roughly thematic order within each expansion and we plan to go through the story using a number of thematically appropriate toons. We’ll be discussion our impressions here. Be warned: our discussions will contain spoilers for all currently published Warcraft material. This isn’t meant for first timers, but for old timers like us to experience it in a new way.You can find our tentative list here.

Sonaira says:

I literally made no notes while I read this, because this was just…sort of there. We have another example of racists on either side, with Thrall and Jaina desperately trying to hold it together. The only thing this book made me think was “didn’t they destroy Northwatch Hold in one of the expansions?” (Yes, they did. As part of The Fall of Theramore, which was where the Horde passed the Moral Event Horizon as far as I’m concerned.)

Any road, this one was just flat and disappointing. The narrative arc was as unsubtle as usual, but there also weren’t any minor characters to really get attached to.

Shoryl says:

About the only part of this I found interesting at all is that we finally find out how Aegwynn ends up being Jaina’s chancellor.

Oh, and look, it was demons all along. Because that’s new. It doesn’t excuse the blatant racism portrayed in the book, especially since I suspect neither the orcs nor the humans in the Burning Blade cult knew about the members of the other race.