World Of Warcraft / Tropes A to B

World of Warcraft trope list A to B.

Main Page Index | C to E | F to L | M to R | S to Z

---

A

• Abusive Precursors:
  • The Old Gods were always understood to be this, maintaining a veritable hell on Azeroth while they ruled the planet.
  • A more personal example is the mogu. Several thousand years before even the sundering, the mogu slowly forgot their original nature and ruled Pandaria with an iron fist, making every other race sans the mantid slaves dominated through fear. Their cruelty is the stuff of nightmares, from abuses to sending slaves to be fodder, to even putting their dead slaves' souls into statues brainwashed to serve them.
  • Subverted with the Titans. Known for some time to have forged landscapes and seeded life on worlds, a growing body of evidence suggested that they weren't exactly saints themselves, imposing strict order on planets they visited, and pragmatically killing everything and starting over if something goes wrong, to the point that even some of their own servants are becoming disillusioned with their attitudes and methods. However, it was ultimately revealed that they truly did care about the life on their worlds. The reason that they were willing to wipe out all life on Azeroth was an absolute last resort, and only due to the sheer threat of the Old Gods winning. The reason they've been hands-off about these major threats, is because they were all killed, and their plans and defenses have fallen into disrepair or corruption in their absence.
• Aborted Arc:
  • Throughout World of Warcraft's history, there have been many apparently unfinished quest lines and plot elements. Some of these have since been revisited in later content, but some remain unresolved. When revisited, Blizzard at least tries to tie up the storyline in a dramatic fashion. Cataclysm in particular went to great strides to bring closure to many unsettled storylines from the original release. See the trope page for specific examples.
  • Though Cataclysm was good at tying up loose ends from previous storylines and setting up threads for future expansions, there was an aborted arc in Vashj'ir. Several places in the game have the Naga plotting to overthrow Water Lord Neptulon, which they do using the kraken Ozumat. The Throne of the Tides dungeon has players rescuing Neptulon and fighting back against the Naga and Ozumat, but ends with Ozumat retreating and Neptulon just disappearing without a thank you, giving the impression that he had been abducted (for players who pay attention to Neptulon instead of the loot, you can SEE him being abducted by the final boss, Ozumat, as it flees the fight following its defeat). A second instance, Abyssal Maw, was supposed to finish the arc, but was dropped. He shows up in the Shaman Champion Hall in Legion, and is helpful to you. Word of Godinvoked is that Neptulon was so badass, he freed himself. Eventually.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer:
  • Undercity is a unique case, being a subterranean city with the sewers above it, used as the entrance. They're spacious enough to fly a winged mount through. Justified in that the Undercity was specifically designed to be a hidden military base and was then expanded into a place for the Forsaken to "live" in.
  • There are many examples in the dungeons and raids as well. Most "impregnable strongholds" in the game are accessed by the players via a sewer, a cave system under the building, or a tunnel into some forgotten lower levels. In fact, it's probably easier to count the number of end-game instances that DON'T use this.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Grandma Wahl in the Worgen starting zone is able to shift back and forth from Human to Worgen long before the Night Elves show up to give Worgen the means to go back and forth at will. She apparently does this by the power of senility, as when she transforms to protect her cat she doesn't seem to be aware she's a Worgen in the first place, let alone in a Shapeshifter Mode Lock.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • Quite a few. Ranged weapons don't run out of ammunition any more, your mounts can fly or run indefinitely, eating or drinking heals all wounds, you can carry hundreds of items with you without so much as a bulging backpack showing, and you can swap pants without ever getting off your horse, as long as you're not in combat.
  • In-Universe, Warlocks, Demon Hunters, and Death Knights are not very well trusted. Warlocks and Demon Hunters must work very hard to ensure their demonic powers do not get the better of them, and death Knights were hated for well, being (former) agents of the Scourge who caused a lot of ruin. (This was even shown with how, with the exception of the Undead, Warlock class trainers tended to be in back alleys or behind buildings while everyone else was front and center and how Death Knights had to go to Acherus to train.) Yet they all start with the same neutral faction and never have to worry about hate crimes or the rogue person who still does not trust them.
  • Averted with the Forsaken, however. Originally neither the quests, the NPCs, or even the in-game voice-over were vague about the Forsaken joining the Horde only out of convenience and not having any real loyalty towards them. Over time the Forsaken appeared to begin developing some real camaraderie with the Horde until Cataclysm came and their queen was shown to be doing all sorts of shady things behind the backs of the other Horde leaders. Because of this, the Forsaken start out as Neutral with other Horde factions (except the Blood Elves, probably due to the Forsaken's leader being a former High Elf) rather than Friendly as all other races, on both factions, do.
• The Ace: The player character. In addition to being a lifelong fighter and adventurer, various quests involve you (expertly) writing, painting, negotiating, driving vehicles, mixing chemicals, assembling uniforms from scrap materials, posing as the enemy without breaking character, and many other things. Furthermore, non-magical classes are perfectly capable of using magical artifacts (for quests, not in-battle) and even cloth-wearing casters can perform martial arts well enough to impress Pandaren monks.
• Achievement Mockery:
  • An achievement "Stood in the Fire"^note  the name of which is in and of itself, a reference to Too Dumb to Live behavior in boss encounters required players to get killed by Deathwing when he strafed zones. It was actually harder than it sounds, given how random Deathwing's attacks were (this resulted in players actually rushing to die in zones that were under attack). Played even straighter after Deathwing became killable when the achievement was modified to include dying during either the Spine of Deathwing or Madness of Deathwing raid encounters. Not only does it retain its dubious value, but it now also signifies that it is likely the recipient's first time fighting Deathwing on that character.
    • Getting killed by Fyrakk (either in the open world or during his raid encounter) rewards the achievement "Still Standing in the Fire" and has Fyrakk laugh at you for fifteen seconds.
  • "It's A Trap" is an achievement given to players who walk across the obvious traps in a scenario.
  • Some dubious achievements are gained on holidays. The "Disturbing the Peace" achievement is gained during Brewfest by getting completely drunk and dancing in the middle of Dalaran. During Children's Week, you get the "Home Alone" for using your Hearthstone while with your charge, and the "Bad Example" by scarfing down candy in front of him. "Out With It" is gained by eating candy during All Hallows' Eve until you puke.
  • Played with by Nefarian with the title "<Name>, Slayer of Stupid, Incompetent and Disappointing Minions". The title is part of a buff Nefarian puts on players after beating heroic Maloriak in Blackwing Descent; he never liked Maloriak, so Nefarian hacks into the achievement system to throw one last insult at him after he's killed.
  • The in-game description of the "Avast Ye, Admiral!" achievement suggests the player "get some fresh air every now and then."
• Acrofatic:
  • The pandaren race. In fact, their surprising agility is part of their backstory: they turned out to be much, much better than the mogu in hand-to-hand combat, as the mogu favored huge, unwieldy weapons designed to inspire fear, on top of already being slow. The pandaren even acknowledge their obesity, and prefer to call it "size training."
  • The humans of Kul Tiras, a new allied race in Battle for Azeroth, have a paunchy, stout human model. They're just as agile as their leaner counterparts and can be rogues and monks, and the female model's dance animation is a graceful ballet routine.
• Acronym and Abbreviation Overload:
  • A large part of the game's slang. All the dungeons are usually referred to by their first letters, for one. "lfm 1 mdd (fdk) 2 rdd (amage, mm) t4w 10" ^note A 10-man raid into the Throne of the Four Winds (ten-man) is searching for three damage dealers, one of them melee such as Frost spec Death Knight and two ranged like Arcane Mage and Marksmanship Hunter makes perfect sense.
  • This can cause confusion when two dungeons or areas share the same initials. "DM" can mean The Deadmines^note For this reason, Deadmines is usually abbreviated "VC" for Edwin or Vanessa VanCleef, the final boss. or Dire Maul, TB can mean Tol Barad or Thunder Bluff, etc..
  • It also doesn't help when some things have more than one commonly used acronym, especially with compound words and words like "of" or "the". For example, Mogu'Shan Vaults is sometimes called "MV" or "MSV", and Terrace of Endless Spring is called "TOES" or "TES".
• Activist-Fundamentalist Antics: The Omnicidal Maniac cult Twilight's Hammer took on this role as they did their recruitment drive just before the release of Cataclysm. Oh, and [insert your own character's name here] got to run around shouting silly slogans as s/he infiltrated the cult.
• Action Bomb:
  • The Warlock spell Hellfire turned the user into this, slowly damaging them as it produces AoE Fire damage.
  • Warlocks also have Implosion, which pulls the Wild Imps spawned by Hand of Gul'dan toward a target and detonates them for AoE Shadowflame damage.
  • The original, non-glyph version of the Death Knight spell Corpse Explosion could be cast on their ghoul minion, causing it to explode.
  • In the Hoptallus encounter and the gauntlet before it in Stormstout Brewery, you can encounter virmen called Hoppers that carry explosives and can blow themselves up. The optimal way of dealing with them is killing the Boppers, picking up their hammers, and using the extra action button to kill them and the Hoplings.
  • In the Commander Vo'jak encounter in the Siege of Niuzao Temple, two of the waves include Sik'thik Demolishers, who carry explosives and try to climb the ramp to reach you. A single hit detonates them.
  • The game has things that amount to the same as Mario's Bob-Ombs, a cartoon bomb with feet that runs and explodes. You can have a non-exploding one as a pet.
  • In the Iron Juggernaut encounter, the boss will periodically deploy Crawler Mines that must be stomped on by the DPS to prevent raid-wide damage. They reappear in the Siegecrafter Blackfuse encounter targeting random players and explode for massive single-target damage if they reach their target, but must also be disposed of quickly before their break-in period ends and they become immune to crowd control effects. Like the above example, you can obtain a Crawler Mine as a pet.
  • In the Blast Furnace encounter in Blackrock Foundry, the engineers will periodically attach bombs to the damage dealers, which they can detonate while it's on them to damage the heat regulators during the first phase of the fight.
• Actually a Doombot: Alliance players get a quest to assassinate Trade Prince Gallywix for the 7th Legion. Right before players kill him, he explodes revealing a regular goblin who was wearing a Gallywix mech suit. The real Gallywix berates you for being fooled and promises to send you a bill for the suit.
• Adam and Eve Plot:
  • One of the fishing dailies in Thunder Bluff is to restock the pond with fish from a nearby lake, and you have to bring back two pairs of fish, which are "randy" and "amorous".
  • A daily quest in Howling Fjord tasks the player with playing "matchmaker" to sea lions after the death of their alpha at the player's hands.
  • In Zandalar the albino brutosaurs are extinct aside from an older male and belligerent female. A quest line focuses on getting the two to mate.
• Adaptational Intelligence: In Warlords, the Ogres are significantly smarter than their previous Dumb Muscle depictions. There are still bits of Hulk Speak amongst the single-headed Ogres, but some are as intelligent as any other race, while the two-headed Ogres are as clever as ever. The expansion added Ogron to be the new Dumb Muscle race.
  • This has been a general trend of the Ogres throughout the franchise's history. They were depicted (briefly) as bestial in Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. In Warcraft II, they became dumb, but clearly sapient. The Ogre-Magi were smarter, but still kind of dim. Burning Crusade was the first big step up for them in intelligence (the second being in Warlords, as noted above). The Ogres in Outland were depicted as being dull, but they lost much of their deep, "moron" voice and their Hulk Speak tenancies. The leaders and casters among them (both one- and two- headed variants) were nearly on par with the player races in terms of intelligence. There was even a small society of highly advanced and intelligent Ogres who gave out end-game daily quests.
• Addictive Magic: The arcane. There are even entire races addicted to it, such as the high elves, blood elves, and naga. Handling this addiction is one of the main reasons for the schism between high elves and blood elves.
• Admiring the Abomination: N'Zoth sent Azshara a vision of the Black Empire at his height, something that drives most mortals insane. Her response was an admiring "Magnificent". She repeated this line on seeing how her people had been transformed into N'Zoth's naga servants.
• Advancing Boss of Doom:
  • The Escape from Arthas encounter in the Halls of Reflection.
  • In the "Thwarting the Twins" Mage Tower challenge, most of the fight involves you running away from Karam as you damage him. If he gets too close, he'll either do enough damage to one-shot you or he'll knock you off the platform.
• Advancing Wall of Doom:
  • Instructor Chillheart of Scholomance employs one made of solid ice, slowly shrinking the area in which you can fight. You have to slay her before it catches and kills you.
  • The Halls of Reflection has the Lich King himself as a Walking Wall of Doom; to escape him you have to kill mobs while Jaina/Sylvanas destroys the actual walls (which, of course, will only happen once you kill all the mobs).
  • In Shadowmoon Burial Grounds, Ner'zhul has Ritual of Bones, a wall of skeletons that will instakill anything they touch.
  • Vault of the Wardens gives us Cordana Felsong's Creeping Doom, an invisible wall of ghosts that will kill players if they don't use a magic light to find the hole in it and slip through.
• Adventurer Archaeologist:
  • Player characters with the archaeology profession.
  • Harrison Jones, Belloc Brightblade, Brann Bronzebeard, and the Reliquary and Explorer's League factions. Not true for Belloc's daughter, however, who sees the motivations of such people as little more than greed.
• Aesop Amnesia: Kul the Reckless at the Argent Tournament takes a band of aspirants to attack a nearby cultist camp, only to get them all captured, so players have to go in and save them. When Kul is saved, he might respond that he won't do anything that stupid again, but since the quest is a repeatable daily quest, he'll have done the exact same thing the very next morning.
• Affably Evil:
  • Nexus-Prince Shaffar, whose fondness of combat is evident throughout the encounter. Combined with his fine manners and sexy voice, Shaffar managed to earn himself quite a fanbase back in the day.
  • Also, Drakuru, who remained a friendly, chipper fellow as he manipulates you into destroying the last remnants of a troll dynasty so that he could become a powerful warlord in service of the Lich King.
  • Pet Tamers are always rather polite, even ones from factions universally regarded as enemies, including Ogres, Naga, the Iron Horde, and even the Legion.
• Affectionate Parody: A very subtle instance; the game is parodying its own players. In the Borean Tundra zone, there are enemy NPCs who work for the Great White Hunter, Hemet Nesingwary. Upon engaging combat with a player, these enemies will yell out things like "Just fifty more hooves and I'll have the new gun!" Replace all the nouns with more appropriate ones, and how often have you heard that said before? Or even said it yourself? Not to mention there are multitudes of slight knocks on the tropes of fantasy, sci-fi, video games, and pop culture in general throughout the game, always affectionate, of course. Keep clicking on an NPC, hilarity will ensue. Also, post-Cataclysm Hillsbrad has you act as a quest giver interacting with NPCs who act in exaggerated stereotypes of the clueless new player, the arrogant high-level player who ganks low-level players, and the obnoxious low-level alt.
• The Ahnold: Hans'gar and Franzok in Blackrock Foundry.
• Air-Aided Acrobatics: The Molten Front area includes thermal vents in some areas, allowing characters to use the updraughts to leap much further than normal. Something similar appears in the Vortex Pinnacle instance, which takes place in a floating castle on the elemental plane of Air, and players are whisked from section to section by swirling vortexes.
• Air Quotes: One quest in post-Cataclysm Hillsbrad Foothills involves the player recovering Forsaken camp "supplies" from the murloc-infested coastline.
  The long stretch of coastline directly south of our position that extends from west to east is known as the Western Strand. Along the Western Strand you will find two things: murlocs and our stolen "supplies."
  <Keyton puts his hands in the air and makes quotation marks with his fingers.>
• Alas, Poor Villain: Arthas gets a send-off that focuses on his human side, rather than his Lich King side.
• The Alcatraz: Several.
  • Stormwind's own prison serves as the setting of a dungeon and part of the Horde's intro to Zandalar.
  • The Arcatraz is a part of Tempest Keep where Kael'thas' forces have several dangerous specimens held.
  • The Violet Hold, the prison in Dalaran that holds various demons, undead, and other creatures. You go there for two dungeons, once to prevent the Blue Dragonflight from taking control and again to prevent the Shadow Council from unleashing the prisoners on the city.
  • Baradin Hold, the main prison complex of Tol Barad and setting of one of the first raids in Cataclysm.
  • The Vault of the Wardens, the Watchers' prison complex that held the forces of the Legion and Illidari after the war for Outland. New demon hunter players are freed from it as part of their starting experience, then it appears as a dungeon.
  • Tol Dagor, the offshore prison in Tiragarde Sound. Players escape from there in the Alliance intro to Kul Tiras and return for a dungeon.
  • Torghast, Tower of the Damned, the Jailer's base in the Maw where souls are subjected to eons of torture and a major part of Shadowlands gameplay.
• Alcohol Hic: If you get drunk in game, in addition to random 'S'es becoming "Sh'es, a "...hic" will sometimes be added to your lines in chat.
  Patch 1.6 note: You no longer spout profanity when talking about sitting while drunk.
• Alien Blood: In contrast to every other race, void elves bleed out violet blood when damaged as a result of their altered genetics.
• Alien Geometries:
  • Karazhan is much Bigger on the Inside than it is on the outside, far more so than Space Compression can account for. On the outside, the tower is only a few stories high and rather dilapidated. Once you get inside, you come upon chambers with floorspace far in excess of the building's capacity, not to mention the extensive vertical complex that just seems to never end. Several times, you're treated to the lovely sight of Deadwind Pass out of one of the demolished sections of the tower, and never are you as high up as you would think. Inside the dome at the very tip top is the entrance to somewhere called Netherspace, an enormous expanse of... nothing. The dead grey floating rocks provide an excellent backdrop for the final boss fight against Prince Malchezaar, but it's creepy enough that you'll want to skedaddle soon after. This is justified as Karazhan was the home to one of, if not the, greatest mage in Azeroth's history who was also possessed by the spirit of a fallen Titan as well as being built on a nexus of magical energy.
  • The Deadmines has a little bit of this, though due to a rare moment of bad map design than an in-game example. Specifically, you enter the instance, spend the entirety of the instance heading downward, and then exit ... higher than you started. Wait, what?
• All Deserts Have Cacti: Averted - the game has a lot of deserts, but only Durotar and southern Tanaris have actual cacti. Uldum, based off of Egypt, does not have cacti at all, nor do the endless dunes of Tanaris. The Barrens are more like the savannah, as was Desolace before the Cataclysm.
• Alliterative Name:
  • Many of the items that Griftah sells, such as the Stone of Stupendous Springing Strides and the Talisman of True Treasure Tracking.
  • Each expansion has included a players-vs.-computer arena event. The names of these include the Amphitheater of Anguish, the Crucible of Carnage, the Arena of Annihilation, and the Fields of Ferocity. The Crucible of Carnage had alliterative quest titles and alliterative rewards for completing the event.
• All Just a Dream: While aiding the Earthen Ring in the Twilight Highlands, you are summoned by Thrall to help him fight Deathwing at the Maelstrom, only for you to be unable to do anything, and are berated for your failure as Deathwing slaughters Thrall's fellow shaman, including his lover Aggra. After Deathwing attacks, you are awoken by a shaman in the Highlands who rescued you from a swarm of enemies that overpowered you and forced you to live out a nightmare.
• All There in the Manual: Does it seem strange that character X popped up out of nowhere and is suddenly a major lore figure? Why are we forming a raid so we can go kill this other guy? Why is this the first time we're hearing about such and such? You'd actually know what was going on if you caught up on the Warcraft Expanded Universe.
• All Trolls Are Different:
  • Hybrid Darkest Africa, theme park Jamaicans practicing Hollywood Voodoo, and Mayincatec. They are also one of the oldest sentient races native to Azeroth, and are the progenitors of the elves. And in this case, the second most popular race in the yaoi fandom as of Burning Crusade, after the blood elves.
  • ...but not so much according to the playerbase. At least before Burning Crusade, people used to see these mysterious trolls and think, "...the Horde has trolls?" because before Blood Elves and rebalanced racials, the Horde was almost entirely undead, especially on a PvP server where undead were able to break crowd-control effects on them and become immune for a short while.
  • Legion mixed it up by adding the Drogbar, also known as "rock trolls", a humanoid race that in many ways resembles the typical Scandinavian troll.
• All Webbed Up:
  • If you see giant spiders, you will have people cocooned in web, and usually there will be a quest to free them; unfortunately, the spiders trap almost anything, so sometimes when you break the web, the trapped NPC is a hostile mob.
  • Maexxna can do this to players in Naxxramas. In the Firelands, some Cinderweb spiders can drag players to their ledges once engaged.
• Allegedly Free Game: The game is free up until level 20. You can stay at level 20 for as long as you please for free, although you're missing out on a lot of game. Oh, but you also have caps on your trade skill levels and how much money you can carry. And you can't use the Auction House. And you can't use chat fully. The game used to have a 10-day free trial, but was changed to the level cap when Blizzard realised hardcore players were rushing through all the Vanilla content and missing a lot of the depth of the game as a result, while those who didn't rush, didn't see much outside of the starting zones.
• The Alliance: Both the titular Alliance and the Horde.
• All Your Powers Combined:
  • The quest "Pick a Yak" in Townlong Steppes has you searching for a good yak. Until you do, you'll fight yaks with the prefixes Mean, Smelly, Angry and Stabby, then they get two prefixes each, then you fight a giant Mean, Smelly, Angry, Stabby, Very Bad Townlong Yak.
  • In a Horrific Vision, completing a Corrupted or Lost Area will cause Alleria or Thrall to have access to a mechanic from that area's boss when you fight them, up to a maximum of four, potentially making the fight a lot more hectic.
• Alternate Timeline:
  • The Caverns of time dungeons were created so players can prevent the Infinite Dragonflight from creating devastating alternate timelines as they seek to mess with crucial events such as Thrall's evasion from Durnhold Keep, the arrival of the Orcish Horde through the Dark Portal on Azeroth or the Culling of Stratholme by Prince Arthas Menethil.
  • One where Thrall died as an infant and Blackmoore conquered Lordaeron is featured in Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects.
  • The fifth expansion set, Warlords of Draenor, starts with Garrosh going back in time to Draenor and creating a new timeline where the orcs became the industrial Iron Horde instead of falling into the Burning Legion's service at first. The Iron Horde plans on invading the main timeline's Azeroth. It should be noted that the Warlords of Draenor timeline has differences from the main timeline which predate Garrosh's arrival. The titular Warlords themselves have different backstories, there are changes in the geography which are not easily accounted for, there are differences in societies and even physiology between some of the races as well (especially the Ogres). It's hard to be sure how much of this is deliberate and how much of it is Retcon from Beyond the Dark Portal and Burning Crusade lore.
  • The Horrific Visions of Orgrimmar and Stormwind hover on the cusp between this and Alternate Universe, being visions of what the cities in question will be like if N'Zoth wins.
  • Dragonflight has a questline involving Bronze dragons (whose powers revolve around time itself) in which the player goes through glimpses of alternate timelines of Azeroth, including one where Primalists win, and one where Azeroth is controlled by... Murlocs. The latter is something of an Alternate Universe, as there are Murloc versions of Thrall, King Varian Wrynn and Deathwing (name included), no less.
• Alternate Universe: Draenor in Warlords of Draenor is an entirely different reality than Outland in Burning Crusade. Aside from events that never took place, the status of many characters is radically modified:^note Only characters who have alternate selves in Draenor, and who have previously appeared in lore should be listed here. Characters from the main timeline that are helping the war effort in Draenor, such as Vindicator Maraad, do not count
  • One thing which makes the task of determining how, when, and if the Warlords of Draenor universe and timeline diverged from the standard is the "Warlords" shorts. Released on Blizz's website leading up to the launch of Warlords of Draenor, they summarize the history of the titular Warlords. They are narrated by Vindicator Maraad who originated in the main timeline (ie: The timeline which contains Beyond the Dark Portal and Burning Crusade). His experience and knowledge of the warlords should be that of the main timeline, not the AU. However his stories conflict, sometimes drastically, with the lore established in Beyond the Dark Portal and Burning Crusade regarding Outland/Draenor. As these are the canon lore for Warlords of Draenor it is unclear if Blizzard retconned the existing lore or if Maraad somehow gleaned information about the AU before the players' arrival.
• Always Chaotic Evil:
  • The Sha, who are literally the manifestations of negative emotions on Pandaria. They're awakened after being dormant for thousands of years when the Horde and Alliance bring the war to the island.
  • The Burning Legion is an army of Omnicidal Maniacs whose goal is to destroy anything in their path.
• Amazing Technicolor Battlefield:
  • The Eye of Eternity, home of Malygos.
  • The Celestial Planetarium in Ulduar, home of Superboss Algalon the Observer(only accessible in Elite Mode); when he's engaged, the dome of the room displays stars in space.
  • When you fight Ultraxion in Dragon Soul, you are transported into the Twilight Realm, resulting in a similar effect.
  • When you fight Ner'zhul in the Shadowmoon Burial Grounds, you end up on a platform in the middle of the Shadowlands, which is depicted as a purple void.
• Amazon Brigade: There are absolutely no male night elf guards as a Continuity Nod to the fact that the Sentinels were an all-female organization in Warcraft III. The night elf priesthood is also mainly female. Inverted with night elf druids, who are mostly male.
• Amazon Chaser: At the Brewfest grounds outside Orgrimmar, Blix Fixwidget wears a pair of glasses that makes everyone look like a female orc. Being a goblin, female orcs are more muscular than Blix, and twice his height, and that's how he likes 'em.
• American Accents:
  • The Goblin race has variations on a pretty awful New York accent to go with their fascination with violent explosions. As a result, they often sound like they're about to hustle you. They're goblins. They hustled you five minutes ago.
  • Stormwind humans speak generic American newscaster English.
• Anachronic Order: Three forms of it in the game.
  • Patches and expansions generally add on new content relevant mainly to the endgame, but often enough they have added content to lower level areas as well. Before the Cataclysm expansion, the biggest of those was Patch 2.3, which made a lot of leveling content easier and added a lot of new quests to a zone (Dustwallow Marsh) in a level range that was particularly sparse on things to do. A character at the maximum level can go through that, breeze through the quests for 100% Completion, and find that The Man Behind the Man was... a dragon they killed 10 levels ago.
  • Also, there are many more quests in the game than you need to do to reach the maximum. Some quest chains are connected storylines and it's impossible to see the end without completing the whole thing from start to finish, but most have some kind of foreshadowing or Backstory much earlier that a player might skip through expedience or simple accident. Until Cataclysm if you leveled up to 70 without questing in the Eastern Plaguelands, it was possible to go to Northrend and serve under Highlord Tirion Fordring, Lord of the Silver Hand and greatest paladin in Azeroth... then go back to Eastern Plaguelands and meet Tirion Fordring, fallen paladin, traitor, and hermit, who hasn't yet been inspired to re-form the Silver Hand.
  • Because Outland and Northrend content haven't been chronologically updated, new characters start their quest in a world ravaged by Deathwing, rebuilding after the Cataclysm and the defeat of the Lich King. Eventually, you go back to the distant past to fight Illidan and the Legion in Outland. Then, after returning to the present time, you then go back in time to fight the Lich King. After you're done there, you return to the post-Lich King world, and you'll be high enough in level to go through a few more zones.
  • The above is MORE complicated for Draenei and Blood Elves. Their starting zones were not updated in Cataclysm, and so they remove the initial post-Cataclysm snarl and replace it with their own - they start in the time frame of the Dark Portal having JUST opened in their starter zones, before leaving into the post-Cataclysm world, returning to the events of the Dark Portal and The Burning Crusade, fighting The Lich King, and finally emerging back into the post-Cataclysm world. Again. A similar experience also harmed the Death Knight storyline in the beginning for a lot of time. While understandable for the latter, Blizzard refuses to budge on the former, merely stating that 'their storylines will be revisited in the future'.
    • This goes double for the Allied Races introduced in Legion and Battle for Azeroth, who travel even further back in time.
  • Content scaling introduced during Legion opened up more possibilities to go through questlines out of order. Combined with the above Allied Races issue, it's entirely possible for a Nightborne character to be inducted into the Horde through the Blood Elves... and then go through the Ghostlands questlines which ultimately induct the Blood Elves in turn.
  • Partially addressed In-Universe in Shadowlands with the levelling concept called "Chromie Time", where a player talks to time-travelling bronze dragon Chromie to be sent back in time to quest during past expansions.
• And Call Him "George": XT-002 Deconstructor, in Ulduar. He's a Giant Robot with the mind and voice of a 6-year old, who fails to understand why he keeps breaking his "toys" when he plays with them. In a similar vein, Rotface in Icecrown Citadel yells, "I broked-ed it!" when killing a player.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Bolvar Fordragon's ultimate fate. He is forced to sit on the throne, frozen for eternity, while alive, in complete solitude, leading an army whose entire purpose is to do nothing and rot away. Arguably the worst part is that nobody but Tirion knows he is there, and he was sworn, at Bolvar's wish, to not tell, meaning rescue will NEVER come. The entire rest of the world thinks he died at the Wrathgate. This could also be considered a mix between Sequel Hook and Cliffhanger Cop Out, as every piece of lore prior to this point, indicates that everything would be just fine without a Lich King - so it seems that this part was just tacked on to leave an opening for a sequel.
  • It's heavily implied that being part of the Undead Scourge is like this as well.
  • Illidan's ten thousand year imprisonment was probably a similar experience.
    • In Legion, the Demon Hunters, including your playable character, are sealed in crystals during the end of the events of The Burning Crusade and left there, throughout the next four expansions until the Burning Legion finally makes a new attempt to invade Azeroth. This was the only thing bad enough to convince Maiev Shadowsong to free you. The end of the cutscene reveals that you can both see and hear her from inside your crystal prison, meaning you've spent several years unable to move, speak, eat, or possibly even sleep, with nothing to do but watch and listen to your very cruel jailors.
  • The night elf Asterion, imprisoned at Bashal'Aran, is a text book example. In his own words: "For a thousand years and more I have stared at [the pillars keeping the barrier up], wondering if at long last I outlived even the stone, would I be free?" With the shattering of the world he's disappeared now though and his location is currently unknown...
  • In the Dread Wastes of Pandaria, the Paragon Iyyokuk the Lucid gives a rather chilling account of his frayed sanity, with this as the primary cause.
  • Downplayed massively by Elder Aldryth. He's been trapped beneath a sunken column for ten thousand years, but his account after being freed is that he "heard a loud crash, was stuck beneath this beam, and has just been waiting ever since." Upon being rescued, his first instinct is to resume looking for the girl he was once pursuing as though it's been five minutes. Angst? What Angst?invoked indeed.
• Androcles' Lion:
  • In a Thousand Needles quest chain, you free a group of baby wyverns. They follow you around for a little while, then leave. When you confront the Jerkass who had them imprisoned, they come out of nowhere, swarm him, lift him up, carry him over a cliff, and then drop him.
  • In the original version of Upper Blackrock Spire, there was a blue dragon whelp named Awbee who you could rescue. She reappears as an adult in Warlords of Draenor's updated version of the instance, where she helps the group fight Commander Tharbek.
• And That's Terrible: The quest "Slavery Is Bad".
• And Then John Was a Zombie:
  • The Scarlet Crusade was devoted to eradicating the undead, but was taken over by Dreadlord Balnazzar, who possessed Grand Crusader Saidan Dathrohan; he kills the Scarlet Crusaders in Stratholme, raising them as undead.
  • Players get in on the act too. New Forsaken players get a quest to collect the bodies of Scarlet Crusaders so they can be "recruited", and a daily quest in Northrend has players killing and raising members of the Scarlet Onslaught as ghouls for the Knights of the Ebon Blade.
  • This is also the case for the majority of the Crusaders post-Stratholme - Due mostly to the actions of player Death Knights, and the Ebon Blade faction. This can result in Death Knights who complete Loremaster be responsible for the Scarlet Crusade becoming Scourge, then eliminating them as Scourge in passing through Eastern Plaguelands...
  • Illidan, too, though he accepts his transformation as a necessary part of gaining enough power to fight demons.
  • After spending several expansions as one of the Scarlet Crusade's most zealous leaders, High Inquisitor Whitemane's ultimate fate is to be resurrected as a Death Knight. This is a vast improvement.
• And This Is for...:
  • Sully "The Pickle" McLeary says this while planting explosives in a Hozen village, first for Amber, then Rell, and finally for Gizmo and Socks, but he is forgetting that the Hozen only beat up Rell. Amber was injured in a plane crash, which was shot down by the Horde who are aligned with the Hozen, but he doesn't know that. Gizmo was shot by Amber because she mistook it for some unfriendly wildlife, and Socks was turned into a statue by the Jade Witch.
  • Genn Greymane delivers one to Sylvanas Windrunner when he confronts her in Stormheim.
    Genn Greymane: I will have my vengeance! For Varian! For Gilneas! For my SON!!!'
• And Your Reward Is Clothes:
  • Many quests reward players with strictly cosmetic rewards, such as clothes or off-hand items with no other use other than appearance. Also, one of the rewards of reaching exalted reputation with most factions during the Burning Crusade expansions was the faction's tabard, which also qualifies as Cosmetic Award if you don't like wearing your guild tabard.
  • Inverted in Wrath of the Lich King, where the tabard is the first reward you can purchase from each new faction, and wearing it in level 80 dungeons is a primary way of gaining further reputation with the faction. This continues to be the case with Cataclysm endgame factions.
  • Played straight in Mists of Pandaria, where the rewards of Challenge Mode dungeons were medals that would let you purchase gear with no stats, for the sole purpose of transmogrification. Warlords of Draenor continued this with weapon models.
  • Some of the rewards you can get by collecting and redeeming Darkmoon Faire tickets include "replica" weapons and armor. They have generally poor stats and are only there to look cool.
  • Reaching level 50 on an Allied Race character (without using a max level boost or race changing from a preexisting character) gives you a set of cosmetic armor exclusive to that race.
• Animal Eye Spy: In Grizzly Hills, the local shaman tasks Horde players with binding her sight to eagles near the Alliance outpost in order to spy on them. In the quest's Alliance counterpart, you're forced to kill said eagles.
• Animal Sweet on Object: A Horde outpost in Tiragarde Sound's Waning Glacier area features a penguin making hearts at a decorative fake flamingo put up by one of the goblins there.
• Animal Wrongs Group: D.E.H.T.A., a group of radical druids in Borean Tundra who will attack players on sight if they kill any of the beast-type mobs in the zone, regardless of whether this death was in self-defense. In addition, their quests require players to kill some Anviliciouslyinvoked stereotyped game hunters, cut off their ears, and bring them back for a reward... when the player him/herself is likely one of those hunters, either in Stranglethorn Vale, Nagrand, or just north, in Sholazar Basin. In fact, the final quest in the Borean Tundra D.E.H.T.A. line is "The Assassination of Harold Lane" - who was a quest giver back in Nagrand, in Outland.
• Animate Dead: The modus operandi of the Scourge, obviously. The Death Knight class in particular has spells to produce ghouls from corpses, with the Unholy spec allowing it to be a full-time minion and the Blood spec also allowing the Death Knight to summon a small army of ghouls for a limited time. As of Cataclysm, the Forsaken are getting in on the act, as well.
• Another Side, Another Story:
  • Several contested zones have the same events played out from the perspective of the Horde and the Alliance, usually as they fight each other; averted in cases where players work for a third party as Horde and Alliance players get the same quests and story.
  • One notable case was the Camp Taurajo massacre in Southern Barrens. To the Horde, it looks like an overzealous Alliance General firebombed the little outpost when all military forces and murdered the civilians, and are now looting whatever is left. On the Alliance side, General Hawthorne did sack the town after the military forces had left and did hire mercenaries to firebomb the Camp, but tried to leave an opening for the civilian population to escape, but were unfortunately killed by the quilboar, which he regretted deeply; and the looters were criminals drafted in to pay their sentence, and took the opportunity to line their own pockets, another decision that Hawthorne regrets. And he'll regret it more since one Horde quest has you killing him in vengeance.
• Anti-Climax:
  • The goblin starter story. At the end when you and Thrall finally defeat Trade Prince Gallywix, who has so far screwed you out of your life savings, tried to enslave you, successfully enslaved your friends and committed various other atrocities, you stand there intending to lay down some righteous retribution, right? Nope, Thrall has other plans for him, like letting him remain the trade prince without any real repercussions for what he's done.
  • The new Westfall quest chain in Cataclysm is a bit like this as well. You've uncovered the conspiracy Vanessa VanCleef has been brewing, have warned King Varian, and returned to Sentinel Hill to see it under attack from the newly reformed Defias Brotherhood. So what does Gryan Stoutmantle have you do? He says it'll take time to plan a counter-attack against the Defias and sends you off to Redridge instead. Um, okay. Let's just ignore the fact that Sentinel Hill is under attack and burning down. Thankfully you get some retribution later by defeating Vanessa in the Heroic version of the Deadmines, but the ultimate fate of Sentinel Hill is never revealed.
  • Much of the Forsaken quest chains and lore results in this. Many, but not all, of the quest lines and lore portrays them as would-be Omnicidal Maniacs who harbor no real loyalty for anyone other than themselves. This is especially prevalent in Cataclysm and you might think that the trend of quests and cut-scenes showing the Forsaken performing increasingly shady and evil acts behind the backs of the other Horde leaders (who, in some cases, do catch them) would culminate in something like an ultimatum to cease their actions or face exile/destruction. You would be wrong, though. The Forsaken cannot be destroyed or removed from the Horde, because then the factions would be unbalanced and players would riot. This leads to a lot of quest chains and zone-wide stories with a lot of build up and no pay off.
    • Pre-Cataclysm, you spent 3 zones collecting ingredients for a plague that would, in no uncertain terms, kill everyone other than the Forsaken. Once you finished questing in Hillsbrad Foothills, this plague was never mentioned again.
    • Two expansions later, you finally see the Plague unleashed by a splinter group of Forsaken at the Wrath Gate, killing not only the Scourge but also the Alliance and Horde soldiers there as well, making this a Subverted Trope. However, it leads to a NEW anticlimax as the follow-up quest chain has since been removed. Now, you not only are denied your retribution for the betrayal, but because nobody is there to explain that the attack was not sanctioned by Sylvannas (which is not obvious without the quest line), it looks like the Forsaken just betrayed the Horde and suffered no punishment for it at all because everyone carries on as if it hadn't happened.
    • There are several quest lines for the Forsaken in Cataclysm that showcase Sylvannas raising new Forsaken from the dead. Garrosh and the other Orc officials are understandably horrified and outraged by this and even make some pretty obvious (but not outright) threats on her life and then...that's it. Nothing is ever done and the Forsaken continue to be as much of the Horde as they always were. Garrosh even assigns a watchdog to Sylvannas and assigns non-Forsaken players as the watchdog's assistant.^note  Forsaken players may also be assigned this role as well. This troper played these zones with an Orc, but the quest-giver talks about the Forsaken and addresses you in a way that wouldn't make much sense if you were a Forsaken player However, as you progress, quests from the watchdog become increasingly infrequent and no indication is ever given of what report he makes to Garrosh or what your contributions achieved.
• Anti-Frustration Features: A lot of these have been added to the game over the years. Some examples:
  • The Dungeon Finder system. When the game was new, to make a group for an instance or dungeon that couldn't be soloed, players had to recruit strangers or ask friends to join them. To get to the dungeon, they had to fly or ride to wherever it was, even if it was on the opposite side of the world from the city where they recruited. Eventually, an expansion added an interface that would both form a group and teleport the entire group directly into the dungeon.
  • Being able to purchase gear. When the game was new, basically all gear was quest rewards, made by players with crafting professions, or dropped by monsters you killed. If you wanted an item that was only dropped by monsters and lots of other people did too, it could take you a very, very long time to get it. On the other hand, if no one wanted it, it would go to waste even if those people really wanted something else that the monster could have dropped. Eventually, monsters began dropping tokens for specific types of armor that a third of all classes could use, or even currencies that anyone could spend on whatever powerful gear they wanted.
  • In addition to the Gold–Silver–Copper Standard, the game has dozens of types of currency dropped by specific enemies or for specific factions. They used to be separate items and compete for inventory slots with gear and quest rewards, but have long since been organized into a tab of their own that takes up no space.
  • When a feature is important enough for gameplay, like automatically sorting outfits for different situations or clues towards quests, players often make and download third-party addon programs. When those features are important and basic enough, like both of the previous, Blizzard often incorporates a basic version of them directly into the interface.
  • The entire game is one giant example of this trope, at least when it was first released. At the time, most MMORPG's made you spend a lot of time looking for quests, you had to visually hunt for ores and herbs, and death was a major setback - you often lost experience, or even a level or two. Warcraft removed almost all of this, adding things like obvious "!" marks above questgivers, making ore and herb nodes visible on your map (and, in later expansions, the actual object would sparkle to help it stand out), and death just cost you a little time while you ran back to your body, along with some easily-repaired damage to your equipment. Say what you will today about the current state of the game, but it was so liberating to players to be free of these things that no MMORPG made afterwards could put them back in without being cast aside in favor of a less-frustrating playing experience.
  • Older raids like Molten Core can typically be easily brute-forced by any top-level character, making farming them quite easy for what they have in them. Newer ones, with rare mount drops and the like, often have an inversion of the trope, with the raid bosses having different stages to the fight that you have to carefully address to get through. The fights aren't really any longer or more difficult for on-level characters, but for high-end characters soloing the content, it can really add up the time it takes to get through the fight. You're rarely in any real danger, and when pure damage is the order of the day you'll still curbstomp them, but any other time you may find yourself sighing at the tedium of it all. The Siege of Orgrimmar raid is particularly notorious for this, with at least three of the encounters (Immerseus, Galakras, and Spoils of Pandaria) requiring very specific, time-consuming actions on the part of the player to get through.
    • One area of this that plays it straight is that now and then Blizzard will go back and make a small change to a fight that originally required more than 1 person to complete successfully (such as the infamous "Razorgore the Untamed" encounter at the start of Blackwing Lair), allowing it to be soloed.
  • Hunter pets used to need to level up just like the player. If there was a tamable pet that was low-level only, and you hadn't started with them from the beginning, you were in for a lot of grinding to get them up to where you were. A patch caused them to automatically be the same level as the player.
  • Certain achievements that rewarded players with things such as access to allied races or flight in zones later became unlocked by default since a lot of these required raiding. Shadowlands removed the reputation prerequisites for unlocking allied races (that aren't already part of the quest prerequisites to begin with).
    • While the Mag'har and Dark Iron allied races required the player to get exalted with their own faction's war campaign faction, the majority of the allied races could be unlocked by a player of only one faction.
  • Battle for Azeroth made it so you can skip entire expansions' worth of content. Shadowlands with the level crunch makes it so you can focus almost entirely on your favourite sets of expansions.
  • A major issue with expansion launches in the past had been people (usually Trolls) parking enormous mounts (often coupled with potions and/or other tricks that would increase your player's, and thus the mount's, size) on top of the quest NPCs and preventing anybody from interacting with them. The pre-launch event for Shadowlands introduced no-mount zones with a small radius around said NPCs to prevent this.
  • Dragonflight completely removed the cost for character recustomization at a Barber, primarily because players might otherwise be discouraged from playing with the massive number of options available for the new Dracthyr race.
  • The "Raid Finder" difficulty setting is intended for players who want to experience raids without having to grind for the best gear and join a dedicated raiding guild, often featuring simplified mechanics for the boss fights in addition to reduced health and damage, for example by the bosses not using their most dangerous abilities on this difficulty, more generous Enrage timers, or the members of a Council fight having their health pools linked with each other.
• Anti-Hero:
  • The Forsaken and their queen, Dark Action Girl Sylvanas Windrunner, are often sympathetic - almost pitiable - but can be extremely vicious and amoral in their quest for revenge, security from persecution, and their own goals. There's also the pre-Sunwell Blood Knights, who were casually sucking away an angelic being's life force to protect their own desperate homeland. And finally, there's the majority of the Knights of the Ebon Blade, whose very mantra is Pay Evil unto Evil.
    Darion Mograine: Harness your hate. Make it useful.
  • The Forsaken, and especially Sylvanas, seem to switch back and forth between Anti-Hero and Token Evil Teammate, occasionally entering outright villain and Omnicidal Maniac territory, Depending on the Writer. The original game made it clear that the Forsaken hated and mistrusted all the living and were only forced into an Enemy Mine with the Horde as a Lesser of Two Evils.
• Anti-Magic:
  • Death Knights have Anti-Magic Shell, which reduces their magic damage taken, and Anti-Magic Zone, which can protect them and their allies.
  • Ko'ragh has a barrier that renders him almost completely immune to magic after being exposed to an ogre artifact unearthed in Nagrand. When the barrier is removed he goes to the center of his chamber to use a rune to restore it, during which one or more of the raid members have to absorb some of the rune's energy to give themselves a barrier that they must use to absorb the spheres of arcane energy raining down.
• Anti Poop-Socking: You get more experience for killing monsters after a break. Some rather profitable repeatable quests can only be done once per day, as opposed to repeatable quests that can be completed as often as you have the requisite Plot Coupons in hand. In addition, the Chinese version, per official request of the People's Republic of China, halves your experience gain after 3 hours of gameplay.
  • Shadowlands introduces a mechanic exclusive to the Maw called "The Eye of the Jailer," which limits the amount of time players can safely spend within the Maw. Completing various activities within the Maw will incur the wrath of the Jailer, who will torment players with increasingly deadly effects. The only way to lower your Eye of the Jailer threat level is wait until the daily reset, which will reset it back to 0. Completing a quest in the Chains of Domination campaign removes it completely.
• Anyone Can Die: Gameplay-wise, almost every major and minor character can be killed by players repeatedly, though they are not truly dead until the lore says they are. Lore-wise is no different.
• Apocalypse How:
  • Outland, the continent where much of the level 60-70 content is located, was once a planet known as Draenor, the homeworld of the Orcs and temporary home of the Draenei. Following heavy losses in the Second War, an orcish leader opened several dimensional portals through which his people would escape the enemy and find new lands to conquer. The combined force of these portals ripped the planet to shreds, such that gravity does not even seem to work properly, and certain landmasses only remain because they've been chained down.
  • The End Time dungeon shows a Class 5 version of this should Deathwing win. Ironically, Deathwing succumbed to his own madness and winds up impaled on top of Wyrmrest Temple. Regardless, players must journey through this dungeon in order to reach the past and reclaim the Dragon Soul.
    • It is heavily implied that this is the better future for Azeroth, though no indication is given what the bad future might be.
  • Should the players have insufficient damage output to defeat Deathwing's tentacles in the Madness encounter, he will begin casting the spell "Cataclysm" which, if it succeeds, destroys Azeroth.
  • A couple of daily quests are set in an Alternate Timeline on Mechagon, in which the players failed to stop King Mechagon from activating the Mechorigination device. While it didn't have the intended effect of mechanizing everything, it did kill off almost every living thing that wasn't sufficiently mechanized.
• Appropriate Animal Attire: There are dozens of sentient races in the game, with different ideas of clothing, usually based on how anthropomorphic they are.
  • The most human-like races, including the playable tauren and worgen are fully clothed.
  • The least human-like races, such as the murlocs and gorlocs, don't wear clothes.
  • There are several types of dragon, and the more humanoid they are, the more clothes they wear; naturally they wear clothes when disguised as one of the playable races.
  • Naga are serpentine creatures derived from elves who wear nothing on their snake-like lower halves. On the top half, males don't wear anything except for armor; female naga have breasts, and wear tops, except for some who rely on their scale covered Barbie Doll Anatomy. More recent expansions have Naga of both genders with armor on their tails and limbs and females with trimmed robes or shirts.
  • The dracthyr go back and forth by having two forms; their visage, which looks human aside from draconic details such as horns and patches of scales, wear the same armour as any other playable race. Their original dracthyr form (which they automatically switch into in combat), however, only shows belts and shoulderpads out of your equipped armour. The rest of their clothing is not equipped as items but rather added in character customization, and it's possible to forgo the clothing and armour options and make your dracthyr entirely nude.
• Aquatic Mook: Cataclysm introduced Gilgoblins, a breed of Goblin that live underwater. Created by Hobart Grapplehammer, Gilgoblins are less intelligent than their land-based predecessors, but are just as greedy.
• Arbitrary Weapon Range:
  • All manner of ranged physical attacks, be they bows, guns, or crossbows, used to have a minimum range. If the enemy got too close, you were forced into melee combat^note In fact, this was a huge part of PVP'ing against Hunters, trying to stay at the (admittedly very small) precise distance that prevented ranged attacks, but being too far away for most melee attacks. This was removed in Mists of Pandaria, though certain turrets and siege weapons still have a minimum range.
  • Some bosses have attacks that they will not use on players in melee range. For example, Garrosh Hellscream will not use Desecrated Weapon on a player in melee range of them, but if they're even barely out of melee range, the weapon might fall on them, putting everyone near the boss inside a Desecrated void zone.
• Archaic Weapon for an Advanced Age: Hunters and Warriors can choose among rifles or bows. The competence and damage difference is negligible. That's of course, when they aren't using axes, swords, or hammers...
• Arc Words:
  • The phrase "They do not die; they do not live. They are outside the cycle." has been said at least in part by three bosses, all creations of the Old Gods. "Preserve the cycle" is also a common expression among another set of the Old Gods' servants, the Klaxxi.
  • Wrath of the Lich King had "No king rules forever" repeated several times by different major characters.
  • "The eyes of Hellscream are upon you."
  • "The Hour of Twilight" in Cataclysm.
  • Also in Cataclysm, "Reborn in flame(s)".
  • Mists of Pandaria has "Why do we fight?" and "What is worth fighting for?", which ultimately lead to this scene.
  • Many of the demons in Legion say "We are legion", "We are endless", and variations on "Your resistance is useless". Gul'dan himself says "Why do you/they struggle?" several times between the radio drama (a lead-in for the expansion) and his boss fight.
  • Also from Legion, "Lord Illidan knows the way!"
  • Illidan's meme-tastic line "You are not prepared!" from The Burning Crusade became somewhat of an meta arc-words, appearing or being reference in achievements, quest lines, and even other products from the franchise. In Legion, a short cinematic is played showing the formation of the Illidari, Illidan's Demon Hunters. One of Illidan's first lines to them is his most famous line and his final line is "Now...you are prepared!"
• Army of Thieves and Whores:
  • The Horde gathers all sorts of monstrous-looking races that are often nomadic or tribalistic. The orcs and the Forsaken are The Atoner because they were previously brainwashed into evil, although the latter are much more resentful and pragmatic. The trolls needed allies against the Alliance because their arch-enemies, the highborn elves, joined that faction. The taurens just happened to be there and spout a similar philosophy to that of the shamanic orcs, as well as not generally getting along with the night elves. The blood elves are the remnants of the highborn elves after they suffered great tragedy and felt betrayed by the Alliance. The goblins are greedy merchants whose methods the Alliance finds distasteful. The Vulpera are nomadic and Cute Monsters. The Huojin Pandaren value pragmatism more than their race's pacifism, so they joined the Horde. Finally, half the Dracthyr were found by the Horde in stasis and joined that faction.
  • On a lesser scale, the small army of Nightfallen that mobilizes against Suramar City. Even when more rebels join the cause, most have no combat experience or have had none for centuries, making them ill-equipped. Still, a crash course does wonders, as your small band is able to take down a rather powerful demon that makes a preemptive strike against Meredil rather easily.
  • Rogues are made of thieves, assassins, and other kinds of low-lives from any race. Therefore, the several In-Universe rogue guilds—such as Ravenholdt, the Syndicate, the Shattered Hand, the Deathstalkers, and SI:7— are an example of this.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking:
  • In the Northern Barrens, an orc running a caravan trading post complains that plainstriders are stupid, they can't fight, and they break the axles of her wagons. But her greatest problem seems to be that they are gamey.
  • The list of crimes on Gorkak Skullcrusher's sinstone in Revendreth: Coward, Liar, Traitor, and Singer. Since singing was considered a crime just as heinous where he came from, though, this is actually a subversion.
• Art Evolution: The contrast between art assets made for the game's launch and ones made in the later expansions is staggering—older art is borderline cel-shaded at times with an abundance of deep, dark lines, compared to recent art with more focus on smooth gradients and subtle, fine details. This isn't even getting into the increasing graphical fidelity, leaving the older and most recent playable races looking like they're from completely different video game eras. In the Warlords of Draenor expansion, the art style and level of graphical complexity of the new pandaren is being applied to the game's early playable races, and the difference has to be seen to be believed◊.
• The Artifact: Due to changes brought about by patches, sometimes characters who used to have some importance are no longer needed, but still stick around as background characters to make the place look lived in. Some storylines become orphaned by later expansions, owing to the Anachronic Order the player can experience the zones in.
  • Gamon in Orgrimmar used to be a pickpocket target for training rogues, but when that job was no longer needed, he just became a joke NPC that people liked to kill for laughs; then the Cataclysm came and he turned the joke back on players, but he's still just a background NPC.
  • Resistance. There are several types of damage, and players used to be able to gain resistance to a specific type through gear, potions, racials, and other mechanics. End-game raids such as Molten Core and Vanilla!Naxxramas actually required that the tanks wear lots of resistance gear, or a wipe was inevitable. This gear could take weeks to collect or gather the mats for. Today, resistance is gone from the Character screen, and only an occasional piece of lower-level equipment can still be seen that carries a resistance stat.
  • Rogues used to need materials to create poisons to place on their weapons or special powder to use for the Blind ability, but now that these have been made innate skills, Poison Vendors only sell Simple Daggers. If a player had any of those items in their inventory when this change was introduced, they instantly became utterly useless grey-quality items with flavor text lampshading their obsolescence.
  • Players used to have to stand next to a Lexicon of Power in order to apply glyphs, but this requirement was removed in a patch. The Lexicons are still around, however, probably because they just look cool floating in the back of shops.
  • Class trainers. In older versions of the game, you'd need to hoof it back to the class trainers around town to get new skills whenever you leveled up, and you'd have to pay money too. You'd even have to make sure you replaced your spell with the newer version of it, and many people would lose track of whether they had the latest and greatest - it became such a problem that there were addons that would warn you and the rest of the group if anyone in your party or raid wasn't using the most powerful version of a spell, but now spells just have one version that scales with you. Certain very special skills had entire sub-quests built around them, like warlocks learning to summon imps or hunter getting their first pet. Now you get your skills automatically by leveling up, and start off with your first pet immediately, so now class trainers mostly just hang around as living tutorials for talents and as a way to reset your talents or class specializations.
    • In Legion, it became possible to change specializations when out of combat, and talents when in a rest zone or through the use of a consumable Tome. The Tome itself became The Artifact in Dragonflight, which allows you to change talents anytime out of combat with no restrictions.
  • Lower-level fish constantly dropped scales and oil, as these were needed as reagents for the Shaman Water-Walking and Water-Breathing spells. The reagent requirements were dropped, and the items, though still a near-constant drop on old-world mobs, are now uselessly grey.
  • For Legion, players were required to collect a literal Artifact weapon, for which there was a unique weapon for each class's specializations. Over the course of the expansion, they'd pick up/get rewarded tokens which provided Artifact Power, which in turn could be spent on powering up their Artifact with new abilities. As soon as Battle for Azeroth released, all Artifact weapons were retconned into having used up their power to heal Azeroth after Sargeras impaled it removing all of their abilities, all Artifact Power-providing items became trash items useful only for selling, and the weapons themselves are really only used a) because no other weapons drop at all during Legion and b) as cosmetic transmogrified reskins for newer weapons.
  • The fact that so many game systems ended up turning into The Artifact whenever the next expansion came out was one of the driving reasons behind the devs overhauling the game's core systems for Dragonflight rather than introduce another new one.
  • Barbers were introduced early in the game's lifespan to allow players to customize their hair-style in-game, as well as to help upsell a full character recustomization option in the Battle.net store. As time went on, full character recustomization was moved into the game proper and the store option removed, but barbers are still the go-to NPC for the feature, culminating in weirdness such as an Ethereal barber shop in Oribos in Shadowlands. In Dragonflight, the Valdrakken "barber" uses magic mirrors instead to finally resolve the issue.
  • The playable Undead race are referred to as the Forsaken in all media, even moreso post-Shadowlands as the Forsaken rebuild post-Sylvanas. But the name "Undead" is too intrinsic to the game to change.
• Artifact Domination:
  • The Skull of Gul'dan turned Illidan Stormrage into a malevolent demon.
  • Frostmourne slowly corrupted Arthas' mind into the service of the Lich King until he finally became the Lich King.
  • The Dragon/Demon Soul's influence corrupted the noble Neltharion the Earth Warder into the power-mad Deathwing the Destroyer who sought to remake the world in his own image.
• Artifact Mook: Rockflayers are creatures native to Draenor, but somehow, they can also be found in Deepholm, the Elemental Plane of another world.
• Artifact Title:
  • Western Plaguelands, which are largely cleansed of the plague in Cataclysm.
  • Rare mobs, through most of the early game, are defined as enemies with no set spawn timer who might be seen during a playthrough. Starting with Mists of Pandaria, rares became more oriented towards being specifically named creatures with specific abilities that are almost always spawned, a trend which Blizzard have acknowledged. It's reached the point where rares in Mechagon tend to respawn every 30-60 minutes.
  • The "Glory of the ____ Hero" series of achievements were originally called such because they were completed in heroic difficulty dungeons. From Legion onwards, they instead require Mythic difficulty, but the name was kept the same.
• Artificial Limbs: Blackhand's incarnation in Warlords of Draenor has a stone right arm.
• Art Imitates Art: Gokk'lok's Shell is a novelty item that makes your character stand naked^note Well, in your underwear, at least inside a large clam shell, à la the Birth of Venus.
• Artistic License – Linguistics: While there are different languages in the setting (represented in-game by cyphers that translate player messages into a set of predefined words), the story usually does not address what language anyone is speaking at a given time, as there are enough cultures around that that'd swiftly get ridiculously complicated. However, this means that when the topic does show up, things can get jarring.
  • The Cypher of the First Ones is a primordial language allegedly spoken by the precursor First Ones, and examples of it can be found all over Zereth Mortis. A character in that zone comments that unlike mortal languages, the tongue of the First Ones is fluid and mutable rather than static. In reality, however, one of the first things any linguist learns is that every language is evolving all of the time, to the point that trying to "freeze" a language is a notoriously impossible project. The only way for a language to be truly static is if it's extinct and has no speaking population to develop it, making this statement about mortal languages egregiously nonsensical.
  • In Dragonflight, a minor questline involves figuring out the language of an isolated furbolg tribe who speak a strange dialect of the furbolg tongue due to the linguistic drift that has occurred while the Dragon Isles were isolated. Other furbolg tribes can communicate just fine, though, as can every other race found on the continent, meaning that somehow the entire population of the Dragon Isles - including factions that are normally kill-on-sight to each other - somehow kept a common language except for this single tribe of furbolg.
• Artistic License – Physics: Yeah, it's a video game, but you can occasionally do things that don't make any sense physics-wise. One of the biggest is a Warrior trick. Specifically, if you are falling from a large height, you can save yourself by using the ability "Heroic Leap" if you time it right. Never mind that you are somehow managing to jump while in mid-air, but are slamming even harder into the ground than you would otherwise, and are completely unharmed, even though you should be dead by falling from this height.
• Asbestos-Free Cereal: During Brewfest, there is a daily where you are tasked with promoting one of the major breweries. For Alliance players barking for the Barleybrew Brewery, one of the random shouts takes this to its logical conclusion:
  Barleybrew brew! Won't fill you up, won't kill you... the Thunderbrews can't say the same.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Exarch Maladaar, formerly a unidimensional boss of a dungeon in Burning Crusade, is now an Alliance supporting character and an integral part of the Dark Portal, Shadowmoon and Auchindoun's storylines, which leads him into direct conflict with...
  • Socrethar, formerly a one-shot villain, final boss of a faction questline, it was mentioned on passing he used to be a draenei leader. Now we can see his fall from grace directly from the person he used to be, Exarch Othaar. His importance as a villain greatly increased as a result.
  • Durotan and Draka go from posthumous characters into full fledged supporting characters for the Horde storyline, and the character arc of their son Thrall.
  • Terokk and the arakkoa in general. Went from being mooks in a dungeon and a few questing zones, to have an entire zone storyline devoted to their Civil War between the Anzu followers and The Adherents of Rukhmar, and if the Player Character becomes the champion of the Anzu followers, they name him their king, give him a title and some arakkoa garrison followers.
  • Kargath Bladefist, went from final boss of a dungeon in Burning Crusade to have his role radically expanded in Warlords of Draenor, getting to be a major villain in the Spires of Arak storyline, where he gets to curbstomp Terokk of all people, and a deeper exploration of his origins as a gladiator, which coincidentally also links into him being the first boss of the Highmaul raid, where he challenges the players to a fight in the Gorian arena.
  • Gul'dan went from posthumous inciter of all things evil befalling on every playable race in TBC, to being relentlessly chased around by Khadgar and his plots getting derailed at every turn, until, of course, he manages to usurp the role of Big Bad from Grom.
  • Cho'gall went from Dragon Ascendant that takes over as main villain following Gul'dan's demise, to The Starscream that betrays Gul'dan and tries to take the power of the Naaru he was sent to capture for himself. Also, he plays a pivotal role on the fall of the Gorian Empire by letting the pale orcs loose on their capital city, and on Mythic difficulty he actually hijacks the final boss fight of the Highmaul raid, by killing the Imperator and forcing the players to fight him instead.
  • Blackhand went from the puppet leader of the Horde in Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, who gets to eventually be on the wrong end of a Klingon Promotion, to one of if not THE primary supporter of Grom as leader of the Iron Horde in Warlords of Draenor, his Blackrock clan forming the main bulk of the Iron Horde forces and being the most technologically advanced, and taking several levels in badass in the process, enough to easily kill Doomhammer, his Starscream in the main timeline once he rebels against him. His position as The Dragon to Grom was arguably so important that he swiftly loses the position of leader of the Iron Horde to Gul'dan, once Blackhand dies as the final boss of the Blackrock Foundry raid.
  • Elerethe Renferal was an Alliance questgiver in Alterac Valley back in vanilla who was later killed by the Twilight's Hammer in The Shattering: Prelude to Cataclysm. Her corrupted spirit appears as a boss in the Emerald Nightmare raid.
  • Nighthuntress Syrenne was originally a random elite NPC in Suramar who would one-shot anyone unfortunate enough to encounter her while questing. In 7.2, she becomes the Legionfall champion for Hunters after they help her rebel against the Felborne.
  • As a result of their races becoming Allied Races and thus playable in Battle for Azeroth, First Arcanist Thalyssra of the Nightborne and Magister Umbric of the Void Elves, particularly the former as some of her backstory is explored in Nazjatar.
• Ascended Fanboy:
  • Sarah Pine, as well as other Writing Contest winners and finalists, now write short stories for the series.
  • Fargo: originally creator of the 'Flintlocke's Guide to Azeroth' comics and now a high-level developer for Blizzard.
  • Ezra Chatterton was a fan of the series who was dying of brain cancer, and the Make-A-Wish-Foundation granted him a tour of Blizzard Studios, which in turn Blizzard created an NPC for him whom he voiced. Ahab Wheathoof a Tauren looking for his dog. Ezra has since passed away, but the character is still there and is unkillable.
  • The Death Knights of Acherus was a book written about the first player-made death knights to hit the level cap during the friends and family alpha, and the three most popular of them were given NPCs and aided the player in utterly destroying the Scourge forces during the quest "The Air Stands Still" in Icecrown.
• Ascended Meme:
  • The Night Elf Mohawk, made famous by Mr. T's commercial, was for a time an in-game buff, which changed your head to look like the Mr. T Night Elf Mohawk from said commercial. Now it is possible for Night Elf players to have that hairstyle by visiting a barber.
  • The achievements from Onyxia's Lair, the first two of which are from an infamous recording of a raid leader berating his team as they attempted to fight her, only to die when a player was feared and ran into the eggs, resulting in whelps spawning and killing everyone, and the third being named for a forum meme which originated from the fact that whenever a new patch was released in the original game, people would mistakenly think a randomly occurring attack happened more often:
    Many Whelps! Handle It!^note Cause 50 Onyxia Whelplings to hatch within 10 seconds of Onyxia's liftoff, and then defeat her.
    More Dots!^note Defeat Onyxia in less than 5 minutes.
    She Deep Breathes More^note Defeat Onyxia without anyone taking damage from a Deep Breath.
  • Thorim's "In the mountains!" line in Ulduar was referenced in a later content patch, with the Pit of Saron's second boss, Scourgelord Tyrannus, yelling "Perhaps you should have stayed in the mountains!" when killing a player.
  • "(Zone) was merely a setback!" Originated by Kael'thas, the line has been reused by Blood Prince Valanar, Hogger, Lady Sylvanas and Millhouse Manastorm.
  • Leeroy Jenkins is immortalized in-game by a dungeon achievement^note "Leeeeeeeeeeeeeroy!" - Kill 50 rookery whelps within 15 seconds and player title^note "Jenkins", awarded for completing the achievement, as well as having his own trading card and miniature. In Warlords of Draenor, you can get him as a Garrison follower.
  • A Druid called Alamo wrote two humorous "guides" in broken English on how to play the Druid class titled "Alamo teechs u 2 play DURID!" and "ALAMO teeches u 2 Burnin Croosaid!" that quickly became popular among players in the year leading up to the release of The Burning Crusade, with the line "CAT DURID IS 4 FITE" being the most famous. Alamo was eventually made into a card in the collectible card game, which mirrored the barely-legible style of the original posts.
  • After a fan at BlizzCon caught the developers in a lore inconsistency and became known across the internet as "Red Shirt Guy", the error was corrected ingame, and the relevant NPC has been accompanied ever since by a "Fact Checker" wearing a red tunic, both in the game itself and in one of the leader short stories.
  • Players who die from standing in damaging effects on the ground or other easily avoidable causes are derided as "standing in the fire". In Cataclysm, there is an achievement for being killed by Deathwing that is called "Stood in the Fire", and Fandral Staghelm yells "You stood in the fire!" sometimes when killing players; one of his attacks creates a damaging circle of fire on the ground. And finally, heroic Deadmines achievement is called "Raid Ready", which is awarded when you manage to not get hurt by a rotating wall of fire.
  • Local Butt-Monkey NPC Gamon suddenly gained a surge of popularity when he was remade into a near-unstoppable killing machine in Cataclysm, becoming a Memetic Badassinvoked as a result. In the Siege of Orgrimmar raid, Gamon helps players in the fight against General Nazgrim and there's special dialogue and an achievement if Gamon is alive when Nazgrim is defeated.
• Ash Face: In the above-mentioned Blast Furnace encounter, when a player detonates a bomb they'll be briefly covered in soot.
• Asian Lion Dogs: Mists of Pandaria introduced the Mogu and their beast companions, the Quilen. The former, named after the "mogwai" of Chinese folklore, are humanoids with stone lion-like heads; the latter look exactly like the traditional stone lions, with a stocky, mastiff-like body and long, curly mane (though they are named after a different creature, the qilin or kirin). They fit very well into the China-esque culture of Pandaria. Unlike traditional portrayals of lion dogs, however, they're hateful and arrogant beings who used to rule Pandaria as harsh tyrants, although they were originally created by the Titans as wardens and guardians of the world before losing their way.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Iadreth, a former Nightborne noble banished from Suramar. In a quest that involves escorting her to meet a smuggler, she laments that she doesn't deserve her fate because "all [she] did was punish those servants" The meeting turns out to be a trap and Iadreth is sacrificed to the Burning Legion.
  • After the player helps capture Matis the Cruel during the Bloodmyst Isle storyline, he taunts Vindicator Kuros about how Saruan (Kuros' mentor) "wept like a babe" as he tortured him. Kuros loses his cool and one-shots him, and if you happened to read Galaen's journal, you know that his fate was well-deserved.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership:
  • This is pretty much how all of the Orcish leaders (of every faction) have gained their positions.
  • Despite the Horde's general trend of respect for personal might and little taste for politics, most of the other racial leaders did not gain their position based on their badassery. Baine and Vol'jin inherited it from their fathers. Sylvanas rallied her people after they broke free of slavery by virtue of being the only person with a plan to get revenge. She then gained the title of Warchief by appointment. Gallywix is the de facto leader of the Horde Goblins due to being the richest. He's fat, lazy, and not big on fighting.
  • When you get to Lvl 100, you gain high rank in your faction's army, and can gain followers through the garrison system. All this while personally crushing the big names of the Legion. This carries over in Legion when you take control of your Class Order Hall, becoming the de facto leader of nearly all members of your class.
• Asteroids Monster:
  • Blat and Splat in the Brawler's Guild.
  • Tectus in Highmaul.
  • Many rock giants and earth elementals in Outland do this as well, either upon death or reaching low health.
  • Blazing Stygia, fire elementals that inhabit the Maw, cause a few Stygic Embers to spawn upon their death, which can then be killed for a brief speed buff.
• Atlantis: The ancient Night Elf empire meets the standards of the myth almost perfectly: An ancient, highly advanced society with incredible Magitek which existed long before modern civilization. The hubris of Queen Azshara led to experiments on the Well of Eternity and the War of the Ancients which ended with the Sundering which sank the empire beneath the waves.
• The Atoner: Most of the Horde. The Knights of the Ebon Blade in Wrath of the Lich King. The Blood Elves, or at least their Paladins, post-Burning Crusade. The Blue Dragonflight in Cataclysm, as they chose Kalecgos, a dragon who believes they must take responsibility for their actions in the Nexus War, as their next Aspect.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever:
  • The enormous Fel Reaver in Hellfire Peninsula.
  • The Badlands quest "The Day That Deathwing Came" features three characters drunkenly telling tall tales about how they defeated Deathwing. You play out each tale from the character's perspective - one of these involves a gnome growing to gigantic size and yanking Deathwing from his hiding place in the sun. You then throw him all the way to Kalimdor.
• Attack Reflector: The Warrior ability Spell Reflection, plus a variety of similar abilities used by various creatures and bosses. Priests and Mages can optionally enhance their magic shields to reflect damage, though Mages' shields are limited to reflecting magic damage. Ozruk in the Stonecore has an ability that reflects spells back at players, and players must take advantage of this to reflect a damage over time spell on themselves to break his paralyzing effect and be able to move to avoid his Shatter ability. Windwalker Monks get Touch of Karma, which converts all damage the Monk takes up to their max health in damage, making use of this ability when a boss uses their most damaging ability an incredibly effective way of squeezing in more damage. In Warlords of Draenor, the Hunter's direhorn pet have a skill that lets it reflect spells back at the user(s) in front of them with their frills for 6 seconds.
• Auction: Auction Houses form a core part of the game's player-driven economy; one of the best ways in the game to earn gold is to play the market, following the basic rule of "buy low, sell high". Even if you don't become the WoW equivalent of a stock trader, you can still earn a lot of gold by selling off your unneeded stuff... or go broke in record time buying stuff.
• Automaton Horses:
  • The mounts never need rest, feed, air, or in the case of mechanical ones, repair. The flying ones can hover indefinitely, in quiet defiance of logic.
  • Averted in the Brewfest event, as the faster your mount goes, the more quickly it becomes tired, but eating apples is enough to restore its stamina. It's easy to go the entire Kharanos delivery in a constant gallop by hitting every apple bin, but you will have to pace yourself when barking for the Thunderbrews or Barleybrews, since they don't put out apples that their competitors might be able to use.
• Avenging the Villain:
  • Vanessa VanCleef, the last boss in the Heroic version of the Deadmines dungeon, considers one of her primary goals to be revenge for her father's death, who was the final boss in the Deadmines dungeon before Cataclysm was released.
  • While he didn't need much of an excuse, the fact Stormwind had the head of Deathwing's daughter Onyxia as an ornament for a while did draw special attention from him when he returned to the world. Why he ignored Ogrimmar, which also placed Onyxia's head on a pike in the center of town, is anyone's guess.
  • Many Kul Tirans appear to hate Rexxar for helping to defend his country against an unprovoked assault on his home by Daelin Proudmoore despite Rexxar avoiding attacking humans until the conflict was inevitable and making personal attempts to broker peace, during which Daelin tried to assassinate him.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • In general, some talent choices, depending on expac, can fall into this trope when compared to their competition. For example, in Shadowlands, the Blood death knight talents Tombstone and Mark of Blood are generally considered even worse than leaving those talent rows with no selection; in the former, you are barely breaking even with constant rune power/bone charge consumption, while the latter is just useless due to its low tuning and global CD waste. In Battle for Azeroth, Drain Soul was widely mocked by warlocks as the worst talent ever due to its tuning resulting in a 10% damage loss over not picking any talent in that row.
  • In Legion, a lot of the legendaries were subject to this, due to the fact you could only equip one (two later down the road) and some had no use (Sephuz's Secret was the subject of mockery due to its incredibly situational effect that, for some specs, it was never good for any situation to consider) or would simply not be worth it over a damage-increase legendary (Prydaz, Xavaric's Magnum Opus, for example, due to the fact a lot of specs had already good defensive choices via talents, rather than selecting an inflexible 30% HP shield).
• Ax-Crazy: Fyrakk the Blazing's Establishing Character Moment is needlessly frying a nearby centaur. Then he took a bath in the Shadowflame that corrupted Neltharion into Deathwing...and it doesn't change his personality at all. Then he has the djaradin and Druids of the Flame forge him a legendary axe to complete the look.

B

• Baa-Bomb:
  • Engineers can make exploding sheep, which will run at a target and explode. Engineers wanting to study Goblin Engineering will need to submit five of them for their certification exam.
  • In Legion, hunters with the proper prerequisite can tame an exploding mechanical sheep, which takes some difficulty to tame it without it getting close enough to you to explode.
• Back Tracking:
  • A lot of the quest hubs will have players going to a particular location to complete the objective and then return, only to give players more quests in the same location that could've been done at the same time as the original quests.
  • In Legion many class and world quests require you to travel to areas of the game which were part of other expansions. This results in you travelling to places as much as 70 levels or more beneath you! Thankfully, magical transportation is usually provided. Many of these quests place you into a special instance with enemies that are on your level, but the geography and layout of the location is unchanged and you often need to travel through lower level areas to reach the instance entrance.
• Badass Adorable:
  • Gnomes, generally. Female gnomes, particularly. Female gnomes in pink pigtails, especially. And the queen of Badass Adorable: Darkrider Arly. Don't even think about punting her.
    Female Gnome /silly emote: I apologize profusely for any inconvenience my murderous rampage may have caused.
  • Xuen's children. Though it's an Informed Ability but they at least have the same health as a typical level 90.
  • The fox-like vulpera are pretty damn adorable, and badass to boot, being a desert-dwelling nomadic people.
• Badass Bookworm:
  • Jaina Proudmoore keeps her catchphrase from the RTS franchise: "All I ever wanted was to study."
  • Playable mages and warlocks generally tend to be this.
• Badass Family:
  • The Saurfangs. High Overlord Varok Saurfang is incredibly popular amongst players due to his Cleave ability single-handedly wiping raids attempting to kill Thrall back in vanilla, to the point where players recite legends that he could cleave the world in two; as of Legion, he's the stand-in Orc leader in Orgrimmar, and the achievement for killing him as an Alliance states he's only humoring you by pretending to die. Dranosh Saurfang "the Younger" led the Horde's charge at the Wrath Gate, had the brass balls to charge at the Lich King head-on, and his Deathbringer form is stated to be one of the most powerful death knights Arthas ever raised; Word of Godinvoked is that if not for Dranosh's death, Thrall would have chosen him as his successor instead of Garrosh. Finally, we have Broxigar the Red, Varok's brother, who not only died fighting Sargeras himself, but was the only mortal ever stated to make the Dark Titan bleed.
  • The Crowleys. Lorna Crowley is one of the only non-Worgen Gilneans fighting in Silverpine and she kicks as much ass as the rest of them. Darius Crowley? He's the only warrior on the planet who can cleave with his fists, and generally is seen as the Alliance equivalent to Varok above.
  • The Bronzebeards brothers are all famous for their martial prowess; the oldest brother is a king and one of the faction leaders pre-Cataclysm, the middle one is a very skilled fighter, and the youngest is a famous archaeologist. Lampshaded in one of Muradin's quotes from Warcraft III, in which he says that with his older brother as King and his younger brother as a famous adventurer, he'd feel a tad awkward if he didn't kick so much ass.
• Badass Normal:
  • The hunter, rogue and warrior are known as "combat classes," meaning they have no magical, mystical, divine or demonic powers. They'll still kill you just as dead as anyone else.
  • Monks from Mists of Pandaria also count to some degree, with even their healing skills being based more on brewing. Though some of their Chi abilities are kinda pushing it, and as healers, they do have a mana bar, unlike the other three.
• Badass Transplant: Kargath Bladefist and the rest of the Shattered Hand orcs in Warlords of Draenor have had their left hand replaced with a weapon after breaking their original hands off to escape their shackles while in ogre captivity. Similarly, Malkorok in Mists of Pandaria sports a sword for a right hand when he's fought in the Underhold.
• Bad Luck Mitigation Mechanic: Some drops, particularly rare dragon whelp pets or drops required for completion of a quest, will be forced after enough unsuccessful attempts.
• Bad Future:
  • The End Time dungeon involves going into the future of Azeroth and seeing the outcome if Deathwing prevails in destroying it.
  • Murozond, Nozdormu's evil future self, implies upon being killed that this is the GOOD outcome, which begs the question; What did he see that makes this the good future?
  • A daily quest from Chromie in Mechagon teleports the player to a possible future where King Mechagon succeeded in exterminating all organic life.
  • Visions of N'Zoth take place in an alternate Azeroth that N'Zoth has succeeded in subjugating. Most of the inhabitants have been either killed or driven insane and the ones who haven't can only hold out for so long.
  • Most of the timelines entered by the Adventurers during the Time Rifts event introduced in Patch 10.1.5 qualify for this trope:
    • A.Z.E.R.O.T.H. is a timeline in which King Mechagon successfully activated his Doomsday Device and wiped all organic life off Azeroth.
    • Azewrath is a timeline in which the Burning Legion won the War of the Ancients, with demons corrupting Azeroth to its core and Sargeras having seen through his crusade of annihilation to the end.
    • Azmourne is a timeline in which the Undead Scourge managed to overrun Azeroth.
    • Azq'roth is a timeline in which the Black Empire never fell, with the Old Gods feeding upon Azeroth for millenia without Titans, dragons, or champions to stop them.
    • The Warlands is a timeline in which the Alliance and the Horde never had the opportunity to stand together against a greater foe, becoming the Great Glorious Alliance and the Blood Horde as they tore Azeroth apart in an escalating, ceaseless war.
    • The only timelines averting this trope are Azmerloth, a timeline in which Azeroth is exclusively populated by Murlocs, and Ulderoth, a timeline in which the Titans built an utopia of Order and Life by stamping out any threat of corruption with an iron fist.
• Bad Guy Bar:
  • The Slaughtered Lamb in Stormwind, sort of, seeing as it's where Warlocks hang out. Good guys are welcome, but unless you're a Warlock, there's not much to do there except buy some basic supplies.
  • Parties battling through Blackrock Depths will come across the Grim Guzzler, full of Dark Iron dwarves reveling. This is one of the rare times you won't see them actively trying to kill you. Unless you piss one off - which you pretty much have to do to make the story proceed.
• Bad News in a Good Way: Professor Putricide is a subversion as he is a villain, so when he says "good news", it is good news for him, but bad news for the players; this is inverted when he is killed:
  Professor Putricide: [at the start of the battle] Good News Everyone! I think I perfected a plague that will destroy all life on Azeroth.
  Professor Putricide: [when killed] Bad news everyone... I don't think I'm going to make it...
• Bad Powers, Good People:
  • Warlocks, Shadow priests, death knights, and demon hunters all make use of darker forms of magic (fel, void, and unholy).
  • Void elves have their very beings infused with the force that grants Shadow priests their power, but they're generally all good people.
  • Through Corrupted gear, any class can be given N'Zoth's power.
• Bait-and-Switch Boss: The end boss of the Arcatraz, and again with the first boss of the Stonecore. Notably, both encounters have a character in common.
• Balancing Death's Books: The so-called Pools of Youth enable this.
• Balking Summoned Spirit: Most of the Warlock demons complain when you summoned them and when you order them to attack. Imps are lazy and whine about the contents of their contracts, Voidwalkers beg you to unsummon them, and Felguards constantly threaten to kill you. The exceptions are Felhunters that can't talk, and Sayaads which just flirt with you.
• Bar Brawl: The Goblins and Gnomes have a friendly rivalry going on at the Speedbarge, and they tend to mingle in the bar; a quest called "Bar Fight!" has you going to the bar, buying a bottle of grog, and smashing it over someone's head, causing the whole bar to erupt. The quest is a one time deal, but the description entices you to go back and do it whenever you want.
• Bare-Fisted Monk:
  • The class added in Mists, which all races except Goblin and Worgen can be. The Monk can tank, damage, and heal, specializes in Death by a Thousand Cuts, and only uses equipped weapons for the Chi-building Jab attack.
  • Windwalker monks can equip or transmog into a set of fist weapons called "handwraps" which are invisible, so they can pull off this look 100% of the time.
• Barehanded Blade Block:
  • Averted for Guardian Druids, who fight with their bare paws, are completely unable to block or parry with them. Other tanks cannot parry without a weapon, nor block without a shield.
  • Played perfectly straight in Mists of Pandaria - all Monks parry with their bare hands, even while they have perfectly usable weapons sheathed on their backs! Of course, it's kind of justified in that Monks are supposed to be a kind of super-martial artist - exactly the kind of person who is traditionally portrayed doing this kind of thing.
• Bare Midriffs Are Feminine:
  • Infamously, there are several armor pieces in the game that look imposing and cover everything on male player characters but shrink into a Chainmail Bikini when worn by female characters, especially in Vanilla and Burning Crusade. There are also a few armor pieces that avert this, baring the midriff on male characters as well.
  • Many female NPCs also wear midriff-baring clothes, notably Jaina Proudmoore, Sylvanas Windrunner, and Alextrasza the Life-Binder, among others. In Legion, Sylvanas finally covers up her midriff at the same time she becomes Warchief.
• Barrier Warrior:
  • Priests in general, but Discipline Priests can cast a stronger barrier more frequently; their barriers can reflect some damage back at the attacker, and heal anyone the barrier is cast on. In Cataclysm, Discipline Priests can effectively attack enemies and create a new, larger barrier that multiple people can hide in.
  • Paladins are also infamous for their protective auras.
• Basilisk and Cockatrice:
  • Basilisks appear as gigantic, six-legged, armored lizards who have an appetite for crystal gems and can temporarily petrify their opponents. Their aquatic equivalents, the crocolisks, are simply six-legged crocodiles with no magical powers. Meanwhile, the giant flightless birds that blood elves ride were originally planned to be called cockatrices, but they got renamed to Hawkstriders before the game was released. The only in-game mention of cockatrices is the "Pygmy Cockatrice", a regular chicken that runs around at the Darkmoon Faire.
  • Cockatrices seem to be at least a known legend, as a gnomish entrepreneur in Tiragarde Sound wants to utilize them as a "mystery" at his resort — by having you put mechanical snake tails on regular chickens.
• Battle Couple: Durotan and Draka, with the implication that this is typical of orcs, or at least Frostwolf orcs. Draka is surprised that Thrall made his own mate stay behind, insisting that war is when it's most important to have family at your side. Aggra later appears in Nagrand, after having made this same point to Thrall herself.
• Battle Cry: Your character can do one with the /charge emote. In general, the Alliance uses "For the Alliance!" and the Horde uses "For the Horde!", and individual races have their own variations.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: When Alliance players and Flynn Fairwind try to stow away on a ship, Flynn's advice for going anywhere you don't belong is just to walk in like you own the place.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Old school raiders have been bemoaning for years that "Molten Core was better back in Classic", so... enjoy your ten year anniversary Molten Core level 100 LFR run! The revamped dungeon quickly became infamous, and few people chose to complete it more than once. Its problems were partially because it was only partially updated, partially because back in the old days raids were designed differently, and partially because with rose-tinted glasses removed, it became apparent that the original raid just wasn't as complex or well-designed as newer ones. Some players viewed all that as Blizzard invoking this trope deliberately to troll their fanbase.
• Beard of Evil: While beards aren't usually indicative of moral alignment, villainous characters that are not humanoid tend to sport some sort of appendices that greatly resemble beards — one clear example is the Sha of Doubt, the physical manifestation of a negative emotion who has white beard-like growths hanging from its face.
• Bears Are Bad News: Invoked with bear-form druids; they are designed to "tank" enemies, and have several abilities designed to hold the attention of enemies.
• Beary Funny: Some of the best parts of the game involve bears.
• Beast Man:
  • Most of the Humanoid races seen in Azeroth and Draenor visually resemble an animal crossed with a human, elf, or hunch-backed dwarf: Kobolds are rats, Gnolls are hyenas, Furbolgs are bears, Quilboar are pigs, Tuskarr are walruses, Wolvar are wolverines, Pandaren are pandas, Hozen are monkeys, Virmen are rabbits, Moonkin are mostly owls, Makrura are lobsters, Eredar/Draenei are goatish, Saurok resemble lizards, the list goes on.
  • Justified in the case of Satyrs, Naga, Fal'dorei and Worgen. Originally, all four of these races were originally elves who were transformed through various means: Satyrs were crossed with goats by the Legion, Naga were crossed with sea snakes and eels by the Old Gods, Fal'dorei were fused with spiders by the failing Arcan'dor of Falanaar, and Worgen were created by failed attempts to master the druidic Pack Form. Playable Worgen are Gilnean humans transformed by descendants of the original Druids of the Scythe.
  • Interestingly, while races on Draenor such as the Saberon or Arakkoa share cat and bird elements with the Tol'vir and Harpies of Azeroth, respectively, they have no relation with one another.
  • The Tauren and Taunka are offshoots of the Yaungol race. All three resemble bovids, with the Yaungol resembling yaks, the Taunka resembling bison, and the Tauren resembling cattle. Highmountain Tauren, however, are given moose antlers.
  • Murlocs are somewhere between fish, frogs and pygmy humans with sharp teeth. Their offshoots include the Gorlocs and Jinyu, the latter of which drop the frog motifs in favor of appearing as koi fish.
  • The Qiraji, Nerubians and Mantid all share insectoid or arachnid features, with most of their species not even qualifying as Humanoids; they share a common ancestor in the Aqir, which were crafted by the Old Gods to act as footsoldiers. Qiraji largely resemble beetles, Nerubians are generally more spider-like, while Mantid take cues from the praying mantis.
  • Keepers of the Grove and Dryads are the respective male and female offspring of Cenarius, who himself bears the image of a night elf crossed with a deer. Centaurs are the offspring of a Keeper and an earth elemental. Furthermore, there are the Magnataur, who appear to be men crossed with mammoths.
  • It's unclear what Grummles and Goren are supposed to be. Goren have shells and can ball-up like armadillos, but their faces and egg-laying habits make them more reptilian. Grummles, meanwhile, are clearly crossbred with some type of domestic mammal, but only half their faces are exposed and their short snouts make it difficult to tell if they're more cat- or dog-like.
  • This is to say nothing of races hybridized with mythical creatures, such as Dragonspawn, Mogu^*Based off of shíshī lions or "foo dogs" or Flamewakers.
  • Battle for Azeroth also adds the Vulpera (Goblin-sized foxes), Tortollan (Tuskarr-sized tortoises) and Sethraki (inversions of the Naga, who are cobras from the neck up).
• The Beastmaster: The Hunter class. One of its main mechanics and draws is the ability to tame a huge variety of creatures to act as loyal pets and fighters. The pet adds greatly to the Hunter's damage and also keeps enemies occupied while the Hunter takes it down from afar. The Beast Mastery spec focuses extensively on the pet and its bond to the Hunter for a wide variety of effects, and BM Hunters can tame Exotic beasts other Hunters cannot, such as Devilsaurs, Core Hounds, Chimaeras, Worms, and Silithids.
• Becoming the Boast: Kingslayer Orkus always imagined himself to be a great hero of the Horde, but fell well short of the mark. In "Heroes of the Horde", he takes on three Elite Alliance soldiers to buy players time to get Alliance war plans back to base, and dies as a proud, honourable hero.
• Beleaguered Assistant:
  • Grisy Spicecrackle, one of The Rokk's assistants. The Rokk is Shattrath's Cooking Master, and he keeps doting on Grisy to hurry up; this is one case where the master is not incompetent, he's just bossy.
  • In Vashj'ir is Felice to "The Great" Sambino. While he's a bit of a Kingslayer Orkus, Sam is competent, but he's so busy with his research that he leaves Felice to deal with the Giant Enemy Crabs.
• Belly Mouth: Gorefiend in Hellfire Citadel has this following his transformation.
• Beneath the Earth: Deepholm, the Elemental Plane of Earth.
• Benevolent Boss: Given that the standard Goblin mindset is to screw everybody else over to obtain the biggest profit possible, Gazlowe (particularly in Battle for Azeroth) is practically a saint.
• Berserk Button:
  • Mimiron, literally. To activate his Hard Mode you have to push a very Big Red Button behind him. Doing this will activate the self-destruct mechanism on his lab and make him VERY pissed. Other bosses that feature similar "hard mode" triggers include XT-002 Deconstructor and Sartharion.
  • Warriors use Rage as their combat resource. They gain Rage by attacking, being hit, or pressing a button on their skill set that causes them to gain Rage. Basically, if you attack them, all you did was piss them off. They even have a literal Berserk Button ability that renders them temporarily immune to a number of mezzing effects.
  • The playable race of Trolls, as well as feral druids, have a racial/ability 'Berserk' the player can activate, another literal case.
  • Insult Coren Direbrew's brew and he will attack you.
  • Kill Runty and Beauty busts out a Raid-level 'Hard Enrage' that will surely wipe the party.
  • If you kill Shannox's dogs, he gains a boost to his attack that results in the tank needing considerably more healing to survive. When you kill Riplimb, he stops throwing his spear and starts driving it into the ground, making it a race against time to kill him before the damage-increasing debuff he puts on you enables him to one-shot you or drains your healer's mana.
  • In The Violet Hold, if you kill Erekem's bodyguards before Erekem, he will flip out and start spamming high dps attacks on the tank, going from a healer/caster to an enhancement Shaman.
  • Never mess with Grandma Wahl's cat.
  • In the trailer for Siege of Orgrimmar, Taran Zhu chews out Garrosh Hellscream by mentioning that his father Grom dabbled in powers beyond reckoning. That was more than enough to cause Garrosh to launch an attack against the Shado-Pan leader.
  • In the actual raid, one of the mechanics in the Siegecrafter Blackfuse encounter is that if the raid members destroy any of his creations he gets angry and gains an attack speed increase.
• Better to Die than Be Killed: In the Heroic Deadmines, Vanessa VanCleef insists on living and dying on her own terms; when brought to 1 HP, she pulls out a bomb, and blows herself up. This can also double as a Taking You with Me attack, since any player who stands too close will get killed, but there is plenty of time to escape.
• Bewitched Amphibians: The Shaman's Hex ability.
• BFS:
  • Most infamously Thunderfury, a one-hand sword bigger than most of the game's two-handers, but almost all weapons are rather oversized, in keeping with the "comic book" style of the game.
  • Armageddon is also notable.
  • Ashbringer. It isn't necessarily huge, but various people never seem to shut up about it.
  • Gorehowl, the weapon of Grom Hellscream and his son, Garrosh. An axe, but still enormous, and still famous.
  • Ashkandi, Greatsword of the Brotherhood is the second biggest BFS in the game. It even came back a second time in a different raid, though it was nowhere near as large the second go.
  • Gurthalak, Voice of the Deeps, a sword that drops off of Madness of Deathwing.
• Bicolor Cows, Solid Color Bulls: Averted. Male and female Tauren have the same fur color options, so you can give females solid fur and males the black and white (or brown and white) patches if you so desire.
• Big Bad:
  • Each of the major patches and expansions has a different character that serves as that story arc's Big Bad. These include Ragnaros/Onyxia/Nefarian/C'thun/Kel'Thuzad in classic WoW, Lady Vashj/Illidan/Kael'thas/Kil'jaeden in The Burning Crusade, Kel'Thuzad again/Malygos/Yogg-Saron/Anub'Arak again/The Lich King in Wrath of the Lich King, and Cho'gall/Al'Akir/Nefarian again/Ragnaros again/Deathwing in Cataclysm. Sargeras, a rogue Titan, is the Big Bad for the entire Warcraft universe.
  • Mists of Pandaria didn't have a main antagonist at launch, instead focusing on the conflict between the Alliance and Horde. Patch 5.2 pitted the Alliance and Horde against the mogu's reanimated racial leader Lei Shen, then patch 5.4 made the villain none other than Garrosh Hellscream, then-current Warchief of the Horde, tying into the "Horde/Alliance conflict being the real villain" motif.
  • Warlords of Draenor features a Big Bad Ensemble between Grom Hellscream of the Iron Horde and Gul'dan of the Shadow Council, but the final boss turns out to be Archimonde.
  • Legion technically features Sargeras, creator and leader of the Burning Legion, as the Big Bad; however, he doesn't become directly involved with the plot until the end, and even then his presence is minimal, with the role of Final Boss going to the previously unknown titan, Argus the Unmaker. Gul'dan and later Kil'jaeden act as the face of the Legion in the meantime.
  • Battle for Azeroth seems to follow in the footsteps of Mists, featuring a broad Big Bad Ensemble including the long-teased Queen Azshara, ruler of the naga, two Old Gods (N'Zoth, Azshara's master, and G'huun), yet another corrupted Horde leader (Sylvanas), and a few smaller threats such as the undead drust king Gorak Tul.
  • Shadowlands has the Jailer as the overarching main antagonist of the expansion, while every Covenant Campaign has its own main threat: The Kyrian have Devos and later Lysonia, the Necrolords have Kel'Thuzad, the Night Fae have Gorak Zhar, and the Venthyr have the Tithelord until he's betrayed by Kel'Thuzad.
  • Dragonflight has the Incarnates, starting with Razsageth, with the other three taking her place after Vault of the Incarnates. In the end Vyranoth has a Heel–Face Turn, while Iridikon moves out of the story to fight another day, leaving Fyrakk as the sole main antagonist.
• Big Boo's Haunt:
  • Stratholme in the classic game, being haunted by the dead that were killed when the city was razed by Arthas and the Cult of the Damned agents that have taken up residence there.
  • Karazhan in The Burning Crusade and Legion, which is predominantly occupied by the ghosts of Medivh and his party guests who don't seem to be aware of their current state of undeath.
  • Areas controlled by the Scourge are generally always this to some degree. Naxxramas and Icecrown Citadel are the best-known examples.
  • Shadowmoon Burial Grounds in Warlords of Draenor, which is the resting place of Shadowmoon orc spirits.
  • Black Rook Hold in Legion, which is full of night elf ghosts who are reliving the events of the War of the Ancients.
  • Waycrest Manor in Battle for Azeroth looks the part, being a decrepit, nightmarish mansion, though most of the enemies in it are witches, charmed thralls, and eldritch creatures rather than undead.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Several quests have a battle in progress between friendly and enemy NPCs which is in a stalemate, or where your allies are supposedly losing; the player then comes in to win the battle, or just to prevent your allies from getting wiped out, depending on whether that quest uses phasing or not.
  • In some situations, the battle is between the Alliance and Horde, where players from each side act as Big Damn Heroes fighting against the players on the other side acting as Big Damn Heroes; the battle regularly shifts from one side to the other depending on how many Big Damn Heroes each side has.
  • The last quest in the caravan questline in the Eastern Plaguelands shows a member of the group about to be turned into a Death Knight and rescued by the arrival of yourself and everyone who joined the caravan.
  • Hamuul Runetotem, who had just recovered from being severely injured saves the player and Malfurion from Leyara.
  • Complete all the quests for the Valley of the Four Winds and Krasarang Wilds in Mists of Pandaria and you'll get a cutscene where the Mantid invade Stoneplow en masse, and your meager forces to be strengthened by the arrival of Chen Stormstout and everyone you helped in your journey through the two regions.
• Bigger on the Inside: Many raid dungeons and some regular instanced dungeons. Mostly averted as the inside of most buildings and dungeons are exactly as big as the outside suggests they are; however, anything Mage related tends to warp the fabric of space, and Karazhan is the most blatant example. On the outside, Karazhan is a crumbling tower, but inside it is huge, with large open spaces like a banquet hall, theater, and library, which clearly can't fit in the narrow tower. In the Broken Stairs section, which takes place in the crumbling ruins and is sized to match the tower's outside, players can look down the corridor leading to the Menagerie and see that it extends into an area that is open space when viewed from outside. Some of them double as Alien Geometries.
• Big Guy, Little Guy: Silas Darkmoon, the well-dressed and wealthy gnome owner of the Darkmoon Faire, and his hulking ogre bodyguard Berth.
• Big "NO!":
  • In Howling Fjord, this is Plaguebringer Tillinghast's response to finding that his strain of plague is completely ineffective on the local proto-drakes.
  • Rotface in Icecrown Citadel does this in response to his pet plague-dog Precious being slain, which ends up being pretty funny due to his high-pitched voice.
  • Also in Icecrown Citadel is Captain Grondel, who might do this if he's among the Argent Crusade champions that are killed and raised by Sister Svalna.
  • One in the Krasarang Wilds from both Lorekeeper Vaeldrin and Sunwalker Dezco in response to Lyalia and Kor Bloodtusk, respectively, being slain.
  • In Shado-Pan Monastery, the Sha of Hatred gives a shorter "No!" followed by this when it's expelled from Taran Zhu's body.
  • At the very beginning of Bloodmaul Slag Mines, this comes from an unfortunate draenei slave when one of the ogres drops him into the river of magma below. In that same dungeon, Forgemaster Gog'duh does this when his health is depleted.
  • Ahri'ok Dugru of the Grimrail Enforcers in Iron Docks when she's killed.
  • In the Legion version of Blackfathom Depths, when the group disrupts the Twilight's Hammer's attempts to enslave Ghamoo-Ra, an unfortunate cultist does this as she's turned to bones by lightning.
  • In the Nighthold outro cinematic, Gul'dan gives one when his ritual to use Illidan's body as Sargeras' vessel is foiled.
• Big Ol' Eyebrows:
  • Dwarves have eyebrows so bushy and big, even their babies◊ sport them.
  • Elves have highly improbable eyebrows that extend conspicuously beyond their faces, yet are still rather thin. They're used to test whether the elf can get his shoulders through a passage. Some small animals use their whiskers for this in Real Life.
• Big Red Button:
  • The newbie quest chain for goblins make you push one of these in order to destroy an oil rig. Oh, and this button is VERY BIG!
  • Mimiron from Ulduar is found in a workshop with a Big Red Button on the back, labeled "DO NOT PRESS". If you press it, it starts the encounter in Heroic mode. And Mimiron will berate you for pushing it.
• Big Red Devil: If you belong to the demonic Burning Legion or have, at least, had contact with their Fel magic, chances are you end up like this.
  • Draenei are alien goat people with hooves for feet, curved horns on their heads, and red-to-blue skin. If you corrupt them with demonic magic, you get the Man'ari, a near-perfect depiction of this trope. Very notable is Kil'jaeden, who is gigantic and has red skin and corkscrew horns.
  • Continuing the Large and in Charge trend and while not as humongous as most demon bosses, Illidan is drawn way bigger than other night elves after he absorbs Fel magic to hunt demons. He also gets a pair of curved horns and hooves. Although his skin is purple.
  • The Legion's Doomguards are red, muscly, horned, hooved humanoids with bat wings protruding from their backs. The Succubi, also affiliated with the Burning Legion, are very similar except that, rather than having bulging muscles, they are Hot as Hell.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Vanessa VanCleef poses as the Saldeans' kindly adopted daughter, but is working to rebuild the Defias Brotherhood and avenge her father.
• Bite the Wax Tadpole: As is customary with video games, neither the main title "World of Warcraft" nor the expansion subtitles are translated when the game is adapted into other languages. Unfortunately, this caused the Mists of Pandaria expansion to elicit quite a laugh in Germany, as Mist is German for "dung."
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • The Battle for the Undercity in Wrath of the Lich King, from the Horde perspective. The Undercity is retaken, Varimathras and Putress are killed, but the war between the Horde and the Alliance is reignited.
  • Wrath of the Lich King: The Lich King is defeated, but Bolvar Fordragon forgoes his salvation in order to become the new Lich King and prevent the rise of the Scourge once again.
  • Badlands in Cataclysm: Rheastrasza is destroyed, along with the egg she and the player worked so hard to keep hidden from Deathwing. The "sweet" part comes in when it is revealed that, though she and the egg were destroyed, it was all part of the plan: She knew Deathwing would find her, so she trusted the cleansed black dragon egg with another ally and replaced it with one of her own.
  • The Siege of Orgrimmar: Garrosh is deposed, Vol'Jin becomes Warchief, and relations between the Horde and the Alliance seem to cool of to some degree, but Pandaria, the Vale of Eternal Blossoms especially, has a long road to recovery ahead of it, there's still a lot of tension between the factions, Jaina's personality shift to aggressiveness starts to show signs of becoming full blown Sanity Slippage, and Sylvanas, infuriated that a Troll is now the Horde's leader, is implied to be up to something sinister.
  • Legion: The Legion is finally defeated for good, but Sargeras has inflicted a major wound on the very planet of Azeroth. Also, with the Legion no longer around as an Enemy Mine to keep the two factions from each other's throats, the misunderstanding from the beginning of the expansion^note The Horde, about to be flanked, retreated from the field rather than be wiped out, which they were unable to communicate to the Alliance - who lost their king, and interpreted the withdrawal as a deliberate ploy to get them wiped out will help fuel the biggest war the world has ever seen, if the previews for Battle for Azeroth are anything to go by.
• Bittersweet 17: Anduin Wrynn is 17 in Legion, when his father is killed and he becomes King of Stormwind. Word of Godinvoked actually said they thought 17 was a good age for him to become King — Young enough to still have the "Boy King" aspect of the character, but old enough to understand his duties and have agency in his decisions rather than being a Puppet King whose kingdom is effectively run by his advisers.
• Black Comedy Rape: In Stormheim, Horde players are sent to kill Alliance spies, one of which is a druid who shapeshifted into her moonkin form to hide amongst the nearby ravenbears. When Horde players find her, she has attracted the attention of an "Enamored Ravenbear".
• Black Mage: Mages, warlocks, and Shadow priests.
• Black Magic:
  • According to Canon, most types of magic in the Warcraft universe are this. Although shadow and fel magic are explicitly derived from The Dark Side, even arcane magic has the twin drawbacks of being extremely addictive and acting as a beacon to attract demons to Azeroth — as the Highborne found out long ago. Also see White Magic in Tropes S to Z.
  • Arcane magic is a little less dangerous to use these days, mostly due to the fact that the demons are ALREADY coming. The addiction is problematic, but the average mage seems to have it more or less under control. The only faction we see really suffering from addiction is the blood elves who ended up going through withdrawal when their giant mana battery, the Sunwell, got destroyed.
  • Note that druids and Shadow priests use arcane and shadow magic, respectively, without invoking this trope, as druids' magic is powered by their connection to the stars, and priests' is psychic in origin, despite using the shadow descriptor. And paladins use holy power to fuel their various magical abilities. The spells are merely classified into the damage schools they are for the sake of simplicity.
• Blackout Basement:
  • The End Time dungeon. In it, the Emerald Dragonshrine was plunged into darkness, and only spots of light appear as players make their way through the darkness towards the Echo of Tyrande.
  • On a similar note, the Vault of the Wardens. Players have to navigate a pitch-black basement leading to Cordana Felsong, the final boss. One player (usually the tank) must click sentinel statues to obtain Elune's Light, which illuminates the path and eliminates harmful shadow patches on the ground when fighting Cordana.
• Black Speech: Shath'yar, the language of the denizens of the Void. Usually when it's spoken in-game, it's translated into English.
• Blatant Lies: In the "Twilight Shores" quest, two Goblins demonstrate how to use a cannon.
  Assistant Greely: [firing the cannon in the general direction of Bilgewater Port] I can hit my house from here!
  Hobart Grapplehammer: Greely, you're not randomly firing that thing into Bilgewater Port, are you?
  Assistant Greely: No. [Beat] Maybe. [Beat] A little.
• Bleak Level:
  • Gilneas, especially in the initial Worgen starting experience before you get bitten.
  • Felwood, which is like you took the Night Elf areas like Teldrassil and Ashenvale and filled it with plague and suspiciously green glowing stuff. The Ghostlands is the same for the Blood Elves.
  • While the Western Plaguelands is an active warzone, filled with armies of undead just barely held in check by mortal forces, the Eastern Plaguelands beyond them are strangely quiet. The wildlife is depressed where it isn't mutated; roving bands of things assault you, even on the roads, and in a world of saturated color, the sky is browner than the soil.
  • Duskwood, a forest infested with zombies and werewolves just across the river from the peaceful Elwynn Forest and a startling Mood Whiplash for new Human players. Everything in the zone is either dead or on constant watch from attack.
  • Deadwind Pass, everything there is washed out gray, and the only things that are alive are vultures, giant spiders, and a clan of ogres. It's also home to the Eldritch Location known as Karazhan and the creepy crypt underneath it. The good news is that there really isn't any reason to stick around in the zone itself for very long.
  • Desolace, at least before Cataclysm, where a huge forest now grows at the center of the zone. Before this, Desolace was a nearly lifeless desert where scavengers and the hostile centaur were the only life present, with the exception of the giant Kodo, who come here specifically to die.
• Blinding Camera Flash: The Venture Company operation in Stormsong Valley has reporters that use the flash from their cameras to stun you.
• Blind Seer: Drek'thar is an elderly orc who was born blind and, therefore, eagerly embraced the shamanic ways. Guided by the spirits of the elements and aided by his wisdom, he can briefly see the future and give cryptic prophecies about Azeroth's Cataclysm. Sometimes, he can even see alternate futures.
• Bling of War: Many armor sets are like this. Casters have Impossibly Cool Clothes, while heavy armor dudes wear nicely designed armor complete with Shoulders of Doom.
• Blocking Stops All Damage: Averted. A Miss, Parry, or Dodge will stop all damage, but a Block will only stop a fraction of it.
• Blood for Mortar: In Hellfire Peninsula, the Orcish Horde had built a massive road known as the Path of Glory out of draenei bones.
• Blood Knight:
  • Death Knights - quite literally. According to Word of Godinvoked, if a Death Knight does not inflict pain on other creatures regularly, they begin to suffer 'wracking pains that could drive them into a mindless, blood-seeking hysteria.' So not only are they solely designed to do battle, they are physically forced to do so.
  • Interestingly enough, not the titular Blood Knights of Silvermoon themselves. While there would certainly be a few Blood Elf paladins who revel in combat, the order is more multifaceted than that, especially after the revival of the Sunwell and what appears to be a shift towards more traditional paladin tenets.
  • Mankrik has become this in Cataclysm. Unable to let go of his grief and vengeful feelings, he's consumed with slaughtering quillboars. Near the end of the questline, an unusually gentle female orc manages to assuage his turmoil a bit, implying there may be a new Mankrik's Wife in the future.
  • Thisalee Crow of the Druids of the Talon enjoys fighting and killing Ragnaros' minions, and is fairly excited when the player recruits the Druids of the Talon.
  • Warmaster Blackhorn of the Dragon Soul raid also counts. Unlike most bosses who get angry or disgruntled when you kill their henchmen, Blackhorn looks forward to fighting the raid himself. His Disrupting Roar sounds unusually happy and when he kills a player, he yells at them to get up... before realizing they're dead.
  • Shelly Hamby, a player's follower available for their Garrison, becomes one after her husband is killed by supposedly friendly natives, becoming cold and withdrawn with a desire to preoccupy her despair by slaughtering the player's enemies.
• Blood Magic: Some of the Mogu, including Flesh Crafter Hoku, who can drain players' blood and use it to spawn adds that can be killed for a damage buff. In general, most remnants of the old troll empire practice this.
• Blood-Stained Letter: In one of the questlines around Darkshire, pre-Cataclysm, you find a torn journal page that is described as being barely legible through thick blood. The updated version yields a book called "The Legend of Stalvan", noting the final blood-stained page has been added.
• Bloody Murder: Blood Death Knights have several tricks to do with their own or other people's blood. Oddly, the "blood plague" disease is mainly associated with the Unholy tree.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality:
  • A great number of forces simply see mortals as plants in the Titans' garden, to be pulled or fertilized as the situation warrants.
  • Algalon the Observer rightfully sees that the Old Gods haven't been properly contained and has decided to "re-originate" the planet.
  • A common interpretation of the war between the Blue and Red dragonflights is that neither is good or evil, the former is simply trying to do its job by killing all mortal magicians, and the latter is just trying to do its job by saving them.
  • Elementals, while often antagonists, are often said to be acting according to the natural behavior of their element; Ragnaros may want to burn down the World Tree, placing Azeroth in peril, but it is because it is in fire's nature to burn.
  • The "A Thousand Years of War" Audio Drama reveals that this morality is how the Light and Void operate. Both the Light and Void can physically only see things from their own perspective, with their opposition appearing as monstrous and any fate involving the other becoming invisible to them when peering into the future. The Light crusades against evil to a level that can appear tyrannical to a mortal, and the Void cannot comprehend bonds between mortals like love. Since the Light and Void predated the physical universe, it is implied their points of view are a result of them being truly alien and from an existence that really did work they way they assume ours does.
• Blue Means Cold: The torches and braziers in Icecrown Citadel burn with blue flames. In the fight with Lord Marrowgar, he throws these flames on the ground, dealing Frost damage to anyone who stands in them.
• Blue Skinned Space Babe: The female draenei.
• Bodyguarding a Badass:
  • In gameplay, the guards of race leaders are much, much weaker than the actual leaders themselves. Downplayed in the lore.
  • One quest in the Caverns of Time requires the player to protect Thrall himself from an assassin. Of course, this is seven years in the past, so he's not quite as Badass as he is in the present. But he's badass enough.
• Bold Explorer:
  • Brann Bronzebeard and later Harrison Jones are seen exploring newly opened lands.
  • One of the scrolls in Pandaria tells the legend of a Liu Lang, a young Pandaren who set out to explore the world beyond the mist riding on the back of a turtle.
• Bond Creatures:
  • Warlocks and Hunters both have pets that they tame/coerce/summon and spend a great deal of time developing; this is one of the primary attractions of those classes. Several other classes can also call upon temporary combat pets of varying use and potency.
  • Post-patch 4.0.1, Frost Mages get their water elemental companion at level 10 as part of the Frost spec, and it's permanent when summoned.
  • Unholy-build Death Knights are an arguable example. All Death Knights can summon a ghoul to briefly assist them in battle, but the Unholy ones can keep it around as long as they like and have more control over it. However, there doesn't seem to be any bond with any one ghoul, since every time the Death Knight summons a ghoul, it's a different, randomly-named one.
• Bonus Feature Failure: Shadowlands features a new way to level for alts called "Threads of Fate", which allows you to entirely bypass the story quests and go straight to world quest and other stuff to level your alt. Unfortunately, the feature happens to be Awesome, but Impractical, as Pointed out by wowhead, leveling this way is slower than just doing the storyline quests (and keep in mind, questing is generally faster than anything else these days, outside specific exceptions). While you can make it a bit faster by grouping with friends, the feature is ultimately far slower than just doing story quests properly and has too many downsides to be worth considering.
• Book Ends:
  • The opening cinematic of Wrath of the Lich King and the final cinematic of the Icecrown Citadel raid dungeon both feature King Terenas Menethil talking with Arthas.
  • The Icecrown raid itself opens and closes with "I see only darkness," once when you kill the gatekeeper and first boss Marrowgar and once when you finally kill the Lich King. Also counts as Arc Words.
  • The opening cinematic of Cataclysm features Deathwing getting new armor plates. The second to last boss fight of the final raid instance is all about tearing off those armor plates. Word of Godinvoked stated that this trope was what they were aiming for with that boss fight.
  • The first time Thrall and Garrosh appeared in a major cinematic together - that is, the trailer for patch 3.1 - Thrall simply said "you disappoint me, Garrosh" in response to the latter's aggressive attitude toward Varian Wrynn. He repeats the exact same line, intonation and all, when confronting Garrosh after the latter's final defeat at the end of the Siege of Orgrimmar.
  • Thrall and Garrosh first met each other at Garadar, and Thrall showed Garrosh Grom's final moments at the village's Stones of Prophecy. In Warlords of Draenor, their final meeting - and Garrosh's death - are at the Stones of Prophecy.
  • The first zone of Burning Crusade is Hellfire Peninsula, which is also home to the expansion's first set of dungeons, Hellfire Citadel. In Warlords of Draenor, Tannan Jungle is the final zone released in the expansion, and Hellfire Citadel is home to the expansion's final raid.
    On a minor note, both Burning Crusade and Warlords of Draenor close with The Burning Legion hijacking the antagonist forces, setting up shop on a place accessible only by sea, and summoning one of their leaders to destroy the world.
  • Nathanos Blightcaller was first encountered by players at the Marris farm in the Eastern Plaguelands back in "Vanilla" in 2004, as a quest-giver for the Horde and a quest boss for the Alliance. Players of both factions —or more exactly Tyrande Whisperwind— got to kill him there 16 years later during the pre-Shadowlands event.
• Book Snap: The opening cinematic for The Burning Crusade featured a Draenei picking up a magic tome before doing this and setting off.
• Booze-Based Buff: Alcohol will blur your vision, make your character walk crooked, and make you misjudge enemies' levels if you drink enough of it, but specific types of booze increase some stats temporarily. The chat box displays your intoxication level as feeling tipsy, drunk, etc. When you get to "completely smashed" you start to have hallucinations and your character starts vomiting. Additionally, some booze buffs have other effects, from breathing fire to slowing your fall in the Storm Peaks.
• Border Patrol: There's a Running Gag of using the humble whale shark as protectors or enforcers in underwater areas.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • All classes will start off the game with some kind of basic spell or ability that you will be using for the rest of the game. The ability might get upgraded, but it will continue to be your basic method of attack for most of your leveling, and maybe even end-game raiding.
  • Bags. Everyone loves cool-looking armor or an impressive mount, but few things are less visible or more valuable in the long run than huge amounts of bag space for picking up that one last item, be it a valuable weapon or simple Shop Fodder to sell for money.
  • Mount speed. A lot of players don't bother with fully training riding, especially with alts. Admittedly 5000 gold for a 30% increase doesn't seem like that much, but if you're traveling a lot, that extra 30% will add up over time.
  • And on the subject of mounts, there's the Druid flight form. The game is filled with incredibly impressive-looking flying mounts, such as a flaming phoenix or a skeletal ice dragon, yet Druids often end up going back to their plain little bird form for flying, due to it's insta-cast nature.
  • Some armor doesn't really become available until later in the game, and you have to make do with what you find. Shoulder armor, for example, often didn't start dropping until late twenties, early thirties-level enemies. It was not uncommon to see, for example, a Warrior with pretty good plate armor for his level, otherwise looking like a badass, walking around wearing threadbare cloth shoulders because it was the only thing the poor guy had been able to find.
• Borrowing from the Sister Series: Some classes were largely based on abilities first devised and experimented with in Diablo II. The WoW Shaman's totem-based powers were prototyped by the D2 Barbarian; the D2 Assassin inspired both the WoW Rogue and the Hunter's traps, etc.
• Boss Banter:
  • Most dungeon bosses will talk to you in combat, starting from the earliest dungeons. Standard ones have an aggro speech and a Have a Nice Death speech. Later ones have Calling Your Attacks, some mid-fight speech, and Last Words. Some later final dungeon bosses even do a Hannibal Lecture when you enter the room they are in. All come in both Speech Bubbles/chat log and audio of course to crank it up.
  • One particular case of this involves a dysfunctional demonic couple in The Arcatraz named Dalliah the Doomsayer and Wrath-Scryer Soccothrates bantering with each other in a rather amusing, and deliciously hammy manner.
  • In the Spine of Deathwing encounter, he randomly says several taunts directed at the adventurers, rather than them being triggered by various events in the battle.
    Deathwing: Ha! I had not realized you fools were still there.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: In Mists of Pandaria there are a number of rare non-elite enemies that can be killed for an achievement and the chance for some nice loot, but they are generally much tougher than the other enemies in the area. They are specifically designed to be challenging for single players to defeat, and if you try to just stand there and hit them until they die like a regular mook, you will most likely lose the fight.
• Boss-Only Level: Several.
  • The Eye of Eternity where players fight Malygos.
  • Trial of the Crusader is five back-to-back boss fights.
  • The Throne of Four Winds consists of a conclave fight, followed by the Elemental Lord Al'Akir.
  • Some of the holiday bosses take place in an existing dungeon and players are teleported directly to the room for the fight, like Coren Direbrew in Blackrock Depths, or Frost Lord Ahune in the Slave Pens; the latter has one trash mob before the fight, but close enough.
• Bottomless Magazines: While ranged weapons used to require ammunition, they did not use it anymore as of patch 4.0.1. Sadly, this means that one of the major appeals of the Legendary bow, the fact that it generated its own ammunition, is now completely pointless (though of course since the bow was from Burning Crusade, no one was seriously using it anymore by that point).
• Bottomless Pit Rescue Service: Should you fall off the Fel Hammer, one of the Illidari felbats will grab you and put you back.
• Bow and Sword in Accord: Prior to Mists of Pandaria, Hunters, Warriors, and Rogues could equip both bows and swords. Pandaria removed the ranged weapon slot, though to compensate the latter two were given a "ranged throw" type attack to allow them to continue to pull from a distance, and the hunter no longer had a "minimum distance" for ranged attacks.
• Bowdlerise:
  • In The Burning Crusade, the quest text for Matis the Cruel used to read "Scour the island for this bastard." At some point, "bastard" was replaced with "killer", which is odd considering there are other instances of the word "bastard" in the game.
  • In the Shadowlands beta, in an attempt to "soften" video game language, Garrosh's response to Sylvanas' snarky comment in the quest The Warchief Cometh has been changed from "Watch your clever mouth, bitch" to simply "Watch your clever mouth." The same patch also altered one of Lord Godfrey's lines so he no longer refers to Sylvanas as a bitch.
  • Starting with patch 9.1.5, many sexual or crude bits that were otherwise in the game for years have been removed or replaced: a vanilla-era painting found in SI:7 of a woman in a robe was updated to a higher-quality version with a more modest outfit, a reclining nude painting in Ravenholdt was replaced entirely with a still life painting of a bowl of fruit (the decision of which was subject to a lot of memetic mockery), the Anglers NPC Master Baiter was renamed Jiang Ziya, multiple jokes and flirts removed, etc.
• Bragging Rights Reward:
  • Any items that drop off of the current Big Bad on Heroic or Mythic mode, since those were the final bosses of their respective expansion. Partially subverted in that the gear you get from those bosses can make leveling easier once the next expansion is released, but if your gear is good enough to allow you to beat the Lich King on Heroic mode, you'll probably hardly notice the difference between leveling with a weapon he drops and leveling without it.
  • A number of achievement rewards are cosmetic items; usually a mount, a tabard, a companion pet, a toy, or a title. Notable are the mounts such as the Rusted/Ironbound Proto-Drakes from Ulduar and the Frostbrood Wyrms from Icecrown Citadel, which you get as a reward for completing all the achievements in a single tier of raiding.
  • The Legendary Cloak questline in Mists averts this. Most Legendaries come from grinding the last tier of raids, so like the above gear example, it means you really don't need them to do the content. For the cloak, the questline started when Mists launched and has run through every patch since; but Wrathion will upgrade the player's cloak to the Legendary before entering the Siege of Orgrimmar, so they'll have it when they need it most.
• Brain Food:
  • Parodied during the Hallow's End festival. Real undead do not go around eating brains, but NPCs wearing a Forsaken mask will occasionally say "Braaaaains".
  • When you were turned into a ghoul during the pre-Wrath of the Lich King Scourge invasion event, you spoke the "Zombie" language instead of your normal one. To non-zombies, this language sounded like "... brains .... braaains".
  • When you raise ghouls in the Scarlet Mine during the Death Knight intro storyline, one of the things they can say is "GIVE ME BRAINS!"
  • The undead pirates in Tol Barad want you to be dead like them, and also say "Braaaaains", implying they want some. However, you still don't see any actual brain-eating.
• Brainwashed and Crazy:
  • Just about anyone listening to the Old Gods' voice for too long. Deathwing himself is the most blatant example. For the players, it's the Sanity mechanic in the Yogg-Saron encounter in Ulduar. It's so thorough that even if you die and are rezzed in combat, you are still this trope.
  • Likewise, just about anyone touched by the Sha.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs:
  • During the intro questline for Horde players to go to Mechagon, Skaggit tasks them with recruiting goblin laborers by negotiating with the Greasemonkey Union Rep. One of the "perks" players can offer the union rep is "Free barbecue... No, donuts! Maybe... barbecued donuts?"
  • In the Plagueworks Wing of Icecrown Citadel, the Adventurers first have to slay Festergut and Rotface, who use gas- and ooze-based abilities, respectively, before facing Professor Putricide, who uses both gas- and ooze-based abilities.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick:
  • Swellthrasher, a Laughing Skull NPC in Drustvar who offers Horde players a ride back to Zuldazar, has the following text when players talk to her:
    You need a boat? A message sent? PERHAPS SOME AID IN STABBING?
  • Brewmaster Boof gives us this gem as he's transporting the player through a saurok-infested cave while the saurok throw spears at your boat:
    The spears are just for show. As long as we don't get out of the boat or make eye contact or get hit by a spear then we should be fine.
• Break the Cutie: Jaina, in spades. After Theramore was bombed during the lead-in to Mists of Pandaria, Jaina went from being the biggest advocate of peace with the Horde to going on a total Roaring Rampage of Revenge. She was then healed again over the course of Battle for Azeroth.
• Break the Haughty: Greymane's had it rough. After cutting his nation off from the rest of the world in spite towards the Alliance, he had to deal both with rebels who didn't agree with his decision, and more notably the outbreak of a werewolf curse that quickly spread amongst his closed-off nation. After most of the population and Greymane himself get infected with the curse, they come under attack from the Forsaken, and Greymane is forced to ask for help from the Alliance. Oh, and his son Liam dies in the fighting. Greymane's been eating a bit of humble pie since the Cataclysm hit.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Averted until relatively recently, where the only things available in the store were vanity items that couldn't be sold to other characters. It was to the point where the introduction of a standard flying mount to the cash shop was controversial, since it meant a savings of 50 gold in-game. This started to change with the introduction of the Guardian Cub, a cosmetic item that could be bought in the cash shop and then sold for gold on the Auction House. In 2016 you gained the ability to buy "WoW Tokens" from the cash shop. The token is useless to the person who first buys it, but after it's been sold to another it can be cashed in for a month of game time.
• Brick Break:
  • Mists of Pandaria wouldn't be complete without bare-fisted monks breaking boards and bricks.
  • On the Wandering Isle, Jojo Ironbrow is looking for ever stronger items to break; until the player finds a Jade Tiger Pillar, which even he can't break. It becomes his favorite weapon.
  • In the Valley of the Four Winds, players undergo training where they learn how to break bricks; it becomes Chekhov's Skill when players use it to kill an enormous kunchong, by punching it to death from the inside.
• Brick Joke:
  • After you give the quest to Johnny Awesome, his Celestial Steed that he bragged about is found dead with its legs sticking out of the field in Hillsbrad with Johnny himself crying in a nearby house.
  • Back in Warcraft III, Medivh told Jaina "Your young prince will find only death in the cold north". At the end of Wrath of the Lich King, Arthas did indeed find "only death in the cold north."
  • A better example is Kingslayer Orkus, after you dispense his quest, the NPC who gave you the quests to dispense offhandedly hopes "Maybe he'll drown?" Sure enough, the next time you see Orkus, he is drowning. In shallow water.
  • The Pridelings in Thousand Needles. See Androcles' Lion.
  • In the base game players fought and killed a core hound called the Beast in Blackrock Mountain. Six years later in Cataclysm his mate appeared seeking revenge. Her name? Beauty.
  • In Warlords of Draenor, soon after passing through the Dark Portal, you encounter Kargath Bladefist, who traps you and your party in an arena and tasks you with killing one hundred of his minions. But you only kill 99 of them before Khadgar leads your party out into the next area. Ten levels later, in Highmaul, you enter another arena, and Kargath is back. Then when you defeat him, his last words are "And that's... one... hundred."
  • Awbee was a severely injured blue dragon whelpling in Upper Blackrock Spire and tells the player to move on cause it's too late for her. About 10 years later in Warlords of Draenor, Awbee appears all grown up and joins the player to assist in the revamped Blackrock Spire to get revenge on the orcs who harmed her.
  • The Alliance-only quest "Life Preserver" in Drustvar in Battle for Azeroth involves the player helping a red dragon complete a ritual so that the remains of another red dragon cannot be reanimated after such a thing happened during the Burning Legion's invasion. She's talking about the Death Knight quest chain in Legion that ended up with the player obtaining their Class Hall mount, and if you do this quest as a Death Knight, she will acknowledge this, and the death knight you have to kill while the ritual is going on complains about the player seemingly wanting to be the only one with such a mount.
  • A quest chain available early in Stranglethorn Vale involves rescuing a baby raptor and having it follow you around for a while before it's captured by evil trolls. In one of the max-level (for that expansion) dungeons, you get a chance to rescue her and she becomes a companion pet.
• Bright Is Not Good: In contrast to most of the rest of the Sha being black and white, the Sha of Pride is azure and cyan and is the most dangerous of all prime Sha.
• Bringing Back Proof: There are hundreds of quests where you need to kill a specific mob and bring proof back to the quest giver, usually their head for named mobs. It can also cross over with 20 Bear Asses when said proof isn't a guaranteed drop from every kill.
• Broken Record: The rare encounter Bashiok in Gorgrond has only one line, repeated many times with different inflections: "I am Bashiok!"
• Brother–Sister Team: Cataclysm brought us two of these, both of them dragons. Blackwing Descent ends with the resurrected Nefarian and Onyxia, and Bastion of Twilight has the Twilight dragons Theralion and Valiona.
• Brought Down to Normal:
  • In terms of political power instead of superpower, this happens to goblin players. Players start out as the proteges of Trade Prince Gallywix, being groomed as the next trade prince(ss); but when Deathwing arrives to spoil the party, leaving you all on his ship fleeing Kezan, he decides you're more useful as slave labor.
  • The surviving Dragon Aspects at the end of Cataclysm.
• Brown Note:
  • The vespers used by the kyrian play a sound that's heavenly to the initiated, but is this to the Forsworn. The inverse occurs with the Forsworn's corrupted vespers, which will periodically buff Forsworn NPCs and inflict a damage done/movement speed reduction to players.
  • The Endmire in Revendreth does... something to the player that causes them to receive an increasing Shadow damage vulnerability debuff while they're in there, which can be kept at bay using torches and braziers in the area.
  • Gorgoa, River of Souls is an area of the Maw that's flowing with disembodied souls writhing in agony. The sound produced by it is apparently agonizing to mortals and being within it inflicts a stacking damage done/damage taken increase.
  • According to the Primus, Domination magic is this. It's different from other magics in that it's essentially a language so powerful that it interferes with a being's sense of self, thereby making it susceptible to being controlled by another.
• Buddy Cop Show: Parodied with Asric and Jadaar; they don't catch the bad guy and they still hate each other.
• Bug War: Several.
  • An unnamed conflict in which the troll empires battled the aqir for thousands of years; this eventually resulted in the latter splitting into the qiraji and nerubians.
  • The War of the Shifting Sands, in which the night elves allied with the bronze, blue, red and green dragonflights to force back the expansionistic qiraji. They succeeded in driving the qiraji back to their capital; however, for various reasons, the qiraji were merely contained. This proved to be a less-than-spectacular decision.
  • The War of the Spider, in which the Scourge all but destroyed the nerubians... and raised them as undead monstrosities.
  • The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj event, in which the Alliance, Horde, and numerous third parties forced their way into Ahn'Qiraj in order to destroy the qiraji and their master, an Old God called C'thun.
  • In Feralas, the Horde encampments come under attack from the gnolls. Once you help drive them back, you pick up gnoll maps indicating that they were attacking you because they were losing territory in their own war against local silithid invaders, forcing them to try to expand the other way.
  • In the fourth expansion, you have the pandaren and mantid. Guess which one's the bug.
• Bullet Hell: The Twin Val'kyr in Crusaders' Coliseum. The fight seems to be based off of Ikaruga, as the raid has to split up and avoid one color bullet while absorbing the other color for a damage buff.
  • Several bosses have this kind of mechanic, including Walden's Ice Shards in Shadowfang Keep and Cookie's barrage of food in the Deadmines.
  • The Imperial Vizier Zor'lok encounter in Heart of Fear has aspects of this with his Attenuation ability.
• Bullfight Boss: Icehowl, in the Crusaders' Coliseum. Crush, another yeti, has similar mechanics.
• Bullying a Dragon: Many raid bosses are terrifying abominations that can reduce puny mortals into a smear on the wall with a thought. Players pick fights with them anyway. And frequently win. A questline in Coldarra also has the NPC Keristrasza mocking a literal dragon to his face about having murdered his mate. This ends poorly for her.invoked What's unusual about this is that Keri is also a dragon and is a pretty powerful one at that. She's just not an Aspect like Malygos.
• The Bus Came Back: Legion has a bunch of this. First there's Illidan, along with Maiev of course. Then there's also Turalyon and Alleria Windrunner, after 19 years of absence and not being found in Burning Crusade, as opposed to Khadgar and Danath. There's more: Calia Menethil, Arthas' sister, who has been missing even before Lordaeron's fall. Main timeline Garona Halforcen also returned since going missing in Cataclysm, while Vanessa VanCleef returned much like Illidan. Valeera Sanguinar also returned after being missing since Wrath of the Lich King, and from the same expansion, we see Bolvar Fordragon as the new Lich King off his frozen throne. There's also the actual WoW debut of Rehgar Earthfury as well as the return of Jaraxxus, EREDAR LORD OF THE BURNING LEGION!!!
• But Thou Must!: At the end of the Warlords of Draenor Legendary questline, Cordana Felsong asks you for the ring you've been crafting up to that point. Suspecting something is very wrong, the player has two options: "No." and "Oh, HELL No!".
• Butt-Dialing Mordor: Legion reveals that Sargeras didn't just show up at the Eredar homeworld; their most skilled and accomplished summoner, who refused to rest on his laurels and was searching the Great Dark Beyond for newer and better things to bring to Argus, contacted him directly and learned of fel magic from him. It went as well as you might think, up until he was executed for trying to take over the world since he found the other leaders of the Eredar ungrateful about his "new toys". As for the summoner himself? Well... his soul was bound to his skull all those eons ago - and warlocks get to bend Thal'kiel to their will.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Gnomes in general are jokingly abused, especially with the now-memetic "gnome punting" enjoyed by both factions!
  • Poor Gamon in Orgrimmar was a level 12 NPC, who was put in the center of town and made attackable for a pickpocketing quest. Instead, bored players would kill him the instant he respawned, over and over for six years. What's more, whenever a new Death Knight player arrived from the starting zone, the otherwise non-aggressive Gamon would leap into action to defend the city, which rarely ended well. When Cataclysm hit, Blizzard took pity and made Gamon a level 85 elite who is immune to crowd control and hits like a freight train. Later, he appears in the Siege of Orgrimmar raid in Mists of Pandaria and can be freed to help the raid defeat General Nazgrim.