Filed under: The Burning Crusade

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how, but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

If you remember Anne's excellent Elune is a naaru post from a few months back, then you'll know how this works. If not, then I'll explain. Basically, what follows is a huge post full of supposition and speculation that takes established lore (including some new lore from Cataclysm) and uses it as a framework to support a contention that is not currently stated by Blizzard. It's probably not what's actually going on, but like that guy you know who won't shut up about the grays, we're going to ride the crazy rocket all the way to violent crash landing town. (I promise you the Yogg-Saron post is coming, but in writing it, I ended up going down these roads for a bit.)

Deathwing. The destroyer, Blackwing Greatfather to the gronn of Outland, Xaxas to the night elves, formerly Neltharion the Earthwarder and still referred to among some of the earth elementals. The Dark One. Neltharion the Betrayer, Blood's Shadow, self-proclaimed Aspect of Death. The Unmaker of Worlds. Many are his titles, earned in acts of rampage and devastation from the time of the War of Ancients (when he used the Demon Soul to annihilate the Blue Dragonflight) right up to the Second War, when he helped the orcs make off with magical artifacts for Ner'zhul. Soon, the fury of Deathwing will be the focus of an entire story arc with the release of the Cataclysm expansion.

One of his titles, however, interested me. Deathwing now claims the mantle of death itself, which is interesting considering his relationship to the Old Gods, who as we know have a death god already. Furthermore, Deathwing now calls himself the Unmaker of Worlds. Now, we could just dismiss this as the typical grandiosity of a being whose pride and arrogance matches his power, but when you really start to think about it, it sounds much less like a boast and more like simple fact. Deathwing has indeed unmade a world. The preparations for this Cataclysm go back much further than we'd expected and have already borne stark fruit.

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. This week, Matthew Rossi's rabbit Grimalkin is using her priestly powers of mind control to answer your questions about World of Warcraft.

Hello.

Do you have any greens, or perhaps a carrot or two? No? Some pellets, perhaps? Or a banana chip? I enjoy banana chips and would gladly eat one now if you happened to have one.

You don't have any of that? I disapprove. But as I told Matt this morning while he was giving me some carrots, I'll fulfill this duty of answering your World of Warcraft questions. You're sure you don't have any banana chips? Not even one?

Hmmph.

Salty asks:

When Cataclysm starts up, will us 80's have a rested xp bonus?

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how, but do you know the why? Each week Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

If you haven't read the short story "Unbroken" by Micky Neilsen on the official site, please do so. Not only does it give you a real sense of the development of the draenei during the Rise of the Horde period and after, it helps one understand the tone of this series of posts exploring the elemental spirits of the Warcraft universe.

We experience elementals on both Azeroth and Outland as we play World of Warcraft. While some pretty significant differences between those two worlds and their elementals exist (for instance, there are four named elemental lords involved in the events of Azerothian history who do not seem to have nearly the same influence on the development of Draenor before it became Outland), the spirits themselves seem to share similarities worth exploring.

Unbroken - Mickey Neilsen

The relationship between the elements and the shaman is one of synchronicity. The shaman's influence helps to calm and unite us, just as our influence enriches and fulfills the shaman. When you have completed your training, you will be able to call upon the elements in times of need. If the elements deem your cause just, we will assist you in any way possible.

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Practiced on both Azeroth (by the tauren) and Draenor (by the orcs) the art of shamanism is more akin to symbiosis than that practiced by arcanists (who control or command mystical forces) or priests and paladins (who seem to either supplicate or demand the power of the Light). And while druids and shamans share certain similarities, a druid's power comes more from a relationship with the Emerald Dream that suffuses the living world and less with the component elements. Shamans concern themselves with the complex interplay between the elemental building blocks of existence. It is almost his role to act as a mediator, allowing them to work in harmony together.

The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, those lovable, squeezable, strokable bundles of pure joy who seethe with a burning inner fire, a rage that can only be quenched in blood. Matthew Rossi tries quenching it in delicious caffeinated beverages. You'd be surprised how often that works.

I can't even believe I'm typing this, but frankly, enough is enough. Yet another long thread about warrior AoE tanking in Cataclysm and frankly, I'm sick to death of the debate. Let's break this down into its simplest component parts.

1. AoE tanking is going to be cut back in Cataclysm, as will AoE DPS.
2. There will be more use of CC and more danger that trying to tank a lot of adds can kill the tank.
3. With 1 and 2 being the case, warriors most likely have enough tools for multi-mob tanking situations.

Ghostcrawler - Re: Twitter chat on Warrior AoE tanking

Our goals are that you won't be spending as much of your tanking time AE tanking in Cataclysm as you did in Lich King. A second goal is that when you are AE tanking, you should use different abilities than when you are single-target tanking. A third goal is that when you are AE tanking, you should use more than one (or maybe two) abilities. None of those seem contradictory. ...

Maybe I'm misremembering something, but the goal going into LK was that warriors should be able to AE tank rather than every group using paladins for trash, and that casters should be able to use their AE spells, otherwise what are they there for? We succeeded in both of those, but a little too well on the latter to the extent that anything with more than 1 mob became a job for Blizzard / Hurricane / Mind Sear, etc.

In Cataclysm, there will be more threat to the tank of dying if you try to just AE tank every pull. Likewise, AE damage won't be quite as awesome so that single targeting things will probably be a better strategy when there are say 3-5 adds. If it's a dozen twilight whelps, then sure, AE away.

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Burning Crusade launched in January 2007, and from that point until November 2008, level 70 was the endgame of World of Warcraft. For roughly 23 months (with staggered content releases, with the Black Temple launching later, then Zul'Aman and then Sunwell/Magister's) we all leveled to 70, ran heroic instances and Karazhan to gear up, and then some of us began making our way through Gruul's Lair, Magtheridon's Lair, Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep before moving on to Mount Hyjal and the Black Temple.

Zul'Aman came out to offer scaled challenges (the prototype of the hard mode) with a timed run to get the Amani War Bear, and of course no one can forget the final big content patch, Fury of the Sunwell, which gave some content for just about any level of gameplay from casual daily quest grinding to hardcore raiding. Gameplay was still very stratified in Burning Crusade -- there were a handful of guilds progressing through the endgame content (which was still tiered into a couple of 10-man raids, with the majority being 25-man) but most people did dailies, ran some BGs or played Arenas (which debuted with Burning Crusade as well).

With Cataclysm previews coming out and Wrath in its last major content phase (Icecrown Citadel and the upcoming Chamber of Aspects raid being pretty much the end of Wrath's end game) we can start to look back at how the last expansion unfolded and the life cycle of an expansion in World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft in China continues to walk a rocky path. NetEase, the company currently licensed to operate WoW's The Burning Crusade expansion in China, lost Li Riqiang, a senior director for the WoW business unit on the 24th of February, 2010. There is no word on why he left, and the company is keeping mum on details about the departure and his replacement.

This comes on the heels of a 62% jump in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2009 generated since NetEase was able to light up the TBC servers after resolving their disputes with the government, which had prevented them from launching the service in China until September 2009. That revenue increase was accompanied by lower profit margins, however, as NetEase must pay hefty licensing fees to Activision Blizzard.

The fact that there are still Chinese players who are willing to play an obsolete and no longer maintained version of the game is a little strange to me-- many Chinese players simply started over on Taiwanese servers. Judging by the amount of red tape that's being wrapped around anything to do with Blizzard, I suspect we'll see Cataclysm released before Chinese players can play Wrath of the Lich King without connecting to a server in Taiwan.

Welcome once again my friends to the lore that never ends, we're so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside Know Your Lore.

This week, we look at the aftermath of the Second War and the years between it and the Third. A lot happened in this intermezzo between the drums of two wars, because in general it seems that Azeroth basically reels from crisis to crisis. I should also point out that in at least one case, a major lore figure dies in one source and yet is said to be alive later in a previous source. If you pay attention to Warcraft lore this will no doubt not surprise you terribly.

At the end of the Second War, the Alliance forces destroyed the Dark Portal in a rather impressive bit of CGI for the time. Generally, it was hoped that Khadgar's little bit of pyrotechnics would end the threat of the Horde forever, as (the theory went) there would be no more reinforcements coming in through the portal. This act effectively broke the back of orcish resistance to the Alliance of Lordaeron's forces, and in so doing ended the war, as even Orgrim Doomhammer found himself captured and chained by the Alliance. Only Kilrogg Deadeye and those few forces directly under his command managed to evade capture and remained free. This would come back to cost the Alliance. However, in the immediate aftermath of the War, the nations of the Alliance found themselves divided on the question of what to do with the orcs, many of whom had sunk into a strange despondent lethargy with their defeat. Should they all be killed? If not, what else could be done with them?

In a fascinating post over at Gamesindustry.biz, Blizzard COO Paul Sams takes great pains to emphasize that Blizzard will ship no game before its time (to rip off an old wine slogan): "We will not pull the rug out from under them and ship it before it's done, so people feel that when they out their heart and soul into a game, they'll be able to deliver the game they envisioned."

This is interesting to me on a couple of levels: the first is the long time between the original idea that World of Warcraft would get an expansion a year and the actual time (more than two) that it took for The Burning Crusade to ship. It seems that over time they must feel they've gotten more proficient at the development process since Wrath of the Lich King and now Cataclysm seem to be getting ready to ship even faster. You can read the excerpt from Sams at gamesindustry.biz (which requires creating a new account) as well as a full interview with Sams and executive producer Rob Pardo.

For a while I wasn't sure if I'd continue playing World of Warcraft into the next expansion. I was by no means planning on giving up my gaming habit, but I really felt like I was ready for something new: either another MMO or one of the latest generation consoles. Many pros and cons were weighed, and I have decided to stick with WoW for at least one more expansion. It was a difficult decision for me but in the end it was the rocks that won me over.

Yes, the rocks.

Some instances and raids, you understand why you're there. Icecrown, for instance, makes a lot of sense to me. I get why we're running the five mans (trying to sneak into the Citadel while the Scourge is focused on the front door) and the raid (that didn't work out so hot so brute force it is!) I always enjoyed Scarlet Monastery and had no difficulty with why I was running the place either as Alliance or Horde. Alliance, you were cleaning out a nasty pack of gibbering mouth-breather sociopathic xenophobes who were totally freaking insane, and Horde... same deal, plus they were killing people you actually knew.

As we're heading towards the final confrontation with the Lich King and the end of this chapter of the World of Warcraft saga, we end up reminded of how much of Wrath of the Lich King was designed and never used, or used sparingly, or even resurrected later, fittingly enough. But not only do we have loads of models that either weren't used at all or were used later in places completely unrelated to where they were supposed to drop, we have entire zones that either didn't happen at all, or did but which don't seem to go anywhere.

Wow, that was a year, huh? From the dizzying highs of fury spec in Naxxramas to the somewhat less dizzying highs of Ulduar, arms' constant evolution and protection spec's astonishing makeover as the expansion launched, 2009 was a year that saw warriors sway from top DPS and solid tanks as if in some kind of gale force wind. Armor Penetration went from a stat we'd take if we had to and is now one of our top DPS stats, Block got a makeover that led to changes in how abilities like Shield Block and Shield Slam calculate, and in general we saw the effects of stat inflation on gear really have an effect on us and how we stack up to other classes as tanks and DPS. If you were a tanking warrior in Naxx on January 1st. 2009, for example, you may have had upwards of 35k health. (To be honest, it's hard for me to remember, it may have gotten up to 38k if you stacked stamina.) Now, a geared TotGC tank walking into ICC can pretty easily hit 54 to 55k health fully raid buffed.

And it's only going up from here. Icecrown Citadel promises much improved itemization as well as crazy old school procs that should have warriors, be they DPS or tanks, salivating.

Warriors have definitely had their ups and downs this year, but I think we can say we're ending the year on a fairly high note. Fury DPS has managed to get back to a competitive place with the new weapons, arms still lags behind but has solid PvP and PvE uses, and protection is quite possibly the single strongest tanking class by virtue of sheer flexibility: other tanks may have more health, more armor, or more AoE threat, but protection's suite of abilities includes standouts like Shockwave, Vigilance, Spell Reflection and Warbringer, making it possibly #2 in every single tanking category when no class can claim to be #1 in them all. Let's look at some changes and how they shook out for warriors.

From time to time it occurs to me that my character, were I a better roleplayer, has actually been to a whole lot of places. He's seen a ridiculous amount of things and would have a really hard time settling down on a farm somewhere on Azeroth or whatever it is old adventurers do when they're tired of killing old gods, elemental monstrosities, Dragon Aspects, ancient liches, and Illidan Stormrage, to name just a few.

It really occurred to me on a visit to Darnassus, in fact, to turn in the quest "A Cautious Return" that I should be able to do more than just hand the dude a note. I mean, I killed Illidan! I've kicked Kil'Jaeden's butt back down the Sunwell myself! I went back in time and fought Archimonde. (By the way, Tyrande, thanks for the slow fall item and all.) Lore wise, I've pretty much seen everything at this point and soon, I'll be running off to fight Arthas. You'd think I could say "hey, take it easy" to that Sentinel for the poor guy.

When you think about all our characters have seen (even new characters leveled from 1 to 80 with this expansion have traveled to an alien world and then to a frozen wasteland stuffed with titan relics and undead like the worst pizza crust ever) these are some really experienced folks (hence that bar on your interface, I guess) and I find myself wondering what kind of stories they'd tell. So now I ask you, what stories would your character tell? What lore moments were the ones you think he or she would be more moved by, impressed by, or pleased to have been a part of? For that matter, which ones were the best for you as a player?

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Michael Sacco will be your host today.

It's my little brother's birthday today -- fourteen years old, what the heck -- so today's Queue is quick and dirty so I can get the caking and presenting done.

Lochlorien asked...

Will we be able to wield Frostmourne after we defeat Arthas?

Nope, the developers opted not to make Frostmourne an equippable weapon, replacing it as the Icecrown legendary weapon with Shadowmourne.