Quote Originally Posted by The Succubus View Post
This may just be me but I'm worried that they've run out of compelling villains to use as raid bosses.
Vanilla had Nefarian, Ragnaros, C'thun, Onyxia - all of whom have well established presences in Warcraft history.
Where were C'thun and Ragnaros prior to WoW? I think that constitutes them coming up with compelling villians, rather than merely recycling set pieces.


BC we had Illidan (I was really sorry to see him go. He was one of my favourite characters, despite being a complete (scrubbed)) and then in Sunwell we even saw Kil'Jaeden.
We also had a host of other great villians and bosses in BC, from Karazhan to Gruul to Magtheridon, and so on. Gruul was a set piece completely unique to BC content, and like most of the zones of BC, he had an entire zone (Blades Edge mountains and part of Nagrand) devoted to establishing him. In fact if you look at Burning Crusade, pretty much every zone centered around a different threat and major villian. The whole expansion was not centered on Illidan or Kil'Jaeden. One could argue that this was a superior means of set up and establishment of villians, along with storytelling.

Also, thank you for being a fan of Illidan AND acknowledging that he was a jerk. For some reason everyone thinks he was this amazing good guy who just did some bad things for the sake of his people, rather than being a selfish jerkwad (which he was).
He can still be a cool character and be a selfish person, and still do good things, but I just do not enjoy reading when the fanboys like to casually forget who the character was.

Wrath of course we were up against Arthas and the first of the loopy Aspects, Malygos.
With Cata, we met the second loopy Aspect Deathwing.
Do you even know what made them crazy in the first place? They've both been crazy since the War of the Ancients. 10000 years ago. Malygos only recently got more crazy. Probably because of Yogg-Saron getting free and whispering in his ear.

Unless Alexstrasza suddenly decides to have a glass of the crazy juice all the other Aspects have been chugging lately.
If any Aspect was going to go crazy next, it would be Ysera or Nozdormu. Ysera because the Dream has been screwed up for a rather long time (detailed in game for years, along with the novel Stormrage), Nozdormu because time has been messing with him for a long time (detailed in game for years, along with the novel Twilight of the Aspects). And hey, you know, that stuff what happened when you go kill Deathwing.


To go back to what I've been saying about the Burning Crusade model of storytelling.
Each zone set up each boss as kind of the end boss of each zone. The only issue with that was, at the end of Hellfire Penninsula you weren't 70 and couldn't go kill Magtheridon.
But clearly they can set up new bad guys just fine. Gruuls and Old Gods are prime examples. And as much as Wrath set up Arthas as THE big bad, plenty of the story directed at Naxxrammus and Ulduar. Specifically at Kel Thuzad and Yogg Saron directly, with lesser bosses inside those instances also given some setup.


In Pandaland, we have.....no-one.
It's like you completely ignored everything I wrote. I am the sad.

First off we have the Sha. Feel free to say they aren't THE overarching big bad, because they probably aren't. But they are a very large threat, and Blizzard did add them new, therefore they aren't running out or unable to come up with new credible threats without mining all their established set pieces to death.

And they are a very credible threat, probably not contained to just Pandaria. In theory, any time someone thinks bad thoughts or feels strong negative emotions, these things get stronger. Add on the coming war, and all the, you know, negative emotions associated with that... yeah, they're about to get seriously stronger. We don't even know if you can perminently kill them. How do you 'kill' the embodiment of anger? I see them being long term.

There is also the Old Gods. We know for a fact that there is some Titan influence and involvement on Pandaria (look up Elegon), we know that Old Gods can't be far behind. Who are faceless and mysterious, but are compelling largely because they are faceless and mysterious.

Finally, there is "the War itself" as Chris Metzen said. The Alliance and Horde both have many compelling characters who could involve themselves in a big bad kind of way. In fact, having 'the war' as a PvE focus could be a very refreshing change of pace. It would give the Alliance VS Horde war a real Center Stage feeling, rather than a behinds the scenes feeling that PvP has thus far relegated it to. Part of why I'm really interested to see how the whole story of Theremore Isle ends up advancing.

As for what they have in mind for the next few raiding tiers, I have some theories. I see them making use of techniques they pulled in Firelands. A good few quests in the 85-90 zones along with some content specific quests or daily quests to establish the raid bosses (IE-The 'save Thrall' questline established a few Firelands bosses, so did the Firelands Dailies, there was the questline which introduced ALL the bosses of Zul'Gurub, even Mandokir's pet, several of the cata zone quests established dungeon and raid bosses like Cho'gall). And from what the Beta has shown me, this appears to be largely the case. Plenty of the Mogu you see in questing show up in the dungeons and raids.


As for Garrosh = Boss, it should be noted that the wording they used was "final event" not "final raid" and for some reason everyone keeps confusing the two. Just figured that should be clarified.