I only play the campaigns, I don't have the attention span or ability to remember tech trees to let me play rts' online.

>>92993
Warcraft isn't really so reliant on that like say, Age of Empires is.

>>92993
This, plus I'm an editor addict. Really loved the W3 editor, probably spent more time in that than the actual game.
I have to say I kinda miss the atmosphere of the old games, tho.

I lost my WC2 Battle Net Edition disk ages ago ;_;

On the plus side, I'm enjoying Frozen Throne.

Remember how fucking awesome the Warcraft 2 manual was? I still have it. 79 pages of awesome.

Holy crap, my friend and I poured HOURS into the Warcraft II campaign editor. We designed these stories and, like, bonus objectives and stuff. Holy shit it was crazy.

I still replay the second and third games from time to time.

>>92993
I'm in the same boat, I think.

  Remember the music?

I just played Warcraft 3 for the first time ever today (my computer club was having a LAN party). It was pretty good! Undead confused the crap out of me because they play so differently to what I grew up with (Acolytes don't need to stay near building? Foot soldiers that chop trees!?) but I think I got the hang of humans fairly quickly.

>>93033
Night Elves are even weirder in my opinion, and about 10x more boring. The walking building thing is neat, but they don't move fast enough to take real advantage of it.

Really though, as much as I enjoy it, even Warcraft 3 is fairly bare bones as far as RTS go. Age of Empires 2 has a lot more depth to it, just as an example (but then I consider AoE2 the pinnacle to which all RTS should aspire towards so I'm probably being unfair).

I think my biggest issue with the series has always been the puny maximum group caps. Warcraft 1 maxed out at fucking FOUR as I recall, 2 at 9, and 3 at 12 I think.

>>93037
I agree with you on the unit caps. I want to be able to select every single unit I have (although that number isn't exactly sky-high, either) and aim them at the same target. Peasants, ground units, air units, all of it. All set to trample across one patch of land.

...Also I have never played Age of Empires 2. Or Starcraft.

>>93037
Warcraft 3 doesn't even have groups or a "guard" command, both of which WC2 had.

>>93038
I doubt we'll ever be rid of party caps, but some games have pretty high ones. AOE2 has something like 30 units a group if I remember right.

So which of the fucktons of shitty plotholes, retcons, and generally stupid shit introduced in the WoW era of Warcraft has pissed YOU off the most /cog/?

I'm going to have to say Med'an myself.

>>93059
It's the small shit that annoys me most. Let's see...
Med'an is right up there.
The survival of Muradin Bronzebeard.
Sargeras corrupted the eredar as opposed to the other way round.
Wyverns are now beasts to be trained instead of sentient allies of the horde.

Warcraft III wasn't a great RTS, but the online custom games were fuckawesome

>>93077
The whole Eredar thing never bothered me to begin with since I always found it hard to believe that anything short of true cosmic horrors could corrupt a titan.

Muradin's survival was poorly handled and dramatically unwise, but it doesn't make me RAGE as much as Malganis surviving did. The ONE good thing Arthas ever really was allowed to accomplish was killing that fucker, and they even took that away.

>Muridan survived
>Illidan survived
>Malganis survived

Did anyone fucking stay dead?

>>93110
Any of the characters you actually liked.

>>93110
Uther
Lothar
Doomhammer
Terenas
Guldan

>>93104
Nothing Arthas accomplished was good from the time we started playing him to the time we stopped. That's the entire point. He became a terrible human being and became sub-human shortly after because of his mental state and demons pushing him over the edge.
He was trolled to oblivion. He got mad. And he gained nothing from doing it. Malganis surviving isn't all that much of a stretch- Dreadlords are just very hard to keep in the ground.

Illidan is canonically dead /now/. Him surviving at Icecrown isn't so big a stretch. Arthas at the time was too focused on not withering like a blade of grass from the melting Frozen Throne.

The worst offender of these story retcons is Muradin, and even that was handled believably. The idea an exploding dais of ice could kill a stalwart dwarven hero is just silly. Plus it segued into frozen metal dwarf tribes. There's nothing to not love there!

>>93167
Arthas was originally just a loyal paladin trying to save his kingdom. The problem was pretty much that he was a TEXTBOOK "purge the evil no matter the cost" paladin and that he had no patience.

>>93167
>The idea an exploding dais of ice could kill a stalwart dwarven hero is just silly

The idea of a powerful cursed artifact weapon is not so silly.

>>93169
I see Arthas as textbook fallen paladin.

>>93184
And so do I.

>>93218
But I think we disagree on when Arthas fell.

Mal'Ganis was a douchebag and needed to go. However, I never felt he was permanently gone. Dreadlords just never seem to die so easily. But Arthas didn't know that.

The more he fell into the trap of compromising his Paladiny virtues, the more corrupt and easily subverted he became. The mere fact he was willing to slay Mal'Ganis out of spite and petty vengeance rather than in the name of the Light was damning in itself, but every event leading up to that tried Arthas' morals painfully, and he failed _every single time_.

Far as I'm concerned, Arthas was morally compromised and ripe for the plucking from the second map onwards. From there it was just setting up some virtual situations for him to lose his virtues and humanity to. And how fucking beautiful and evil is a gesture that drives a man to murder, killing a piece of himself but not his target? Just left to believe he'd done the deed, and suffer the moral consequences.

Narratively, that sets the Nathrezim up as pretty impressive tempters and corruption seeders. That's tricking a paladin into thinking he murdered a sock puppet, all the benefits of making them slit their own throat with none of the collateral damage from losing men. He gave up his conscience just to rid the world of evil, and got nothing back for it when it didn't work. Not even his dignity.

Mal'Ganis surviving actually works better than if Arthas killed him, I think.

The whole "Dreadlords don't die" thing was never a factor till WoW. Before that, they were no more death-resistant than any other hero.

Personally I feel that Arthas was just doing what he had to do... UNTIL that whole business with backstabbing the mercenaries, which was both the dick move of dick moves AND stupid since he could have used them as extra manpower against the undead.

>>93288
It was expanded upon in WoW, but I guess if you disregard extended canon, that's true. And you have every right to do that.

Arthas also butchered yet unchanged men, women and children in Stratholme. Even if technically done to prevent further transformation into the undead, it still counts. And that's exactly what Mal'Ganis was counting on. Uther, being the bro he is, knew butchering a town pre-emptively was wrong, even in the name of preventing further atrocity. At that point, Arthas went from a defender to being an overstimulated immune response.

>>93290
They were infected. You can't save infected. Period. Killing them was the only option that made any sense.

>>93290
Is this the same extended canon that made Orgrim Doomhammer a nice guy?

What I want to know is how Guldan's head gets passed around so much when he supposedly died deep within a secret, sealed tomb full of insane demons.

>>93302
Sense? Paladins don't do what is sensible. They do what follows their code. Before those still human people transformed, they were still human. Paladins aren't really in the business of killing innocent people. The 'proper' thing was to be reactive. Call it a restriction of the occupation. Even if it's more logical and sensible, and the right thing to do for a normal person, Arthas still put too much zeal into crushing people beneath a hammer before they'd yet died.

>>93303
Nope. Ogrim Doomhammer is an asshole, in any canon. He's just less one dimensional in the extended canon.

>>93307
Dreadlords did it, of course.
;)

So we agree that Arthas=
Paladin->Practical->Revenge Crazed->Soul Sucked Out->Snarky Death Knight->Lich King then?

>>93311
Yeah, pretty much.

>The Blood Elves
>Return of naval battles
>Sylvanas pressganging ogres, bandits, and a fucking Dreadlord into service
>Running through Nerub fighting giant spiders and creatures right out of Lovecraft
>Everything Rexxar says and does
>I BRING PANDA-MONIUM
>DEM. FUCKING. CREDITS.
Sylvanas still isn't as cool as Alleria from Beyond the Dark Portal and the Cthulhu bits seems to come out of nowhere, but HOLY SHIT, EXPANSION OF THE YEAR, ALL YEARS.

So Frozen Throne has left me on a OH FUCK YES BLIZZARD I LOVE YOU high that I haven't been on for years. The way I see it, I have three options:
1. Actually try out WoW and see what sort of crazy shit they do with the setting after Frozen Throne.

2. Play Starcraft, Diablo, or Lost Vikings, since I never did play those as a youth save for a bit of Starcraft at my friend's house.

3. Fuck the whole things and play WC2/Beyond the Dark Portal again.

>>93368
Rexxar has always been a pretty sweet bro.

I don't know what Admiral Proudmoore was eating but god damn the man was a monster. Summoning sea elementals and shit.

>>93381
I fucked around a lot on the final mission. And by "a lot" I mean that I destroyed all the wave towers and production buildings (except the ones belonging to the Guard), resulting in THE HORDE ITSELF pouring out of the base right into Proudmoore's throne room(ish area). They couldn't beat the man himself because of the elemental summoning, but they did kill all his guards.

>>93379
I wouldn't recommend trying WoW unless you're in it for the long haul. Which would really be a waste of money if you're just into it for the lore/story continuation. Vanilla WoW (levels 1-60) also aren't worth playing through.

Centaurs have become everybody's gimp. I ain't kidding. The Horde have even taken to making rugs out of these fuckers. Murlocs are hilarious and horrifying.
Also, Night Elves may possibly, potentially be descended from trolls that stumbled upon the Well of Eternity.
Humans, Gnomes and Dwarves have the most metal of fantasy origin stories I've ever heard.

>>93384
My only knowledge of WoW era lore comes from Azzur's Warcraft 1 and 2 LPs (and the thread for the latter).

Apparently the gnomes have nuked themselves and Elves in the horde? Also holy shit the Ice Trolls.

>>93397
Yeah. Gnomes were missing from WC3 because they were off dealing with an invasion of troglodytes. Weird caveman ape-dwarves made of animate rocks and stone. One of the ruling people decided it'd be wise to flood the city capital with deadly radiation. It poisoned the gnomes who couldn't escape and just made the troggs radiation flavored.

Also yeah. The Sin'Dorei are kind of a leap of logic and buggered canon, but.. y'know, not really. You saw how dem elves were treated. At least Thrall doesn't treat his people that way. When the Tentacled Space Goats arrived, Blood Elves took one of their Saintly Wind Chime creatures from their capital and drank the delicious, delicious holy power from it. Taaadaaa. Paladins in the Horde.

Human beings are also the offspring of half-giants, themselves the fleshy spawn of metal half-giants, who themselves were the spawn of giants made of ICE, LIGHTNING AND METAL. Who were the spawn of the Titans. Turns out everything on Azeroth was mechanical or an animate creature made by the Titans. Flesh was the result of the Elder Gods (those eldritch creatures from the cave in icecrown) curse.

>>93384
>Humans, Gnomes and Dwarves have the most metal of fantasy origin stories I've ever heard.

So out of pure curiosity, did you ever play Brütal Legend?

>Decide to catch up on lore via the WoW wiki
>Kaelthas an evil servant of the Legion
>Muradin revived
>All Dreadlords alive
>Pretty much everyone from Beyond the Dark Portal is confirmed to be alive... and doing nothing
>Grom's son is about to fuck over the horde by doing the exact thing his father died trying to stop
>Entire Dragonflight devoted to TIME COMPRESSION
>MED'AN
>KAELTHAS IS SERVING THE FUCKING BURNING LEGION WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK
Illidan finally just snapping I can understand. That's one mind that really held together far longer than it should have. Kael on the other hand seems to have had his motives entirely thrown aside and gone on a goddamn power trip by siding with THE VERY POWER THAT LANDED HIM IN HIS POSITION IN THE FIRST PLACE. This isn't even like with Arthas, where there's a whole campaign devoted to him being constantly tempted and finally have his soul sucked out, it seems that he just up and say "well Illidan's lost it, better latch on to the nearest demon sorcerer."

Fuck that noise, time for that other Blizzard game that people were going on about 10 years ago. "Spaceforge," yeah that was it.

>>93582
Oh yeah and
>Jaina completely sidelined in favor of a new Alliance leader just as loco as Garrosh
>Garona reduced from mildly respectable assassin character to... well... yeah.
>Peons not playable characters
HOW MANY THINGS CAN YOU FUCK UP IN ONE MMO BLIZZARD?

>>93582

>This isn't even like with Arthas, where there's a whole campaign devoted to him being constantly tempted and finally have his soul sucked out, it seems that he just up and say "well Illidan's lost it, better latch on to the nearest demon sorcerer."

To be fair, the dude does have an addiction.

>>93595
I DON'T CARE, IT STILL MAKES NO SENSE. It seems that a good 90% of the other Blood Elves said "fuck that" when it came to joining the Legion and the ENTIRE GODDAMN POINT of Kael's character is supposedly leading what remains of his people after the fall.


But fuck it, I'm playing Starcraft now, and I must say, it wastes no time in establishing that all your commanding officers are assholes, unlike Warcraft, which took 2 games and an expansion pack before settling into "every faction is run by dicks." Also every Terran is a cowboy.

>>93379
If you're thinking of trying out WoW I would definitely wait until Cataclysm.

>>93658
I think he'd be better off just reading up what happens cause I would imagine he'd miss out on a lot of story content in areas people just don't do anymore like Blackwing Lair, Ahn'Quiraj, Black Temple and etc.

Then again I never really read up on Warcraft's lore at all so I may just be saying something stupid.

>>93613
Hey, you're missing a great deal of the development of what happened when the High Elves became the Blood Elves. Once their Sunwell was fucked with evil poop, they had no convenient source of magic to eat. They're thaumavores, that means the elves are both nourished by and simultaneously addicted to magic. Partly.

Have you ever tried to stop breathing? Eventually you will have to breathe. Magic for the elves is how they live. The Night Elves consume druidic/earthen magic, which is plentiful and all encompassing. As renewable as the sunlight and the growing seasons. The Sunwell is a little piece of the Well of Eternity.

Kael'Thas was lost the minute he sided with the Nagah and the Illidan. He had no choice, just like Arthas didn't. And from then he just fell in with the wrong crowd, getting an alternate source for his addiction for magic.

In WoW, the playable Blood Elves of the Horde broke away from Kael'thas. While Kael'Thas forces in Outland started drinking the blood and essences of demons and Mannoroth the Pit Lord. You actually have to fight gigantic, thorny Felves that've had a steady diet of devil juice.

At the end of the Burning Crusade expansion, they go to free Quel'thas from the Burning Legion's influence. The Blood Elves get their Sunwell back. But by that time, Kael'Thas has drunk the devil juice himself.

The Pit Lords are not dead. Vashj? Kael'Thas? Illidan? Dead.

.. that said, I still wouldn't recommend playing WoW for the gameplay, and you don't need to pay for the story.

>>93671
Yes I'm aware of the magic addiction, but here's the thing about siding with Illidan vs siding with The Legion: ILLIDAN WAS NOT A GENOCIDAL MANIAC. In Reign of Chaos he was working to free the Felwood from the Legion. In Frozen Throne he was working to destroy the Scourge. In the backstory he brought back the Well of Eternity to defend the world (which it DID via the World Tree at the end of Reign of Chaos, destroying Archimonde).

>While Kael'Thas forces in Outland started drinking the blood and essences of demons and Mannoroth the Pit Lord.
>Mannoroth
Okay so either there's a supply of Mannoroth's blood lying around in the Legion's storehouse, OR THEY BROUGHT HIM BACK TOO FUUUUUUU

>>93613

People with an addiction will behave irrationally in order to get their fix.

>>93677
Yeah. Burning Crusade amplified (retconned) the ending of Frozen Throne. Illidan's crew didn't kill Mannoroth, he survived.

However, Mannoroth was denuded of his armor and then stuck in the basement of a citadel where they made him a full time blood donor. To feed orcs. And elves. You do eventually kill him in the Burning Crusade.

>>93687
I thought that was Magtheridon.

>>93723
..You're right. I got them confused.
n/m.

>hurr durr reactions to a 12 year old game
My old bosses were neglectful cowboy douchebags, but my new boss is a GENOCIDAL douchebag. Just another day of being an abused minion for the glorious Magistrate Rodyle of the Sons of Korhol I suppose.

Also I seem to remember hearing something important about this Kerrigan woman but don't recall what it was. Oh well.