If anyone is going to be playing on the new Anniversary realms because of this video (sorry), I am going to be rolling characters on both Horde and Alliance there for the upcoming TBC Classic realms. If you looking for a realm to play on, we are rolling on Dreamscythe, Alliance preferred. I don't have a planned timeframe I am actually going to play but if you want to send me stuff to use when I do, that is where I am going to be. Note 1: I have lowered the number of ads on this video. I was following the standard of 4+ minutes per ad that is common on YT, however with the new UI on a longform video that ends up looking like one continuous ad break. Also, apparently Medivh is apparently technically in WC1. Sorry WC1 fans, I failed you
As a paladin main I hope you're able to level up that paladin who was lost to dead servers in Era. I personally am trying to quit WoW right now so I'm sorta speedrunning myself to 60, leveling this last character before I finally stop paying Blizzard after 20 years. Also I want to say thank you, the video was overall excellent, but I just finished an Uldaman run tonight on the Dreamscyth, it was my first time healing (ironic given how long I've been olaying WoW) & your words about how really anyone can do it motivated me to such it up & just be the healer, gotta say, I much prefer tanking as healing really felt like juggling l, but still, it was a good experience + I got some shoulders & a weapon off the final boss (though I can't use it for 2 more levels). Sorry for oversharing a bit but, TL;DR: Thanks for the motivation to try healing, I hate it but it was good to face up to that weird social anxiety.
The idea of helping others as you pass by with buffs/heals and sometimes helping killing mobs was some of my favorite interactions when playing. Not knowing the person and never seeing them again but taking the time to help them out was always a feel good moment.
Several years ago on a private PvP TBC server I played as a Draenei shaman. I made it to Terrokar Forest and had to kill an elite bird there. An Orc was on the same quest, so I helped him. The guy not only stayed to help me, but actually waited on me when I died due to pulling aggro and the second time when he did the pull and I didn’t get the credit for the kill. All of that without ever being able to communicate apart from gestures. Some time ago on another private server the guy from my own faction stole a chest while I was fighting the mob near it. Then it happened again with another guy. As a SSF I was pretty annoyed.
During TBC, I did a Shaman Pilgrimage across the Alliance Kingdoms. Part of it was started as a desire to be a Dranei on a Tiger (you needed to be exalted with factions to get their mounts). So I did the simplest thing I could, grinding beginner quests up through the Night Elf Zones, healing anyone I saw along the way, helping with any group quests, sharing those that you get from drops. There's a certain Zen to it and you meet a lot of cool people.
This is the best channel for truck drivers like me who spend hours driving. (I find the mildly bored, vaguely disdainful voice soothing for some reason) Welcome back, Pat!
this appeared on my feed. thanks for making it. today Nov 23 2024 is exactly 20 years when the original was released. halo 2 and half life 2 had come out that same month. you had to be there. youtube didnt even exist back then
I love the Wetlands run. My favourite RP concept is a night elf warrior who lost her memory somehow and woke up nursed back to health by the dwarves, and adopted a lot of dwarven stereotypes and mannerisms (mining, drinking, brawling, etc) because she doesn't remember being a night elf at all.. and so to live this out, I do the Wetlands run at level 1 or 2 in order to level in the Dwarven starting zone. I did it on Dreamscythe (the new anniversary PVE realm) not long ago, and a kind level 23 (or so) hunter escorted me, unasked, the whole way. It was really kind of him~ The collaborative spirit of classic WoW is still alive and well; like Pat mentions, one good, generous experience will outweigh so many minor bad ones. Do a kindness for your fellow players! They won't forget it
5:09:00 The hatred for Gnomes is actually twofold if i recall correctly; one, they're very underdeveloped and seemed a lot like a joke race that's not really meant to be taken seriously, kinda like Pandaren, and they had more or less been just an offhand plot device to explain who is supplying the Alliance with their arsenals of gunboats and tanks in an otherwise grounded high fantasy setting (even to this day, there is not a single quest involving them that has a serious tone, it's always about their inventions malfunctioning in bizzarre ways or procuing outlandish parts and components). The second reason is that Gnomes were one of *the* powergamer PvP races and still kind of are because of their tiny hitboxes that makes clicking on them to focus them down really difficult in hectic situations, even more so when they're rogues zooming about at Mach 5 after dropping out of stealth. The playerbase has also historically favoured Horde to play as, so there's a lot more angry Horde people who are annoyed by that tiny Gnome griefing them in Strangethorn.
I swear, Shadowlands is one of the biggest reasons why I still don't even want to think about getting into WoW again. Ruined so much lore, mysteries and characters.
@@Merlin326 I don't know everyhting that was wrong about the shadowlands, but my problem with it was that it felt like the whole expansion came from left field. Basically, it was all made up at the moment with really no build up. Sure, some youtubers made lore videos explaining how the shadowlands were foreshadowed, but it was reaching for some fairly loose strings of evidence. So yeah, my problem was that shadowlands came from no-where and it wasn't even all that interesting. Someone else might have more deeper explanation than me.
@@Merlin326imagine if the new WoW writers went “woah woah woah we can’t mulch all these iconic characters to death!” Also they tried to make it so that everything that has happen was all a part of some super duper big bad’s plan. Some guy worse than the grossest and mind melting Eldrich abomination. And yeah he is just a goofy looking wow model :/
More people should be annoyed by Blizzard leaning on "and then person / thing was corrupted" for Warcraft lore. It's been annoying me for multiple expansions for WoW at this point. I'm tired of the Old Gods. I'm tired of the endless parade of cosmic threats being somehow more grave than the previous cosmic threat and thus rendering the previous one not cosmic, aaaaaa
@@spookzie4208 That's not much of an excuse to try and make every expansion a more bombastic cosmic danger than the previous one. If anything it should encourage a slower pace of stakes increasing, to figure out a long-term gameplan.
@@civildisorder 100% agree. The cosmic danger thing should've been assigned to the void lords that Blizzard have done nothing with. Now they are so much lesser because of how high the stakes already are and Azeroth now feels so small.
@@blur3316 I said "now they are so much lesser" as in now when they are used. Have no intention to "catch up" anymore because the writing has gone down a cliff.
Neat little factoid but if you unlocked the door inside the Deadmines then fired the canon, you would auto kill Mr.Smite during the very early beta of WoW. It was removed for being to confusing and missing out on experience. You would of looted the chest next to the bridge to get his loot.
Incredible, I lived through the original lifetime of wow. All of this stuff you talked about I personally experienced. On top of that I have watched videos like this multiple times in the past. Yet somehow you made this compelling enough that I stopped what I was planning on doing today and watched the whole thing through. I kneel to your monumental efforts, I remember trying to explain wow lore to my dad when we watched the warcraft movie and I was not successful.
I mean its so easy to play WoW for free these days, especially if your interest is in the vanilla-wrath era. TurtleWoW is Vanilla+, Warmane is Wrath of the Lich King or Burning Crusade. You don't have to pay Blizzard to play WoW anymore, just try it. It costs you nothing
Getting my Tank credentials questioned before a SoD Wailing Caverns run was a slap to the face, this dungeon has been out for 20 years, 19 of which I have been playing. I've tanked in this dungeon since before a lot of the player base has been alive. You can improve the game, but the retail player base mentality is stuck as is.
Right? You would think SoD had buffed the entire dungeon for how weird some people would be about that instance. It's WC, don't pull raptors and use tremor totem
People are still desperately chasing the feeling they got from old school MMOs without realizing that half of the magic was an immature Internet. Rereleasing nostalgia bait will never take you back to an age of ignorance where you had to talk to people in game and ask where and how they got an item, or force you to organically discover a quest location.
I replayed Old School Runescape this year and I ended up playing it harder than I ever did 20 years ago. Being able to more readily learn more efficient ways of skilling up and profiting at the same time, was way more motivating then fumbling in ignorance 20 years ago.
Classic felt like vanilla, your points make sense on paper but it did not play out that way for everyone, I think that had something to do with BFA tbh
Same. Not a WoW person, but PatricianTV's takes are consistently interesting. The Skyrim review put into words so many things that I felt about that game but couldn't express; that review I have rewatched/relistened to three times now.
29:24 having huge lore beats in external sources has been a huge problem for the story of wow. It was so jarring going from the end of MoP and defeating garrosh, to all of a sudden he not only survived but also fled to the past in an alternate reality and returned with an army
garrosh was imprisoned at the end of MoP they tell you that they are going to have a trial for him at the end of the cinematic after you defeat him. i will agree the reason he broke out was pretty dumb and shoehorned in but the rest was explained.
There is also a problem of having story tied to events and like half the story in flavor text or super boring exposition. Instead of concise dialogue. FF14 is how you do it right. With WoW. You could play the entire expansion and have zero clue what is going on Another game notorious for this is Warframe. If you just play through all the story quests. You will not understand the story. Half the time you'll even outright miss character introductions and a quest will start assuming you know what's going on and who people are. I think it partly comes from dropping the story over time instead of all at once. Many MMOs suffer from it. FF14 is like the only one that doesn't cause they drop a fully completed story on release
Despite having played WoW for over three or four cumulative years from TBC to WotLK (and a few more from private servers in between then and now) the experience of playing "World of Warcraft" still nestles itself deep in my grey matter like a nebulous dream I keep trying to make sense of every time I think back to it. Happy to hear you ramble on for hours about a genre-defining game that's over a decade old at this point, if only to help me figure out what I actually enjoyed about the most famous and successful Skinner box known to man.
As someone who’s been playing Wow since 2004, this is so hype. You’re absolutely right that WoW is surprisingly underrepresented on RUclips. The vanilla game has such an amazing setting with lots of interesting characters and smaller stories.
Jediwarlock makes some very intriguing lore videos delving into more obscure stuff. He explores it like how people explore dark souls lore, looking at easily missed objects in the world and seemingly one-off comments about ancient events and connecting it all together. Highly recommend. I really do wish there were more people doing lore vids.
Arthas, and the Human campaign for WC3 is some of the best tragic hero writing Blizzard has actually done. So I find it really amusing the guy who designed the level STILL seethes whenever you tell him he doesn't actually get why people would understand and even side with Arthas given the awful situation Stratholme was. It's like one man is determine to be butthurt about it to this day.
Lmao he doesnt understand why people side with arthas, when theres a fkin zombie plague, and by destroying this one city, he could save millions more? how doesnt he fkin get it!?
@@ManCheat2 I don'T even get how it is not the correct decision. I mean, what was the alternative? Wait until they trun zombie and kill them afterwards?
Stratholme was a trolley problem. The thing is after the trolley problem is that you're supposed to minimise losses then go after the evil bastard who set it up.
It's because in the initial version of the mission, the civilians wouldn't automatically turn into zombies, and you'd have to slaughter the non-infected just to be sure. Developing it they realized that was a bit too grim, and a little boring to play through, so now every single person is 100% ghoul in waiting. The buttmad developer is still hinging on the version of the story where it's stil ambigious whether a complete purge was the only solution, even when the gameplay flies in the face of that.
@ He did a little interview with a Vtuber, I forget her name but it was odd seeing him have trouble with some of her more basic questions on his interpretation when it was clear it was less directed at Arthas and the situation and more at people who he thought were morally reprehensible for agreeing with Arthas at that moment. The usual Nazi implication was thrown around by him.
I rewatch all of patrician's best videos like every month at this point, never forget any of it, he's just soothing to listen too during 8-12 hour work shifts
At first I thought this video was gonna be some kind of 6hr troll. Turns out it truly is an epic telling of the classic adventure. Riddled with wonderful snippets of lore and behind the scenes back story to the lore. I have a feeling I will enjoy watching this a second and third time.
Just discovered you. Don't feel bad about being a radio channel. I love it. I listen to you driving around for work. Keep up the good work, i can't wait for part 2
I literally was thinking yesterday, "I wonder what rpg patricianTV will cover next, I hope its long." And to see that it's about Classic Wow is awesome. This game has been one of my favorites since childhood, and I come back to it every year as often as I come back to FNV and Skyrim!
I been waitin for this one since I first heard you talk about it I think like a year ago, glad to see it finally out, can't wait to hear what you're gonna say, I really appreciate your analysis on games & I've been playing WoW most of my life.
oh my god thank you for that bit about hotbar size, so many people I know make a huge deal about how many buttons you have in these games while saying things like "how am I supposed to learn what all of them do" like you're expected to use all of them all the time or aren't given them at a steady pace so you have time to learn and adjust to your new tools
I think part of what turns people off from Retail these days is that Blizzard (and by extension, the playerbase) is these days fully expecting you to use *ALL* of them where they didn't used to back then. Ironically, they curbed the (to be fair, actually kinda excessive) button creep of Vanilla only to actually increase the required amount of knowledge you to need to actually play your class right. Many abilities were there simply for fluff reasons. Now all these buttons are there for gameplay reasons, and the amount of them hasn't actually gone down by as much as many classic andys think it does. I enjoy that aspect and much prefer retail over classic, but i can see why people feel very turned off by this design.
@@Donnerbalken28 Yeah retail is very much something that you can tell is the product of 20 years added on top of the original development time. It's extremely overwhelming to jump straight into without some homework. You need time to invest into more educational content where even finding good stuff is tricky. My issue with classic vs retail is the reductionist views both sides will have of the other game. Classic andy's will criticise retail for things it isn't anymore but never really discuss why retail has gone that way without strawmanning retail players as impatient and dumbed down. Retail andy's who are end game focussed miss the idea of classic being a slow paced more dynamically social game etc. I like both but I play much more retail simply because retail is designed that way. Classic just isn't for pushing keys and mythic raid progression. There's a lot of things that make classic what it is that people do not want to do anymore. People generally don't want to spend hundreds of hours levelling anymore. People generally don't want to play a game with equally simple mechanics anymore. You cant recapture the magic of classic and that's why retail has focussed on the things that can feel fresh, retaining players- and it excels at that. Specs have high room for skill expression, progression is rewarding but not timewasting, raiding is legitimately solid every patch, mythic+ regardless of balance stays fun for me. The gameplay loop is far more replayable than classic. I like classic but its a one and done deal for me. For an mmo, that is an unsustainable model so It was inevitable that wow developed the way it is currently. Classic was great because then the game had charm, The game and world itself was a mystery by virtue of being novel and fresh and all that stuff. There's just no way that can could have been maintained as the game persists imo, which is fine given that classic is available to play anyway.
Great video as always Pat! as a person who loves extremely long game reviews and world of Warcraft classic this hit me in that appetite of videos about the game that I've been wanting! Cant wait for part 2!
Not even 15 minutes in and I'm screaming Old School RuneScape at the screen so hard. That game did what WOW fans are asking for. Just relaunch an old version people have nostalgia for and develop new content in the old school style with player input and voting to make sure the devs don't make any of the controversial updates that put a lot of old players off
They tried it with Season of Discovery but they didn’t put near enough effort and content into it. They claimed the whole mode was a test for something similar in the future so it’s possible that they still do it, but Blizzard is a really stubborn company and unlike the RuneScape devs, they have a huge player base playing the modern version of the game who spend millions of dollars on the in game purchasing. I like to think that RuneScape 3 is kept alive by the amount of people subbing to play OSRS while it’s just the opposite for WOW.
Yeah we want the wow version of that, ours is good and I enjoy it. If classic+ had a similar community vote system on updates and additions to the game i think it would be so amazing, but I doubt blizzard will replicate what jagex does
Osrs has also been out long enough that the Devs know exactly how to maintain that old school theme while still pumping out QoL which we can't live without, there's now an inherent trust that we won't get the same style of updates in rs3. Playing RS3 is insanely jarring to play, it's fun and different but losing QoL that OSRS and runelite has is terrible, the removal of tick manipulation is boring, the MTX is predatory
Yup i was just about to post this as well. He is the second "adventure mission" on the human side so technically he was indeed killed by a bold band of adventurers.
And the full story he had was Medivh is le mad vvizard. He does bad demon summony stuff and whatnot. Go kill his ass. And then you do. And thats the mission. Yay.
The level of research done for this is insane, I know a lot about classic wow having been on and off private servers and playing it over again, but you even showed me some stuff I had never seen. Is it bad to say you have done this justice as expected? after watching your Bethesda reviews several times, I just expected to learn about stuff I have missed having played 15 years mostly on "Classic" realms. Can't wait for the rest of this big excite.
It's funny, because if you're a vanilla WoW player who has played Warcraft 3 and paid attention to the quest text, he hasn't said something I didn't already know. Really puts into perspective how much time I've put into this game that a man can rant for 6 hours straight about a game and it's nothing I didn't already know.
I started playing WoW in 2006 when I was 9. I was never allowed to play video games as a kid, but I watched my dad play & he'd been playing WoW since the beta, he even had a few friends in the alpha. He passed away in early 2006 & my mom let me take over & play on his account. I missed maybe 3 months of subscription time on that account since the game launched, and I've played every expansion up until the latest one, The War Within. Besides The Burning Crusade I got every collectors edition of the game as well. All this to say I finally cancelled my subscription for good, it ends on December first. I'll be watching(listening to) this as I level my final character on the relaunch of Classic Fresh that just came out a couple days ago, trying to hit 60 one last time before I finally kick the habit for good. While I haven't watched through yet I'm sure this will be great as your videos always are, much thanks for making this I've been looking forward to it for a while now.
Curious to hear what was the last straw that broke the camel's back? Most long time players bailed either at the end of Cataclysm, in the middle of Warlords of Draenor, at the start of Battle for Azeroth, or after the first patch of Shadowlands. If neither of those managed to break your streak, I'm curious to know how The War Within managed to do that. I am personally looking forward to finally having a dedicated Goblin patch for once.
This video really shows me how much I missed when I played WoW way back in the Vanilla days in terms of the story and the continuity of the questlines and stuff. I had no idea so many things were connected the way they are. It gives me a lot of appreciation for the world.
There's a great commentary on the playerbase in this analysis. The idea that a gamer who has played this one game for 250+ hours needs a resume, a teacher, and a bureaucratic evaluation to do a new boss in that game is a unique Warcraft psychosis. Druids being raunchy in barrens chat is good and proper.
Something to fall asleep to for the next three weeks, gradually absorbing every line until it becomes a permanent fixture in my subconscious. Thanks mom!
Can't believe I was able to watch this all the way through. I had some fond memories of WoW back in the day and this video was a fun trip down memory lane. Great video, loved how thorough it was, and I can't wait for the follow-up!
Wooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Never thought this would happen. I kept playing the Elder Scrolls series on repeat. Before even watching this, Patrician, I greatly appreciate the time and effort you put into making this video analysis and all others. Love the content.
2:00:15 Not true, Medivh DID exist in Warcraft 1, the 8th Human mission was named after him and was about you killing him. Admittedly though, he was just characterised as an evil warlock taking advantage of the situation to gain more power, rather than being the one to summon the orcs to Azeroth, I'm pretty sure, but still, he at least *existed* in the game.
Yeah that is in the endless lore blackhole category of mistakes. Forgive me WC1 fans. I'm sure when they made that mission they had it all planned out, even the Jailer!
@@Patrician Truly unforgivable, you'll be sent to work in the incredibly inefficient Warcraft 1 mines as punishment. Also gnomes were in WC2 as the Alliance counterpart to goblins, but like, I think they were probably half thinking about retconning them out of existence until WoW needed another race anyway to be fair
As someone who got goated into playing on my friends private wrath server. Playing as my undead priest who feed a warcrime plague pumpkin to a prisoner of war in a tavern basement felt like a fever dream and I was all for it.
I remember getting to the mid-50 levels and being able to kill the goblins at booty bay to grind up my Bloodsail reputation to do their quests for the pirate hat. Was such an achievement at the time.
After finishing I'm glad you made this, I'm glad to finally see someone just rambling for hours about the very same exact things I rambled or thought about while playing through all this. I'm going straight to Act 2.
No shit last night was watching the Skyrim video for the hundredth time and thought it would be neat to get his take on WoW. As far as I'm concerned I manifested this video and you're all so so welcome.
@@ЂорђеКозић It still amazes me how much love Morrowind gets. Feels like yesterday I was just a kid playing it for the first time, not realizing that was gonna be about as good as it gets for Bethesda titles. A yearly playthrough (to some degree) for the last 20 years, and still finding new things I didn't know about.
While I'm grateful for all the fantastic video essays, I can never forgive how this has irreversibly altered my perception of time and also raised my expectations for other video essays. I can no longer look at a 30 or 50 minute video and feel with confidence it's going to leave me satisfied on the topic.
I literally yelled to my husband from across the house about this video and how excited I was. I then seen it was only part _one_ and proceeded to scream incoherently for 30 seconds. Pure happiness was given to me today, thank you 🤗🖤
The best example I can think of to show the worst part of WoW storytelling is the Scarlet Crusade, not only does it show how badly retcons, writers not taking into account the larger story when writing scenarios, last minute changes in plotlines, gameplay elements taking precedents over logical writing, but also it can easily segway into other similar bad plots (The Forsaken, the Worgen, Jaina, etc,) The story of the Scarlet Crusade actually start in the Tabletop RPG books, published by White Wolf, which were released before WoW was launched. The aftermath of Warcraft 3 left the kingdom of Lordaeron in shambles, the kingdom was targeted by the Undead Scourge, created by the Burning Legion, to soften up the World of Azeroth before their invasion, the Scourge would succeed in destroying the Lordaeron, they did it under the leadership of Arthas, former paladin of the silver hand and crown prince, the remaining survivors either went to Kalimdor under the leadership of Jaina Proudmoore, or fled to Stormwind. Arthas went rogue, taking control of the Scourge from the Burning Legion and their Dreadlords, some of the Undead split off from the Scourge, becoming the Forsaken under the rule of Sylvanas Windrunner and Varimathras, they would take over the capital city from Balnazzar, killing him and becoming the pre eminent power in the region. The remaining Humans that survived the onslaught, banded under the leadership of various military orders, such as the Argent Dawn, the Brotherhood of the Light or the Alliance of Stormwind, the remnants of the Silver Hand in Lordaeron, led by Alexander Mograine, wielding a powerful artifact called the Ashbringer, and Dathoran, founded the Scarlet Crusade It was one the most succesful ones, retaking huge chunks of the Tirisifal region, including a couple of farmstead and the newly rechristened Scarlet Monastery, Hearthglen, Tyr' Hand, and parts of Stratolholm. It was also quite directly stated that while the Crusade was fighting for a righteous cause, it had gone off the deep end, with their paranoia, believing everyone not part of their organization was hostile. This was somewhat understandable however, due to the fact that the Scourge was able to succeed due to having so many hidden agents in the populace, and one of the stories in the books was about one non-undead human farmer, poisoning soldiers fighting the scourge. One of the members of the Scarlet Crusade was Taelin, son of Tirion. Tirion was the protagonist of the first Warcraft novel, where he stopped the unjust execution of an orc and for that he was relieved of his rank as a paladin and banished to the wilds, but his son followed his footsteps and became a paladin himself. Tirion was saddened by his son joining the SC and sought to lead him back on the path of justice. In Vanilla, we learned that the Scarlet Crusade had a high ranking member serving as an envoy to the Alliance in Stormwind, and that there where members who were unhappy with the direction the Crusade was going, and directed us to the Monastery, to destroy its corrupt leaders. During the raid, we learned that the SC imprisoned and tortured its dissident members, and that Renault Mograine, son of Alexander was now one of the leaders of the SC. At Stratolholm it was discovered that Dathoran had been replaced by the dreadlord Balnazzar, which is the first major retcon, as it implied that Varimathras didn't kill him or that dreadlords have some kind of ressurective ability. In the Plaguelands we met Tirion and help him convince his son that he should turn back on the SC, but he was killed by an inquisitor just before meeting his father. Enraged Tirion dispatched his sons murders, and decided to rebuild the paladin orders with the help of the Argent Dawn. When Naxxramas descended to blight the land, and the various factions had to come together, we saw that the SC was willing to put aside its difference with the Argent Dawn and Brotherhood of the Light to lead an assault on the nexus, but it also was unhappy with the AD harbouring Tirion, who was recruiting knights to help in banishing the Scourge, and was looking to end his live. In Naxxramas, we find that Alexander was turned into a death knight and the Ashbringer was corrupted. After the battle, if you brought the sword to the Scarlet Monastery, the ghost of Alexander would reveal that he was betrayed and killed by his son, Renault. If you brought the Ashbringer to the inquisitior Fairbanks he said that the sword could be purified and it would involve something in the Outlands, the name of the remnants of Draenor. In the Comics, another set of retcons followed, here, Dathoran and Alexander fought the Scourge under the banner of the Silver Hand, after killing and replacing Dathoran, Balnazzar would corrupt the troops, this included convincing Renault to murder his father, after these events the Silver Hand would split between the Scarlet Crusade and the Argent Dawn. The main story of the comics, however follows Alexander's other son, Darion, and his quest to purify his father's soul, a quest that would succeed at the cost of his life. In The Burning Crusade, nothing relating to the SC happened, and there was nothing to help with purifying the Ashbringer. In The Wrath of the Lich King, the story was continued, in the death knight starting area. Arthas, now part of the Lich King (another bag of contradiction, even discounting post WOTLK events, due to various writers, try and follow closely the quests in Northerend and see what the Lich King is, and his various atributes) leads a succesfull campaing against the Scarlet Crusade, and at the end orders Darion, now also a death knight, and the player to Light's Hope Chapel, when they arrive they are confronted by Tirion, who frees the group from the Lich King's control and forces Arthas to retreat. Tirion than declares a union between the Silver Hand and the Argent Dawn, called the Argent Crusade, to eradicate the Lich King and his minions. Later when arriving in Northerends, you find the Scarlet Crusade has rebranded itself as the Scarlet Onslaught and has set up base near Ice Crown Glacier, led by Genereal Brigette Abendis and the disguised dreadlord, Mal'Ganis. This doesn't make much sense for a few reasons: 1) The Crusade was willing to put aside its difference with other faction to fight the Lich King but now, it doesn't. And Mal'Ganis was looking for revenge against him so he would have little reasons to fight with the other factions at the moment. 2)How does the Crusade have so many resource left? Warcraft 3 happened less than a decade ago in cannon, and the SC suffered heavy casualties throughout WoW, so where are they getting their manpower, which couldn't have been that large, even if cannon doesn't give hard numbers or percentages, since it states that most of Lordaerons inhabitants where turned undead, and a significant chunk helped in forming Theramore, a proper city in lore, and helped repopulate Stormwind (It was implied in the White Wolf RPG books that Bolvar orignally was from Lordaeron, due to his tabard displaying the ensignia of the kingdom, though in the books he was depicted significantly older than he was in the game, but him and a large part of Stormwind troops being from Lordaeron would make his speech at the Wrath Gate hit harder), and resources? 3)From a meta point of view, how could the SC be a threat at this point? They've been defeated numerous times and they are normal humans, why would you use them. And this leads me to think and hypothesize that perhaps the story of Scarlet Crusade was changed late in the Development of Cataclysm and Wrath of the Lich King. I think that originally The Scarlet Crusade was suppose to unite with Argent Dawn, and be retired as a faction, the evidence? 1)As mentioned, the raid in Northerends doesn't make much sense in storywise, but does in a meta way if it was suppose to be the last major appearence of the Crusade, their swansong. 2)In Cataclysm, the Brotherhood of the Light, takes over Tyr's Hand, the BotL, although now part of the Argent Crusade are still an autonomous group, and one of their own members describes them as Argents minus morals. A good setup for future antagonists. 3)The death knight starting area storyline is something of a mess, you beat up the SC a bit and than, literally at the end you began Tirions' story, where he declares a union of two factions, which do not appear in the zone or storyline, which is the one that is followed throught the rest of the expansion, with the Scarlets receiving just one quest of note. This makes 99% of the DK starting area irrelevant to the larger Lich King-Tirion story, but also to the SC story, as they would once again have the manpower and resources to be a major threat. But if the Argent Dawn and Scarlet Crusade where to being merged into one faction, and Tirion was suppose to be a member of the Argent Dawn, than the DK starting area storyline would not be irrelevant in the grander narrative of WoW, and the redemption of the SC would parallel the redemption of the Death Knights. 3)Even with all the retcons, the silver hand in Lordaeron was defunct, and the ones in Stormwind under the juristiction of the Alliance, with Tirion being noted in Vanilla to helping the Argent Dawn. 4) The name of the Argent Crusade, makes more sense as a union between the ARGENT Dawn and the Scarlet CRUSADE. This is all circumstantial evidence, and I haven't looked at behind the scene stuff so take it with a grain of salt.
Finally retail, the Scarlet Crusade would still be antagonists, and still somehow have the resources to threaten the Forsaken, and even more baffalingly the Gilneans. If you don't know, some months ago, during Dragonflight Blizzard released an event about the worgen retaking Gilneas (sidenote: if you follow the lore closely, this is the 3rd time they have done so, it's so blatant that the status of Gilneas change depending on the need of the storyline) and the current owners of Gilneas turned out to be the SC. May I remind everyone that: A) The scarlet crusade was never hinted at operating even close to Gilneas B) The SC is fanatical in fighting the undead, the worgen curse grants immunity to undeath, besides other benefits and downsides C) Worgen were waging a guerilla war against the Forsaken in Silverpine, and where turning remaning humans of Lordaeron, such as the Southshore survivors, into worgen to bolster their ranks. So what seems more logical? Joining together? Alliance? Leaving each other alone? No! Fighting.
5:08:20 Fun fact, in Norse mythology Dwarves and Dark Elves are two terms for the same beings, so TES making Dwarves a type of Elf is probably more in line with actual mythology than it is a mockery of the modern fantasy Dwarf, though I'm not so bold as to claim it to be the intent of the writers (maybe it was, maybe it wasn't idk)
I quit playing WoW years ago. I quit when my guild and I looked around and realized the game wasn't what had brought us together originally back in 04. We all were popping into WoW to see each other, make plans for trips to cross continents and even oceans to hang out. We'd put in the work, but the game wasn't the game that drew us in. The characters and narratives we cared about weren't just gone, they had been functionally erased and replaced several times over. The narrative wasn't something we could make sense of anymore. The world wasn't the one we went on raids to save anymore. We would pop in the hang out, then log off to play other games. One day we decided to run a few missions in Warframe together and realized "Wait, we don't need WoW anymore. We chat all day in IRC (Discord hadn't replaced it yet). We hang out when we can IRL. Some of us paired off and got married to each other. We can just play other games that don't feel like chores and obligations" So we all dropped the game fairly quickly after. A few people called us traitors just for playing single player games while waiting in queue rather than dedicating our entire lives to WoW and Blizzard or prioritizing families and careers at times, but we didn't care. We quit anyways. A big part of old WoW was community. As the years went by I felt that less. WoW got too big for the game we loved to exist within it. Even Vanilla isn't dragging many of us back, partly because a big part of our guild has passed away, partly because it didn't bring back the community we missed.
I thought I was gonna end up listening to this on my second monitor while gaming but it was so interesting I ended up giving it my full attention and just watching segments before bed. Great vid!
Great video, as a fan of WoW since Warcraft 3. I followed WoW's lore religiously and many of your criticisms of how it was handled ring very true. This video carried a lot of nostalgia for me and I watched a lot of it
Only just now starting the vid so I haven't watched more than a couple minutes but I wanted to say up front that I recall how weirdly dismissive the Blizzard Devs were back when people were originally calling for some kind of Classic WoW release with the whole "you think you want that but you don't really want that attitude" and I've always thought that was interesting because like I get it. Players are often notoriously unreliable when it comes to actually critiquing things honestly. To use a simpler example, you might put out a new character in a Moba or a shooter or something and then you get a ton of feedback from your players saying that they're super busted and op and whatnot but then you have objective cold hard stats from your game showing that it actually only has a 45% win rate so they're clearly not actually overpowered. And the issue is that a bad developer would look at that kind of situation and go "oh well I guess the players are clearly wrong so we should just ignore their complaints" when that is not the correct response. Yes they are wrong, but the important thing is that they're still complaining despite being wrong. Which means there's clearly still some core underlying issue that is creating this illusion that all the players are falling for. In my example maybe it's that the character is just annoying to fight, or that there's a particular ability that feels overpowered while the rest of the kit is weak or something like that. The complaints still mean that there is clearly a problem that needs to be solved, it's just that the players are bad at accurately articulating what that problem specifically is. And I suspect that it was the same for WoW in many ways. Players clearly were complaining about the current state of the game at the time and so they claimed they wanted things to go back to a simpler time when they liked the game more. And maybe the Devs are objectively correct that the lack of many QoL features made the original launch version of WoW very annoying to play compared to the current version. But it seems like their response was entirely dismissive instead of actually trying to address the complaints and dig through them to figure out what people were actually complaining about. And you know I wonder if that attitude ever really changed cause ultimately while i don't play WoW myself, I do know that obviously they did end up releasing some kind of actual Classic WoW, but it also feels like Blizzard has repeated this kind of scenario over and over again where they do something to a game, get feedback complaining about it, and then act completely dismissive towards that feedback and completely miss the point of it all. We saw it with Overwatch and how many people complained with every new patch about the game getting worse, only for them to completely screw everything up with Overwatch 2 and now of course we're getting that Overwatch Classic event to try and appease those people. And to some extent you could apply this to the Diablo Immoral situation where they acted as if the issue was people not having Phones instead of what they were actually complaining about. It seems like Blizzard has a history of belittling their own players and not wanting to take them seriously and then having their unwillingness to address feedback on a deeper level come back to bite them in the ass over and over again. --- Anyways I have no idea how relevant any of this is to the actual video so I'll probably write up another comment when I actually finish watching it in a few days
Okay, about the video. Pat, I'd like to apologise to you, because in the brief moments I was watching and not listening to it during my walk, I saw how much effort you put into putting together the relevant footage and even adding some written bits, but I simply didn't see most of it! I think putting more effort into the audio, rather than video is truly the way forward. Great vid, can't wait for part 2.
4:57:50 "The Old Gods made him CRAAAAZYYY! He wasn't mad after thousands of years of holding a grudge, there was a guy in the dirt that whispered in his ear while he was eepy!"
I was literally halfway through my rewatch of the Oblivion retrospective, grinding linen the day after the anniversary launch. Thanks for the leveling content 🙏
I think one thing about the "nature" aspect of the druids being focused on trees and forests comes down to the somewhat artificial nature of Azeroth's ecosystems as a whole. The druids aren't really hippies (or at least they weren't supposed to be) they're much closer to maintenance engineers working off a specific blueprint created by the Titans: The Emerald Dream. Sadly the dev's often forget this aspect and simply make them mystical hippies, which is a shame since 'mortal followers enacting the will of a godlike robot terraformer' is a far more interesting root for their organisation.
Its funny that the barrens are such a "suboptimally" designed area from a gameplay perspective but by far the coolest and most "world of actual WARCRAFT" one from a visual and layout design. It actually feels like the barrens from warcraft 3. I love it. Its by far my favorite zone. Its not the fastest for levelingand not the most fun from a quest perspective but just walking around the place and taking in the view is still my favorite WoW-singleplayer memory.
Incredibly well done! I really enjoyed your insights and references to early WoW development and culture, it really helped bring the whole experience together
Hi! 2019 Shaman Tank main here, if you care for any insight. While Sunken Temple is certainly a filter for my fellows in green jesus, Shaman Tank remains (sometimes) viable up until about AQ40. Shaman tank in vanilla has roughly 5 major problems, which may or may not be acceptable depending on the scenario. 1. We have poor sustained threat. Being a mana user with no built-in mana regeneration - Water Shield wasn't until TBC - and which needs to cast every 5-6 seconds for maximum threat, you can run out of mana quickly when competing for threat. Compare to Warriors and Bears, whose threat output is relatively constant over the course of a fight. 2. We wear mail. While druids have a built-in passive to get more stamina and armor, Shamans are left with inherently weaker defenses than warriors. While this is made up for by wearing a shield while warriors might need to dual wield to output enough threat, our gear doesn't otherwise scale properly for tanks and we become reliant on block and dodge for mitigation. This leaves us quite vulnerable to damage when stunned, or from behind. In addition, there is precious little endgame Mail armor with tank stats, leaving us at the mercy of crushing blows. 3. We have poor AoE threat. Most of our threat comes from a single-target spell and a threat-enhancing buff to our melee attacks. This can be easily mitigated in dungeons with Engineering, but that is insufficient for most raids. (And the fact we can't wield Thunderfury doesn't help either.) 4. Half of our threat comes from a Nature spell. Given the number of mobs in the game that are immune or resistant to Nature in both Maraudon and Sunken Temple, it's no surprise that's when many aspiring shaman tanks give up. It also means that Nature-immune bosses are a hard no-sell for us. 5. Due to the above, we have absolutely shit PR. It's damn hard to find new groups that'll take you seriously, even if you know what you're doing. Anyway, due to all of the above, Shamans are not a substitute for Warrior tanks in some content. This doesn't mean they're never useful, however. They bring the same utility all Shamans do, which can be unusually useful for a tank in some scenarios. Situations where a shaman tank is unacceptable: - AoE trash tanking in 40-man raids; - Main tanking most bosses in 40-man raids; - Tanking pretty much anything in AQ40 and above; - Tanking most nature-immune mobs in raids. Situations where a shaman tank is fine: - All 5-man dungeons (although ST will still suck, even at 60); - UBRS, even without a second tank; - Main- and off-tanking all of ZG; - Off-tanking AQ20; - Main- or off-tanking Onyxia; - Off-tanking single mobs in 40-man raids. Situations where a shaman tank is the best option: - Tanking the skull in a burst scenario (e.g. Majordomo's little guys); - Tanking a single mob without threat competition (e.g. Core Ragers during Golemagg); - Offtanking anything at all when the raid just needs another shaman. Let me know if I've missed anything important or you want to know more!
It's interesting how much of SoD was giving Shamans tools from later expansions, that explains both my experience playing the class and the experience of healing for an SoD shaman. It's unfortunately just a format thing that I didn't get to play Horde end-game classic to see their potential because I think seeing one work would be better than any questions I can think of.
@Patrician What's truly sad is that SoD tank shaman plays absolutely nothing like classic tank shaman. Doesn't scratch the itch at all. Obviously it's a lot stronger because they replace all the problems with new tools, but I wish they'd stuck closer to the OG identity. Then again that's all of SoD I guess.
I comfortably maintanked every MC boss at gear level aside from Magmadar and Golemagg. Still wound up doing them because I couldn't say no, and I lucked out enough that no one noticed the problem. Opening on Vael is an unparalleled power fantasy, but everything after in BWL is admittedly pretty rough. AQ40 is "fine", but it was at that point where the Warriors had caught up so much that it stopped feeling like a shammy brought anything meaningful to the table. ST is surprisingly ok. You just frost shock the dragons instead of earth. Shaman melee threat carries hard when everyone's gear is bad, and especially if your group is underleveled since blocked and glancing attacks still apply rockbiter. Furthermore, you can pull more aggressively to gain threat leads because Shaman mitigation outpaces dungeon mob damage until mid-BRD. Fresh 40 Shammy felt invincible regardless of pserver or classic. AoE threat is a challenge in specific cases, like packs in Strat UD, but even that I think can be overcome via tab targeting with a fast weapon and some alternative threat management (ie. dropping earthbind to slow the group, marking a skull for dps to burn, grounding for lone casters to buy you time). 3-5 target groups are a nonissue unless you're in a party with a bunch of sweaty cleavy warrior dps, which is annoying from a pride standpoint but things at least die quickly. As for PR, I found people were heavily skeptical of it on private servers (their threat tools were bugged on most of them for a super long time, and mob damage was often overtuned), but almost no one on classic seemed to care. Warriors would frequently try to get out of having to tank, so they were particularly receptive. Shaman's added utility while playing the role can make for some really smooth dungeon runs if you manage your mana well and keep everyone's favorite totems up, and that leaves a strong impression, but maybe people are less forgiving if you're new and don't have those things down.
@@Raisukee Ah yeah your post reminds me of the truly most annoying part of shaman tank, which is required tank swaps 😭 gotta build all that threat manually
@@hollowtruncatedicosahedron It meant the only role you could play vs the drakes was maintank, which was scary due to thrash crits. Building all the threat manually is even worse when you consider taunt gives a bigger lead the longer a fight has been going. My condolences to Paladins as well.
I got 44 minutes in and am excited to listen to the rest. This 6 hour video is just part 1? I'm in for a treat if the first 40 minutes of quality carries through the rest. Great job from what I've listened too so far.
As someone who has only played FF14 and not WoW, its very interesting to hear about the differences in the fan reactions to the massive world changes in Cataclysm and A Realm Reborn.
its an incredibly different situation though, surely you see that if youre familiar with both games. ARR was a desperate final attempt to salvage a playable game out of the ruins of FF14. Even people who played back then say it was hardly enjoyable, but the vibes were there, and thats what made it salvageable. Cata was released at the height of WOW’s popularity, and massively changed and overhauled things people were completely content to spend their virtual lives within. …its different. different stuff. hardly fair to compare the audiences reactions and act as if thats where the differences lie and not the massive amount of context surrounding said reactions.
I'm a wow baby (only started in 2020, in retail), yet a Warcraft veteran (1995 - Warcraft 1). I think the problem with Cata is that the changes were just different for difference sake - that hole in Westfall? There are no quests explaining what happened. That fire lord that fucked up Ashenvale? He's just there - no explanation. Then there's also the vanilla world quests that took you all over Azeroth. All cut back down to a zone. That Dusk wood quest that took you to Stormwind, Red Ridge, and Westfall? Yeah, it the guy is just over there in the same zone - aren't you happy you didn't have to go on this mysterious quest!? Vanilla has so much better world building than the rest of WoW. And I say that after playing retail for 1000 hours, and having put the same amount of hours in Wrath (got Loremaster, BTW). I can already tell that the game went downhill during TBC. The dungeons immediately felt ALL more straightforward. Just run this long corridor, instead of Blackrock Depths that's larger than Stormwind, and feels like an actual underground city! All those older dungeons made me feel a sense of wonder and amazement that felt immediately lacking in most if not all dungeons from TBC onwards. /rant
I stop playing WoW during Cataclysm and eventually migrated to FF14 during HW, but it wasn't the massive world changes that prompted the move. It was the heavy emphasis on gear that would constantly obsolete and there was no glamor system at the time so if you weren't having a mountain of fun raiding, the game just felt like building a sandcastle the tide would eventually just wipe away. In FF14, there was way less emphasis on raiding and gear and more emphasis on personal appearance and actually being a part of the story, and you wouldn't see the WoW website have no updates for like 10 months straight.
Appreciate that you're branching out in these longform videos from modern Bethesda and Modern Bethesda-style games, but GOD DAMN you need to cover Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel. I know it's not your most popular but I think the Morrowind video is your best because you're the most entertaining when you actually like something, and NOBODY besides a few short Warlockracy videos have given these community expansions the analysis they deserve.
So RUclipss 2024 recab says this is my favorite channel. I say that's absolutely right. Next to Private sessions where I'm in the 0,1%. Getting the notification for this video here is like early Christmas. Thanks for that
Great video, didn't agree with all the takes but really appreciate the level of care you took to craft this mega analysis of one of the best games of all time, imo.
Absolutely worth the wait. Cant believe the amount of work that went into this and this is only part one. Playing this while levelling a rogue in Anniversary. You werent lying about rogues being looked over in dungeon groupings, but its still a good fun.
Fuuuuuckk, this is gonna be so good. Pat, thank you. Now I don't have to start the Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim retrospectives over again... for a couple days
I just finished Oblivion and a bunch of work streams. This interrupted me right as I was about to go to Morrowind again. I am happy for new content... But now I gotta wait to listen to that masterpiece again.
It feels really nice hearing pat talk about a game he likes without a personal burning hatred for the company behind it. It's rare to find a critique maker that actually backs up and elaborates on everything they say and doesn't say shit just cuz it sounds good and the online circlejerk will like it
@@neck_acrobatics His disdain for modern Blizzard was there for sure. For earlier Blizzard he has appreciation despite some of the headache they caused him.
it's hard to have no disdain whatsoever, looking what a dumpster fire this company has became. 20 years ago you expected at least a 9/10 from them, possibly a 10. Today you expect shit, and if the game actually happens to be good, you're surprised. It's like The War Within, it's a good WoW expansion, same with Dragonflight. But people don't care anymore. The game died in Shadowlands and people never returned. Sure there were bad patches and expansions and the game would come beaten-up and brushed, but would heal eventually with a good expansion. Shadowlands ain't like that. It KILLED the game. There's no coming back from that. Players nowadays drop in for a month and drop out for 2 years.
@@AbstractTraitorHero ikr like it’s hard to tie the company culture directly to product quality, but it really was such a 1-2 punch for them and the fans… shame
If anyone is going to be playing on the new Anniversary realms because of this video (sorry), I am going to be rolling characters on both Horde and Alliance there for the upcoming TBC Classic realms. If you looking for a realm to play on, we are rolling on Dreamscythe, Alliance preferred. I don't have a planned timeframe I am actually going to play but if you want to send me stuff to use when I do, that is where I am going to be.
Note 1: I have lowered the number of ads on this video. I was following the standard of 4+ minutes per ad that is common on YT, however with the new UI on a longform video that ends up looking like one continuous ad break. Also, apparently Medivh is apparently technically in WC1. Sorry WC1 fans, I failed you
I'm down to clown.
Will you be creating a guild?? I'm down
As a paladin main I hope you're able to level up that paladin who was lost to dead servers in Era.
I personally am trying to quit WoW right now so I'm sorta speedrunning myself to 60, leveling this last character before I finally stop paying Blizzard after 20 years.
Also I want to say thank you, the video was overall excellent, but I just finished an Uldaman run tonight on the Dreamscyth, it was my first time healing (ironic given how long I've been olaying WoW) & your words about how really anyone can do it motivated me to such it up & just be the healer, gotta say, I much prefer tanking as healing really felt like juggling l, but still, it was a good experience + I got some shoulders & a weapon off the final boss (though I can't use it for 2 more levels).
Sorry for oversharing a bit but, TL;DR: Thanks for the motivation to try healing, I hate it but it was good to face up to that weird social anxiety.
On Dreamscythe, have a small band of adventurers in my Guild for anyone looking for a home. : )
Brother, I've never left.
A 6 hour review? On a game I haven't played? A game I have no intention of ever playing? Yeah I'll watch that for the next week.
6hrs is only the first act
@@gae_wead_dad_6914not everyone is as mentally corrupt as you bud.
@@gae_wead_dad_6914 or, guys like looking at a butt of a girl running around, rather than a dude.
@@gae_wead_dad_6914so what? He plays just as many male characters. Why are you transvestigating him you weirdo?
@@gae_wead_dad_6914 Not everything has the meaning you want to assign to it, that's a stretch and reach beyond reason lmao
Will be watching this on my MAIN MONITOR while WIDE AWAKE btw
U are the exception my man
Built different
Rawdogging Patrician analysis? Crazy!
People of culture 👏🏻
Im putting on my eyelid stretchers rn. Can someone tie my hands to the chair?
The idea of helping others as you pass by with buffs/heals and sometimes helping killing mobs was some of my favorite interactions when playing. Not knowing the person and never seeing them again but taking the time to help them out was always a feel good moment.
I've loved seeing this during Fresh Classic. "Hey, have some Arcane Intellect!" "Cool thanks, don't drown, here's Water Breathing."
Several years ago on a private PvP TBC server I played as a Draenei shaman. I made it to Terrokar Forest and had to kill an elite bird there. An Orc was on the same quest, so I helped him.
The guy not only stayed to help me, but actually waited on me when I died due to pulling aggro and the second time when he did the pull and I didn’t get the credit for the kill.
All of that without ever being able to communicate apart from gestures.
Some time ago on another private server the guy from my own faction stole a chest while I was fighting the mob near it. Then it happened again with another guy. As a SSF I was pretty annoyed.
During TBC, I did a Shaman Pilgrimage across the Alliance Kingdoms. Part of it was started as a desire to be a Dranei on a Tiger (you needed to be exalted with factions to get their mounts). So I did the simplest thing I could, grinding beginner quests up through the Night Elf Zones, healing anyone I saw along the way, helping with any group quests, sharing those that you get from drops. There's a certain Zen to it and you meet a lot of cool people.
Yeah that massive burst of good will in super early classic was so fucking cool.
...and then the elf returned the favour and tried to kill you.
I learned quickly not to trust any elf that wasn't a druid.
"Warcraft III was humanity's turn at the ball crushing factory" killed me, so hilarious but truer facts have never been spoken
This is the best channel for truck drivers like me who spend hours driving. (I find the mildly bored, vaguely disdainful voice soothing for some reason) Welcome back, Pat!
You might like efap. Pats been on there a few times
It’s like NPR for nerd shit
I get to do a 10 hour drive next week, this is first on my playlist
I'd rather not listen to anything soothing while driving lol
Great for pulling doubles in management too.
this appeared on my feed. thanks for making it. today Nov 23 2024 is exactly 20 years when the original was released. halo 2 and half life 2 had come out that same month. you had to be there. youtube didnt even exist back then
Brah, this is like the complete inverse of me finding Tay Zonday on that quantum physics video by Anton Petrov.
Ima gonna have to present to the emergency room after this crossover
@chubbyemu
Warcraftemia -
Warcraft meaning World and emia meaning presence in blood.
You're a legend Chubby! It's so great to see you here :)
This is the most based crossover I've ever seen in my life. Surely I'll see you on a coach Eugene video next?
Your comment reminds me that RUclips is a community
This video is pretty classic, wow.
Get in
Say it again?
This comment is very much underrated, to a cataclysm-ic proportions
It really made my Lich King fill with wrath, if you know what I mean.
John Warcraft
I love the Wetlands run. My favourite RP concept is a night elf warrior who lost her memory somehow and woke up nursed back to health by the dwarves, and adopted a lot of dwarven stereotypes and mannerisms (mining, drinking, brawling, etc) because she doesn't remember being a night elf at all.. and so to live this out, I do the Wetlands run at level 1 or 2 in order to level in the Dwarven starting zone. I did it on Dreamscythe (the new anniversary PVE realm) not long ago, and a kind level 23 (or so) hunter escorted me, unasked, the whole way. It was really kind of him~
The collaborative spirit of classic WoW is still alive and well; like Pat mentions, one good, generous experience will outweigh so many minor bad ones. Do a kindness for your fellow players! They won't forget it
5:09:00 The hatred for Gnomes is actually twofold if i recall correctly; one, they're very underdeveloped and seemed a lot like a joke race that's not really meant to be taken seriously, kinda like Pandaren, and they had more or less been just an offhand plot device to explain who is supplying the Alliance with their arsenals of gunboats and tanks in an otherwise grounded high fantasy setting (even to this day, there is not a single quest involving them that has a serious tone, it's always about their inventions malfunctioning in bizzarre ways or procuing outlandish parts and components). The second reason is that Gnomes were one of *the* powergamer PvP races and still kind of are because of their tiny hitboxes that makes clicking on them to focus them down really difficult in hectic situations, even more so when they're rogues zooming about at Mach 5 after dropping out of stealth. The playerbase has also historically favoured Horde to play as, so there's a lot more angry Horde people who are annoyed by that tiny Gnome griefing them in Strangethorn.
"Shadowlands? Not canon."
Based
Also true.
I swear, Shadowlands is one of the biggest reasons why I still don't even want to think about getting into WoW again. Ruined so much lore, mysteries and characters.
As someone who quit around Cataclysm and hasn't kept up with WoW since, can someone explain what was so bad about Shadowlands?
@@Merlin326 I don't know everyhting that was wrong about the shadowlands, but my problem with it was that it felt like the whole expansion came from left field. Basically, it was all made up at the moment with really no build up. Sure, some youtubers made lore videos explaining how the shadowlands were foreshadowed, but it was reaching for some fairly loose strings of evidence.
So yeah, my problem was that shadowlands came from no-where and it wasn't even all that interesting. Someone else might have more deeper explanation than me.
@@Merlin326imagine if the new WoW writers went “woah woah woah we can’t mulch all these iconic characters to death!”
Also they tried to make it so that everything that has happen was all a part of some super duper big bad’s plan. Some guy worse than the grossest and mind melting Eldrich abomination. And yeah he is just a goofy looking wow model :/
It's very polite of you to have *wave* and "thank you" as macros
i always say, manners cost nothin'
I just type them out, it takes about as much time as finding them on my bars
I used to have those + /cheers and /chicken when I felt in the mood
People complain that I don't keybind as though I don't have the most important macros bound and ready
I don't want to stop running
More people should be annoyed by Blizzard leaning on "and then person / thing was corrupted" for Warcraft lore. It's been annoying me for multiple expansions for WoW at this point. I'm tired of the Old Gods. I'm tired of the endless parade of cosmic threats being somehow more grave than the previous cosmic threat and thus rendering the previous one not cosmic, aaaaaa
I don't think the devs expected wow to go as long as it has.
@@spookzie4208 That's not much of an excuse to try and make every expansion a more bombastic cosmic danger than the previous one. If anything it should encourage a slower pace of stakes increasing, to figure out a long-term gameplan.
@@civildisorder 100% agree. The cosmic danger thing should've been assigned to the void lords that Blizzard have done nothing with. Now they are so much lesser because of how high the stakes already are and Azeroth now feels so small.
@@TheBloopers30 its like, almost 100% the void lords who xal'atath is allied with or serving... idk man seems like you gotta catch up
@@blur3316 I said "now they are so much lesser" as in now when they are used. Have no intention to "catch up" anymore because the writing has gone down a cliff.
Neat little factoid but if you unlocked the door inside the Deadmines then fired the canon, you would auto kill Mr.Smite during the very early beta of WoW. It was removed for being to confusing and missing out on experience. You would of looted the chest next to the bridge to get his loot.
That is pretty cool. I did always wonder about that chest but figured it was just for the setpiece of him switching weapons
Incredible, I lived through the original lifetime of wow. All of this stuff you talked about I personally experienced. On top of that I have watched videos like this multiple times in the past. Yet somehow you made this compelling enough that I stopped what I was planning on doing today and watched the whole thing through. I kneel to your monumental efforts, I remember trying to explain wow lore to my dad when we watched the warcraft movie and I was not successful.
1:47:47
Yo, 4 strength 4 stam leather belt?
Level 18?
Euuugh aaaaaugh
Huge missed opportunity to edit in the classic clip
LOL that's actually insane
I've got bawls of steeel
Ohhhhhh my gooood.
This guy has a macro when he lands.
AHHHHH!
Act 1 of 2? So only 12 hours max?
What is this TikTok ADHD stuff, you can do longer than that!
part 2 of his skyrim video is over 2 hours longer than part 1, who knows
Oh, you noticed the video is long? You're the first to point it out. Very unique.
Act 1 of 2.
Check the Act 2 video description.
Acts 7-8-9 in the works.
Yeah, he is going longer just in shorter videos 😏😆
I've never played Wow and I don't think I ever will, but I will definitely watch and enjoy every second of this. Thank you Patrician.
Asmongold will come, asmongold is coming he will deliver us HAIL TODD HAIL BETHESDA HAIL ASMONGOLD
I mean its so easy to play WoW for free these days, especially if your interest is in the vanilla-wrath era. TurtleWoW is Vanilla+, Warmane is Wrath of the Lich King or Burning Crusade. You don't have to pay Blizzard to play WoW anymore, just try it. It costs you nothing
@@malfuresz7351 nah I enjoy showers and not having dogshit takes
@@Shmandalf it costs me 130 gigabytes of storage space
@@Shmandalf I enjoy having a social life
Getting my Tank credentials questioned before a SoD Wailing Caverns run was a slap to the face, this dungeon has been out for 20 years, 19 of which I have been playing. I've tanked in this dungeon since before a lot of the player base has been alive. You can improve the game, but the retail player base mentality is stuck as is.
Right? You would think SoD had buffed the entire dungeon for how weird some people would be about that instance. It's WC, don't pull raptors and use tremor totem
People are still desperately chasing the feeling they got from old school MMOs without realizing that half of the magic was an immature Internet. Rereleasing nostalgia bait will never take you back to an age of ignorance where you had to talk to people in game and ask where and how they got an item, or force you to organically discover a quest location.
I replayed Old School Runescape this year and I ended up playing it harder than I ever did 20 years ago. Being able to more readily learn more efficient ways of skilling up and profiting at the same time, was way more motivating then fumbling in ignorance 20 years ago.
Idk classic wow was pretty fucking fun
Classic felt like vanilla, your points make sense on paper but it did not play out that way for everyone, I think that had something to do with BFA tbh
@@Joutube_is_trash Nope. Just nope.
Yea man vanilla was something specia
The "Act One" part scares (and delights) me greatly!
settle in for another 20 hour review
Considering it's WOW, it's no surprise.
I don’t care about WoW but I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on it. Your Morrowind analysis was so good that I’ve listened to it *several* times
Same, for all of his long form reviews
Same 2x. I have listened to his long videos 10+- times@@HumbleHonkingEnthusiast
Glad I’m not the only one
According to RUclips, morrowind became my #1 most viewed game this year.
I don’t remember any other morrowind videos.
Same. Not a WoW person, but PatricianTV's takes are consistently interesting.
The Skyrim review put into words so many things that I felt about that game but couldn't express; that review I have rewatched/relistened to three times now.
How do you check that?
29:24 having huge lore beats in external sources has been a huge problem for the story of wow. It was so jarring going from the end of MoP and defeating garrosh, to all of a sudden he not only survived but also fled to the past in an alternate reality and returned with an army
garrosh was imprisoned at the end of MoP they tell you that they are going to have a trial for him at the end of the cinematic after you defeat him. i will agree the reason he broke out was pretty dumb and shoehorned in but the rest was explained.
There is also a problem of having story tied to events and like half the story in flavor text or super boring exposition. Instead of concise dialogue. FF14 is how you do it right. With WoW. You could play the entire expansion and have zero clue what is going on
Another game notorious for this is Warframe. If you just play through all the story quests. You will not understand the story. Half the time you'll even outright miss character introductions and a quest will start assuming you know what's going on and who people are. I think it partly comes from dropping the story over time instead of all at once. Many MMOs suffer from it. FF14 is like the only one that doesn't cause they drop a fully completed story on release
It's also just stupid. Simple as.
listen pookie i know this came out two weeks ago but i can't wait for part two and your new vegas video
Despite having played WoW for over three or four cumulative years from TBC to WotLK (and a few more from private servers in between then and now) the experience of playing "World of Warcraft" still nestles itself deep in my grey matter like a nebulous dream I keep trying to make sense of every time I think back to it. Happy to hear you ramble on for hours about a genre-defining game that's over a decade old at this point, if only to help me figure out what I actually enjoyed about the most famous and successful Skinner box known to man.
As someone who’s been playing Wow since 2004, this is so hype. You’re absolutely right that WoW is surprisingly underrepresented on RUclips. The vanilla game has such an amazing setting with lots of interesting characters and smaller stories.
Jediwarlock makes some very intriguing lore videos delving into more obscure stuff. He explores it like how people explore dark souls lore, looking at easily missed objects in the world and seemingly one-off comments about ancient events and connecting it all together. Highly recommend. I really do wish there were more people doing lore vids.
Arthas, and the Human campaign for WC3 is some of the best tragic hero writing Blizzard has actually done. So I find it really amusing the guy who designed the level STILL seethes whenever you tell him he doesn't actually get why people would understand and even side with Arthas given the awful situation Stratholme was.
It's like one man is determine to be butthurt about it to this day.
Lmao he doesnt understand why people side with arthas, when theres a fkin zombie plague, and by destroying this one city, he could save millions more? how doesnt he fkin get it!?
@@ManCheat2 I don'T even get how it is not the correct decision. I mean, what was the alternative? Wait until they trun zombie and kill them afterwards?
Stratholme was a trolley problem. The thing is after the trolley problem is that you're supposed to minimise losses then go after the evil bastard who set it up.
It's because in the initial version of the mission, the civilians wouldn't automatically turn into zombies, and you'd have to slaughter the non-infected just to be sure. Developing it they realized that was a bit too grim, and a little boring to play through, so now every single person is 100% ghoul in waiting.
The buttmad developer is still hinging on the version of the story where it's stil ambigious whether a complete purge was the only solution, even when the gameplay flies in the face of that.
@ He did a little interview with a Vtuber, I forget her name but it was odd seeing him have trouble with some of her more basic questions on his interpretation when it was clear it was less directed at Arthas and the situation and more at people who he thought were morally reprehensible for agreeing with Arthas at that moment. The usual Nazi implication was thrown around by him.
Ah yes, another masterpiece to watch over the next few nights before bed, and eventually to rewatch after I've forgotten enough of it, ad infinitum.
I rewatch all of patrician's best videos like every month at this point, never forget any of it, he's just soothing to listen too during 8-12 hour work shifts
How would you forget it?
At first I thought this video was gonna be some kind of 6hr troll. Turns out it truly is an epic telling of the classic adventure. Riddled with wonderful snippets of lore and behind the scenes back story to the lore.
I have a feeling I will enjoy watching this a second and third time.
Just discovered you. Don't feel bad about being a radio channel. I love it. I listen to you driving around for work. Keep up the good work, i can't wait for part 2
I literally was thinking yesterday, "I wonder what rpg patricianTV will cover next, I hope its long." And to see that it's about Classic Wow is awesome. This game has been one of my favorites since childhood, and I come back to it every year as often as I come back to FNV and Skyrim!
I been waitin for this one since I first heard you talk about it I think like a year ago, glad to see it finally out, can't wait to hear what you're gonna say, I really appreciate your analysis on games & I've been playing WoW most of my life.
oh my god thank you for that bit about hotbar size, so many people I know make a huge deal about how many buttons you have in these games while saying things like "how am I supposed to learn what all of them do" like you're expected to use all of them all the time or aren't given them at a steady pace so you have time to learn and adjust to your new tools
Yeah you're lucky to get 1 new ability every 4 levels or so, maybe 2. It usually just a higher rank of ability you already have/know how to use
I think part of what turns people off from Retail these days is that Blizzard (and by extension, the playerbase) is these days fully expecting you to use *ALL* of them where they didn't used to back then. Ironically, they curbed the (to be fair, actually kinda excessive) button creep of Vanilla only to actually increase the required amount of knowledge you to need to actually play your class right. Many abilities were there simply for fluff reasons. Now all these buttons are there for gameplay reasons, and the amount of them hasn't actually gone down by as much as many classic andys think it does.
I enjoy that aspect and much prefer retail over classic, but i can see why people feel very turned off by this design.
@@Donnerbalken28 Yeah retail is very much something that you can tell is the product of 20 years added on top of the original development time. It's extremely overwhelming to jump straight into without some homework. You need time to invest into more educational content where even finding good stuff is tricky. My issue with classic vs retail is the reductionist views both sides will have of the other game. Classic andy's will criticise retail for things it isn't anymore but never really discuss why retail has gone that way without strawmanning retail players as impatient and dumbed down. Retail andy's who are end game focussed miss the idea of classic being a slow paced more dynamically social game etc.
I like both but I play much more retail simply because retail is designed that way. Classic just isn't for pushing keys and mythic raid progression. There's a lot of things that make classic what it is that people do not want to do anymore. People generally don't want to spend hundreds of hours levelling anymore. People generally don't want to play a game with equally simple mechanics anymore. You cant recapture the magic of classic and that's why retail has focussed on the things that can feel fresh, retaining players- and it excels at that. Specs have high room for skill expression, progression is rewarding but not timewasting, raiding is legitimately solid every patch, mythic+ regardless of balance stays fun for me. The gameplay loop is far more replayable than classic. I like classic but its a one and done deal for me. For an mmo, that is an unsustainable model so It was inevitable that wow developed the way it is currently. Classic was great because then the game had charm, The game and world itself was a mystery by virtue of being novel and fresh and all that stuff. There's just no way that can could have been maintained as the game persists imo, which is fine given that classic is available to play anyway.
Great video as always Pat! as a person who loves extremely long game reviews and world of Warcraft classic this hit me in that appetite of videos about the game that I've been wanting! Cant wait for part 2!
Structurally this is Pat’s best work yet considering how messy it is to talk about warcraft
I'm glad someone understands how difficult structuring a video about Warcraft can be
Not even 15 minutes in and I'm screaming Old School RuneScape at the screen so hard. That game did what WOW fans are asking for. Just relaunch an old version people have nostalgia for and develop new content in the old school style with player input and voting to make sure the devs don't make any of the controversial updates that put a lot of old players off
ive been saying that WoW classic should go the OSRS route for years.
They tried it with Season of Discovery but they didn’t put near enough effort and content into it. They claimed the whole mode was a test for something similar in the future so it’s possible that they still do it, but Blizzard is a really stubborn company and unlike the RuneScape devs, they have a huge player base playing the modern version of the game who spend millions of dollars on the in game purchasing.
I like to think that RuneScape 3 is kept alive by the amount of people subbing to play OSRS while it’s just the opposite for WOW.
Yeah we want the wow version of that, ours is good and I enjoy it. If classic+ had a similar community vote system on updates and additions to the game i think it would be so amazing, but I doubt blizzard will replicate what jagex does
@@trevorburton3290 it is actually the opposite, RS3 has less players than OSRS but they spend way more per person
Osrs has also been out long enough that the Devs know exactly how to maintain that old school theme while still pumping out QoL which we can't live without, there's now an inherent trust that we won't get the same style of updates in rs3. Playing RS3 is insanely jarring to play, it's fun and different but losing QoL that OSRS and runelite has is terrible, the removal of tick manipulation is boring, the MTX is predatory
I can't wait to add this analysis to my monthly cycle of Pat videos to binge watch
2:00:14 correction, Medivh was literally in Warcraft 1, one of the missions in the Human campaign was to kill him with your troops.
Yup i was just about to post this as well. He is the second "adventure mission" on the human side so technically he was indeed killed by a bold band of adventurers.
And the full story he had was
Medivh is le mad vvizard. He does bad demon summony stuff and whatnot. Go kill his ass.
And then you do. And thats the mission. Yay.
Never played Warcraft, never will, but will watch the entire analysis multiple times
This is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen
The level of research done for this is insane, I know a lot about classic wow having been on and off private servers and playing it over again, but you even showed me some stuff I had never seen.
Is it bad to say you have done this justice as expected? after watching your Bethesda reviews several times, I just expected to learn about stuff I have missed having played 15 years mostly on "Classic" realms.
Can't wait for the rest of this big excite.
It's funny, because if you're a vanilla WoW player who has played Warcraft 3 and paid attention to the quest text, he hasn't said something I didn't already know. Really puts into perspective how much time I've put into this game that a man can rant for 6 hours straight about a game and it's nothing I didn't already know.
@@Zhohan- there there grandpa
I don't have much interest in WoW, but I absolute will listen to Pat ramble on about things he likes... and/or dislikes.
Hell, yeah. Cheers, bro!
I started playing WoW in 2006 when I was 9. I was never allowed to play video games as a kid, but I watched my dad play & he'd been playing WoW since the beta, he even had a few friends in the alpha. He passed away in early 2006 & my mom let me take over & play on his account. I missed maybe 3 months of subscription time on that account since the game launched, and I've played every expansion up until the latest one, The War Within. Besides The Burning Crusade I got every collectors edition of the game as well.
All this to say I finally cancelled my subscription for good, it ends on December first. I'll be watching(listening to) this as I level my final character on the relaunch of Classic Fresh that just came out a couple days ago, trying to hit 60 one last time before I finally kick the habit for good.
While I haven't watched through yet I'm sure this will be great as your videos always are, much thanks for making this I've been looking forward to it for a while now.
Curious to hear what was the last straw that broke the camel's back? Most long time players bailed either at the end of Cataclysm, in the middle of Warlords of Draenor, at the start of Battle for Azeroth, or after the first patch of Shadowlands. If neither of those managed to break your streak, I'm curious to know how The War Within managed to do that. I am personally looking forward to finally having a dedicated Goblin patch for once.
This video really shows me how much I missed when I played WoW way back in the Vanilla days in terms of the story and the continuity of the questlines and stuff. I had no idea so many things were connected the way they are. It gives me a lot of appreciation for the world.
There's a great commentary on the playerbase in this analysis. The idea that a gamer who has played this one game for 250+ hours needs a resume, a teacher, and a bureaucratic evaluation to do a new boss in that game is a unique Warcraft psychosis. Druids being raunchy in barrens chat is good and proper.
Here I was, thinking that Patrick has left us and yet, he comes out with another certified hood classic.
Wow, that was quick, figured this would take another six months. Thank you Pat!
Something to fall asleep to for the next three weeks, gradually absorbing every line until it becomes a permanent fixture in my subconscious. Thanks mom!
Can't believe I was able to watch this all the way through. I had some fond memories of WoW back in the day and this video was a fun trip down memory lane. Great video, loved how thorough it was, and I can't wait for the follow-up!
This is incredibly detailed but also very relaxing to follow at the same time. Can't wait for more acts
2:20 Sseth jump scare
The Merchant's Guild continues to thrive
Hey Hey Patrician
_The smooth taste of Malboro Gold, really hits the spot_
Hell yeah what a surprise to my news feed. Can't wait to crack into this one after I sleep.
Wooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Never thought this would happen. I kept playing the Elder Scrolls series on repeat.
Before even watching this, Patrician, I greatly appreciate the time and effort you put into making this video analysis and all others. Love the content.
2:00:15 Not true, Medivh DID exist in Warcraft 1, the 8th Human mission was named after him and was about you killing him. Admittedly though, he was just characterised as an evil warlock taking advantage of the situation to gain more power, rather than being the one to summon the orcs to Azeroth, I'm pretty sure, but still, he at least *existed* in the game.
Yeah that is in the endless lore blackhole category of mistakes. Forgive me WC1 fans. I'm sure when they made that mission they had it all planned out, even the Jailer!
@@Patrician Truly unforgivable, you'll be sent to work in the incredibly inefficient Warcraft 1 mines as punishment. Also gnomes were in WC2 as the Alliance counterpart to goblins, but like, I think they were probably half thinking about retconning them out of existence until WoW needed another race anyway to be fair
Cool analysis man. Will take a look at act 2 now. Thanks.
As someone who got goated into playing on my friends private wrath server. Playing as my undead priest who feed a warcrime plague pumpkin to a prisoner of war in a tavern basement felt like a fever dream and I was all for it.
Crazy patrician could post this from Asmongold's basement
RUclipsrs uh- find a way.
Wonder who else is chained up down there
@@0ldar Gotta ask Pilav. He recently escaped.
@@0ldarprobably kids
Yaaay, another quick retrospective!
I remember getting to the mid-50 levels and being able to kill the goblins at booty bay to grind up my Bloodsail reputation to do their quests for the pirate hat. Was such an achievement at the time.
I cannot believe I watched a full six hour video from a RUclipsr I’ve never seen and enjoyed it thoroughly all the way through. Can’t wait for part 2!
Oh yeah, it's going to be a GOOD long Saturday.
PatricianTV is the literal peak of video game analysis. I love how you are not afraid to shit on everyone if necessary, very cool.
At last, he returns! And with the long awaited video about WoW! I'll have a great evening today!
After finishing I'm glad you made this, I'm glad to finally see someone just rambling for hours about the very same exact things I rambled or thought about while playing through all this. I'm going straight to Act 2.
No shit last night was watching the Skyrim video for the hundredth time and thought it would be neat to get his take on WoW. As far as I'm concerned I manifested this video and you're all so so welcome.
Perfect time to have this on for audio while grinding in Redridge!
Barely 6 hours? I need at least 8+ hours to sleep soundly!
That's why I watched the Morrowind one more times than I dare to admit.
@@ЂорђеКозић It still amazes me how much love Morrowind gets. Feels like yesterday I was just a kid playing it for the first time, not realizing that was gonna be about as good as it gets for Bethesda titles. A yearly playthrough (to some degree) for the last 20 years, and still finding new things I didn't know about.
RUclips has a queue function
While I'm grateful for all the fantastic video essays, I can never forgive how this has irreversibly altered my perception of time and also raised my expectations for other video essays. I can no longer look at a 30 or 50 minute video and feel with confidence it's going to leave me satisfied on the topic.
at this point im just watching these videos to hear an intelligent and soothing voice keep me company
I literally yelled to my husband from across the house about this video and how excited I was. I then seen it was only part _one_ and proceeded to scream incoherently for 30 seconds. Pure happiness was given to me today, thank you 🤗🖤
Oh heck yeah! I hoped you would cover WoW someday, the fact that this is 6 hours for act one?! We are in for an amazing experience.
The best example I can think of to show the worst part of WoW storytelling is the Scarlet Crusade, not only does it show how badly retcons, writers not taking into account the larger story when writing scenarios, last minute changes in plotlines, gameplay elements taking precedents over logical writing, but also it can easily segway into other similar bad plots (The Forsaken, the Worgen, Jaina, etc,)
The story of the Scarlet Crusade actually start in the Tabletop RPG books, published by White Wolf, which were released before WoW was launched.
The aftermath of Warcraft 3 left the kingdom of Lordaeron in shambles, the kingdom was targeted by the Undead Scourge, created by the Burning Legion, to soften up the World of Azeroth before their invasion, the Scourge would succeed in destroying the Lordaeron, they did it under the leadership of Arthas, former paladin of the silver hand and crown prince, the remaining survivors either went to Kalimdor under the leadership of Jaina Proudmoore, or fled to Stormwind. Arthas went rogue, taking control of the Scourge from the Burning Legion and their Dreadlords, some of the Undead split off from the Scourge, becoming the Forsaken under the rule of Sylvanas Windrunner and Varimathras, they would take over the capital city from Balnazzar, killing him and becoming the pre eminent power in the region.
The remaining Humans that survived the onslaught, banded under the leadership of various military orders, such as the Argent Dawn, the Brotherhood of the Light or the Alliance of Stormwind, the remnants of the Silver Hand in Lordaeron, led by Alexander Mograine, wielding a powerful artifact called the Ashbringer, and Dathoran, founded the Scarlet Crusade
It was one the most succesful ones, retaking huge chunks of the Tirisifal region, including a couple of farmstead and the newly rechristened Scarlet Monastery, Hearthglen, Tyr' Hand, and parts of Stratolholm. It was also quite directly stated that while the Crusade was fighting for a righteous cause, it had gone off the deep end, with their paranoia, believing everyone not part of their organization was hostile. This was somewhat understandable however, due to the fact that the Scourge was able to succeed due to having so many hidden agents in the populace, and one of the stories in the books was about one non-undead human farmer, poisoning soldiers fighting the scourge.
One of the members of the Scarlet Crusade was Taelin, son of Tirion. Tirion was the protagonist of the first Warcraft novel, where he stopped the unjust execution of an orc and for that he was relieved of his rank as a paladin and banished to the wilds, but his son followed his footsteps and became a paladin himself. Tirion was saddened by his son joining the SC and sought to lead him back on the path of justice.
In Vanilla, we learned that the Scarlet Crusade had a high ranking member serving as an envoy to the Alliance in Stormwind, and that there where members who were unhappy with the direction the Crusade was going, and directed us to the Monastery, to destroy its corrupt leaders. During the raid, we learned that the SC imprisoned and tortured its dissident members, and that Renault Mograine, son of Alexander was now one of the leaders of the SC.
At Stratolholm it was discovered that Dathoran had been replaced by the dreadlord Balnazzar, which is the first major retcon, as it implied that Varimathras didn't kill him or that dreadlords have some kind of ressurective ability.
In the Plaguelands we met Tirion and help him convince his son that he should turn back on the SC, but he was killed by an inquisitor just before meeting his father. Enraged Tirion dispatched his sons murders, and decided to rebuild the paladin orders with the help of the Argent Dawn.
When Naxxramas descended to blight the land, and the various factions had to come together, we saw that the SC was willing to put aside its difference with the Argent Dawn and Brotherhood of the Light to lead an assault on the nexus, but it also was unhappy with the AD harbouring Tirion, who was recruiting knights to help in banishing the Scourge, and was looking to end his live. In Naxxramas, we find that Alexander was turned into a death knight and the Ashbringer was corrupted. After the battle, if you brought the sword to the Scarlet Monastery, the ghost of Alexander would reveal that he was betrayed and killed by his son, Renault. If you brought the Ashbringer to the inquisitior Fairbanks he said that the sword could be purified and it would involve something in the Outlands, the name of the remnants of Draenor.
In the Comics, another set of retcons followed, here, Dathoran and Alexander fought the Scourge under the banner of the Silver Hand, after killing and replacing Dathoran, Balnazzar would corrupt the troops, this included convincing Renault to murder his father, after these events the Silver Hand would split between the Scarlet Crusade and the Argent Dawn.
The main story of the comics, however follows Alexander's other son, Darion, and his quest to purify his father's soul, a quest that would succeed at the cost of his life.
In The Burning Crusade, nothing relating to the SC happened, and there was nothing to help with purifying the Ashbringer.
In The Wrath of the Lich King, the story was continued, in the death knight starting area. Arthas, now part of the Lich King (another bag of contradiction, even discounting post WOTLK events, due to various writers, try and follow closely the quests in Northerend and see what the Lich King is, and his various atributes) leads a succesfull campaing against the Scarlet Crusade, and at the end orders Darion, now also a death knight, and the player to Light's Hope Chapel, when they arrive they are confronted by Tirion, who frees the group from the Lich King's control and forces Arthas to retreat. Tirion than declares a union between the Silver Hand and the Argent Dawn, called the Argent Crusade, to eradicate the Lich King and his minions.
Later when arriving in Northerends, you find the Scarlet Crusade has rebranded itself as the Scarlet Onslaught and has set up base near Ice Crown Glacier, led by Genereal Brigette Abendis and the disguised dreadlord, Mal'Ganis. This doesn't make much sense for a few reasons:
1) The Crusade was willing to put aside its difference with other faction to fight the Lich King but now, it doesn't. And Mal'Ganis was looking for revenge against him so he would have little reasons to fight with the other factions at the moment.
2)How does the Crusade have so many resource left? Warcraft 3 happened less than a decade ago in cannon, and the SC suffered heavy casualties throughout WoW, so where are they getting their manpower, which couldn't have been that large, even if cannon doesn't give hard numbers or percentages, since it states that most of Lordaerons inhabitants where turned undead, and a significant chunk helped in forming Theramore, a proper city in lore, and helped repopulate Stormwind (It was implied in the White Wolf RPG books that Bolvar orignally was from Lordaeron, due to his tabard displaying the ensignia of the kingdom, though in the books he was depicted significantly older than he was in the game, but him and a large part of Stormwind troops being from Lordaeron would make his speech at the Wrath Gate hit harder), and resources?
3)From a meta point of view, how could the SC be a threat at this point? They've been defeated numerous times and they are normal humans, why would you use them.
And this leads me to think and hypothesize that perhaps the story of Scarlet Crusade was changed late in the Development of Cataclysm and Wrath of the Lich King. I think that originally The Scarlet Crusade was suppose to unite with Argent Dawn, and be retired as a faction, the evidence?
1)As mentioned, the raid in Northerends doesn't make much sense in storywise, but does in a meta way if it was suppose to be the last major appearence of the Crusade, their swansong.
2)In Cataclysm, the Brotherhood of the Light, takes over Tyr's Hand, the BotL, although now part of the Argent Crusade are still an autonomous group, and one of their own members describes them as Argents minus morals. A good setup for future antagonists.
3)The death knight starting area storyline is something of a mess, you beat up the SC a bit and than, literally at the end you began Tirions' story, where he declares a union of two factions, which do not appear in the zone or storyline, which is the one that is followed throught the rest of the expansion, with the Scarlets receiving just one quest of note. This makes 99% of the DK starting area irrelevant to the larger Lich King-Tirion story, but also to the SC story, as they would once again have the manpower and resources to be a major threat. But if the Argent Dawn and Scarlet Crusade where to being merged into one faction, and Tirion was suppose to be a member of the Argent Dawn, than the DK starting area storyline would not be irrelevant in the grander narrative of WoW, and the redemption of the SC would parallel the redemption of the Death Knights.
3)Even with all the retcons, the silver hand in Lordaeron was defunct, and the ones in Stormwind under the juristiction of the Alliance, with Tirion being noted in Vanilla to helping the Argent Dawn.
4) The name of the Argent Crusade, makes more sense as a union between the ARGENT Dawn and the Scarlet CRUSADE.
This is all circumstantial evidence, and I haven't looked at behind the scene stuff so take it with a grain of salt.
Finally retail, the Scarlet Crusade would still be antagonists, and still somehow have the resources to threaten the Forsaken, and even more baffalingly the Gilneans.
If you don't know, some months ago, during Dragonflight Blizzard released an event about the worgen retaking Gilneas (sidenote: if you follow the lore closely, this is the 3rd time they have done so, it's so blatant that the status of Gilneas change depending on the need of the storyline) and the current owners of Gilneas turned out to be the SC. May I remind everyone that:
A) The scarlet crusade was never hinted at operating even close to Gilneas
B) The SC is fanatical in fighting the undead, the worgen curse grants immunity to undeath, besides other benefits and downsides
C) Worgen were waging a guerilla war against the Forsaken in Silverpine, and where turning remaning humans of Lordaeron, such as the Southshore survivors, into worgen to bolster their ranks.
So what seems more logical? Joining together? Alliance? Leaving each other alone? No! Fighting.
I was wondering why this was so short :D Can't wait for pt 2
Your content is the only one where I do 6 hours in one sitting. Can't wait for pt 2
5:08:20 Fun fact, in Norse mythology Dwarves and Dark Elves are two terms for the same beings, so TES making Dwarves a type of Elf is probably more in line with actual mythology than it is a mockery of the modern fantasy Dwarf, though I'm not so bold as to claim it to be the intent of the writers (maybe it was, maybe it wasn't idk)
Wow, so happy to see my good personal friend Patrician Television making a video for me, personally.
I quit playing WoW years ago. I quit when my guild and I looked around and realized the game wasn't what had brought us together originally back in 04. We all were popping into WoW to see each other, make plans for trips to cross continents and even oceans to hang out. We'd put in the work, but the game wasn't the game that drew us in. The characters and narratives we cared about weren't just gone, they had been functionally erased and replaced several times over. The narrative wasn't something we could make sense of anymore. The world wasn't the one we went on raids to save anymore. We would pop in the hang out, then log off to play other games. One day we decided to run a few missions in Warframe together and realized "Wait, we don't need WoW anymore. We chat all day in IRC (Discord hadn't replaced it yet). We hang out when we can IRL. Some of us paired off and got married to each other. We can just play other games that don't feel like chores and obligations" So we all dropped the game fairly quickly after. A few people called us traitors just for playing single player games while waiting in queue rather than dedicating our entire lives to WoW and Blizzard or prioritizing families and careers at times, but we didn't care. We quit anyways.
A big part of old WoW was community. As the years went by I felt that less. WoW got too big for the game we loved to exist within it. Even Vanilla isn't dragging many of us back, partly because a big part of our guild has passed away, partly because it didn't bring back the community we missed.
I thought I was gonna end up listening to this on my second monitor while gaming but it was so interesting I ended up giving it my full attention and just watching segments before bed. Great vid!
Great video, as a fan of WoW since Warcraft 3. I followed WoW's lore religiously and many of your criticisms of how it was handled ring very true. This video carried a lot of nostalgia for me and I watched a lot of it
Only just now starting the vid so I haven't watched more than a couple minutes but I wanted to say up front that I recall how weirdly dismissive the Blizzard Devs were back when people were originally calling for some kind of Classic WoW release with the whole "you think you want that but you don't really want that attitude" and I've always thought that was interesting because like I get it. Players are often notoriously unreliable when it comes to actually critiquing things honestly.
To use a simpler example, you might put out a new character in a Moba or a shooter or something and then you get a ton of feedback from your players saying that they're super busted and op and whatnot but then you have objective cold hard stats from your game showing that it actually only has a 45% win rate so they're clearly not actually overpowered.
And the issue is that a bad developer would look at that kind of situation and go "oh well I guess the players are clearly wrong so we should just ignore their complaints" when that is not the correct response. Yes they are wrong, but the important thing is that they're still complaining despite being wrong. Which means there's clearly still some core underlying issue that is creating this illusion that all the players are falling for.
In my example maybe it's that the character is just annoying to fight, or that there's a particular ability that feels overpowered while the rest of the kit is weak or something like that. The complaints still mean that there is clearly a problem that needs to be solved, it's just that the players are bad at accurately articulating what that problem specifically is.
And I suspect that it was the same for WoW in many ways. Players clearly were complaining about the current state of the game at the time and so they claimed they wanted things to go back to a simpler time when they liked the game more. And maybe the Devs are objectively correct that the lack of many QoL features made the original launch version of WoW very annoying to play compared to the current version. But it seems like their response was entirely dismissive instead of actually trying to address the complaints and dig through them to figure out what people were actually complaining about.
And you know I wonder if that attitude ever really changed cause ultimately while i don't play WoW myself, I do know that obviously they did end up releasing some kind of actual Classic WoW, but it also feels like Blizzard has repeated this kind of scenario over and over again where they do something to a game, get feedback complaining about it, and then act completely dismissive towards that feedback and completely miss the point of it all. We saw it with Overwatch and how many people complained with every new patch about the game getting worse, only for them to completely screw everything up with Overwatch 2 and now of course we're getting that Overwatch Classic event to try and appease those people. And to some extent you could apply this to the Diablo Immoral situation where they acted as if the issue was people not having Phones instead of what they were actually complaining about.
It seems like Blizzard has a history of belittling their own players and not wanting to take them seriously and then having their unwillingness to address feedback on a deeper level come back to bite them in the ass over and over again.
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Anyways I have no idea how relevant any of this is to the actual video so I'll probably write up another comment when I actually finish watching it in a few days
I hated playing against Yone as a midlaner too. (:
You should look into J Allen Brack's impact on Star Wars Galaxies, people have been telling me stories about the decisions he made there
Okay, about the video. Pat, I'd like to apologise to you, because in the brief moments I was watching and not listening to it during my walk, I saw how much effort you put into putting together the relevant footage and even adding some written bits, but I simply didn't see most of it! I think putting more effort into the audio, rather than video is truly the way forward. Great vid, can't wait for part 2.
4:57:50 "The Old Gods made him CRAAAAZYYY! He wasn't mad after thousands of years of holding a grudge, there was a guy in the dirt that whispered in his ear while he was eepy!"
You are literally insane the work you put in. Respect and love from California
Hello from 🇳🇴
The goat of long form content is back!!!!
I was literally halfway through my rewatch of the Oblivion retrospective, grinding linen the day after the anniversary launch. Thanks for the leveling content 🙏
>scavenging in the ruins of gnomish Chernobyl
would you go so far as to call it Chergnobyl?
I think one thing about the "nature" aspect of the druids being focused on trees and forests comes down to the somewhat artificial nature of Azeroth's ecosystems as a whole. The druids aren't really hippies (or at least they weren't supposed to be) they're much closer to maintenance engineers working off a specific blueprint created by the Titans: The Emerald Dream. Sadly the dev's often forget this aspect and simply make them mystical hippies, which is a shame since 'mortal followers enacting the will of a godlike robot terraformer' is a far more interesting root for their organisation.
Its funny that the barrens are such a "suboptimally" designed area from a gameplay perspective but by far the coolest and most "world of actual WARCRAFT" one from a visual and layout design. It actually feels like the barrens from warcraft 3.
I love it. Its by far my favorite zone. Its not the fastest for levelingand not the most fun from a quest perspective but just walking around the place and taking in the view is still my favorite WoW-singleplayer memory.
Incredibly well done!
I really enjoyed your insights and references to early WoW development and culture, it really helped bring the whole experience together
i need act 2 yesterday thank you
Hi! 2019 Shaman Tank main here, if you care for any insight. While Sunken Temple is certainly a filter for my fellows in green jesus, Shaman Tank remains (sometimes) viable up until about AQ40.
Shaman tank in vanilla has roughly 5 major problems, which may or may not be acceptable depending on the scenario.
1. We have poor sustained threat. Being a mana user with no built-in mana regeneration - Water Shield wasn't until TBC - and which needs to cast every 5-6 seconds for maximum threat, you can run out of mana quickly when competing for threat. Compare to Warriors and Bears, whose threat output is relatively constant over the course of a fight.
2. We wear mail. While druids have a built-in passive to get more stamina and armor, Shamans are left with inherently weaker defenses than warriors. While this is made up for by wearing a shield while warriors might need to dual wield to output enough threat, our gear doesn't otherwise scale properly for tanks and we become reliant on block and dodge for mitigation. This leaves us quite vulnerable to damage when stunned, or from behind. In addition, there is precious little endgame Mail armor with tank stats, leaving us at the mercy of crushing blows.
3. We have poor AoE threat. Most of our threat comes from a single-target spell and a threat-enhancing buff to our melee attacks. This can be easily mitigated in dungeons with Engineering, but that is insufficient for most raids. (And the fact we can't wield Thunderfury doesn't help either.)
4. Half of our threat comes from a Nature spell. Given the number of mobs in the game that are immune or resistant to Nature in both Maraudon and Sunken Temple, it's no surprise that's when many aspiring shaman tanks give up. It also means that Nature-immune bosses are a hard no-sell for us.
5. Due to the above, we have absolutely shit PR. It's damn hard to find new groups that'll take you seriously, even if you know what you're doing.
Anyway, due to all of the above, Shamans are not a substitute for Warrior tanks in some content. This doesn't mean they're never useful, however. They bring the same utility all Shamans do, which can be unusually useful for a tank in some scenarios.
Situations where a shaman tank is unacceptable:
- AoE trash tanking in 40-man raids;
- Main tanking most bosses in 40-man raids;
- Tanking pretty much anything in AQ40 and above;
- Tanking most nature-immune mobs in raids.
Situations where a shaman tank is fine:
- All 5-man dungeons (although ST will still suck, even at 60);
- UBRS, even without a second tank;
- Main- and off-tanking all of ZG;
- Off-tanking AQ20;
- Main- or off-tanking Onyxia;
- Off-tanking single mobs in 40-man raids.
Situations where a shaman tank is the best option:
- Tanking the skull in a burst scenario (e.g. Majordomo's little guys);
- Tanking a single mob without threat competition (e.g. Core Ragers during Golemagg);
- Offtanking anything at all when the raid just needs another shaman.
Let me know if I've missed anything important or you want to know more!
It's interesting how much of SoD was giving Shamans tools from later expansions, that explains both my experience playing the class and the experience of healing for an SoD shaman. It's unfortunately just a format thing that I didn't get to play Horde end-game classic to see their potential because I think seeing one work would be better than any questions I can think of.
@Patrician What's truly sad is that SoD tank shaman plays absolutely nothing like classic tank shaman. Doesn't scratch the itch at all. Obviously it's a lot stronger because they replace all the problems with new tools, but I wish they'd stuck closer to the OG identity. Then again that's all of SoD I guess.
I comfortably maintanked every MC boss at gear level aside from Magmadar and Golemagg. Still wound up doing them because I couldn't say no, and I lucked out enough that no one noticed the problem. Opening on Vael is an unparalleled power fantasy, but everything after in BWL is admittedly pretty rough. AQ40 is "fine", but it was at that point where the Warriors had caught up so much that it stopped feeling like a shammy brought anything meaningful to the table.
ST is surprisingly ok. You just frost shock the dragons instead of earth. Shaman melee threat carries hard when everyone's gear is bad, and especially if your group is underleveled since blocked and glancing attacks still apply rockbiter. Furthermore, you can pull more aggressively to gain threat leads because Shaman mitigation outpaces dungeon mob damage until mid-BRD. Fresh 40 Shammy felt invincible regardless of pserver or classic.
AoE threat is a challenge in specific cases, like packs in Strat UD, but even that I think can be overcome via tab targeting with a fast weapon and some alternative threat management (ie. dropping earthbind to slow the group, marking a skull for dps to burn, grounding for lone casters to buy you time). 3-5 target groups are a nonissue unless you're in a party with a bunch of sweaty cleavy warrior dps, which is annoying from a pride standpoint but things at least die quickly.
As for PR, I found people were heavily skeptical of it on private servers (their threat tools were bugged on most of them for a super long time, and mob damage was often overtuned), but almost no one on classic seemed to care. Warriors would frequently try to get out of having to tank, so they were particularly receptive. Shaman's added utility while playing the role can make for some really smooth dungeon runs if you manage your mana well and keep everyone's favorite totems up, and that leaves a strong impression, but maybe people are less forgiving if you're new and don't have those things down.
@@Raisukee Ah yeah your post reminds me of the truly most annoying part of shaman tank, which is required tank swaps 😭 gotta build all that threat manually
@@hollowtruncatedicosahedron It meant the only role you could play vs the drakes was maintank, which was scary due to thrash crits. Building all the threat manually is even worse when you consider taunt gives a bigger lead the longer a fight has been going. My condolences to Paladins as well.
Can't wait to fall asleep to this video for the next week!
Me too, mate, me too! 😂🤌
I got 44 minutes in and am excited to listen to the rest. This 6 hour video is just part 1? I'm in for a treat if the first 40 minutes of quality carries through the rest. Great job from what I've listened too so far.
As someone who has only played FF14 and not WoW, its very interesting to hear about the differences in the fan reactions to the massive world changes in Cataclysm and A Realm Reborn.
its an incredibly different situation though, surely you see that if youre familiar with both games.
ARR was a desperate final attempt to salvage a playable game out of the ruins of FF14. Even people who played back then say it was hardly enjoyable, but the vibes were there, and thats what made it salvageable.
Cata was released at the height of WOW’s popularity, and massively changed and overhauled things people were completely content to spend their virtual lives within.
…its different. different stuff. hardly fair to compare the audiences reactions and act as if thats where the differences lie and not the massive amount of context surrounding said reactions.
I'm a wow baby (only started in 2020, in retail), yet a Warcraft veteran (1995 - Warcraft 1). I think the problem with Cata is that the changes were just different for difference sake - that hole in Westfall? There are no quests explaining what happened. That fire lord that fucked up Ashenvale? He's just there - no explanation. Then there's also the vanilla world quests that took you all over Azeroth. All cut back down to a zone. That Dusk wood quest that took you to Stormwind, Red Ridge, and Westfall? Yeah, it the guy is just over there in the same zone - aren't you happy you didn't have to go on this mysterious quest!?
Vanilla has so much better world building than the rest of WoW. And I say that after playing retail for 1000 hours, and having put the same amount of hours in Wrath (got Loremaster, BTW). I can already tell that the game went downhill during TBC. The dungeons immediately felt ALL more straightforward. Just run this long corridor, instead of Blackrock Depths that's larger than Stormwind, and feels like an actual underground city! All those older dungeons made me feel a sense of wonder and amazement that felt immediately lacking in most if not all dungeons from TBC onwards. /rant
I mean there is nothing to destroy, it's Final Fantasy. Compared to Warcraft.
please dont bring ff14 ff14 is shit go play 11 wow classic is much better
I stop playing WoW during Cataclysm and eventually migrated to FF14 during HW, but it wasn't the massive world changes that prompted the move. It was the heavy emphasis on gear that would constantly obsolete and there was no glamor system at the time so if you weren't having a mountain of fun raiding, the game just felt like building a sandcastle the tide would eventually just wipe away. In FF14, there was way less emphasis on raiding and gear and more emphasis on personal appearance and actually being a part of the story, and you wouldn't see the WoW website have no updates for like 10 months straight.
Appreciate that you're branching out in these longform videos from modern Bethesda and Modern Bethesda-style games, but GOD DAMN you need to cover Tamriel Rebuilt and Project Tamriel. I know it's not your most popular but I think the Morrowind video is your best because you're the most entertaining when you actually like something, and NOBODY besides a few short Warlockracy videos have given these community expansions the analysis they deserve.
Nice to see another Warlockracy watcher here.
So RUclipss 2024 recab says this is my favorite channel. I say that's absolutely right. Next to Private sessions where I'm in the 0,1%. Getting the notification for this video here is like early Christmas. Thanks for that
Great video, didn't agree with all the takes but really appreciate the level of care you took to craft this mega analysis of one of the best games of all time, imo.
Absolutely worth the wait. Cant believe the amount of work that went into this and this is only part one.
Playing this while levelling a rogue in Anniversary. You werent lying about rogues being looked over in dungeon groupings, but its still a good fun.
Fuuuuuckk, this is gonna be so good.
Pat, thank you. Now I don't have to start the Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim retrospectives over again... for a couple days
I just finished Oblivion and a bunch of work streams. This interrupted me right as I was about to go to Morrowind again.
I am happy for new content... But now I gotta wait to listen to that masterpiece again.
It feels really nice hearing pat talk about a game he likes without a personal burning hatred for the company behind it. It's rare to find a critique maker that actually backs up and elaborates on everything they say and doesn't say shit just cuz it sounds good and the online circlejerk will like it
Patrician's disdain for Blizzard is quite noticeable I think.
@@neck_acrobatics His disdain for modern Blizzard was there for sure. For earlier Blizzard he has appreciation despite some of the headache they caused him.
it's hard to have no disdain whatsoever, looking what a dumpster fire this company has became. 20 years ago you expected at least a 9/10 from them, possibly a 10. Today you expect shit, and if the game actually happens to be good, you're surprised. It's like The War Within, it's a good WoW expansion, same with Dragonflight. But people don't care anymore. The game died in Shadowlands and people never returned. Sure there were bad patches and expansions and the game would come beaten-up and brushed, but would heal eventually with a good expansion. Shadowlands ain't like that. It KILLED the game. There's no coming back from that. Players nowadays drop in for a month and drop out for 2 years.
@@alewis514 That's not to mention all the horrible irl stuff with blizzard as well regarding some of the stuff it's done.
@@AbstractTraitorHero ikr like it’s hard to tie the company culture directly to product quality, but it really was such a 1-2 punch for them and the fans… shame