He also seemed to mean what he said when he convinved the rest of teh aspects that the dragon soul would be a good thing, point being he is not above lying, especially if his 'masters' are listening in.

As far as old god power goes yeah in WotA it is stated that even Sargeras himself would not stand a chance against the combined power of 'the three' and I wasn't doubting their power, simply thinking how powerful they must be if we dedicate entire expansions to their minions, it's quite an impact when you spend an expansion trying to kill a big bad dragon and then you do it, everyone cheers and then someone points out that he was merely a pawn of a much more evil and powerful foe.

To amplify Blayze: the Twilight "destroy the world at the behest of the Old Gods" doesn't fit well with Deathwing having a goal to "conquer the world". Not much to conquer if your boss destroyed the place. If dominion is Deathwing's goal and he's supporting the Old Gods, then he's not just crazy, but also stupid. It sounds more like he's bought in to the whole destroy Azeroth thing. Perhaps he has a side deal where they whip up a new and improved Azeroth for him, afterward.

Prophecy or Blizzard game-plan? If it's a Prophecy, shouldn't we have it in game? Prophecies allow all sorts of "Aha, what happened last year in location X actually correlates to prophecy line Y, we should have known" hindsight as well as endless second-guessing "But if I do Z, it might actually be fulfilling part of the prophecy and cause more harm than good." Great grist for the plot mill.

Putting it into the game later is like someone coming forward today with a three-thousand-year-old prophecy about the 1929 Stock Market Crash. Hard for it to feel like a prophecy (even if legit) it you receive it after the events.

Have any of the NPCs in Deepholm mentioned the old gods? Seems to me that they should be aware or possibly even familiar with them but I can't remember any mention of them while questing there.

Using the word "loyalty" seems a bit harsh in my opinion. I think it's more believable to say Deathwing is insane, corrupted, or perhaps mind controlled in some way. You could make a believable case in that the metal armor protecting Deathwing is also controlling/corrupting him; remember how Yogg Saron corrupted Saronite ore and made the dwarf archaeologists in Howling Fjord go insane?

And after the Old God revelations that we've heard (that Yogg-Saron and C'thun aren't as dead as we would like) it's entirely possible that we're playing right into the hands of the Old Gods; if we kill Deathwing, maybe control of the earth (and more specifically, control of the deep areas of Azeroth) devolves to the Old Gods. It might be better if we just grabbed Deathwing and jailed him in Vashj'ir or even in Old Ironforge.

With that said, I think we need to be grateful that we're only facing the minions of the Old Gods. The dragonflights have power over all aspects of Azeroth: if the Old Gods are strong enough to corrupt even them, it's unlikely that we could beat an Old God without massive Titan support. How on earth are we supposed to fight Deathwing, who has the power to raise entire mountain ranges, much less a being that even DW is scared of?

I've been struggling to understand the Uldum quest storyline. Each individual quest makes sense I suppose as it goes, but the whole thing begins to unravel for me when you take a step back and look at the forest.

My understanding is that the Uldum zone was revealed to the Azeroth population at large due to the Cataclysm/Shattering's events which disabled the cloaking mechanism that previously kept the entire zone hidden. The Obelisk of the Moon was at least in part (or totally) responsible for the functioning of the cloaking mechanism.

So that brings me to my questions

1) When we reactivate the Obelisk of the Moon with Indy (err, uh, Harrison), why isn't the zone cloaked again? Or am I missing something.

2) Is it correct to say that the Coffer of Promise can only be accessed if the Obelisk of the Sun, Stars and Moon are activated?

3) The Coffer of Promise, we are told, contains Titan Discs which are essential to the re-origination process. The latter process being hideously undesireable, wouldn't it make sense to keep the Obelisks quiescent and therefore the Coffer would remain locked away and unaccessable?

4) On the other hand, since Uldum's secrecy is no longer a secret, the security of the Titan Discs might be open to debate. So, perhaps moving them to a new safe location makes sense. Given the devastating consequences of these items falling into the wrong hands -- I mean, we're talking the end of all life on Azeroth -- shouldn't the new hiding place be Double Ultra Magic Top Secret sort of thing? Instead we give it a lone dwarf, who is very charming but has an adventurous nature that sometimes makes him a little irresponsible.

5) Would a Horde member really just turn over the Discs to a dwarf like that? Brann is likeable, but do you really entrust the fate of all living things to him? It's tough to imagine Garrosh feeling good about anyone except an Orc holding onto them, nevermind a Dwarf like Brann. Shouldn't Thrall be notified?

And lastly, I'm not familiar with the nuts and bolts of re-origination, but I presumed that re-origination might work differently for the Forsaken and they might be exempt, immune, or somehow less threatened by it. During my time during this quest line, as the magnitude of what we were dealing with unfolded, I kept saying to myself. "Sylvanas has GOT to have something to say about this." At the end, I was really disappointed that she or a Forsaken surrogate didn't show up to play spoiler. Even if re-origination does mean dreadful things for the Forsaken, I think their take on it would be a little bit different than the rest of the Horde and Alliance races. "No Dwarf is going to hold the power of life and death over the Forsaken."


Perhaps I'm way off base. I enjoyed the storyline and quests, but ended up a bit confused by how casually the goal was treated.

To answer your question, here is a part of the text from the Algalon event:

So reading between the lines here, it seems that everything is going to get melted in this reorigination process... the planet, living beings, and anything else on the planet. So it would seem to me that everybody is going to lose in such a process. It's similar to the MAD policy (Mutually Assured Destruction) that held during the Cold War: nobody is going to be stupid enough to launch planetary reorigination because they're going to die as well.

Probably the "best" thing to do would have been to leave the discs where they were, but build giant Horde and Alliance bases right next to the discs so that observers from both factions can guarantee that the discs are not being moved by either side (which again has some parallels to the current nuclear-disarmament policies). But giving the discs to Brann has some upsides as well, in that he's probably more experienced in Titan relics than anyone else.

1) Logically the zone should be re-cloaked. You could use some hand-waving and explain that turning on the Obelisk is like rebooting a powered off computer. It may be on, but the cloaking program isn't automatically running. Makes one wonder what it is doing, or could do in the wrong hands.

2) The Coffer must be accessible without all three Obelisks active. The impression offered (I don't recall anything in-game declaring outright) was that the Obelisks failed during the Shattering. Before their failure no one entered Uldum. So sometime after Uldum became visible, Brann entered Uldum and somehow found his way into the Coffer, since he's there once we open the thing. So at least Brann should know how to enter the (now empty) coffer regardless of the Obelisks.

It does make one wonder, if the Coffer opens when the Obelisks are active, and before the cloak fell all three were active, that logically means the key to start re-origination was sitting in an open box. A random pygmy (or naive Ramkahen, etc) who managed to insert tab A in slot B could have re-originated Azeroth at any time. At least it wasn't a red button labeled "Do not press", or Azeroth never would have survived to the War of the Ancients, much less recent history.

3) Inaccessible makes sense. Better than that would be to destroy them or at least render them (or the machine in which they are used) inoperable. Locking up a handgun prevents most accidents. Disassembling and melting a gun to scrap metal prevents everything else short of dropping the lump on a foot or choking on it (not for use by children under the age of three).

4) Reference 3 - destruction is better than disguise.

5) Would the Horde truly have assisted a human in all these strange tasks in the first place? For example, "Here's a personal cloaking device, go run in there and explode some bombs, it's all safe." I'd think even an Alliance member would be leery of that in a real life situation (cloaking device? Really? Why don't we have/use these elsewhere?), much less a Horde. Since it's just a game we know it's safe and just do it. May as well ask how Harrison speaks Orcish (I believe the "common" language of the Horde), or how you suddenly understand Common, but only when he or Brann speaks it.

6) Sylvanus and the Forsaken could have mixed feelings about re-origination, but definitely wouldn't want the key in a Dwarf's hands any more than another Horde race would support that. Since re-origination would effectively restore Azeroth to an earlier save point (one presumably without any life, or at best flesh-less life) all the Forsaken would perish. Mixed feelings would arise from the fact that some Forsaken have spoken about an end to the torment.

Except that's right up the alley of the Twilight doomsday cult. They want the end of Azeroth. Keeping any possible re-origination under lock and key would remain important (or again, destroy it). Recall a lot of Cold War era thrillers involved access to a nuclear weapon - it would only take one crazy to trigger the whole MAD process. Re-origination likewise, since apparently an individual could cause it to happen.

More to the point, we give it to the one person most likely to become a servant of the Old Gods through nothing more than prolonged exposure to them.

If you want to look at it that way, it would have been far more dangerous for the player character to have it. Direct physical and mental contact with three Old Gods and counting.

Brann has proven to be one of the most resilient beings besides the player characters when confronted with the corrupting influences of the Old Gods. Honestly, I think it's in pretty good hands.

Point.

I watched the Afrasiabi videos earlier today, and noted that he mentioned there were "at least three other Titan facilities" besides Ulduar, Uldaman and Uldum. I wonder if he was counting Terramok among them or not, and if the other two or three sites would follow the Uld naming convention of the three we know of.

I doubt it. Brann is basically in the Indiana Jones vein: He has access to artifacts that could literally grant you amazing powers, but his primary concern is making sure they end up in a museum and are studied. He's got this sort of single-minded guidance that really doesn't allow for deviation.

Besides, you could always explain it away by saying that he's studied so many Titan artifacts that he's found a way to immunize himself