The Shattrath event had nothing to do with Kael dying and everything to do with the blood elves realizing their leader went insane and was now at the Sunwell and trying to summon in a demon lord. Onyxia was retconned into Varian and his group killing her (and the orc at Wyrmrest says nothing about her). Kel'thuzad was changed into a Argent Dawn group lead by Darion and not the players and never is it mentioned that the player was the one who defeated him. Nefarian and other bosses such as C'Thun remain as beings we have killed but that can change in the future.

The Baron Rivendare book is just a journal of a Thuzadin Necromancer taking Rivendares signet ring to get into Naxxramas followed by him getting killed by the initial Argent Dawn attack and being raised into undeath for the level 80 instance. The Rivendare in Naxxramas is the same Rivendare that was in Stratholme. Sure he should be headless but I'd imagine it came down to Blizzard having much better things to do than to edit his model.

Well, I finally got caught up, 177 pages took me a few weeks .. but I did. And I had a few thoughts as I read through the vast knowledge you guys have both created, cited and argued about. (Also, first post jitters, so if it isn't up to par with the standard this thread has already, my apologies.)

In no particular order, the first thing I thought of, was regarding Sara AKA Yogg-Saron. A lot of thought has gone into explaining this as being remnants of an axed Azjol-Nerub Raid, which is fine and such, but I was wondering, what if it is much simpler than that? Many surmised it was absurd that if it took battalions of Dwarves, and then a 'rag tag group of random heroes™' to actually get past the gates, how did some Vrykul woman get all the way to the basement? (And for that matter, how would she have gotten to [Location of Yogg-Saron] in Azjol-Nerub?) What if she merely was meant to give a sense of unease to the raid, i.e. "We know she's a baddie, and an image/avatar/not-true-form,.. but who is it?" Yeah, we all knew it was an Old God, ... we read the NPC dialogue/quest text ... but maybe Average Joe / Josephine didn't? (It is equally possible though that Blizzard just wanted to put someone in the instance to scream all the time and cause rage in raiders.)

Related to this, is the idea and much discussed topic of the Loken 'Hey Father, i'm doin' it for you!' text. Was this really a leftover piece of text/speech from the intended original 'Father' of Ulduar? I think it's equally possible that Yogg-Saron pretended to be his Father,... just like Thorim thought Sif was back, is it really so far fetched? Sure, it may have been neater if it was an actual Father, but why is it so 'Blizzard dropped the ball, hack/slashed it together' for it to simply be another Yogg-Saron trick? (On a related note, Priests are referred to as Father, is it possible Loken revered Yogg-Saron's guidance, or was showing respect/submission, rather than genealogy?) I don't think either are hard to believe, honestly.

Last Ulduar related thought, was regarding the 'seemingly randomness' of the Iron Council. They are an optional boss, in that you can get to and kill Yogg-Saron without dropping in for cookies, but (and I say this without having done the ARCHIVUM questline), since they drop the ARCHIVUM disc, wouldn't that place them in a similar position as Illidan's Illidari Council and Gruul's Maulgar Council? (Since we have come to understand Algalon as the true final boss of Ulduar). On a side question/note, is Algalon's room behind them? I haven't, again, actually spent much time looking at his fight location, so that's why i'm unsure about that portion. Also, related to this, would be a partial explanation to the reason for the dead Iron Dwarves outside of General Vezax and Yogg-Saron's room, if they were (originally) sent to contain the problem,.. since some are still good (and protecting Algalon?).

Sartharion is another great topic, and it's very plainly stated multiple times that there was no flavor text, quest text, or dialogue which leads us into going in and showing Sartharion the error of his, and his 1, 2, no 3 pals' ways. While I completely understand and sympathize with the 'Where was the tie-in, Blizzard?' questions, I propose another possible line of thought, that maybe it was intended? Mr. Lich King wants us to become like him, to cross moral boundaries, to perform acts of questionable merit ... why does this not extend to the mentality of 'kill it because it's a black dragon'? Sure, it turned out he was evil, blah blah. But, we didn't have any actual reason to do it, since it appeared that Sartharion was happy playing in his lava by himself, for now,... so we simply killed him (and pals) because that's what we do? Is that not slightly 'stepping outside moral imperative' for us? Keeping in mind, also, that it was right below the conglomeration of dragon awesomeness up top Wyrmrest Tower, and they definitely could have done something (or were aware of it, since they/the portals are guarded?) Perhaps it lends to us 'doing it our way' instead of maybe how they (the other dragons) would have done it?

Last thought of my very wordy post, is that of the very briefly discussed continent at the bottom of the globe-map in Halls of Lightning. I saw this just yesterday, and it most definitely is (obviously) not just light shooting up at the bottom or anything, it clearly has a shape, ... is there anything in the lore about a bottom continent? Is this a subtle hint about what could be contained in the Cataclysm™ expansion? Did they just put the globe in upside-down?

Azeroth has poles just like earth and so that white mass at the top and bottom is just ice.

Antarctica looks like its just an icecap, but its actually its own continent buried under miles of ice.

I don't think its too farfetched for a part of it (or all of it) to melt and expose another landscape for storyline purposes. Or even have another race thawed out.

Having the South Pole melt would be a cataclysm, and definitely something Queen Azshara would want to see so it'd tie in nicely with what's speculated about the new expansion. But it'd take quite a bit of whacky reasoning to explain why that doesn't wipe the coasts of Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, though. On the other hand it could be a convenient excuse for Blizzard to give the old world a facelift.

In the past they haven't lacked an excuse, they've just said it's not where they want to place their resources. As a case study, let's consider what happens if you raise the coast of Durotar, which is not a water-centric zone by any means:

- Sen'jin and all of its NPCs must be relocated.
- The Echo Isles disappear, and all of the quests there must be redone or new ones added.
- Tiragarde is flooded.
- The cave east of orgrimmar is likely flooded, which breaks several class quests and a major 'intro to the horde' chain.
- The old coastline must be retextured to look like seafloor, and a new coastline textured.

Now multiply that by every single coastal zone: Feralas, Stranglethorn, Eversong/Ghostlands, Tirisfal, Azuremyst/Bloodmyst, and that's just the ones with coastal content.

Not so much. If they want to play with the moral imperative regarding Sartharion there should have been quests to that nature. Some wimpy quest giver who can say "Sartharion's in there. Alexstrasza says don't mess with him. But Black Dragons are evil! Go kill him for me!" Heck, make said quest giver a female Vrykul named Sara. I swear all the P1 stuff in Uludar reminds me of Return of the Jedi. Strike her down and your journey to the Dark Side will be complete.

Point is, if they want to play with morals - they need to actively play with morals. Not leave it up to us to decide whether we should kill things. It's an MMO. We all follow the moral imperative that "It lives in a cave, therefore it's evil." Which extends to Robin Hood syndrome: "It's evil, therefore murder and robbery of its corpse is for the greater good." QED: "It lives in a cave, therefore we're fully justified to kill and rob it." It doesn't even cross our minds that this might be a bad or immoral thing.

This issue I could see with this would be people who didn't complete those quests at the time(I know I haven't yet) and would maybe want to at some point(you'd have to change some achievements as you level as well then). Maybe if they gave you the ability to unphase?

Then WoW becomes the Doctor Who MMO, where instead of us dabbling with the Caverns of Time under the guidance of a dragonflight, we all have our own little TARDIS where we complete quests in one phase to unlock a phase where there are more and the game is more about jumping around in time rather than progressing forward in time. Storylines are no longer linear.

I'm not saying that wouldn't be cool, but it certainly wouldn't be WoW.

Yeah, I totally can see this playing out ala Star Wars, and would not be remotely surprised if it took that sort of end. The question, in my opinion, would be whether the Lich King is Vader or the Emperor? (Probably Anakin/Vader, depending on the part of the Arthas/Lich King journey, but who would be the Emperor? Ner'zhul? I thought they sorta got rid of him in the book and implied Arthas was either in control, or alone?)

Otherwise, I realized my inference was likely rather thinly based, and I agree, it would have had much more impact if it was more active and ... well, obvious. I was just pondering that the other day and thought it was a reasonable 'original intent' kinda thing. But then I killed Sartharion last night, and it would have been just as easy for them to give Sartharion some text like 'Hey, flowers and puppies are awesome, I love playing with unicorns in my fancy-free environment! Ooh, friends to frolic with?' and then we kill him because we dislike black dragons.

Props for the Robin Hood reference ... but he's my hero, so ... be gentle. Although, your entire statement about Robin Hood Syndrome™ is a perfect rendition of what i'd like to think was possibly the intent of the lack of explanation behind 'there's a dragon, kill it, take it's purples.'

I guess I don't see it that way, phasing allows you to make major changes without screwing up the world for people who haven't done it, you would only need to have 'unphasing' in places where people maybe didn't finish quests(like you could do a razing of stormwind for instance, but if you didn't finish the quests for missing diplomat you could still 'unphase' and do those.). It would just be another tool to let them do a wider range of changes to the world without locking people out of older content.

While that might make sense from a mechanic standpoint, it certainly doesn't work from a gameplay standpoint. There needs to be something in the game to explain the "unphasing." When you capture the Shadow Vault in Icecrown the area phases to the new content through the questline. The world has changed and you don't get to go back; time moves forward.

It wouldn't be hard for Blizzard to allow us to unphase the area to do some quests that are no longer available there but there's nothing in the game to allow for that in the story. You can't get a quest from one of the DK NPCs in a another zone that says, "Head to Icecrown and at the uncaptured Shadow Vault meet with Duke blahblahblah. If you have already captured the Shadow Vault, please go into you UI display options and select..." The only other option to allow for that is to give the player a TARDIS they can carry around with them and honestly that's a pretty weak plot device.

So what? We put Chromie in a special place and you talk to her (him) to turn phasing on and off in areas? "Today I want to do old quests in Elwynn!" That's still pretty weak though.

I agree that there proabbly isn't a good way to go about that(you'd end up doing the chormie thing and that is kinda weak mostly because I don't see the broze flight basicly letting us muck in the time stream at will). This is proabbly one of those things that might be best off just not having any lore reason just so they can do larger main story line changes to the world.

There are times where there arn't story line reasons for game mechanics such as switching between normal or heroic modes in raids and dungeons. The other option is to ignore the effect it could have on players(unlikely I think) or just not make changes to major areas and keep it things like the wrathgate or the DK starter zone. I'd rather suspend disbelief at unphasing then not have them do major earthshattering events. Of course they proabbly won't do anything like that but you never know.

I doubt Blizzard would go out of their way to create a phasing/unphasing system unless there was a really compelling reason for them to do so. It's far simpler for them to adjust the loremaster achievements, which are the largest motivator for complaints about missing quests, than to phase/unphase large portions of the game.

Consider "The Power to Destroy". To my knowledge nothing has been done to deal with the issue that you can't turn in that quest once Varimathras is dead (though it can be received through sharing). Blizzard seems generally content to let old quests and questlines die if new lore/events cause them to.

Hmm, reverting back to the old 'neutral race' discussion, here's some news to pour some gasoline on the fire.

PVP realm faction restriction removed

Granted, it could mean nothing and simply be something to facilitate faction changes, because Blizzard are known for making moves that generate a lot of speculation. It could also mean that they are in fact preparing something we'll be finding out about soon enough, given that they're also prone on planning half a dozen moves ahead.

Could be related to the faction change more so than the new races.

Indeed it does. I meant to say that there's always a chance Blizz are not giving us all the reasons just yet.

Why do they need any other reasons? If they don't remove the restriction, then faction transfer is irrelevant for well over half their playerbase - i.e. everyone on a PvP realm with more than one character. Having a major announced paying feature be largely useless? Not gonna happen. Well, voice chat aside.

So, in the new 5 man, we kill 9 Argent Dawn NPCs, and 9 opposite faction champions. Does anyone else find this a little bit odd that we fight to the death with our allies?

Not as strange as nobody on any side of the conflict realising Arthas could just have plague containers catapulted into the middle of the Tournament grounds or dropped via gargoyle. I'd have accepted another magic shield courtesy of the Kirin Tor.

Maybe the wood used to build the Coliseum is the same wood that is found in Crystalsong Forest ... so it's anti-Lich King, (cept for the floor in the center, which is obviously made of a sinster combination of cement, and ... SARONITE. Dun dun duuuuun.)

I'm leaning on the side that the PvP change is not indicative of a forthcoming Neutral or Choose-Your-Own-Faction impending announcement. As neat as I think it would be, I think, as others do, that it was merely a practical thing. I suppose with Blizzcon coming soon, we'll find out.

Also, has anything changed in the sound or text files since it was originally datamined? Since the encounter where we meet Arthas isn't coming for a few weeks, it seems possible that they could/would/did change it.

Even if the wood the coliseum is built of is anti-plague, not only are there a lot of juicy targets standing around outside between matches, but there's also that extended length of time when the coliseum *wasn't* finished.

Also, there's a large hole in the middle of the roof. I don't care how powerful Paladins like Tirion might be, it's one hell of a lot of juicy targets without adequate protection gathered in one area on the Lich King's doorstep. It would be practical to drop the plague right in the coliseum during a match where Varian, Garrosh, Jaina, Thrall and Tirion are present. It would be practical to cave in the entire coliseum from underneath, killing as many as possible and wrecking Tirion's seemingly idiotic plans.

At the moment, it seems to me as if there's only two reasons the Tournament has lasted this long:

1) Arthas wants it to reach fruition, so the best and the strongest of those champions can storm Icecrown Citadel and get turned.

Counterpoint: Dropping plague on the entire Tournament would turn both those conquering champions AND those they defeated to earn the right to storm the Citadel anyway, meaning more success for Arthas -- and a shot at turning some of the leaders as well.

2) All hope of Arthas actually using his troops in a tactical and intelligent manner has been killed off to allow this Tournament to succeed. I think this is going to be the most likely answer: The Tournament succeeds because Tirion is Good and Right and a famous Paladin -- and also because we can't have an actual setback. We can't actually *lose* as players. We can't have the plague affect us as it affects NPCs. We can't be allowed to die from a cave-in orchestrated by Anub'arak.