World Of Warcraft / Tropes C to E

World of Warcraft trope list C to E.

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C

• Cain and Abel: Several pairs of good and evil siblings exist.
  • Illidan and Malfurion Stormrage. While Illidan is technically the younger sibling, he's the one who also became a literal demon from absorbing the power of the Skull of Gul'dan and was exiled for his actions. That said, the two parted on pretty even terms for this trope, especially since they teamed up to save Tyrande Whisperwind, Malfurion's wife and the one Illidan wanted to love him. Illidan never made an attempt on Malfurion's life, and Malfurion wasn't even among the force that finally ended Illidan's life.
  • Stalvan and Tobias Mistmantle. Stalvan killed his student and her lover out of jealousy, much to Tobias' dismay.
  • Krenna and Gorgonna. The former is a General Ripper who wants to go to war with the Alliance, while the latter is a more Reasonable Authority Figure who wants to prevent it. Krenna and her bodyguards ultimately fight Gorgonna and the players in a Duel to the Death, and are defeated.
  • Maiev and Jarod Shadowsong. The former is a Knight Templar Warden who went a little crazy after she finally killed Illidan and decided to start killing Highborne after the Night Elves started to allow them back, while the latter is a war hero who wants peace for his people. The two finally clash at the end of the Wolfheart novel when Jarod discovers she intends to capture and kill Malfurion, though he can't bring himself to kill her and allows her to escape.
  • The Dragon Aspects are considered siblings in a sense, and regularly address each other as "sister" or "brother." Deathwing is the Cain, as is Malygos in Wrath of the Lich King, while Alexstraza, Ysera and Nozdormu are the Abels until Nozdormu becomes Murozond.
  • Subverted with Randolph and Mortimer Moloch in the Stockades dungeon; Mortimer is also evil, and fakes his death rather than take his brother's place.
  • The Windrunner sisters. Sylvanas is the Cain to Vereesa and Alleria's Abels.
    • Or, as the joke goes:
      Male Void Elf player: Alleria is my favorite Windrunner sister. Edgier than Vereesa, but slightly less homicidal than the dead one.
• The Caligula: Meng the Demented is implied to have been "the most foul ruler to ever abuse the imperial throne" among the Mogu, which is saying quite a bit considering the kind of cruelty the Mogu are capable of. His saying things such as "Slaughter yourselves for my amusement!" during the battle does not do much to dispel that perception.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": All over the place, sometimes with minor variations on colour as an excuse. Zhevras (unicorns with zebra hides); swoops (basically vultures), striders (big emus), crocolisks (six-legged crocodile-basilisk hybrids), riverbeasts (hippopotami); and of course dinosaurs, including stegodon (stegosaur), ravasaur (bigger raptors), and devilsaur (T. Rexpy), and animals often mistaken for dinosaurs such as diemetradon (dimetrodon), pterrordax (pterodactyl), and threshadon (plesiosaur).
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit": Orcas and raptors, though apparently both have horns. To wit: Accounting for the WoW style, orcas look exactly like their real-world counterparts aside from having four giant horns.
• Call-Back:
  • The game is full of references from Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal, and Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne.
  • Interestingly, the music played during Pet Battles is remixed off of Warcraft II's music.
  • The entrance to Blackwing Descent is located on the balcony of Blackwing Lair where you originally fought Nefarian, now accessible in the Burning Steppes by flying.
  • When you fight them in the Emerald Nightmare instance, the Dragons of Nightmare all recycle their lines from when you fought them back in vanilla, some written differently or paraphrased:
    Ysondre: The strands of life have been severed! The dreamers must be avenged!
    Ysondre: Come forth, dreamers... and claim your vengeance!
    Taerar: Peace is but a fleeting dream! Let the Nightmare reign!
    Taerar: Children of madness! I release you upon this world!
    Emeriss: Hope is a disease of the soul! This land shall wither and die!
    Emeriss: Taste the Nightmare's corruption!
    Lethon: I can sense the shadow on your hearts. There can be no rest for the wicked!
    Lethon: Your wicked souls shall feed my power!
  • The longest callback (at the time of writing) is the box art for Battle for Azeroth. The art features an Orc grunt and a Human footman staring each other down and snarling. Exactly like the art for the very first Warcraft game^note  Warcraft II also featured this layout, but with a nautical twist.. The designs are slightly updated and the background of the image features armies clashing instead of a vague red mist, but the similarities are very obvious. A fitting callback as this expansion is focusing on the first villains the Horde and Alliance faced when Warcraft was released in 1994: each other.
    • In that expansion, Jaina's Warbringers entry deserves special mention as one to the Wrath of the Lich King intro cinematic where her actions can be compared and contrasted to those of her former lover Arthas. Arthas woke up from his slumber atop the Frozen Throne and recalled his father's testament to him. He went on to raise a great dragon queen from the dead and stood as a twisted mockery of what his father wanted him to be. Jaina has finally woken up from her pacifism and the stupor following the destruction of her city, and goes to raise her father's enormous galleon from the seafloor, becoming the warlike leader he always intended for her to be. Unlike Arthas, who used to heed his father's words, Jaina only now says "I'm listening now, Father", which is also a Call-Back to Warcraft III, when she asked him why he wouldn't listen to her agenda of peace. Both cinematics are accompanied by haunting pieces named "Arthas, My Son" and "Daughter of the Sea", respectively.
  • The cinematic at the end of the war campaign has several call-backs to the Wrathgate cinematic: A force of united Alliance and Horde soldiers standing outside an imposing fortress. The ruler of the fortress is called out and the scene cuts to the pitch black interior of the gate which lights up as the door opens, revealing the silhouette of the ruler. In the ensuing fight, an orc declares "Let it be finished" and is ultimately struck dead with a single blow. The ruler is then forced to flee from battle due to the intervention of a Forsaken character.
• Calling the Old Man Out: In Warlords of Draenor, Garrosh tries this along with "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Thrall. Thrall responds with reason of his own.
  Garrosh: You made me what I am!
  Thrall: No. You chose your own destiny.
• Calling Your Attacks: Many bosses do this, to the point where the game engine will display prominent warnings for the use of powerful abilities by bosses so you can't possibly miss them. Players also frequently set up macros that make them say things when they use certain abilities, either for roleplaying or to coordinate with their party members.
• Calm Before the Storm: The short "Old Soldier" takes place on the eve of the Battle of Lordaeron. Varok Saurfang looks out at the assembled forces of the Alliance and, disillusioned with the Horde under Sylvanas Windrunner and longing for the warrior's death that keeps being denied him, begins marching out toward the enemy encampment seemingly preparing to commit Suicide By Alliance. Before he can, Zekhan convinces him to live another day.
• Came Back Wrong:
  • Virtually anyone resurrected by the Scourge, as they are forced into ruthless evil by the Lich King; the Forsaken are viewed as this, regardless of their personal inclination - usually at first. The current, most recent batch of Forsaken brought back by the Val'kyr are given the choice of returning to "life", though this does not mean they are not brainwashed into fawningly obeying the Banshee Queen afterwards. Death Knights' "Raise Ally" skill originally worked this way, but has since become a more standard combat resurrection ability.
• Canon Discontinuity: Med'an was officially decanonized in a particularly trollish way in Warcraft Chronicles, Volume 3 (which has fewer than 300 pages): The index refers you to page 404.
• Can't Catch Up:
  • This has happened at various times in the game due to iterations of raid content. At the start of classic and each expansion, everyone's on more or less equal footing regarding gear, but this rapidly changes once new raid tiers are introduced and players need to play catch-up to be considered qualified to get into top-tier content. The trick, of course is that to get geared for that content, they have to run the content, creating a Catch-22. Generally averted whenever a new expansion is released, with equipment available in the new zones outclassing most of the hard-earned epic gear, putting everyone on more or less equal footing going forward.
  • This was especially bad in Classic and The Burning Crusade, where you had to do all sorts of different pre-requisite quests and attunements before reaching the content. The problem was, there was no dungeon finder until Wrath, so if you were on one of the wasteland servers, if you didn't get into the two guilds that ran the end-game content, you simply didn't raid. At all. This created a pretty big Can't Catch Up because players would pick these servers, find that they can't reach the guilds' initial gearing, and then transfer to a higher-population server where there are actually guilds that ran multiple raid groups. Entire guilds sometimes stagnated at the initial raiding tier due to a similar mechanic: any player good enough to progress to the next level got poached by a rival guild, so the other guild had to recruit and train a new raider, stalling their progress and perpetuating the cycle.
  • Blizzard has mitigated this considerably with the Cataclysm gearing system. Running 5-man heroic dungeons now rewards Valor Points that players can spend to buy up-to-date raid gear, and each boss in said dungeons drops Justice Points which can be spent on the previous tier's raid gear.
  • Mists of Pandaria made things even simpler to catch up, with more end-game Player Versus Environment options available besides dungeons and raids, such as scenarios. Daily quests also provide Valor Points.
  • During Warlords of Draenor, this happened with the followers, especially ones recruited at the inn. Followers recruited at the inn always came in at level 90. Players would instinctively pick followers with traits they are lacking... and unfortunately they needed to send them on useless missions so they could catch up. Fortunately, Harrison Jones, when paired with followers, automatically would make them catch up. Legion subverts this - you can only have five followers active at a time, and they usually level up to 110 quickly. Especially who you assign as your combat ally.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin':
  • Blizzard can't put anything into the game secretly. The moment a patch with new content gets rolled out people take it and datamine everything out of it and discuss what they found online.
  • And in the other direction, Blizzard records dungeon runs and flags the odd ones, meaning some neat tricks players come up with to take advantage of things are quickly fixed out before word can get out too far in the playerbase.
• Captain Crash:
  • At the end of the Alliance questline to Twilight Highlands, Fargo Flintlocke says he ditched the landing gear among other things to make the plane lighter - he doesn't "land" usually anyway. Fargo's remark at the end of the trip is funny.
    [player awakens on a ship and looks up to see the plane burning on top of the mast]
    Flintlocke: [his head popping into view, and looking down at the player] What? Like you could have done any better!
  • There's a running gag about the draenei, that any time they're piloting a vehicle they'll crash it. This is likely because their capital, the Exodar, is a magic interstellar spaceship that they crashed into Azeroth. The Oshu'gun, the ship that got them from Argus to Draenor, crashed as well. Neither was the fault of the draenei but the meme stuck. This is lampshaded in Sholazar Basin where a female draenei remarks on how everyone looks at her like she crashed the boat.
  • Played with for the opening zones of Warlords of Draenor. The ship that goes to Shadowmoon Valley, carrying the draenei and the Alliance members, ends up beached, halfway out of the water. Closer examination shows that the ship seems mostly intact, however...and an examination of the Horde ship shows that it came off worse, crashing into the ice and rocks at the coast of Frostfire Ridge and taking noticeable damage as a result. To an ironclad ship, mind.
• Captain Obvious: Watcher Tolwe on the Orgrimmar/Thunder Bluff zeppelin will comment on random things he sees. Warcraft Wiki even just says "he's very observant."
  Tolwe: Dere be a bug.
• Car Fu: One of the bosses in the Crucible of Carnage is a Worgen that grabs the stagecoach he came in on, and smashes the players with it.
• Carrying the Antidote: During the Legion class hall questline for Warlocks, the Eredar Twins afflict Shinfel with a curse that will eventually kill her. The curse is one where only the caster can remove it, so it's not that the Eredar Twins are carrying the antidote, it's that they are the antidote.
• Cartography Sidequest: One for each zone, giving a lesser achievement for each, a tabard for exploring every zone in Northrend, and the overall achievement and the title of "The Explorer" for getting ALL of them.
• Cash Gate: In the Suramar zone questline in Legion, Arluin is a well-connected rogue who sets you up with assassinations, political insertions, and the like. Often, he won't bother helping you unless you grease his palms with Ancient Mana, a zone-specific currency.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • Drek'thar's visions are often correct, but tend to be dismissed as he is becoming senile.
  • In Patch 4.3, if you tell Bishop Farthing that Archbishop Benedictus, who left to Northrend to help the Aspects, is the Twilight Prophet, he will first laugh it off, then scold you for spreading nasty rumors, mentioning a rumor he heard about Bolvar that indicates that the truth about him is also viewed in a similar light. And then in Legion, Farthing also turns out to be a Twilight cultist...
• Casting a Shadow: Spells belonging to the Shadow school, such as those cast by a Shadow-specced Priest or a Warlock, show up as a "black glow" around the caster's hands.
• Cast from Hit Points: Warlocks have always had the ability to turn their health into mana (Life Tap) and heal their demons with their own health (Health Funnel), but have gone further into this in Mists of Pandaria, with several spells that sacrifice health for different benefits.
• Casual Kink:
  • Your goblin female character sometimes say: "I'm a free spirit. I don't like to be tied down. Wait, you meant literally? Oh, I'm totally into that!". Characters of certain other race-gender combos also say things that can be interpreted in a similar direction, but they are less obvious about it. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Good. Bring ample supply of butter and goblin jumper cables."
  • Humorously subverted by the male goblin: "Yeah. She told me to tie her up, and do whatever I wanted to her. So I took her stereo."
• Catapult to Glory: You can pilot and be fired out of Siege Engines in some locations. This is a key strategic element to the Hard Mode of the first boss in Ulduar.
  • Spoofed with an Alliance quest from Fargo Flintlocke shortly after the player lands in Twilight Highlands. Fargo's "clever plan" involves shooting the player out of a cannon and through the hull of the enemy blimp. Yes, through.
    Fargo: Take these explosives, then wait here next ta me. As soon as that blimpy comes around I'll blast you onto tha deck. Plant the explosives in 'er belly and, oh I dunno, make it up as you go.
  • Done with rockets in one dungeon in Pandaria. And somebody actually has to do it due to how the mechanics on the final boss work.
• Catchphrase:
  • "Frostmourne hungers..."
  • "For the [Faction]!"
• Cat Folk:
  • The Tol'vir: a race of centaur-like beings with lion bodies and feline faces, crafted by the Titans from stone.
  • The saberon from Draenor.
• The Cavalry:
  • Happens during a Horde quest in Borean Tundra when Saurfang shows up to save the PC.
  • At the climax of a particularly memorable quest chain, The Knights of the Ebon Blade come to the aid of you and Fordring when you're surrounded by the Lich King and his elite servants.
  • Tirion Fordring pulls off an epic one during the final battle with the Lich King.
  • 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.
  • During the quest "Harrison Jones and the Temple of Uldum", The Hitler wannabe Commander Schnottz was about to destroy the chest when he and his Black Dragon allies are obliterated. The man responsible for saving the butt of both the player and Harrison...Brann Bronzebeard himself.
  • Mists of Pandaria has the Defense of Stoneplow, where players arrive in the town just as the Mantid swarm breaks through the wall. Vastly outnumbered, the Shado-Pan are forced to retreat, until Chen Stormstout arrives with an army made up of almost everyone from the Valley of the Four Winds and the Krasarang Wilds. It ends with the player dealing the finishing blow to the colossal mantid that broke down the wall.
• Cavalry Betrayal: The Battle of Angrathar the Wrathgate. Grand Apothecary Putress initially appears to be The Cavalry, stopping the Lich King dead in his tracks right before he attacks Highlord Bolvar, but reveals his true intentions shortly afterward by nuking everyone on the battlefield, Horde, Alliance and Scourge alike. The killer line is "AND DEATH TO THE LIVING!"
• Cave Behind the Falls: Referenced by Li-Li when you visit Huangtze Falls.
• Cerebus Retcon:
  • Chen Stormstout in Warcraft III was mostly known for his love of drinking and having fun, and was a pretty laid-back dude all in all. Turns out in Mists of Pandaria that he and his whole race have a VERY good reason for being so carefree; negative emotions arouse and strengthen their local Sealed Evil in a Can.
  • Likewise, kobolds and their protectiveness of candles and fear of the dark become less funny in Highmountain, as it is revealed that they are actually afraid of Uul'Gyneth the Darkness, Herald of the Old Gods.
• Chain of Deals:
  • To purchase the Red Crystal Monocle from Sir Finley Mrrgglton, players start by buying seashells from him, and trading with other aquatic creatures in Vashj'ir until they get the items needed to trade for the monocle. What makes this difficult is that all the items have timers on them, so players have to do all three chains within about an hour, or they will have to start over.
  • Griftah in Zandalar starts one of these, sending you all over Dazar'alor to eventually come back to him and get a toy.
  • In Nazjatar, the rescued murlocs have a daily one of these; one murloc sells a rare item, and in order to get that item you have to go back and forth between four other murlocs buying and trading their junk (and in one case, washing their socks). Like the first example, these junk items last less than a day, so it's impossible to stockpile them.
  • Getting Droman Aliothe's RSVP for the Ember Court requires buying an item from a broker in Revendreth, exchanging it for an item from a broker in Oribos, exchanging that for an item from a third broker in a different part of Oribos, and finally exchanging that for an item from a fourth broker in Revendreth right across from the first one.
• Chaos Architecture: In designing the maps of World of Warcraft, Blizzard took a very Broad Strokes approach to the lore and previous games. Several locations have been radically altered or are just plain missing. The most glaring example is Kul Tiras, which has a small presence along Kalimdor's coast. And let's not even get into the fact that one of Azeroth's moons is missing...
  • Maps of Warcraft III put Brill far south of Stratholme with Andorhal in the middle of the two. In WoW, Brill is on the West of Lordaeron, Andorhal is in the center and Stratholme is north-east, roughly where it was in Warcraft III maps.
  • There is a "Vandermar Village" in Warcraft III where the first undead mission takes place. It is supposed to be near the border of Tirisfal Glades and Western Plaguelands. It is nowhere to be found, though many speculate that Deathknell, located in the Western side of Tirisfal, used to be Vandermar.
  • Kul Tiras' colony on the coast of Kalimdor is not an example of this trope; the colony was explicitly founded by Admiral Proudmoore during the expansion to Warcraft III. However, the absence of Kul Tiras itself from this game fits. According to source materials and previous games, the island nation should be off the coast of the Eastern Kingdoms south of Gilneas, but just isn't there, except for a prison colony.
    • The return of Kul Tiras has been hinted at many times. Including an attempt to explain its disappearance. An earthquake did it. And with Battle For Azeroth, it was rediscovered.
  • As of Cataclysm, Azeroth once again has two moons.
• Character Development: Naturally. The most obvious example is Thrall, who steps down as Warchief to explore his role as a shaman, join the Earthen Ring and stop Deathwing, while cultivating a relationship with a Mag'har shaman named Aggra.
  • The arrogant Kingslayer Orkus, who appears to be a one-note gag character, ultimately overcomes his apparent cowardice and self-centered attitude to save the player's life, and dies honorably as a warrior of the Horde. In contrast, Johnny Awesome mopes for a few months and buys another "Sparklepony".
  • King Varian Wrynn of Stormwind. When he was first introduced, he was an amnesiac gladiator and The Strategist, and later turned out to be a Literal Split Personality. After his Split-Personality Merge Varian was highly unstable, had major anger issues, and was racist. After the events of the novel Wolfheart Varian has calmed down his two personalities and once again become The Strategist, as well as becoming the leader of the Alliance's militaries as a whole.
  • Moira is an arrogant tyrant upon her return to Ironforge after her father is turned to diamond, albeit with the well-intentioned goal of integrating the Dark Iron Dwarves with the others. In Patch 5.3, she leads her men in an attack on the Frostmane trolls when the Bronzebeards and Wildhammers refused to leave out of fear that she would betray those left behind, earning their trust.
• Character Shilling: Many characters have had this done for them by Blizzard, but some are worse than others.
  • Garrosh's Informed Ability as a worthy leader of the Horde was constantly pushed on players throughout Cataclysm, though it was eventually subverted in Mists of Pandaria.
  • From Wolfheart onwards and into Mists of Pandaria, Varian Wrynn qualifies as well, the narrative going out of its way to paint him as the absolute leader of the Alliance, though Blizzard has backtracked a bit on how much authority as High King he has.
  • Some of Richard Knaak's characters.
• Chekhov's Army: The pridelings you save in one quest chain, see the funny page.
  • A lot of factions were originally mild antagonists or just one faction of many others depending on how you played Classic, later became the main driving forces behind other zones' storylines, or even other expansions.
  • The Drust appear to be this. Despite being the namesake for "Drustvar" in Kul Tiras and only two are actually found (one of which is only an avatar anyway) they appear in Ardenweald, finally giving some more screentime into their mystery.
• Chekhov's Gun: The hammer that Arthas casually threw away in favor of Frostmourne in a blink-and-you-might-miss-it animation at the end of the very first campaign of Warcraft III serves as the core of the ultimate weapon designed to defeat him and Wrath's penultimate melee weapon.
  • A very early Forsaken quest has you gathering ingredients so that Apothecary Putress can continue his research on further weaponizing the Scourge plague. In Wrath of the Lich King, Putress unleashes his improved plague on Horde, Alliance and Scourge alike at Angrathar the Wrath Gate. That's right, that gun lay dormant through almost all of the original game and two expansions before being fired.
  • Xal'atath, Blade of the Black Empire, was the artifact used by Shadow Priests during Legion. Like all of the other artifacts, it was drained of its power at the end of the expansion... only to turn up again during patch 8.1.5 in the hands of the naga, where it describes itself as having been casually thrown away by its previous wielder. And it uses the player to deliver it to N'zoth. Oops.
  • Chekhov's Boomerang: The Scarlet Key could be considered one. Found at the end of the second wing of Scarlet Monastery, its only role seems to be allowing access to the last two wings of the dungeon. Then thirty-odd levels later, it turns out to be necessary for accessing half of Stratholme too.
• Chekhov's Gunman: A lot...
  • Tirion Fordring. Questgiver with a mild storyline in Classic. Come Wrath of the Lich King? one of the main driving forces for good.
  • Eranikus, originally a mild boss, becomes a bigger bad during the Silithus chain.
  • Chromie pops up at various places, tasking the player to help deal with time anomalies.
  • Fandral Staghelm, formerly a Jerkass NPC who orders players to help him with his research, including gathering Morrowgrain for him, turns out to have been responsible for corrupting Teldrassil while working with Xavius under the belief that his son could return from the dead.
  • Lilian Voss makes an appearance as a captured Forsaken in the very first starting zone. About 25 levels later, she reappears in the Scarlet Monastery. Even later, she returns in Scholomance waging a one-woman war, ultimately being overpowered and mind controlled by Darkmaster Gandling before being turned against you. She is defeated and, regaining control of herself, destroys Gandling's bone shield before telling you to let her die alone, but apparently decided to continue living as she can later appear offering quests at your garrison's inn or tavern. She later plays a major role in the Horde War Campaign in Battle for Azeroth.
• Chekhov M.I.A.: Barean Westwind, who first appeared as a statue in Scarlet Monastery, reported as missing in action off the coast of Northrend. He appears in Wrath of the Lich King, the expansion dealing with Northrend. Though he is actually possessed by Mal'Ganis.
• Chekhov's Skill: The player's ability to resurrect foreshadows almost the entirety of Shadowlands.
• Chewing the Scenery: High Priestess Azil's acting could easily devour those boulders she tries to crush you with.
  • Every Hallow's End, the Headless Horseman descends on Azeroth and devours entire set pieces.
  • Kael'thas in general, but especially in Magister's Terrace, makes you wonder if he's going to devour the entire dungeon.
  • Out of the Icecrown Citadel bosses, Lady Deathwhisper gets the "Chewing the Scenery" award for her intro speech alone.
  • The Trial of the Crusader raid gives us JARAXXUS! EREDAR LORD OF THE BURNING LEGION!!! He spends his entire fight shouting his attacks of the top of his lungs.
• Child of Two Worlds: The heir-apparent of Ironforge has the blood of the rulers of the Bronzebeard Clan and their mortal foes the Dark Iron Clan.
• Children Are Innocent: The Gnomes and Goblins on the Speedbarge are normally separated, and when they interact, it's usually to taunt or insult the other; even the bar where they mingle is just a bottle of grog away from a Bar Brawl. The exceptions are Raphael and Juliette, a Gnome boy and Goblin girl who are described as "rugrats", and are found playing on the deck of the barge.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Every race and every faction has multiple traitors in it. Even the ones who are supposed to be neutral have a few members sneaking around cheating people - and by people, we mean you.
• Circling Birdies: Daze effects are usually accompanied by the target having stars around their head, while certain disorient effects are signified by a !, @, # and ?.
• Circus of Fear: The Darkmoon Faire. Doubly so after the introduction of Darkmoon Island, which is Always Night. the place seems like a typical carnival with a lot of fantasy-themed games you can use to buy cool and useful stuff, but once you leave the safety of the lights, a darker side emerges. Vicious beasts prowl the perimeter a Forsaken vendor sells food heavily implied to use unorthodox ingredients, and should your player actually die, you meet other dead spirits who say ominous things when spoken to.
• Citadel City: The cities of Stormwind and Orgrimmar are fortified and surrounded by walls, making it all-but impossible for an enemy - or even an army of them - to get in.
• City Guards: The game has guards in every city and town. These guards mainly exist to give directions to players, but will attack opposing faction players on sight, regardless of what they're doing. They'll also attack hostile NPCs, in the event they wander too close or get led there by an enterprising player. Some of the best unscripted moments in the game's history have involved people kiting outdoor world bosses to a major city and watching them wreak havoc.
• Clamshell Currency: The Winterfin tribe values seashells above all else. So much that their currency is the Winterfin Clam.
• Clean Dub Name: Mechagon was changed in the Spanish dub to "Mecandria", due to the original name being similar to "me cago", which is Spanish for "I shit".
• Cleavage Window: A fair amount of chest armors have these when equipped by a female character. Male characters can also show off their pec cleavage with quite a few chest armors.
• Clock of Power: Zigzagged. Clocks exist, and they are perfectly fine for telling time, but if you ever find an hourglass around, you can be 95% sure that it's got some kind of time-related magic ability or enchantment despite very few people using them to actually measure time. The reason for this is that sand is the way that time-related magic usually manifests, to the point that the Bronze Dragonflight's members don't breathe fire like most dragons — they breathe sand.
• Clothes Make the Superman: The two things that determine how powerful your character is — how much damage they can deal out, how much damage they can absorb, or how much damage they can heal — is their level, and their gear. The difference between a newly-minted max-level character wearing quest reward greens, and a max-level character in top tier epics, is like night and day.
• Clothing Damage: Starting in Mists of Pandaria are attacks that put a debuff on the player which amount to ripping off a piece of your clothing. The first was a Hozen attack called "Gimme Pants!", which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, and unless your character was wearing a robe, the attack would leave the player in their underwear for a few seconds. Warlords of Draenor followed this with Orc raiders and the Pillage ability that would steal random pieces of gear.
• Colorblind Mode: There is a standard colorblind mode in the settings which for example changes money so that it isn't marked by colored coins, but by letters indicating which coin type it is (like "31g 41s 59c"), or marks recipes more likely to give skill points with plus signs. That said, hues can be adjusted for several forms of the disability, including the less talked about ones like achromatomaly. If you want a specific type, just type "/console colorblindshader #" in the chat with # replaced by the mode's number (0-8).
• Colon Cancer: The title for the tie-in novel to the next expansion. World of Warcraft: The Shattering: Prelude to Cataclysm.
  • Also see World of Warcraft: Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: The game is the Trope Codifier that introduced "standard" color coding of Grey (Poor) > White (Common) > Green (Uncommon) > Blue (Rare) > Purple (Epic) > Orange (Legendary). Light blue "Heirloom" items are also present and can be transferred between characters on the same account.
• Color Wash: Different zones have different color washes. For instance, Durotar has a red color wash on top of its red terrain that can sear itself into players' vision after a while. Zones can look quite different without this wash: try looking at Ghostlands while standing in the Zul'Aman subzone.
  • Icecrown has a blue-ish color wash.
  • In Legion, the Highmountain subzone of the Blind Marshlands has a "desaturated" color wash. Dalaran has it even worse, with the main city having a bright, sunshiney-day wash, but the flight deck that houses the flight point is a dark, stormy wash. It was noticeable enough before general flight capability was available, but now that you can just fly past the turret that hid the switch, you can actually watch the changeover take place, making it particularly obvious.
• Colossus Climb: Most of the fighting against the Flame Leviathan battle platform in Ulduar is done with a variety of vehicular weaponry, but the demolishers are capable of launching other players onto its back to destroy its turrets. This is necessary in order to send it grinding to a temporary halt that both resets its continuous acceleration and lets all the other vehicles pound on it for extra damage.
  • The first battle against Deathwing takes place on his back, as players work to break off his armor plates and enable Thrall to shoot him with the Dragon Soul.
  • Raigonn, the final boss of Gate of the Setting Sun in Mists of Pandaria, is a gigantic beetle called a kunchong. After it charges into the walls of the gate, players use cannons to leap onto Raigonn's face and attack its weakened shell.
  • A number of quests have you climb on the back of drakes and other flying monsters, but not always to kill them, sometimes it's their riders you're after.
• Combat Medic:
  • Obviously, every healing class has enough offensive spells, but the most obvious would be Discipline Priest who heals his allies while dealing damage, Restoration Shaman's unconventional builds letting him conserve and regen mana via shocks and lightning bolts, and the Mistweaver Monk can heal people without ever targeting anything but enemies.
  • Talent abilities for classes that can heal especially tend to be useable for both healing and damage in one way or another, but some basic spells like the Discipline Priests Penance work both ways as well.
• Come to Gawk: Poor Vanthir is meant to be subject to this when the insurrection starts in earnest; hoping to scare the remaining loyalists into submission, Elisandre orders him placed in a cell in the Terrance of Order so the city can see him wither in public. (This backfires against her completely; when the player rescues him, he's able to place a dusk lily - the symbol of the resistance - in the cell, giving anyone who attends a much different message.) Following completion of this quest, a World Quest opens where the goal is rescuing Suramar civilians from a similar fate.
• Company Cross References:
  • The weapon named "Wirt's Third Leg".
  • There are Diablo, Tyrael and Zergling battle pets.
  • In the Uldaman dungeon, if you're Alliance there's three Dwarven NPCs named Erik, Baleog and Olaf (they're bosses to the Horde). Since Cataclysm, there's an Alliance questline at the Badlands where the player is helped by them.
  • Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft is advertised with a summonable board in the "Toys" category for player characters. It can be obtained through the missions at the Draenor garrison.
• Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like:
  • The Warlords of Draenor quest 'Hardly Working', you free enslaved Arakkoa Outcasts by replacing them with an illusory copy of themselves. At least one will complain that it looks nothing like them.
  • One goblin you have to rescue in Desolace is pretty rude and demanding to the player until you get back to town.
• Complete-the-Quote Title: There's a quest in the Mt. Hyjal region that's a play on the phrase, "If you're not with us, you're against us", but switches it around a bit. The actual title is, "If You're Not Against Us...", and the point is to convince a demonic satyr to help repel the invading Twilight's Hammer, which he does, though he arranges it so that in the process he can escape the chains imprisoning him there.
• Complexity Addiction: Arthas. There are easier ways of conquering Azeroth. Possibly involving the gigantic army of incredibly powerful undead he already possesses. Turned out it was because his overweening arrogance and pride was deliberately injecting Idiot Ball into the plans to delay things for the good guys.
  • Explained in that he was setting up an entire expansion just to cause our heroes to take a Face–Heel Turn. Doesn't make it any less complex, however.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: When Medivh tries a new strategy in the Kharazan chess event, the game flat-out tells you he's cheating. Of course setting parts of the board on fire, usually where your king is standing, is obvious enough that Medivh is a cheating bastard.
• The Computer Shall Taunt You: On Mythic+ keys of 10 or higher, going over the time limit will have the villain of the current raid tier (N'Zoth in Battle for Azeroth Season 4, Sire Denathrius in Shadowlands Season 1, etc.) criticize your group.
• Condescending Compassion: A short quest chain in Zangarmarsh has a draenei send the adventurer out to gather reagents to take the form of the spirits worshiped by a local tribe of Lost Ones. After gathering everything together, he sends a message saying that the Light has not forgotten them and that the draenei are willing to welcome them back with open arms. The message is worded in a fairly condescending 'We'll save you from yourselves because you can't do it yourself' type manner and the tribe chief is insulted both by the disguise and the message, telling you to get out immediately and that his tribe is not interested.
• Conflict Ball: In Wrath of the Lich King, the smoldering feud between Horde and Alliance is reignited through a combination of treachery and epic idiocy on both sides, and taken to its ultimate extreme in the Icecrown Citadel raid where Horde and Alliance fight each other directly instead of Arthas.
  • Also present in Cataclysm. Cho'gall lampshades it by saying, "Our enemies fight each other across the Highlands. Fools."
  • Legion gets it rolling again thanks to Genn Greymane's burning need for vengeance against Sylvanas for both the death of his son and loss of Gilneas, and for the perceived betrayal when the Horde was forced to retreat on the Broken Shore.
  • The entire plot of the first two patches of Battle for Azeroth revolves around the two factions (though arguably primarily the Horde) tossing around the conflict ball.
• Connect the Deaths: Can be and has been done by gold sellers with player corpses.
• Conflicting Loyalty: A relatively minor example happens in patch 4.1 Rise of the Zandalari. Following the Cataclysm, the previously player-friendly Zandalari trolls have decided that they will rebuild the troll civilization at any costs, to which end they start making alliances with all the various barbaric troll tribes scattered throughout Azeroth, including the Horde-aligned Darkspear trolls, whose leader refuses the offer in a very much awesome manner:
  Zandalari Leader: Vol'jin of the Darkspear. You would turn your back on your own people?
  Vol'jin: Da Horde is my people. If it be war you bring, den I stand against you.
  Zandalari Leader: So be it, Darkspear.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu:
  • Actually introduced as a game mechanic in Wintergrasp. Since this is an outdoor PvP zone where anyone can join the fray usually one side will be outnumbered. The underdog gets a buff called Tenacity which increases their damage, health and pretty much everything else in proportion to how outnumbered they are. Join a highly unbalanced WG fight and you become a mini-raid boss.
  • In Wolfpack Boss battles without a shared health pool, the remaining enemies often become stronger as their comrades die. For example, every time you kill a member of the Assembly of Iron, the survivor(s) gain a new ability.
• Conspicuous Consumption: The achievement called "Conspicuous Consumption" for those who bought a Mighty Caravan Brutasaur during Battle for Azeroth. It is the largest mount in the game, and at 5 million gold is the most expensive item that can be bought. Starting in Shadowlands it is relegated to the black market auction house, where bids can hit the money cap of 10 million gold.
• Conspicuously Selective Perception:
  • Your aggro radius is based on your character's level compared to theirs. At 20 or more levels higher, you can dance naked next to a hostile mob and it won't even notice. It could be explained by that they are simply too afraid to attack a powerful character, if not for the fact that most monsters will blithely ignore nearby combat as long as nothing you do falls within that same aggro radius. Although some monsters will call or run for help, they won't raise a finger if you kill their friends first. It's as if they're victims of a kind of group sociopathy.
  • You can behave in the most incredibly suspicious ways while disguised as one of the Highborne in Suramar City, and no one will bat an eye, not even while you are stabbing messengers in the back right in front of the guards (though considering what a Wretched Hive the city is, full of schemers and backstabbers, this sort of thing is probably just business as usual).
• Conspiracy Redemption: The Alliance hopes for one of these with the Scarlet Crusade, and two quests send players to the Scarlet Monestary to help Joseph the Awakened, a disillusioned Crusader launch a coup to restore the Crusade to its former glory. As you progress through the Monestary, Joseph becomes more and more unhinged, becoming "The Crazed", then "the Insane".
• Consulting a Convicted Killer: In one quest, the player has to visit Tyrus Blackhorn, an imprisoned satyr. He gives advice to stop a powerful fire elemental and uses this opportunity to escape his prison.
• Continuity Cavalcade:
  • Tons of old characters show up for the daily quest "The Protectors of Hyjal," a different one fighting by your side each time you do the quest. They range from minor but memorable quest givers like Mankrik to semi-major characters like Thassarian.
  • Many old characters show up at the Inn building in your garrison, to give quests for various dungeons in Draenor.
  • And again with Class Hall missions in Legion. A lot of quests, especially related to your Class Hall setup and Artifact, will have you revisit earlier areas of the game and meet characters you haven't had anything to do with for years, in both in-game and Real Life time.
• Continuity Nod: Surprisingly considering the game's nature, some characters you've aided in the past will note you when they see you again. Darion Mograine actually has an entirely different speech for death knights when they first meet up with him again in Icecrown.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Ironforge, Blackrock Mountain, and pretty much any other active volcano. The Molten Core and the Firelands crank it up a notch.
• Cool Airship: One for each faction; the Skybreaker for the Alliance, and Orgrim's Hammer for the Horde, each patrolling the skies above Icecrown. Helicarrier or monster zeppelin, take your pick! The Skyfire, similar to the Skybreaker, makes an appearance in the Dragon Soul raid, and takes Alliance players to Pandaria.
  • In Legion, both of these awesome airships are seen again together as they fly into the Broken Isles.
• Cool Bike: The Mekgineer's Chopper and Mechano-Hog in Wrath of the Lich King, which get one-upped by the Champion's Treadblade and Warlord's Deathwheel in Warlords of Draenor; the former has sabers incorporated into the front, while the latter has the front wheel held between two tusks and axes for handlebars.
• Cooldown Manipulation: In addition to cancelling the current casting, all Counter Spell type abilities also place the spell on cooldown for 5 seconds to prevent the target from simply trying to cast it again.
• Cool Versus Awesome: A few instances, but most notable when the Forsaken invade Gilneas in Cataclysm. In a nutshell, it's Zombies vs. Werewolves.
• Copy-and-Paste Environments: Each race/faction uses a common set of building elements throughout their towns, forts, and cities. There are also many identically structured caves throughout the world. This is justified on two counts. First, it's easier to create and debug a limited set of interior models, and know that NPCs aren't going to get stuck behind a rock, than to make dozens and have to test each and every mob and item placement to be certain it works. Second, since it's based on an RTS franchise, there's a thematic consistency to having each Town Hall, Keep, Castle, etc. look the same as every other.
• Cordon Bleugh Chef:
  • Every recipe in Kul Tiran (and Zandalari) cooking has fish oil in it. Including ravenberry tarts and the eye-rollingly named Kul Tiramisu.
  • Several of the foods you can cook in Shadowlands are bizarre combinations such as Pickled Meat Smoothies, Banana Beef Pudding, and Steak a la Mode. Presumably, they're just what denizens of the Shadowlands find delicious.
• Corpse Land: Hellfire Peninsula. The land is shattered and almost devoid of plantlife, what few animals survive are violent, predatory, and often demon-possessed. Flames erupt from hellish chasms, ghosts of slain soldiers roam the ruins of their fortresses and the bones of the fallen litter the road, and there doesn't seem to be any sources of clean water; the only water available is from swamps full of mutated, poisonous slime monsters and demons.
• Corrupt Church: The Scarlet Crusade.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Trade Prince Gallywix, the Bilgewater Cartel faction leader. Even by goblin standards, Gallywix is considered scum by his own followers; a reputation that certainly wasn't helped when he extorted the survivors of a natural disaster, and then sold them into slavery when he got their money.
  • Another goblin example with Siegecrafter Helix Blackfuse, head of the Blackfuse Company and creator of the True Horde's advanced arsenal. His ruthlessness and technical prowess is the reason why Garrosh put him in charge of his army's tech.
• The Corruption: Fel magic, the Sha, the Emerald Nightmare, and the Old Gods' influence can do this.
• Cosmetic Award:
  • Mounts, non-combat pets, character titles, tabards, and most especially the achievement system introduced with Wrath of the Lich King. There are, of course, achievements for acquiring mounts, tabards, and pets, making them a recursive Cosmetic Award. Although it is technically impossible to achieve 100% Completion in the game - Achievements that can be lost for good are actually called Feats of Strength and don't award any points, filling up the Achievements bar can occupy far more in-game time than simply conquering the dungeons and battlegrounds and point-giving ones can be completed fully.
  • Challenge Mode in Mists of Pandaria gave different awards based on how fast you completed each dungeon. Bronze gave a title, silver gave an egg that could be traded for a phoenix mount exclusive to the character who obtained the egg, and gold gave a set of class-specific armor you could transmogrify to your actual armor. Challenge Mode in Warlords of Draenor had cosmetic weapons and a yeti mount.
  • Warlords of Draenor lets you collect armor scraps from Iron Horde enemies, which you can turn in for a set of cosmetic armor for each armor type.
  • Perhaps the shining example of this is a long, difficult questline for warlocks that has the ultimate reward of... turning the warlock's fire spells green.
• Covered in Mud: Rogues have the ability Blind which pretty much consists of throwing dirt in one's face.
  • Lampshaded in the blinding powder's new item description:
    Once favored by rogues as a blinding agent, it was abandoned for more readily available resources... like dirt.
• Cowardice Callout: In "Ravencrest's Legacy", Illidan calls Kur'talos a coward for his unwillingness to sink to low depths like Illidan feels he had to in order to stop the Legion.
• Cowardly Mooks: A trait found in many humanoid enemies is their attempt to escape once you deplete most of their health. This is problematic as those guys can reach other enemy groups and alert them against you.
• Crack Pairing: An in-universe one: Dragon/Spirit Healer.
  Azuregos: I know. I KNOW. We could never be, right? Dragon and Spirit Healer... two different worlds! Not to mention the physiological problems. But you're wrong. We have a deeper connection than that. Anara and I, we're involved.
• Cranium Chase: While fighting the Headless Horseman, he loses his head, both in the Hallowe'en world event and in the actual dungeon fight. Players have to kill the boss' body, then his head, then kill the body all over again to win the fight.
  Headless Horseman's Head: [to his body] Get over here, you idiot!
• Crapsaccharine World:
  • Quel'thalas, homeland of the Blood Elves, is very much this, particularly its capital of Silvermoon. At first glance it's a scenic, calming area, filled with wonderful magic — slightly marred by the massive scar of undead blight through the centre, but beautiful all the same — but exploring in more depth quickly reveals unsettling details such as drunks passed out in the street, an anti-establishment rally quashed by mind control, and a hidden sweatshop under the tailoring trainer's building.
  • The entire continent of Pandaria is this. Sure, it's inhabited by the jolly Panderan, but it has plenty of dangers in the form of the Mogu and the Mantid. The fact that there's a dead Old God underneath the continent that literally feeds on negative emotions doesn't help. Things don't get much better when the Zandalari trolls resurrect the long-dead Mogu leader Lei Shen or when Garrosh Hellscream absorbs the power of the Old God Y'Shaarj.
  • Legion brings us Suramar, a beautiful and tranquil city that has preserved the high culture of the Kaldorei Empire for ten thousand years. Except then you learn that the nightborne elves of Suramar are basically hostages in their own city, being dependent on the Nightwell for survival, and any dissent is punishable by exile (which leads to mana starvation and eventual withering), plus the nobility is decadent and corrupt, the secret police is everywhere, and worst of all, the ruler has allied with the Burning Legion and is sacrificing her own citizens to fuel the demons' war machine.
  • In Shadowlands, we get Bastion. Out of all the realms of the Shadowlands, it is the most brightly lit one, and it consists of beautiful rolling plains and pristine, elegant buildings. Its inhabitants, the kyrian, literally look like Christian angels. However, the price for being a kyrian is high - your memories are taken away and stored in an archive. The kyrian's servile attitude towards their Archon can also get on your nerves.
• Crapsack World: Whooo BOY. Between the bitter, warring races and the legions of demons, titans, and old gods trying to ruin it, Azeroth is not a place you'd want to reside in. Cataclysm takes it further, sundering a good portion of the world, limiting its valuable resources and driving the Horde and Alliance into open war with one another. This is actually enforced by WoW's design, which revolves completely around having a world-destroying evil to face every expansion.
  • A few places in-world try to subvert this. Moonglade is an obvious example. The Cenarion faction of druids enforce sanctuary for Horde and Alliance factions and the Moonglade is kept as much a pristine, sylvan woodlands as possible by their efforts.
  • Might even be a case of Crapsack Universe, since according to characters such as Illidan, Xe'ra, and what Star Augur Etraeus shows us, Azeroth is one of the last inhabited worlds still full of life, only a handful besides it remaining, a few of which were under attack by the Legion already as we saw in Argus. And of these, Azeroth is the only important one left because of the World Soul within it. Every other world, and their once thriving species and civilizations, has been destroyed by the Legion or the Void, or are just frozen barren landscapes where there was never any life in the first place.
• Crazy Enough to Work:
  • The "horribly dangerous" plan to make an offensive against the Legion after Varian's death is to move the entire city of Dalaran using magic.
  • Budd's plan to escape the Neferset in Uldum. Steal a bunch of Neferset armor, then have two people carry a third between them so they look like a tol'vir.
  • Also, any plan concocted by Fargo Flintlocke. When he explains that he will fire you out of a giant cannon and "Doc" Schweitzer points out a cannonball makes more sense, Flintlocke dismisses it as "too obvious."
• Crazy Jealous Guy:
  • Goblin players start out with a boy- or girlfriend as a quest giver, but shortly afterward, they dump you and hook up with each other; two of the following quests will have the player killing both of them. Oh, and if that seems like Disproportionate Retribution, they're also implied to be the ones who sold you out to Gallywix, and are working directly for him when you take them on.
  • Stalvan Mistmantle, toward his student.
• Crazy-Prepared: Engineers can make a TON of weird stuff, some of which is only really useful in certain situations. Run into a ogre swinging an axe? A blast from the Gnomish Shrink Ray will reduce him to pint size and take a chunk out of his strength stat. Jackass mage spamming powerful spells? Turn him into a chicken, you cannot cast with a beak! Some asshole trying to get to a PvP objective? Lay a few Goblin Landmines and nail him while they are trying to figure out what the hell happened. In the middle of a dungeon and your best weapon breaks? Summon your Robot Buddy to fix it right up or another one to pull a new one from the bank. In addition to this though, they get bombs, transporters, and other weird stuff right out of Star Trek. The downside to this is that a lot of the stuff has a chance of backfiring, you might end up shrinking yourself, polymorphing yourself, exploding yourself, or getting teleported around 100 feet off the ground. Also, the better stuff, in addition to the backfire, is usually only worth one go before it breaks, or has a huge cooldown period. So use your toys wisely. And guess what race plays with engineering the most?
• Crazy Survivalist: The Scarlet Crusade is an entire faction of this. They managed to survive and organize themselves to fight the Scourge, but are so paranoid that they attack on sight pretty much anybody who isn't them. Demon corruption probably didn't help.
• Creepy Child:
  • In a house near Goldshire, where a skinning and leatherworking trainer are on the first floor, there are 6 kids upstairs who stand in a pentagram formation and don't talk, and creepy music plays while you're in the room. The kids every morning leave and walk in that same formation then after a while stop and point in five directions. Then will go back home which upon reaching their original spot a creepy sound effect will play. Blizzards' Customer Service Representatives stated it was an Easter Egg referring to the then-upcoming Diablo III.
  • Abby Lewis in Battle for Azeroth. Pretty much everything about Drustvar is creepy, but the young girl in the middle of the ghost town asking you to find all of her "guests" for her "tea party" takes the cake.
  • In the horrific vision of Stormwind, the player can find orphans standing over the corpse of their matron in a pentagram shape like the above-mentioned Goldshire children, playing hackeysack with the matron's skull and speaking in creepy rhymes.
• Crime of Self-Defense
  • When the Alliance is invading the Southern Barrens during the Cataclysm, the Horde kills their commander and are met with outrage. Later, the dwarves call call the tauren animals for attacking their digsite, which which just happens to be where those tauren were living until the dwarves invaded. When the commander's son is killed when the Horde destroys the Bael Modan fortress, the commander is furious at the Horde for daring to defend their land.
  • The destruction of Theramore is often considered an atrocity because Jaina was rather friendly towards the Horde, but she was actively participating in the war against the Horde by allowing soldiers to depart through the city and sending siege engines and supplies through to the Barrens, which is unmistakably Horde territory. While the way the city was destroyed was not exactly the best^note The bomb used to wipe it out was far more powerful than expected and things could have gotten much worse if not for Rhonin, plus a certain level of civilian casualties, Theramore was a legitimate military target and hostile foreign power that had received a warning ahead of time that it needed to evacuate the citizens.
  • Of course, in the same general area, the Horde is trying to wipe out the indigenous races such as the Quilboar for daring to get in the way of Horde expansion, never mind the fact that they have lived there for thousands of years and would really like to keep their land, thank you very much.
• Critical Hit Class: It's possible to reach absurd levels of critical hit chance through proper gearing, especially later in expansions when the gear improves but your level is not increasing to balance out the stat gains. Additionally, some classes have talents to get additional bonuses from critical hits or the ability to get a guaranteed critical hit every now and then.
• Crosshair Aware: Many boss attacks and some mobs' are telegraphed by blindingly obvious graphical displays on the ground where they are about to land/go off. Failing to notice these and move out of the way often marks the player as Too Dumb to Live. Fortunately the most obvious attacks are generally happy to smash anyone who sticks around, so it handles itself. Other attacks, however, must be absorbed by a player, hopefully the group's tank.
  • As far as mobs go, they won't notice being targeted by Hunters Mark, which causes a giant arrow to appear above them, but they will notice other debuffs which are far less visually obvious...
• Cruel Mercy:
  • Sven Yorgen blames Jitters for bringing the worgen and the Dark Riders to Duskwood, which leads to Sven's family's death, and him becoming a worgen; Sven uses this to explain not killing Jitters when he gets his claws on him.
  • Gelbin Mekkatorque ultimately does this to Sicco Thermaplugg, after he gets cut in half and survives.
• Cthulhumanoid: The faceless ones, minions of the Cthulhu-inspired Old Gods.
  • The Tier 13 Warlock helm is a hood with tentacles where the face should be.
  • The k'thir in Battle for Azeroth, who resemble Piscodemons/Mind Flayers from Dungeons & Dragons.
• Cultural Posturing: Are you an elf? Then this is your base state when dealing with all the other flavors of elf. Night elves look down on high elves and blood elves for their use of magic. High elves look down on blood elves for their turning to fel magic out of desperation and their alliance with the Horde, and the night elves for living in the forests like barbarians. Blood elves agree with the high elves about the night elves, but hate the high elves for not giving in to, essentially, peer pressure and sucking down demonic essence to survive and for "abandoning" Silvermoon and their people. The void elves hate the blood elves for exiling them when all they wanted to do was protect Silvermoon... with incredibly dangerous, corruptive Void magic that could destroy the Sunwell again, which was why they were exiled, and while they've joined the Alliance, the high and night elves don't seem to be that enthused about the void elves, either. And if you're one of the nightborne, you especially look down on the others because of how far all the others have fallen from the "empire that spanned the world", despite being A) one city and the only remnants of said empire, and B) allied with the same demons that destroyed that empire and caused the sundering of the world ten thousand years ago... though they've learned some humility since and joined up with the Horde.
• Culture Chop Suey: Most races are a hodgepodge of many different bits and pieces from real-world cultures. For instance, night elf architecture is based in equal parts on Korean, Japanese, Nordic, and Greco-Roman styles. The draenei speak with an Eastern-European accent and are inspired in equal parts by the Rom, Jews, and some sort of South-Asian cultures, but use a lot of Greek sounds in their names. Goblins are infamous for both their gold smarts and the pervasion of the Mafia in their culture, and most recently in Cataclysm, conspicuous consumption and a thick accent.
  • Pandaria in general is one for Chinese culture, complete with Chinese-style dragons and a Great Wall of China equivalent.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Any content that is a full expansion behind you becomes this. Vanilla!Ragnaros, who once gave 40 people at once an incredibly hard time, can now be soloed by pretty much any class, in any spec.
  • One of the many criticisms of Warlords of Draenor by players was a general impression of impotence on the part of the villains. Anywhere the player goes, the Iron Horde's plans crumble without much difficulty. 6.2, the very first story patch after the expansion's release, had the Iron Horde on its last legs and willing to make a Deal with the Devil to try and stall its inevitable defeat. This turned out to be the only story patch of the expansion, setting a land speed record for a Warcraft villain getting smacked down.
  • In response to the above criticism of Draenor, it is the players who get dealt this in the beginning of Legion, getting their butts kicked, and losing two of their greatest leaders while accomplishing nothing.
  • At the end of the Stormheim questline, Genn ambushes Sylvanas from above, ready to tear her to pieces... only for her to easily dodge his attacks, slip back and put a cursed arrow in his shoulder, meaning he got beaten badly despite the surprise attack and fighting with every advantage. Unfortunately for Sylvanas, it's a hollow victory as he at least managed to interrupt her plans and escape safely.
  • Similarly, Sylvanas also easily handles Saurfang with simple daggers during their duel at the climax of the War Campaign in Battle for Azeroth. After he eventually manages to deal a small injury and pissing her off with a taunt, she proceeds to simply one-shot him with bizarre magic no one has ever seen before.
• Cursed Item:
  • Occasionally, killing enemies in Nazjatar will yield an item that will grant a worsening random debuff until it's sold to a specific vendor.
  • Corrupted gear, introduced in patch 8.3 as a temporary replacement for Warforging and Titanforging, grants a percentage-based stat increase or a powerful on-use effect for each piece at the cost of also giving the wearer "corruption" that causes worsening detrimental effects. The effects of corruption can be suppressed with a specific legendary-quality cloak, or the item can be cleansed to remove both the positive and negative affixes entirely. This feature has been removed as of Shadowlands.
  • A vignette mob in Revendreth drops a chest containing a Tantalizingly Large Golden Plum. Having it in your bags gives a debuff that prevents you from gaining benefits from eating or drinking, but unlike the Nazjatar items, you can sell it to any vendor for a handful of gold.
• Cursed with Awesome: Both the Forsaken and the worgen. In Cataclysm, the Southshore refugees even happily take the worgen curse as a more favorable alternative than becoming a Forsaken.
• Cute Monster Girl:
  • Most female troll and orc faces are mean-looking and ugly by human standards; however, each race has the option of a deadpan and reasonably attractive face. Predictably, nearly all female orcs and trolls have those faces.
  • Female Forsaken qualify for this, too. While there are a couple of faces that are frankly hideous, even the faces where the jaws had to be replaced are reasonably attractive.
  • Thanks to the Barbershop, it is now possible to create attractive orcs and trolls without resorting to the cutefase.
  • Fanart inevitably renders tauren females somewhere between "adorably cute" and "instantly converts viewers to furries".
  • Draenei ladies, however, are firmly in this category.
  • Female worgen ended up with eyeshadow and what appears to be a cat smile from the front.
  • Female goblins, and genuinely sassy to boot.
• Cutscene Incompetence: Every now and then you'll be unable to stop a villain from getting away with something even if you're strong enough to do it, either because your character is incapacitated in some way or because they aren't flagged as attackable. This is particularly evident in multiple Cataclysm cutscenes in Uldum and Vashj'ir that require that you be captured or incapacitated regardless of the power difference between you and your enemies.
  • Justified in that the developers have stated that "level" is a gameplay mechanic, not a true objective measure of ability, which is why top level characters can go back and curb stomp the Molten Core version of Ragnaros solo, when he is supposed to be only a couple of steps below a god.
• Cyanide Pill: Overlapping with Press X to Die, in "The Stormwind Extraction", Nathanos gives you a potion that serves this function in the event that you have no other option. More than likely, you won't be needing it.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: The central focus of Mechagon's storyline. King Mechagon has made himself more machine than gnome and has forcibly done the same to his citizens, necessitating the formation of La Résistance to stop him from exterminating all organic life on the planet.
• Cyborg: The mechagnomes of Mechagon all have mechanical limbs and may additionally have bionics for their eyes, ears, and jaws.
• Cycle of Revenge: In Mists of Pandaria, Taran Zhu refers to the Horde/Alliance war as one of these. He manages to get Jaina and Lor'themar to stop fighting, but he knows that it'll probably not last.
  Taran Zhu: Every reprisal is itself an act of aggression, and every act of aggression triggers immediate reprisal.
  Taran Zhu: It ends TODAY. Here. The cycle ends when you, Regent Lord, and you, Lady Proudmoore, turn from one another. And walk. Away.

D

• Damage-Increasing Debuff:
  • Happens quite a few times in some encounters. If it applies to the party in general, it's either an avoidable mechanic, something you will have to reset at times, or a soft enrage. If it's applied to the boss, you'll typically have to use it well in order to win. If it's applied to the tank, it typically necessitates a tank swap.
  • Also available to players, most commonly as a slight increase in spell damage taken or armor reduction. Some classes also get unique debuffs that only increases damage taken from their own abilities.
  • Back in Vanilla, there was often a warrior, paladin or shaman in raids to use the two-handed axe Nightfall against the bosses. The reason? Its debuff that increases spell damage on the target by 15% also worked on bosses, and spellcasters evidently loved it.
• Damage Over Time: The warlock class is primarily built around skills that cause damage over time, especially if combined with the Affliction talent tree.
  • Over time, this has become slightly less important to warlocks as their formerly numerous damage over time spells were condensed into only a few, and become more important to other classes, such as Fire Mages, Assassination Rogues, and Feral Druids.
• Damager, Healer, Tank: The three core roles are built around this, and World of Warcraft probably helped popularize it.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The Druid's Travel Form, which transforms the user into the equivalent of a mount, can be quite a notable offender once you go on to play as another class. You'll suddenly start wondering why your character does not get into their mount (Travel Form is instant cast, whereas casting a mount requires the user to stand still), or why they dismount when you try to loot something (Druids don't lose their Travel Form to interact with objects, unlike everyone else), among other minor inconveniences.
• Damsel in Distress: Parodied by Maximillian of Northshire, a Don Quixote expy, as he believes all women are damsels in need of rescue. He helps a woman, (actually MALE blood elf) retrieve her purse from a lake, rescues a woman trapped on a cliff — by tossing her off of it and rescues another woman from her own pet parrot.
• Dance Battler: Giving a follower the Supreme Manual of Dance from the garrison mission "The Dance Studio" will replace one of their traits with an ability like this that gives them a slightly increased success rate against missions with Danger Zones.
• Dark Action Girl: So far, almost all Dark Rangers in-game are Forsaken elven females, who like Sylvanas fit this bill quite well. Also, Darkrider Arly. Complete with cute pink pigtails.
• Darker and Edgier:
  • Cataclysm. The constant threat of a Fourth War grips the Alliance and Horde and those who had vouched for peace are either ignored entirely or branded traitor And the two factions chose the worst possible time to be at each other's throats: much of Azeroth is in ruins due to Deathwing's return, the naga queen Azshara has finally begun to make her move, Ragnaros and Nefarian have returned stronger than ever, and the Twilight's Hammer is gaining followers from both factions and is ready to bring about the world's end.
  • Mists of Pandaria plays with this trope in two respects. On the surface, you bring war and a huge Sha outbreak to the peaceful, beautiful continent that you washed up on. But underneath the surface, Pandaria is a false utopia that was starting to buckle under the weight of the Sha^note especially after the Sha of Fear awakened even before you showed up.
  • Legion ranks as one of the darkest entries. It turns out that Gul'dan had survived the last event in Draenor, and traveled back in time to orchestrate the third invasion of the Legion, the leaders of the Alliance and Horde are Killed Off for Real during the invasion, Demon Hunters are introduced in order to stop the invasion, and the spread of the Emerald Nightmare threatens the mortal world.
  • Battle For Azeroth (initially) lacks the same world-ending scale as other expansions. But the Fourth War has finally started and it's absolutely vicious. The prelude to the expansion starts with Sylvanas burning down Teldrassil and killing countless innocents, and the expansion itself doesn't let up.
• Darkest Hour:
  • Cataclysm chronicles one of the times Azeroth was on the knife's edge of complete annihilation. Tensions between the Horde and Alliance have reached an all-time high, leadership in both factions is shifting rapidly, Queen Azshara has returned after years of lying low, both the black dragonflight and the naga have become more powerful than ever, and much of the world has been torn to shreds just from Deathwing's return.
  • Same deal with Legion. Alternate Gul'dan has opened a gateway to the Burning Legion's front door and demons are pouring into Azeroth; several major lore characters are either dead, missing, or corrupted; the Emerald Dream has fallen to corruption again; and everything is almost literally going to hell.
• Dark Is Evil:
  • There are five dragonflights, guess which one is (historically) evil.
  • Likewise, guess which one of the three dwarf clans is hostile, at least until Cataclysm.
  • The Grimtotem tauren tribe, who have black fur and are hostile to almost everyone.
  • The Forsworn kyrian have purple skin and wear black and silver clothes, contrasting the blue, white, and gold of the main body of kyrian.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Most notably the Forsaken; the Horde in general, to some degree; the Alliance's Void Elves; player-controlled warlocks, Shadow priests, death knights, and demon hunters.
  • Nether dragons, despite being mutated descendants of evil black dragons, are all but evil. In fact, the players can choose to aid them, as they're enslaved by fel orcs.
  • The death knights are all but Scourge that are having a dispute with upper management. They still fight exclusively through necrotic magic and vampirism, kept all the Scourge decorations, practice necromancy and one of the Ebon Blade detachments in Icecrown is operating in a brutal chaotic evil fashion against living humans they have a grudge against. At one point, that commander arranges to destroy the SOUL of an enemy for no real reason other than hatred. Black-and-Gray Morality and Pay Evil unto Evil would be putting it lightly.
  • As Word of God has stated, there are no truly evil races available as major playable factions.
  • Although warlocks and mages technically use Black Magic, they're quite capable of doing good as well.
  • Wrathion the Dragon Prince. He hails from the Black Dragonflight who hasn't had the best track record with old god corruption, but he opposes his Omnicidal Maniac father Deathwing. He makes it very clear he is his own dragon and will not be held accountable for Deathwing's actions. Upon N'Zoth's defeat he openly states his intention to honor the Black Dragonflight's ancient charge of the defense of Azeroth against any threats the world might face.
  • The Arakkoa Outcasts in Warlords of Draenor make heavy use of dark shadow magicks. However, they do this largely as a matter of survival, to help hide them from the flighted arakkoa who would see them exterminated. The questline involving the story of Terokk implies that the curse actually attunes them to the dark magicks.
• The Darkness Before Death: Arthas' last words in Wrath of the Lich King were "I see only darkness before me." As seen in Shadowlands, that darkness was his soul being thrown into The Maw.
• Darkness Equals Death: Inverted in Battle for Azeroth during the chapter "At the Bottom of the Sea" of the Horde's war campaign: you're sent to retrieve the body of a Kul Tiran marshal at the bottom of the sea and you're given a diving helmet with a headlamp to provide visibility, but keeping the headlamp on for too long will attract sharks.
• The Dark Side: Death knights and warlocks use this; see Black Magic. Depending on how strictly you follow the lore, mages also partake of it, since arcane magic is both addictive and what attracted the Burning Legion to Azeroth in the first place. In fact, the overuse of arcane magic by mortals really pissed off a dragon aspect so much that he started a war.
• Dead All Along: In the Mage Class Hall is a librarian named Old Fillmaff who died during the Scourge invasion in Warcraft III. One day, he just showed up out of nowhere and started arranging the bookshelves as if nothing had happened. A nearby blood elf comments he probably has no idea he's dead.
• Dead Character Walking: You can explore as a ghost when dead, and before you respawn. Before this bug was fixed, you could actually "travel by suicide", as in, die and walk while dead to the Spirit Healer nearest where you wanted to be. Now, you can only respawn at the spirit healer nearest to where you died, or on the site of your corpse, with a few exceptions. Also... as one certain video demonstrates, there was a bug in which revived characters would keep using the dead model, leading to apparent corpses gliding on the ground.
• Deader than Dead:
  • In the updated Scarlet Monastery, it is revealed that High Inquisitor Sally Whitemane is so powerful that she can resurrect herself, as opposed to using a spirit healer like a certain blue dragon. A short quest chain has players finding the Blades of the Anointed, and using them to kill Whitemane once and for all.
    • Come Legion, though, death knights make a point of averting this for Whitemane.
  • The mana bomb that destroyed Theramore is described by the dragons as being so destructive, it destroyed every Theramore in the past, future, and all alternate timelines. Somehow, though, it is possible for players to visit that place even after they witness its destruction (though this is likely just a game mechanic so that you can go and complete quests).
• Dead Guy Junior: Anduin Llane Wrynn is named after both the Alliance badass Anduin Lothar, and his grandfather Llane Wrynn.
  • And his dad too, who is named after his grandmother Queen Varia Wrynn.
• Dead Guy on Display: When players killed Nefarian or Onyxia, they could loot their heads and bring them back to Stormwind or Orgrimmar where they were put on display. Due to Onyxia being canonically killed by King Varian, bringing her head back now yields confusion from the quest giver.
  • For more dragons, several black dragons were killed and their bodies left impaled on the scenery in the Blade's Edge Mountains.
  • In a vision using the hourglass in the Siege of Orgrimmar, players can see the fate of Stormwind after Garrosh sacks it; with the bodies of Alliance and Horde leaders strung up on the fortress walls around the ruined harbor.
    • Orgrimmar itself has quite a few of them itself during the raid... especially the Warlock trainers.
• The Dead Have Eyes: And they glow!
• Dead Man Writing: Sho is a Pandaren tasked with monitoring the Hozen on Skyrange, and has a letter prepared just in case the Hozen catch her. The letter starts out as normal, but then suggests she's gone to town to get some beer and you should go check. It then tells you to contact her family if it turns out she's actually dead.
  • Alliance players who finish the Shadowmoon Valley storyline receive a crystal that contains a farewell message from Prophet Velen.
• Deadpan Snarker: The loading screen tips will occasionally tell you "don't stand in the fire." Not that this stops some players.
  • Achievement added for getting killed by Deathwing when he randomly attacks the zone you're in: "Stood in the Fire."
  • Achievement added for killing a certain boss without taking damage from a rotating fire wall: "Ready for Raiding." It's not accurate - this is one boss, less than a fourth of the way through one instance - but the achievement has that name simply because getting it requires not standing still when fire is coming at you, a very rare skill.
    • The achievement returns for the Molten Front. This time, you must defeat five randomly appearing bosses without getting hit, and their attacks are somewhat more difficult to avoid, from a trail of fire that chases you, to a channeled flame attack that the boss uses while rotating to a thrown spear that shoots out more fire upon impact.
    • It returns again for Mists of Pandaria, in which you must stay in two obstacles courses for 90 seconds without taking damage. In one, you have to avoid circling blades and Pandaren who will try to knock you into them, and in another, you must avoid the flames.
  • Moodle the Gorloc in Sholazar Basin is also one, in addition to being the only one of his kind who has learned enough to avoid You No Take Candle.
  • Hell, the player characters themselves can be this sometimes, judging by the Dialogue Tree options you can get. Case in point: if you quest in Mount Hyjal, you meet Kristoff Manheim who is hanging from a meathook in the back of an ogre cave.
    Kristoff: Hello, (class). I imagine you have a lot of questions.
    Suffice it to say that Royce Duskwhisper sent me into the middle of an ogre cave for some "Eye of Twilight" jib-job, and it hasn't gone well.
    If I ever get my hands on that lanky, heartless, mealy-mouthed little night elf...
    [Kristoff wriggles helplessly as he dangles in the air, his face reddening]
    Player (dialogue option): So how is your research into the Eye coming along?
  • In Legion, the undead warlock Tehd Shoemaker is quite snarky while observing the shoddy workmanship of the demon portals at Felblaze Ingress.
    Bah! That portal foundation is all wrong. It is fully exposed to tampering. Whoever made this should feel bad about themselves.
    What is this mumbling trash? They call THIS a ritual? I could rain fire down on all of these eredar and I don't think it could make this ritual any worse than it already is.
    Why? Why would demons, of all things, be this bad at summoning their own kind?
    This physically hurts me and I haven't felt real pain in decades.
  • Even the tooltips in places start heading here. During an event in Nazjatar, players are tasked with preventing naga from summoning a creature. On killing them all, Azshara herself shows up in a projection to summon it anyway, and her spell is called Empowered Summoning:
    Empowered Summoning (8 sec cast): Summons a creature from the depths yourself, since your incompetent minions failed you again.
• Deadly Dust Storm: When weather was added, desert regions were given sandstorms, which look impressive but are really just cosmetic features that don't actually do anything. In Uldum, however, the town of Orsis is being buried by sandstorms called up by the djinn Siamat.
• Deadly Euphemism: The quest "Investigation at Mak'rana" requires players to "release" 4 Queen's Reprisal sailors. For Horde players, this means releasing them from captivity by the gilblins; for Alliance players, this means releasing them from this mortal coil. It's possible for a Horde and Alliance player to do both to the same NPC.
• Deal with the Grim Reaper: In the Zandalar storyline, following Rezan being killed by Zul, Rastakhan makes a deal with Bwonsamdi for the latter to become his new loa. When Bwonsamdi isn't content with simply his allegiance, Rastakhan indebts his entire future bloodline as well. Horde players strike a deal with Bwonsamdi during the Nazmir storyline as well.
  • Then averted, as during Talanji's coronation afterward, she outright rejects Bwonsamdi's deal.
• Death as Game Mechanic: Several quests can only be accessed while the player is dead because the NPCs that start the quests are only visible to ghosts/wisps.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist:
  • For one, players can simply run back to their body as a ghost when they die, or talk to a Spirit Healer to be resurrected if their corpse is inaccessible, and all in-game NPCs respawn after a set amount of time. For another, a number of bosses tend to come back. For Kael'thas, dying was merely a setback.
  • And in a true example of Lampshade Hanging, in Cataclysm, when the minor quest boss Avalanchion dies, his last words are "No ... not again."
  • Another one by Gamon in the Siege of Ogrimmar, hinting back all the way to the beginning of the game when he was one of the biggest Butt-Monkey NPCs.
  • On Mardum, the Demon Hunter can choose to sacrifice themself for a ritual, which will just result in them needing to run back to their corpse. Illidan acknowledges that the player's soul is immortal like his.
  • Death just flings your spirit to the nearest spirit healer. One could technically apply the same logic to the continually respawning NPCs; maybe they just run back from the graveyard. This gets a special Lampshade Hanging by a villainous NPC who writes about being constantly killed and resurrected in his diary. Also played with by Azuregos. He's not quite sane after being killed so many times by players, and after deciding to stay dead to avoid being killed again, has fallen in love with a spirit healer.
• Death of a Child:
  • Amidst all the Money Spiders and Eldritch Abomination Pinata Enemies, there's at least one storyline where one questgiver is the ghost of a little girl who doesn't understand that she's dead and her hometown is in ruins. You wind up helping her find her doll, among other things, because she's lonely.
  • The segment of Uuna's story where she is kidnapped by the void in Legion. A young girl killed by demons long ago, you free her ghost and gradually help her find peace, only for void tendrils to suddenly appear and drag her away. Then comes a desperate search for her ending in the "Dark Place", a pitch black forest filled with monsters intent on devouring Uuna's soul. You can't hurt them, at best you can only slow them down as more and more converge on the crying ghost of a child.
• Decapitated Army
  • Averted with the Lich King; his death would result in the Scourge rampaging throughout Azeroth, so after Arthas dies, Bolvar takes his place.
  • Knowing that this trope will be averted is a large part of the reason why Varian decides not to destroy the Horde after Garrosh's defeat; he knows that even if all the leaders are dealt with right then and there, there would be months of bloody fighting against the remnants of the Horde. Wrathion, while furious with Varian for this decision, concedes this point, but sees it as an acceptable price.
• Decapitation Presentation:
  • In several quests where you kill an NPC, the quest giver wants you to bring them the head as proof.
  • When brought to Stormwind or Orgrimmar, the heads of Onyxia and Nefarian are strung up outside as trophies; Deathwing was none too pleased about that.
  • In Booty Bay, one of the Bloodsail Buccaneers wants you to kill Fleet Master Seahorn and bring him his head; Seahorn believes that the pirate wouldn't know one tauren from another, and has you bringing back the head of a regular cow with a pirate hat on it.
  • Subverted in an Alliance quest in the Twilight Highlands. An SI:7 agent wants you to kill two Ogre-Magi, so you kill them and bring the four heads to him as proof; he finds your trophies a little gruesome, and says he would've taken your word for it.
  • invoked The achievement for killing the Headless Horseman is called "Bring Me the Head Of...Oh Wait".
• Deconstruction: Wrath of the Lich King can be arguably seen as one for the entire concept of redemption, especially through death and how it may not work in the real world by showing that often people seek for the evil that wronged them to be brought to justice instead of redeemed. In one of the quest chains the players and Tirion finds a heart that may have belonged to Arthas and kept his humanity. When Arthas taunts them about redeeming him, Tirion rejects redeeming him and destroys the heart, stating that only the Lich King remains—and that is before we learn in patch 3.3 that as it turns out, the good half of Arthas was the only thing holding the Scourge back from destroying Azeroth—thus to what extent was there really nothing left or to what extent was Tirion enraged by how much Arthas started the chain of events that screwed over his life and decided to kill him instead because of that, is debatable. At the end as we kill the Lich King the good Arthas takes back his body long enough to have his humanity restored before his death, and the subsequent quests on heroic difficulty gives the impression that the people once close to him have forgiven him—it turns out, in the Sylvanas short story, that doesn't seem to have sent Arthas to a good afterlife...
  • Made more striking by the fact that if it were some other media, Arthas could have been written as redeemable Darth Vader Expy given the similarities.
• Decon-Recon Switch: Mists of Pandaria initially starts as one for the game itself - Player characters entering Pandaria had fought off all sorts of demonic corruption and saved the world while keeping at war with each other. However, the Alliance and Horde's inability to put aside their conflict results in an idyllic continent becoming corrupted... by the players. Pandaria risks being overrun by the rising threat of the Sha because of the two factions' war... but the player characters' experience with strife and a changing world, in contrast to the idyllic but stagnant Pandarians, ultimately makes them well-equipped to help end the Sha threat once and for all.
• Defeat Means Friendship: Many of the garrison followers are earned by proving yourself worthy of their aid, for some that means beating the crap out of them. Blook and Phylarch the Evergreen are both gotten this way, and two parts of the quest chain to recruit Garona Halforcen are beating her, then beating her Enemy Without.
• Defector from Decadence: Several of the playable races are small sects of races that are otherwise evil.
  • Trolls: While the playable Darkspear trolls are members of the Horde, most trolls are savage and grouped into tribes that attack other trolls as much as other races.
  • Forsaken: The playable undead are rebels from the Scourge.
  • Draenei: The remnants of the Eredar who fled when Sargeras corrupted the rest of their race.
  • Blood Elves: The blood elves of Silvermoon rebelled against Kael'thas when they found out what his real intentions were.
  • Worgen: The people of Gilneas found a way to partially restore the humanity to some of the werewolves.
  • On a more individual level, you can see a defector from the Twilight Hammer cult in Silithus, who is hiding from the cultists trying to kill him for leaving.
  • Death Knights are an entire class of these, again to the Scourge.
• Deliberately Monochrome: Most Sha are completely black and white, while some of the more powerful Sha are black and some light color instead of white. The Sha of Fear, the first one that's a raid boss, is one of the only two that isn't monochrome, but even then it's mostly dark purple with some dabs of light purple and red. The Sha of Pride, meanwhile, is azure and cyan overlapping with Bright Is Not Good.
• Demon Head: The Warlock spell Shadowflame summons a literal demon head to blast enemies at close range. Mages have a similar spell, except with a dragon head.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • The high elf race, who were originally one of the primary Alliance races in Warcraft II and III, have been largely replaced by night elves and void elves within the Alliance and reduced to serving as generic extras outside of a few mid-expansion storylines (Argent Tournament, Zul'Aman, Isle of Thunder, Suramar), almost always showing up to act as a foil to the blood elves. By Battle for Azeroth, they only show up as supporting NPCs in the Stromgarde warfront and the portal room in Stormwind, and in Shadowlands, their defining visual traits (blue eyes, human-like skin, and light hair) were rolled into customizations for blood and void elves.
  • Exarch Akama, formerly Akama the Broken, who played a large part into Illidan's rise to power in Outland, and his eventual downfall. Here since both the broken draenei don't exist, and the draenei still have other competent leaders, his role is reduced to that of a few quests, including one where he gets his trademark scythes.
  • Vindicator Nobundo, formerly Farseer Nobundo, went from the first draenei to ever learn how to communicate with the elements, and introduced shamanism into their culture, into another paladin-like soldier that protects the draenei from the demons of the Burning Legion. At least until he appears in Nagrand as a speaker for the elemental furies, signaling that he may end up repeating his role from the original timeline. He makes a comment that speaking with the furies at the Throne of the Elements somehow seems familiar even though he's sure he's never been there before, indicating some sort of unconscious awareness of his main universe self.
  • Prophet Velen, formerly, the leader of the draenei playable faction. His screentime has always been limited, but the fact that his alternate universe counterpart pulls a Heroic Sacrifice near the climax of the Shadowmoon storyline qualifies him for this trope.
  • Orgrim Doomhammer, former leader of the Horde during Warcraft II, after usurping command from Blackhand. It is sort of a running theme for Blizzard to retcon his character into being considerably less badass than he was portrayed in Warcraft II, culminating here with being killed by Blackhand in a egregiously easy manner, to show how dangerous he is, during the Talador storyline. It is worth noting, however, that the main reasons for him usurping command, Gul'dan manipulating the Horde by demonic corruption and Blackhand assassinating Durotan and Draka, don't exist in this timeline as well.
  • Teron'gor, formerly Teron Gorefiend, goes from the first death knight ever created who cheated death many times, manipulated the Player Character into resurrecting him, and ultimately became a raid boss in the Black Temple, to a meager warlock and final boss of the Auchindoun dungeon, who also wanted to become The Starscream to Gul'dan by stealing the power of the spirits buried at Auchindoun for his own gain. However, he returns as a boss in Hellfire Citadel, having gorged on souls to the point he's become a bloated twisted monstrosity who can rip out and devour the players' souls during the fight.
  • Ner'zhul went from being one half of the friggin' Lich King to last boss of a dungeon and main villain of the Alliance storyline in Shadowmoon Valley. His sympathetic traits compared to the other warlords aren't properly explored either.
  • The Shadow Council, unlike their leaders, still hasn't got time to become powerful enough to be a threat on their own right, and many bases, armies, and so forth which they had in BC, simply don't exist here, and they are forced basically to play Mooks to the Burning Legion Elite Mooks.
  • The Burning Legion itself, despite that their presence in the original Outland would already be scarce enough to put in question their status as Greater Scope Villains, in Draenor they are even more scarce appearing only in the failed assault on Auchindoun and trying to capture and hold Shattrath, formerly Burning Crusade's Hub City, to varying degrees of success. They invade in a big way in Patch 6.2, taking control of Hellfire Citadel for the final raid of Warlords, with Archimonde himself as the final boss.
  • Related to the previous entry, we have Archimonde, Generic Doomsday Villain extraordinaire. You would believe it wasn't possible for Blizzard to make him more generic, but... he went from appearing in about the half mark of the story in Warcraft III, being built up as a ultra dangerous villain single-mindedly devoted to the Burning Legion mission, and with the power to achieve it, and who gets killed in the climax of the game, to appearing at the eleventh hour with basically no foreshadowing whatsoever to take over the role of final boss in the last raid of Warlords of Draenor, and like last time to provide someone whose threat is high enough to force the more developed playable factions to ally with each other to fight him: in Warcraft III, the Alliance, the Horde and the Night Elves and in Warlord of Draenor, the Draenei, the Frostwolf Clan and Grommash Hellscream. Speaking about that last one...
  • Grommash Hellscream, previously a major character in Warcraft III, whose entire character arc consisted of an exploration of the savagery of the orcs and how it is used by the Burning Legion to drive them into evil, and who ultimately achieved redemption for himself and the orcs by killing the pit lord Mannoroth and getting killed in the subsequent explosion. In Warlords of Draenor he was being built up as the main villain, being the warchief of the main antagonist organization, the Iron Horde. But most of the in-story villainous actions end up being done by his subordinates, Garrosh, Azuka Bladefury and Blackhand. Eventually as the story progresses and the aforementioned subordinates get killed, he gradually loses control of the Iron Horde, and ultimately his mantle of warchief gets usurped by the very much irredeemable villain Gul'dan, and he's locked up to be tortured by one of the Legion commanders, and after the players rescue him, he eventually helps them in the fight against Archimonde, where he teams up with his former enemies Yrel and Durotan, who don't even question whether they can trust him, despite having being fighting basically a Guilt-Free Extermination War with him not that long ago.
• Den of Iniquity:
  • The Den of Mortal Delights in the Black Temple raid instance has parks, fluffy pillows, fountains, hookahs, silk curtains, nubile dancing blood elves, succubi and other female demons in stark contrast to the rest of the temple.
  • The first boss fight in Magister's Terrace takes place in the blood elf equivalent of an opium den.
  • Sunwell Plateau has a zone called the Den of Iniquity, but it's empty and wrecked.
• Department of Redundancy Department
  • Female humans' flirt voicelines includes "My turn offs are rude people, mean people and people who aren't nice."
  • "Undead Death Knight." This is all sorts of dead. Add "Unholy" for extra Captain Obvious. To make it even more fun, before Legion you could've had your undead death knight take the "Lichborne" talent, which temporarily transformed you into...an undead.
  • Worgen Druids, for all your recursive shapeshifting needs. For ultimate absurdity, try a Worgen hunter with a wolf pet, wearing wolf's head shoulderpads and a Big Bad Wolf's Head. With a worg pup vanity pet. And a wolf mount, though getting one might be more difficult for Alliance than Horde.
  • Depending on who you ask and what their opinion of Murlocs is, the Demoralizing Mmmrrrggglll ability used by certain Murloc mobs.
  • The "progress" text from a quest in the Jade Forest:
    The Elder is a Waterspeaker. He speaks to the waters, and they answer.
  • One of the aggro lines for the drogbar mobs in Highmountain is "These are drogbar rocks! Drogbar stones!"
  • Any spell or item effect that changes your character's race becomes this if they were that race already; e.g. the feral worgen mobs in Duskwood that can inflict a curse that turns you into a worgen.
• Desert Bandits: The Wastewander bandits of Tanaris, originally pirates who had their ships stolen by other pirates and turned to capturing water sources and stealing from the Goblins of Gadgetzan to get by. In a stroke of irony they were all wiped out by the Cataclysm, with the area they had control of now being underwater from the land subsiding.
• Despair Event Horizon:
  • Both Fandral Staghelm and Archbishop Benedictus seem to have had their Face–Heel Turn triggered by this, Fandral after both losing his beloved son and realizing he was nothing more than Xavius' pawn, and Benedictus apparently went mad with despair upon discovering The Hour of Twilight prophecy.
    Twilight Father/Archbishop Benedictus: I looked into the eyes of the Dragon, and despaired...
  • In the Talador zone of Warlords of Draenor you have to fight Kaelynara Sunchaser, a blood elf who became hooked on powerful magics in a mine and was determined to consume it all even as it would destroy the area around her. After you've killed her, you find a Tear-Stained Letter on her body, in which her master writes to effectively disown her as an apprentice, tell her she has no talent and should take up something like basket-weaving and, since he has no time to deal with basket-weavers, won't be offering any kind of recommendation.
• Determinator: The Black Knight. You fight and kill him at the end of an Argent Tournament questline, only for him to come back as a zombie in Trial of the Champion. You kill the zombie, but he gets up as a skeleton and attacks you again. When you kill the skeleton, he collapses again... Only to get back up as nothing but a spirit and continue attacking you. Poor guy just doesn't know when to give up.
• Deus ex Machina: The fight with the Lich King. He has done more than put you on the run. He has outright KILLED the entire raid, and is in the process of enslaving YOUR SOUL. Suddenly, Tirion Fordring PRAYS, the ice block shatters, and he destroys Frostmourne. Then Arthas' dead father comes out of the damn evil sword, rezzes the raid, and you beat on the final boss like a loot pinata. Keep in mind that Arthas explicitly stated that this very thing WOULD NOT HAPPEN A SECOND TIME. Third time's the charm, I... guess.
  • Val'sharah's story ends with Elune herself intervening to redeem the Nightmare-corrupted Ysera and purify the Pillar of Creation that was corrupting her.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • One daily Cooking quest in Orgrimmar asks the player to steal rice from Darkspear trolls. Naturally, this quest would have been awkward for Darkspear troll characters, so those instead steal rice from goblins.
  • In the Assault on Violet Hold encounter in Legion, you have a chance to face Millificent Manastorm. If you do, try using the Manastorm Duplicator toy from Warlords of Draenor before or during the encounter. She will not be happy with your disguise and hit you with a shrink ray for the duration of the disguise. After defeating her, she will be pleased with your disguise and give you a debuff.
  • In Darkheart Thicket, Archdruid Glaidalis will not only acknowledge if the group has a druid, but he also has a unique line for whatever spec they're in.
  • Death knights of races that were playable prior to Mists of Pandaria will have the stamina-buffing spell Veteran of the Third War, which refers to them having died fighting the Legion in Warcraft III. Death knights of pandaren and allied races will instead have Veteran of the Fourth War, referring to them having died fighting for the Alliance or Horde during Battle for Azeroth.
  • The quest tracker offers directions to help you get to the quest area if you're not already there. If you're a mage, you're instead recommended to make a portal to your destination if applicable.
  • The intro to Bastion has a mnemis asking you where you come from when you say you're not dead. For most races, you can only say that you're from Azeroth; orcs can say that they're from Draenor, while draenei can say that they're from Draenor or Argus.
  • Certain quests will have story characters accompany and support the player. Other players will see these characters under a generic name so as to not ruin immersion.
  • Amber Kearnen, an SI:7 agent whom Alliance players quested with in Westfall and on Pandaria and was later found dead during the rogue Order Hall campaign, appears in Maldraxxus as the aranakk spy Kearnen the Blade. Rogues that finished said campaign will have extra dialogue where she recognizes them from Azeroth and asks if her message got to the Uncrowned.
  • In the Revendreth quest "Sign Your Own Death Warrant", you're required to forge a warrant in order to enter the Ember Ward. You're given multiple options for your writing, the normal ones all short and to the point, but if you're a scribe, you'll logically be a better writer than a non-scribe and will have the option to write a more verbose warrant impersonating a member of House Darkvein. The fake name you use will also change depending on your character's gender (Alexander if you're male, Alexandria if you're female).
  • Upon meeting Baroness Vashj in Maldraxxus, she'll remember you if you defeated her in the Serpentshrine Cavern Burning Crusade raid (as Lady Vashj), mentioning you're obviously capable enough to help her with her mission. Otherwise she'll merely recognize you being from Azeroth, and say you'll need to prove your worth.
  • In the third chapter of the Night Fae campaign, when Tyrande is told that the player can ferry the night elf souls trapped in Torghast to Ardenweald, she has slightly different dialogue if you're playing as a night elf, calling you "child of Teldrassil" instead of your name and asking you to "save the souls of our people" instead of "my people". Likewise, when you meet Huln Highmountain much later in that same campaign, he has special dialogue if you're playing as a Highmountain tauren.
  • During the introduction questline for the druid class hall in Legion, you enter the Emerald Dreamway, which has portals to various Great Trees across Azeroth. If you previously completed the quest "Sealing the Dream" to seal the Dream portal in Feralas, the portal to Feralas in the Dreamway will be blocked, and you will need to unblock it from the Dreamway side to use it.
• Didn't Think This Through: In the couple of weeks before World of Warcraft: Classic launched, Blizzard announced the realms that would be available, and opened them up to allow players to claim character names.^note 11 in NA, 2 in Australia, 12 in Europe across the languages. Two weeks later, still before the game had launched, those realms were getting so overpopulated (one of them in particular had expected queues of over 10,000) that Blizzard had to open up several more just to cope with demand.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?:
  • There are three raid encounters where players attack and kill the Old Gods themselves,^note C'Thun in the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, Yogg-Saron in Ulduar, and N'Zoth in Ny'alotha though the first two are in a weakened state, as they're partially imprisoned.
  • Other examples of players defeating beings of near Godlike power are Kil'jaeden in the Sunwell, Malygos in the Eye of Eternity and Arthas himself in Icecrown Citadel. Plus there's Deathwing in Cataclysm, who's more powerful than any/all of the above.
  • The Ik'thik Colossus is possibly the biggest thing in the game; it is a giant insect that smashes down part of the Serpent Spine. Players literally punch it to death.
  • In all honesty, this might as well be in the job description of the player characters, considering how many ancient and powerful monstrosities the players can encounter and defeat.
• Dinosaurs Are Dragons: Maximillian of Northshire certainly thinks so.
• Disability Immunity: In Fogcliff Strand, the only sailor not affected by the nearby sirens is named Earless Joe. As his nickname suggests, he has no visible ears, as his hairstyle covers up where his ears would be.
• Disc-One Final Boss: Many final bosses of a raid before the final patch of an expansion end up as this, since they're usually major adversaries and may close off certain sub-plots, but they aren't the be-all-end-all of the greater story arc.
  • The Sha of Pride in the Siege of Orgrimmar raid. In a pretty literal sense in "Looking for Raid" and "Flexible Raids" which are split into smaller segments, of which the Sha is the last to fall into part 1.
• Disc-One Nuke: Some items, like the Luffa, ended up having a level cap placed on them because they completely trivialized some encounters in later expansions. Gems and enchants have minimum item levels associated with them, to prevent players from making low level gear too powerful.
• Disciplines of Magic:
  • Mages can spec into the Fire, Frost, and Arcane schools, which all focus on single-target or area of effect damage to different degrees. Frost spells put special emphasis on Crowd Control with their slowing abilities and Arcane has a variety of utility spells.
  • Priests have the Discipline, Holy, and Shadow schools. Discipline balances healing and damage with defense spells, Holy increases healing prowess, and Shadow priests are damage dealers through and through.
  • Shamans can specialize in Elemental, Enhancement. and Restoration trees. Elemental shamans bombard enemies with the elements from afar. Enhancement shamans bludgeon foes with elementally-infused melee weapons, and Restoration shamans focus on healing and support.
  • Warlocks have Affliction, Demonology, and Destruction trees. Affliction warlocks drain the life from their foes and use shadow magic to inflict damage over time, Demonology warlocks summon demons to their aid, while Destruction warlocks bring down fire and shadow bolts for maximum carnage.
• Disney Villain Death: Garrosh does this to Warlord Krom'gar after he murders High Chieftain Cliffwalker's wife and forcing him to watch as he bombed a Druid school full of innocents all because he dared to avenge his son's murder and thereby challenged his authority. Garrosh was not pleased. Not at all.
  Garrosh: YOU. ARE. DISMISSED.
• Distracted by My Own Sexy: Two trash mobs fought on the path between the Fallen Protectors and Norushen encounters can stun players with a spell that does this appropriately labeled "Self-Absorbed".
• Distracted by the Sexy: One Uldum quest requires distracting several infected Gnomes using holograms. One of them is a dancing female Eredar.
• Divergent Character Evolution: Dark Iron dwarves and Mag'har orcs originally used the same models and voices as their Alliance and Horde counterparts, just with exclusive skins, but upon becoming playable in Battle for Azeroth, they were also given exclusive hairstyles and voices. Zandalari trolls also originally used the Darkspear models before getting their own models in Mists of Pandaria; see Early Installment Character-Design Difference below.
• Divided We Fall
  • A lot of people a lot of the time, but the crowning example has to come when the Horde and Alliance are both in the process of storming Icecrown Citadel, and start killing each other while doing so. The only reason either of them are in Northrend in the first place is to fight Arthas, an incredibly powerful necromancer, and they still can't stop making corpses even when he's right there. On the Broken Front, some Horde troops attacked the Alliance forces trying to take the Death Gate, resulting in both being annihilated when the Scourge attacked; even Garrosh found this outrageous.
  • The Drakkari ice troll empire had been fighting the Scourge basically alone for years with the players arriving as their empire finally starts to crumble. Normally you'd think they'd welcome the allies, but they're so aggressive that they attack the Horde and Alliance just as much as the Scourge and the Zandalari have shown up to record what's left of their culture for posterity. By the time BFA comes around, the race is functionally extinct with the lone survivor found in Zuldazar. Nerubians, on the other hand, were in the same situation but despite their racial aggression were entirely willing to work with the adventurers and as such are starting to recover.
• Do a Barrel Roll: During the spine of Deathwing encounter, Deathwing himself doesn't attack you as he barely seems to know you're there; however, if the party isn't divided evenly across his back he will sense the weight imbalance and do a roll to throw you off. This makes soloing the encounter, no matter how powerful you are, rather tedious as you have to constantly shift back and forth across the middle of his back (there is no "perfect center" where you can just stand).
• Do-Anything Robot: In Legion, engineers can construct Reaves, an ad-hoc miniature fel reaver that can teleport the user around the Broken Isles, repair gear, revive dead party members, provide food, launch fireworks, give presents, and ultimately become pilotable into combat.
• Does Not Like Men:
  • The Hyldnir are an Amazon Brigade of Frost Vrykul in the Storm Peaks. They have several Vrykul prisoners, and the men are used as slave labor in their mines, while the lone female is chained to a wall; players get quests to discipline the men and to kill one to set an example, but the woman is to be taken outside and killed as painlessly as possible.
  • The exception to this is Thorim, one of the Titan's creations whom they all look up to; they fight amongst themselves during Hyldsmeet, hoping to prove themselves worthy of "ruling by his side".
• The Dog Bites Back: In Tal'gurub in Zuldazar, Vol'jamba's followers have mind-controlled the local Gurubashi trolls. In one quest, Zul gives you the option of either killing them or freeing them from their bonds; if you free the dire trolls, they'll go on to attack the nearby Jambani mobs.
• Don't Ask: In Stormheim, tailors can find a leyweaver who will teach them how to make Imbued Silkweave pants. Said leyweaver is found standing over a Vrykul's dead body, and says you really shouldn't ask why a leyweaver is standing over a Vrykul's dead body.
• Don't Do Anything I Wouldn't Do: When a warlock dismisses a pet Succubus, sometimes says this line as Double Entendre before disappearing.
• Doomed Hometown:
  • Gilneas for Worgen, and Kezan for Goblins. Gilneas is being invaded by the Forsaken, and is now a battleground; while Kezan was attacked by Deathwing, who triggered Mt. Kajaro to erupt. In the Tides of War novel, Theramore becomes this for Jaina.
  • Gnomeregan used to be this for the gnomes.
  • Teldrassil for night elves.
  • Undercity for Forsaken.
• Doomy Dooms of Doom: Millhouse Manastorm knows a spell named "Impending Doooooom!". Its effects are, however, unknown. On the other hand, if he casts "Dooooooom!" on you in the Brawler's Guild fight against him, you're finished.
• Doppelgänger Spin: Jandice Barov does this twice during the fight. There are slight differences between herself and the copies, so it's possible for attentive players to spot the real one; the fakes explode if you destroy one, and there's an achievement for finding the real one both times.
  • Mages can do it too. It's not very convincing against players, but monsters are easily fooled.
• Double-Edged Buff:
  • Some types of alcohol will increase your stats temporarily, but they also blur your vision, make your character walk crooked, and make you misjudge enemies' levels if you drink enough of it.
  • The "Elethium" anima powers in Torghast work this way:
  Elethium Alembic: Your mastery is increased by 30%, but your arcane damage and healing done is reduced by 25%.
  Elethium Beacon: Your critical strike chance is increased by 25%, but your fire damage and healing done is reduced by 25%.
  Elethium Censer: Your healing received is increased by 100%, but your Holy damage and healing done is reduced by 25%.
  Elethium Lantern: Your leech is increased by 15%, but your shadow damage and healing done is reduced by 25%.
  Elethium Muzzle: Your abilities cool down 25% faster, but your physical damage and healing done is reduced by 25%.
  Elethium Teardrop: Your critical strike damage and healing is increased by 30%, but your frost damage and healing done is reduced by 25%.
  Elethium Veil: Your ability costs are reduced by 25%, but you are no longer able to view your map.
  Elethium Weights: Your strength, agility, stamina, and intellect are increased by 30%, but you are no longer able to jump.
• Double Entendre:
  • There used to be daily quests for the Sons of Hodir called "Blowing Hodir's Horn", "Polishing the Helm" and "Thrusting Hodir's Spear".
  • In Vashj'ir is Adarrah who thanks you for giving her "crabs" and "juicy tail".
  • Goblin merchants have a few lines like "I've got what you need"; when spoken by the squeaky-voiced Goblins, it sounds like an advertisement, but when spoken by the gruff-voiced Goblins, it sounds like a cheap pickup line.
  • Many of the /flirt emotes qualify - for example, the male worgen's "If you play nice, I'll share my bone with you."
  • During the Shadowlands introductory quest in the Maw, "A Good Axe", Thrall searches through various weapon racks, commenting with his view of each type of weapon he picks up. When picking up a sword he says "A serviceable weapon. Though I've never understood why the Alliance seems so fixated with swords. Too much blade, not enough haft." It's safe to say that not all players ignored this specific comment, illustrated in Youtuber Captain Grim's "The Shadowlands Launch Experience" video where he twists the last phrase into "Too much head, not enough shaft" prompting the accompanying blood elf demon huntress to facepalm.
• Double Jump: A passive ability for Demon Hunters.
• Double Play: Not officially supported, but many players engage in multiboxing, playing two characters at once using separate accounts for each one.
• Double Unlock: Several rewards are available for gaining reputation with the different factions, but these rewards are usually bought from the faction's quartermaster.
  • Some of the above rewards were purchasable with tokens instead of the gold you normally acquire throughout the game, but those tokens were earned through the same activities that earned you the reputation in the first place, so you're unlocking both locks at the same time.
  • Mists of Pandaria spread the Valor gear to the different Pandaria factions, instead of a vendor in Stormwind or Orgrimmar; so getting the gear requires grinding reputation with the different factions, and then running dungeons to get the Valor points to buy the gear. There are vendors in Niuzao Temple that sell all the faction's gear at one place, but the reputation requirements still applied at first.
  • Many of the professions work in this kind of fashion in Mists of Pandaria, with one or two skills to create advanced crafting materials on a daily cooldown that also teaches them a random recipe that uses those crafting materials. Blacksmiths take it one further with the weapons crafted with Lightning Steel, crafting one of them also unlocks a recipe that essentially works as an upgrade for said weapon, with each having two upgrades.
• Downer Ending:
  • The quest Till Death Do Us Part. It has you place an undead woman's pendant she received from her husband on his grave, saying she wants to forget him and have nothing to do with him, telling you he ignored her and his children to go out and fight the Scourge, as he considered devotion to the Light to be the way to stop the encroaching undead. Of course, the Scourge tore through Lordaeron, she became Forsaken, and he's dead. You find his grave to be littered, scratched, and uncared-for. You place the pendant on it. And that's it.
  • The end of the Battle for the Undercity, for both factions.
    • For the Horde: Sure, Thrall and Sylvanas manage to retake the Undercity from Varimathras, Putress and the demon hordes, but the rest of the Horde is now incredibly suspicious of the Forsaken, and as a result of their actions Varian Wrynn has seen all the evidence he needs to rekindle open war with the Horde. Thrall's dream of a peaceful world for his people to live in has been completely and utterly shattered.
    • For the Alliance: Varian Wrynn enters the Undercity himself and sees the horrors the Forsaken have been working on all these years, as well as what Lordaeron has become in that time. He then fails at retaking the city when Jaina stops him from trying to kill Thrall. And to top that all off, Bolvar is still dead or at least, appears to be.
  • The ending to the Keristrasza quest line. Your original goal in the Nexus dungeon is to save her, but it's too late; she has been tortured and can barely resist Malygos' mind control. She pleads with you to kill her, and that's really all you can do.
  • The entirety of Vashj'ir, coming close to a "Shaggy Dog" Story: You start off on your way to an island off the coast of Stormwind that emerged after the Cataclysm. This goal is pretty much forgotten when the Naga attack your ship and sink it. You spend the rest of the chain trying to find out what the Naga are up to, eventually uncovering that they are planning to to take over the realm of Neptulon, culminating in a struggle to prevent this from happening. The final battle has your faction attacking the Naga with a heavily armed submarine to keep them from breaking into Neptulon's realm. And you fail. The Naga break through. Neptulon is incapacitated. The submarine is blown up. And Erunak, the shaman that has repeatedly saved your life, is captured.
  • Throne of the Tides is an example in itself; you manage to save Erunak and kill Lady Naz'jar, but Ozumat kidnaps Neptulon and escapes into the Abyssal Maw. And since a invokedAsk The Devs session stated that they were no longer planning to release the Abyssal Maw dungeon due to wanting to spend more time on Firelands, and because they felt that Throne of the Tides "does a pretty good job of finishing the Neptulon story" we may never see the story's actual ending.
  • The ending of Val'sharah storyline. Corrupted by the Emerald Nightmare, Ysera sets off to destroy the Temple of Elune, forcing Tyrande to choose between rescuing Malfurion or saving her Goddess' temple at the cost of killing one of most noble and motherly creatures she's ever known. She chooses Elune, tearfully letting Xavius abduct Malfurion and she and the player proceed to kill Ysera when it's made clear that she's too far gone to be saved from the corruption. In her dying moments, Elune manifests herself and reaches down to redeem Ysera's spirit and cleans the Pillar of Creation, leaving a dragon-shaped patch of grass where she died. The storyline ends with Ysera dead, Malfurion still kidnapped and being tortured by Xavius, Cenarius corrupted and destroying the Emerald Dream even further, and the nightmare still spreading. Things don't get better until the Emerald Nightmare raid.
• Down on the Farm:
  • The Valley of the Four Winds is the breadbasket of Pandaria, with the Heartland section having several farms right next to each other. Almost every quest here has something to do with food except the west which has Master Bruised Paw, the latest Nesingwary expedition, and a Mantid invasion; the latter of which is attacking a farming community.
  • You can also become a farmer yourself if you wish, and grow ingredients for cooking recipes that give you temporary stat buffs. It also gives you reputation with the Tillers faction, which offers some fun but totally optional rewards.
• Draconic Humanoid:
  • The Dragonspawn are said to be humans who were so devoted to the dragonflights they started to take on draconic characteristics.
  • Drakonids are humanoid dragonkin used as ground troops by the dragonflights.
  • In Blackwing Descent, a creature that is actually called a dragonman is encountered, which is a human crossed with a dragonspawn.
  • Dragonflight introduces the dracthyr, a race of dragonkin that were previously created by Deathwing and are just now being rediscovered. Like normal dragons, they can exist either in dragon form or as a human-like form with draconic elements.
• Dragged Off to Hell:
  • After being defeated in the Eternal Palace raid, Azshara is picked up by N'Zoth, revived, and dragged off to Ny'alotha.
  • Shadowlands reveals that when souls from multiple realms dies they travel to the titular Shadowlands, where they are sorted into four lands which go about redeeming (or punishing) them. The darkest souls judged to be completely irredeemable are sent to the Maw. At some point sometime around when Legion was going on, Argus' soul was used to disable the Arbiter which meant all souls were being sent straight to the Maw. The story of the expansion itself begins with Thrall, Jaina, Baine, and Anduin being abducted by Sylvanas' forces and brought to the Maw as well.
• Dragon Ascendant: Cho'gall was originally lieutenant to Gul'dan during the Second War. After Gul'dan's death, Cho'gall took control of the Twilight Hammer and rebuilt it into an insidious and powerful organization striving to unleash disaster on the world.
  • And in the next expansion, he succeeds. As a result he is soon demoted, but that's mainly because he just won in his attempts to wake up something bigger and badder than himself.
• Dragon Their Feet: Kargath Bladefist and Rend Blackhand were both major players during the Second War but survived the Horde's defeat with relatively minor loss of personal power and followers. Now each has taken control of a rabidly-fanatic remnant of the Horde and are working towards their own ends.
• Dragon with an Agenda: Horde players play something between this, Noble Top Enforcer, and The Starscream to Garrosh in Mists of Pandaria. Depending on the quest, they might be working for Garrosh himself, the Blood Elves or Vol'jin.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • In particular, the voiceover to the cinematic intro for Wrath of the Lich King.
    Terenas: My child, I watched with pride as you grew into a weapon...
    [Arthas pulls out Frostmourne]
    Terenas: ...of righteousness. And I know that you will show restraint when exercising your great power.
    [Arthas shatters a glacier and raises an enormous Frost Wyrm]
  • Kil'jaeden reveals that one of the reasons he joined the Legion was because he didn't believe that Sargeras could be stopped. Thanks to the Chronicles, the audience knows that Sargeras recruited Kil'jaeden because he was having trouble holding together his army. In other words, if Kil'jaeden never joined to begin with, Sargeras would have been defeated by default.
• Draw Aggro: Many player parties use knowledge of enemy AI to have the toughest character take the hits while the other players support the tank or go after the enemy. In single player characters can use pets and familiars to draw aggro from enemies.
• Dreams vs. Nightmares: The gentle druidic Emerald Dream is under attack from the demon/old god corrupted forces of the Emerald Nightmare.
• Dressed to Plunder: There are several factions of pirates, most of whom sport this type of garb and have a tendency to say "Yeaaarg!" when they attack. There's even a hat with a skull and crossbones on it that players can get and use, and if you really want, here's how to dress your character as a pirate. Or you can just use the pirate wand.
• Dressing as the Enemy: The skies of Mechagon are filled with flying enemies that will target anyone trying to fly on the island, forcing players to stay near the ground, or occasionally landing to shake them off. Players with the Rustbolt Resistor mount, a rebuilt Aerial Enforcer, can fly without hassle as the enemies will think you are one of them; so long as they don't get too close and the pilots realize they aren't Mechagnomes.
• Driven to Suicide: In the End Time, Deathwing, for all his corruption and madness, is still a dragon aspect, and the Old Gods won't be free unless all the aspects are dead. They give the command, and Deathwing jumps on it, that is, the top of Wyrmrest Temple.
  • Psychic-Assisted Suicide: Shadow priests can use Mind Control to do this. It's sadistically amusing to use this on an enemy player in PvP and run them off a cliff. Nefarian can use an ability like this on players in the Heroic version of the Blackwing Descent encounter against him.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Kael's nonsensical Face–Heel Turn and subsequent death. Other examples vary wildly depending on one's sensibilities, but popular candidates include Uther the Lightbringer and Saurfang the Younger.
  • Earthbinder Maruut apparently perishes without the player noticing during the last battle of the Deepholm storyline; he's found dead when you speak to another shaman to turn in the quest.
  • Prince Nadun in the Tol'vir quest chain is unceremoniously killed off in a skirmish outside of the next quest hub, this one's particularly bad, as the camera scrolls away when the scout's giving Phaoris the message, so it's very likely the player may never notice this.
  • Rell Nightwind succumbs to his wounds sustained during a Hozen ambush in the Jade Forest, which you're very unlikely to notice since the other members of his band become recurring characters, and Rell himself seemed to be pulling through last you see him.
  • At the Broken Shore, Vol'jin gets stabbed by some random demon and immediately passes out and dies from poisoning a few days later. This is extremely stupid for several reasons. 1) Vol'jin had barely done anything as Warchief yet, so it seems a waste to kill him off so soon, 2) Trolls are naturally resistant to poison due to their Regeneration, and Vol'jin in particular was strong enough to previously overcome a poison specifically designed to stop Troll regeneration, and 3) Varian Wrynn got a much more epic death in the same cinematic.
• Drought Level of Doom: The endgame used to require massive resource stockpiling efforts before a raid could begin. It got better.
• Drowning My Sorrows: A follow-up video to the Mists of Pandaria trailer shows what became of the Human and Orc after Chen cleaned their clocks; despondent over getting owned, they drink themselves stupid.
• Dual Boss: There are several dungeon encounters that are this, but for PvPers, there are the faction leaders.
  • Pre-Cataclysm, Alliance raids going for Warchief Thrall had to deal with the troll chief Vol'jin.
    • Post-Cataclysm, Horde players can turn the tables on Alliance raids against Garrosh Hellscream by kiting Gamon into the fray.
    • To be fair, Alliance players get the chance to do this with Crithto if Varian is attacked.
  • Post-Cataclysm, Horde raids taking on King Varian Wrynn now have to deal with King Genn Greymane.
  • Also, Horde raids taking on Ironforge now have a trio boss of Muradin Bronzebeard, Moira Thaurissan and Falstad Wildhammer.
    • Though Alliance has had to deal with that since Burning Crusade. When attacking Silvermoon City, they have to deal with Regent Lord Lor'Themar Theron, Grand Magister Rommath, and Ranger General Halduron Brightwing.
  • Two fights in the Brawler's Guild- the one against Fran and Riddoh and the one against GG Engineering. The former has the two bosses as enemies with separate health bars, and the latter has the two bosses share a health bar.
• Dual Wield:
  • Warriors, rogues, shaman, death knights, hunters, and demon hunters can wield two weapons at once. Fury warriors can even opt to dual-wield two-handed swords, axes, and maces when they reach the top tier of their talent tree. Illidan Stormrage famously wields the dual Warglaives of Azzinoth, which players can obtain and use as well.
  • With Mists of Pandaria, Fury warriors can choose between Titan's Grip and Single-Minded Fury at Level 10. Single-Minded Fury is for those who choose to dual wield smaller one-handed weapons while Titan's Grip is for two-handed axes, swords, and maces. With patch 5.4, Fury warriors can now dual wield Polearms as well.
  • While monks can dual-wield, they only use the weapons when they Jab and they fight with only one hand. The exception to this is fist weapons, which monks wield for their regular attacks and lets them attack with both hands. And for a while fist weapons didn't appear on their hands during combat, but with patch 6.0.2, fist weapons properly appear now.
• Dude Looks Like a Lady:
  • Blizzard often pokes fun at male blood elves for this. A named one in Hillsbrad named Johnny Awesome is consistently referred to as being a girl by two of the undead NPC's in the area, one of them mentions how beautiful and how in love with "her" he is and the other is convinced he's a small girl.
  • Nevertheless, male blood elves are only "feminine" in comparison to the other race's males, most of which are quite musclebound and top-heavy. Compared to your typical Real Life human, they're pretty damn buff. With the model updates in Warlords of Draenor, blood elf males are quite distinctly male-looking.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?:
  • Averted in the later expansions — some NPC's acknowledge that you have done some pretty awesome stuff in the past. For example, right at the start of the Alliance entrance to Northrend, you are skipped past NPCs wanting to join the fight thanks to your heroic deeds in Outland. One assumes this takes place even if you managed to level without going to Outland. Not to mention that in Legion and Warlords you're involved in leading your faction's armies.
  • Played straight with Conqueror Krenna, the Jerkass in charge of Conquest Hold in Grizzly Hills, who outright states that all your previous achievements mean crap to her and proceeds to treat you like a common grunt.
  • In addition, if you reach "Exalted" reputation with some factions, some NPCs will kiss your ass... figuratively, of course.
  • If you have a legacy PVP rank there are a couple of NPCs that will address you by it in quest text.
  • There are several NPCs who greet you differently depending on whether you have or haven't done certain quests before. When you meet Thassarian over Icecrown, he thanks you again for the time you helped his sister in the Borean Tundra - if you did that quest chain. Same for a gnome in those zones. And the first time you meet Highlord Fordragon in Northrend, if you did the Onyxia quest chain wayyy back in vanilla WoW he reminds you of the time you helped him fight dragons in the Stormwind throne room.
  • In yet another example, NPCs in a town under siege by the undead cheer themselves up by reminding each other that help is on the way: they have heard rumors of elite soldiers handpicked by A'dal himself, and even the Scarab Lord. "Hand of A'dal" and "the Scarab Lord" are, of course, titles that used to be attainable by players. The latter of which has one per server.
  • In the Shrine of Seven Stars, you can find a draenei arguing with a pandaren. If you try to convince the draenei that the pandaren has a point, he will ask "What do you know? You act like you're the savior of Azeroth!" This becomes quite funny if you do in fact have the "Savior of Azeroth" title.
  • During Escalation, players are given a quest to help an old seer retrace the steps of Emperor Shaohao, who appreciates that despite being a powerful warrior, you are willing to help an old man climb a mountain. When it's done, the seer commends you for your humility, then reveals that he is the ghost of Emperor Shaohao, and tells you how Pride was his one great vice.
  • Thoroughly averted in Warlords of Draenor with your Garrison. Everyone from the grunts to your recruited followers salutes you when you walk by, says something about how honored they are to be working with you, and compliments you.
• Dug Too Deep: The Gnomes were just expanding their home city when suddenly troggs. The Nerubians, in their battle against a newly-created Scourge, tried to expand deeper underground when suddenly Yogg-Saron. Basically, in World of Warcraft, mining seems to be the one profession that can unintentionally doom the world, or at least the part of it you're standing on.
  • When excavating ruins in Pandaria, you can do dig too deep too...
• Dung Fu: The Hozen apparently think of poo as something to throw, though we don't see them doing so in-game. Rivett Clutchpop does weaponize Hozen excrement, specifically the methane from it, to create grenades to ward off a Jinyu attack on Grookin Hill.
• Dungeon Crawler: A huge chunk of the gameplay has always been the instances — sections of the world that, once entered, become exclusive to a player or a group of players for they to fight their way through without other players' interference. Their entrances are usually indicated by a blue, swirling portal. Even if you level up never setting a foot in any instance, the late game at the top levels of most expansions is all about crawling from dungeon to dungeon to find the best equipment and defeat the plot's final bosses. Unless, of course, you choose the PvP route, but then you'll be missing most of the game's plot and dynamics. There are two types of instances: dungeons (designed for 5 people) and raids (designed for 10 or more people). Dungeons you find everywhere and exist so you can get equipment with good stats even in the lower levels. The five members are three damage dealers (melee or ranged), one healer, and one tank. Raids have a normal mode (10 players) and a heroic mode (25 people), the latter being much more difficult but with better payoffs. And then there are the mythical raids that can only be accessed and completed by 20 people and have no scaling. Whichever the case, more tanks and healers are in order. Finally, the rewards you get by either looting the elite creatures/bosses or completing instance-specific quests range from rare weapons and armor sets to epic mounts.
• Dwindling Party: Happens to Warriors in Legion when they go on a recon mission of the Broken Shore and end up stranded there with a bunch of Vrykul. The Vrykul are there to kill as many demons as they can, hoping to earn their way into the Halls of Valor. As the waves of demons bear down on the player and the Vrykul, the Vrykul fall in battle and their souls are claimed by Odyn's Val'kyr, until the whole fight is reduced to the player vs. a Pit Lord.
• Dying as Yourself:
  • A large number of the bosses who've been animated or enslaved to fight you will thank you as they die. This turned out to include one of the prime sources of these bosses, Arthas himself.
  • Sha-possessed enemies happen to do this, including a few of the bosses. Some, however, survive the sha leaving their bodies.
• Dynamic Difficulty: Introduced in Mists of Pandaria, mostly for the World Bosses added in the expansion. The more people that tag an enemy, the more health they have.
  • The Kor'kron commanders added to the Barrens as part of Escalation become stronger as more people join in the fight, easily seen by watching their health bar start at 16 million and going up with each new player. There is a limit to how strong they get, so a large enough group can go through them like tissue paper.
  • Flex raiding involves groups of 11-24 players taking on a raid with the difficulty automatically adjusted for the number of players, as opposed to the fixed difficulty of 10- and 25-man raiding. The difficulty overall is a bit lower due to fixed-size raids being fine-tuned for the exact number of players.
  • Some of the rare spawns on the Timeless Isle also become stronger as more players join the fight.
  • As of Legion, all mobs above level 100 scale their health and level to the player's so the zones and dungeons can be done in any order at any level. Stronger mobs like rare and rare elites will also scale up their health in regards to more players joining the fight, it's not uncommon to see a rare World Quest mob being attacked by 30+ players possessing 100 million plus HP.
  • All of the zones in Legion are like this, with all mobs being the same level as the player, so no matter what order you quest in the zones, it's always on-level. Averted for Suramar, which is permanently level 110.
  • And now much of the game's early content has received the same treatment, dynamically adjusting all the enemy's levels up to level 60.

E

• Early-Bird Cameo:
  • Several events happened in the last patch of Wrath of the Lich King, setting up the changes and new stuff introduced in Cataclysm, as noted below;
    • There are a ton of Horde goblins in Northrend which explains goblin death knights. Even moreso, Goblins had been far more aligned with the Horde than the Alliance since Classic.
    • The Wolfcult, led by Arugal, were a major villain in one area of Northrend, setting up playable Worgen by showing that they were infectious but could also retain their minds.
    • Several Dark Rangers showed up in Undercity, including a Back from the Dead Nathanos Blightcaller which gave a reason for why Forsaken could be taught to be hunters.
    • A Highborne mage appeared up in the Temple of the Moon in Darnassus and wanted an audience with High Priestess Tyrande Whisperwind. His dialog to the guard as he waited about the changes coming to the world and the need for the Night Elves to "rediscover the arcane path", explaining the Night Elf Mage class combo.
    • In Thunder Bluff, a pair of Tauren could be seen discussing similarities between their Sun deity and the Holy Light that most of the Alliance revere, setting them up for the introduction of Tauren Paladins and Priests.
    • And, of course, the Ruby Sanctum raid, setting up the Twilight Dragonflight with Halion.
  • Mists of Pandaria: Within the Siege of Orgrimmar raid, Garrosh uses the services of a Goblin engineer who conceived all sorts of machinery, the very technology Garrosh will bring to Orcish clans on Draenor in the past to create the Iron Horde.
• Early Installment Character-Design Difference: Overlapping with Art Evolution, major NPCs and whole races will sometimes receive major visual overhauls after they're introduced to follow the graphic evolution of the game, or have their current models given a tweak. Progressively Prettier also applies to a number of them as a result.
  • Varian appeared as a generic male human in a random mishmash of plate and cloth gear until Wrath of the Lich King gave him a unique model, which was refined with subsequent expansions.
  • Likewise, Sylvanas used a night elf model in plate and cloth gear as a placeholder until Wrath of the Lich King where she was changed to the red-eyed, undead blood elf model used by dark rangers before getting a unique model that was later refined further in Legion.
  • Khadgar went from this in The Burning Crusade to this◊ since Warlords of Draenor. He looks younger as a result.
  • Garrosh in The Burning Crusade and early Wrath appeared as a generic Mag'har orc. He was given a unique model around the Argent Tournament patch and later a more refined one in Mists of Pandaria that was much more detailed and expressive and would become the basis for the new models for other male orcs in Warlord of Draenor.
  • Gallywix and Queen Azshara infamously used placeholder models for many years until they were given lore-accurate ones in Legion and Battle for Azeroth, respectively.
  • Nathanos Blightcaller is famously an Ascended Extra, but he originally appeared as a standard male undead in "Vanilla"-era brown, green, and silver armor. In Legion, his model was changed to a red-eyed male human model in pieces of black player armor, and in Battle for Azeroth he was given a unique model with an exclusive Badass Longcoat outfit more appropriate of a ranger. Admittedly, there's an in-lore explanation for the change during Legion, which is that he went through a ritual to strengthen himself in the short story Dark Mirror.
  • Mo'arg in The Burning Crusade were depicted as engineers with mechanically modified bodies. In Legion, they're now a race of Smash Mooks, their bionic eyes have been replaced with eyepatches, and in place of their bionic limbs, they now have one normal arm on their right that is used to grip their weapon of choice, while their left arm has been replaced with a long, spiked one made out of felslate.
  • Between Classic and early Mists of Pandaria, Zandalari troll NPCs used the same models as most of the other troll tribes. In patch 5.2, the males were given a whole new model based on the male night elf rig that was later given a moderate touch-up in Battle for Azeroth with more detailed skin and a thinner neck, while the females in the same expansion were given a modified female Darkspear model. Some Classic-era NPCs that used the old Zandalari model show up in Dazar'alor sporting the new one.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: The Blood Elves in The Burning Crusade.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom:
  • Malygos' plan once he becomes sane again is to suck all the magic out of Azeroth so it can't be abused anymore. When told that this would result in the complete destruction of the planet, he considers that an acceptable loss.
  • The Titans' plan for "reoriginating" Azeroth should it become irreparably corrupted by the Old Gods is implied to involve this.
  • The Cataclysm. A gigantic dragon bursts out of a shifted plane of existence, causing a massive global earthquake, then proceeds to fly around setting fire to anything within a 100-yard radius of itself. There's an entire expansion based on this. Unlike the other two, this one happened.
  • During the Madness of Deathwing encounter, Deathwing tries to summon a second Cataclysm to finish off Azeroth.
• Easter Egg: Many; here's the incomplete list.
• Easy-Mode Mockery: Not in the game itself, but extensive among the player base. Every class at one point or another has been generally regarded as overpowered and its players subsequently looked down upon; hunters and death knights, in particular, have reputations as being easy mode for leveling, and the forum community is quick to scorn anyone trying to comment on PvE without hard mode achievements on their Armory page.
  • The Raid Finder bosses are significantly easier than their Normal 25-man equivalents, but any gear you get is less powerful than its Normal or Heroic equivalents and has "Raid Finder" on it. Additionally, the only achievements you can obtain on this difficulty are the ones for clearing each wing.
  • Unfortunately also a source of significant difficulty in those raids, as more experienced players on alts won't bring their best and still wipe because they underestimated it.
• Easy Logistics: Averted a number of times in quests to supply soldiers and encampments. The event for opening Ahn'Qiraj required players to stockpile millions of bandages, food and other items to supply the armies. Later on in Wrath Saurfang brings up the problems of keeping troops supplied in his objections to Garrosh's reckless tactics.
  • The players more or less play this straight, though to what extent depends on how well set up you are. Early on, you'll need to bring healing food/drink into the wilderness with you, and come back often to get more, empty your small bags of trash to sell, and repair your gear. Later on, you'll often be able to heal yourself (or at least recover from damage rather quickly when out of combat), have mounts that can repair equipment, buy your trash or even access the auction house for you, and there's even an item/follower that allows you to access your bank or a mailbox, to the point that a player can theoretically be self-sufficient indefinitely in the wilderness with no real need to resupply anything.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: In their human disguises, the female black dragons Onyxia and Nalice have pale skin and long black hair; Deathwing's original human form also had very light skin and black hair.
• The Eeyore: The flavor text on Torok Bloodtotem's coin in the Dalaran fountain paints him as this:
  "I hate everything. Everything is horrible."
• Egomaniac Hunter: Hemet Nesingwary, although he is a friendly fellow and acknowledges your efforts when you finish his quests.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • The Old Gods, which are such an obvious Shout-Out to the Cthulhu mythos that it borders on plagiarism. Only two have been specifically identified so far in-game: C'thun was introduced with the Ahn'Qiraj dungeon and is, of course, a giant tentacled eyeball; while the Wrath of the Lich King expansion brings us Yogg-Saron, final boss of the Ulduar raid instance, who appears to be a giant fleshy mass festooned with gaping toothy mouths. Outside discussion during the end of 2010 from Blizzard has revealed the name of a third Old God, N'Zoth, who is linked to the Emerald Nightmare and 'sleeping beneath the oceans' (N'Zoth finally showed up in Battle For Azeroth).
  • In a larger Shout-Out to the Cthulhu mythos, Yogg-Saron's fight includes a Sanity mechanic, where being hit by certain attacks drains your sanity, and when you lose all of it, you become a gibbering slave to the Beast-With-Many-Maws. Unlike most status effects, this one lasts through death, so don't think your teammates will be planning to revive you anytime soon...
  • The demons of the Burning Legion are often seen as this. The draenei, in particular, call them "man'ari", which translates approximately as "something hideously and fundamentally wrong".
  • Slimes, fiends, and faceless ones were all categorized as "Aberrations" in Mists of Pandaria, a new category that's also affected by paladin moves that harm undead and demons.
  • On Pandaria, the fourth Old God, the seven-headed Y'Shaarj, is revealed to be dead, and his last breath cursed Pandaria with the seven Sha, physical manifestations of negative emotions like anger and hatred. They wait and lurk beneath the earth, ready to possess anyone who 'feels' too strongly.
• Eldritch Ocean Abyss: The Titans chained N'zoth at the bottom of an ocean trench where he has slowly corrupted the surrounding sea life, birthing creatures such as the zoatroids. The final encounter of Azshara's Eternal Palace takes place above the abyss where players accidentally release N'zoth.
• Elemental Crafting
• Elemental Plane: The game hinted at those in the past, but really went nuts with the concept in Cataclysm:
  • Deepholm, the plane of Earth, made of mostly shiny rocks and crystals.
  • Firelands, the plane of Fire, with lots of magma, ash, lava and hot air.
  • Skywall, the plane of Air, consisting of mostly clouds and wind.
  • The Abyssal Maw, the plane of Water, typical underwater flair everywhere.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors:
  • Mostly averted but there are many enemies that are specifically resistant or immune to a given element and a rare few that take extra damage from them - particularly in the Blackwing Lair raid dungeon. Two interesting variations are the bosses Thaddius in Naxxramas and the Twin Val'kyr in Trial of the Crusader, where the "positive/negative" effect is applied to the players and must be managed properly to complete the encounter.
  • Battle Pets work largely along these lines. There are several different families of pet, each of which is strong against one type, and weak against another. Most of the really high-level pet battles, like the Celestial Tournament, will require pets that can do damage that is not the typical damage type for their family, such as the Mechanical Pandaren Dragonling^note It's a Mechanical pet, but it has a breath attack that does Dragonkin damage.
  • This is the core mechanic of The Primal Council encounter in Vault of the Incarnates. Each council member has a signature elemental ability that either negates or is negated by the ability of another council member.
• Elseworld: The entire setting of Warlords of Draenor. It is an alternate version of Draenor altered by this timeline's Garrosh Hellscream so that the orcs don't drink Mannoroth's blood. Then heroes from the main timeline come in, and from that point on just about everything goes different - Velen dies before Archimonde, Orgrim dies before Blackhand, Teron Gorefiend becomes a weird bloated monster, and so on.
• Embarrassing Tattoo: Some of the races have body tattoos as a customization option. One of the Female Lightforged Draenei's jokes is that no, she does not have a glowing stamp above her tail.^note Due to the position of the embedded crystals covering her spine, a "tramp stamp" wouldn't be a feasible tattoo option anyway.
• Emote Animation: Several slash commands are available, such as /rude, /train or /roar. /dance is one of the most commonly used, triggering a different dancing animation depending on the race and gender of your character:
  • Alliance:
    • Humans: males perform John Travolta's dance on the Bee Gees' "You Should Be Dancing" from Saturday Night Fever, females perform Los del Río's "Macarena".
    • Dwarves: males perform That Russian Squat Dance, females perform some Riverdance-esque Irish step-dancing.
    • Night Elves: males perform Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean", females perform Alizée's "J'en ai Marre".
  • Horde:
    • Orcs: males perform MC Hammer's "U Can't Touch This", females perform "Back That Ass Up" by Juvenile.
    • Trolls: males perform Capoeira, females perform Shakira's "Whenever, Wherever".
    • Taurens: males perform "Peanut Butter Jelly Time", females perform "Electric Slide".
    • Undead: males perform Metalhead moves, females perform Liquid Dancing.
    • Blood Elves: males perform Jon Heder's dance from Napoleon Dynamite, females perform Britney Spears' "Toxic".
    • Goblins: males perform Soulja Boy's "Crank That", females perform Beyoncé's "Single Ladies".
• End of an Age: After the players defeat Deathwing, the other Aspects reveal that they have lost their immortality now that their purpose has been fulfilled. Thus, Deathwing's defeat heralds a new "Age of Mortals".
• The End of the World as We Know It:
  • What happens to Azeroth in Cataclysm. It's not nearly as bad as most of other examples of this trope, but still a lot of damage was done.
  • The dungeon End Time shows us the actual end of the world if Deathwing wins.
  • Draenor got hit far worse in the backstory, though it's still fairly inhabitable in some areas.
• Enemy Civil War: Every race has at least one faction hostile against the rest. It's a World of Warcraft for a reason.
• Enemy Mine:
  • As much as the plot of the game involves the conflict between the Alliance and Horde, they do come together in response to the occasional overwhelming threat. This began to happen with increasing frequency as the game evolved, so the writers went out of their way to drop the Conflict Ball in Wrath of the Lich King. Specific examples include:
  • In classic, the War of the Shifting Sands forced Horde and Alliance to unite to deal with the Qiraji threat.
  • In Burning Crusade, the Aldor and Scryers are forced to work together to assault the Black Temple in order to defeat Illidan. They then form the Shattered Sun Offensive to confront the threat of Kil'jaeden.
  • In Wrath of the Lich King, the Wrathgate cinematic shows Bolvar Fordragon and Saurfang the Younger leading a combined assault on Arthas, only to have the Forsaken betray both sides and reignite the conflict.
  • The Dragon Soul raid in Cataclysm implies a combined effort on the part of the Horde and Alliance to defeat Deathwing, showing members of both factions as supporting NPCs. In Tides of War, Garrosh says that representatives of every race helped him defeat Deathwing.
  • Mists of Pandaria, meanwhile, has the Klaxxi, the high council of the largely evil Mantid. They reluctantly accept the aid of the player to cleanse the taint of the Sha from their swarm, but still remain fully loyal to it and the evil Old God Y'Shaarj, and feature as raid bosses in the Siege of Orgrimmar.
  • Patch 5.3 has representatives of the Alliance and Horde fighting against Warchief Garrosh Hellscream and his elite Kor'kron soldiers.
  • While the beginning of Battle for Azeroth massively plays up the conflict, the later parts of the war campaign and Nazjatar involve this very much; the former as the Horde leaders start believing that Sylvanas is going too far in her crusade against the Alliance, and the latter as Jaina Proudmoore and Lor'themar Theron realize that the two factions fighting is just allowing Azshara to Divide and Conquer.
• Enemy Within: New Worgen players start by being infected with the Worgen curse, turning on their fellow Gilneans, getting captured, and then treated to give them back their humanity; however, the treatment is temporary, and just as the player heads out to retrieve ingredients to make more serum, the Forsaken attack. For the next hour or so, the player fights the Forsaken while being reminded that the serum could wear off, and they will turn feral again. Eventually, the player meets some night elves who teach them about the balance between their human and beast sides. Demon Hunters supposedly have this, but aside from a few NPCs, the "inner demon" is completely under their control.
• Enmity with an Object: The Crazed Trogg vignette mob on Mechagon Island will have an inexplicable hatred of the colors blue, green, or orange at random when he spawns. Seeing a player painted in the one that has currently sparked his ire will cause him to attack.
• Enough to Go Around:
  • For the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj event, only one player can actually complete the quest to open the gates. This player is thusly awarded a unique mount, the only one on the server. The mount is available for anyone turning in the quest during the duration of the World Event which occurred once the quest was first handed in (about 12 hours), but due to the low number of top-end raiding guilds at the time (which were the players who made the scepter to open the gates) there was generally only 1 per server. The quest can still be completed up until the Cataclysm revamp but doesn't reward the mount anymore—only a choice of weapon.
  • Some raid bosses whose body parts can be turned in at the correct NPC only ever have one such body part. Kael'thas can carry up to 25 vial remnants (which are unique, story-wise), yet the player can only loot 1 verdant sphere (of which he has 3 visible in-game).
  • This extends beyond quest items, which are at least unique—you can possess multiple copies of the same weapon. For a few days after patch 3.3, players could dual-wield two copies of the supposedly unique sword Quel'Delar before it was made "unique-equipped" in a hotfix.
  • This also goes for the loot system in the Looking for Raid and Flexible formats. Instead of having the players argue who gets one of the few items that dropped, every player automatically gets something—usually a bag of gold.
• Enslaved Tongue: The Warlock spell "Curse of Tongues" slows the target's spell casting speed by forcing them to speak Demonic.
• Entitled Bastard: In the Crumbled Chamberlain questline, the questgiver, the spirit of Lei Shen's chamberlain, who wants you to reassemble his statue body, constantly insults you if you kill monsters while assembling his body, thinking of you as his slave. This is unsurprising given that the Mogu look down on all races other than themselves.
• Equivalent Exchange: Lorekeeper Vaeldrin sought the Water of Youth, thinking it could restore the Night Elves' immortality, instead it just transfers Life Energy from the drinker to a nearby person. Later, when his daughter is killed by the Mogu, he uses the water to resurrect her at the cost of his own life.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Many examples, so much so that racist organizations like the Scarlet Crusade and the Grimtotem are the exception rather than the rule.
  • The goblin race in general, and the Venture Co. in particular, although the Steamwheedle cartel is more moderate. Maybe they just figured that it's easier to make a profit if you don't attack random adventurers all the time - or better yet, get them working for you.
  • There is also the Twilight's Hammer, and the Wyrmcult. The Knights of the Ebon Blade were once this, but then became a force of racially-diverse anti-heroism.
  • The Iron Horde is almost entirely orcs, but it does have a refreshingly high number of women in important leadership positions; for example, Azuka Bladefury, Skylord Tovra, Admiral Gar'an, and Siegemaster Mar'tak.
• Escort Mission:
  • Many and varied. Fortunately, Blizzard has made an effort to reduce the reliance on these sorts of quests in later expansions, as by their very nature, only one player or party can do a particular quest at any given time and some of the original ones could take fifteen to twenty minutes, and on PvP realms can be undone by an opposing faction player camping the end spot of the quest.
  • Inverted and mocked in a Northrend quest during which an Indiana Jones Expy pummels a snake god while you watch his back. Quest completion is achieved when he's escorted you to safety.
  • Some of the escortees are actually strong enough to fight off the enemies with the player, others stop to allow players a moment to take a break, and they as a whole tend to be less suicidal about charging into danger than most of them.
  • Lampshaded with a vengeance with a quest in Uldum. When you finish the quest, Brann Bronzebeard asks you to accompany him to The Halls of Origination, which is a considerable distance away from where you are. After travelling barely a hundred feet with several stops for Brann to "rest" he laughs uproariously and says, "Ah the old slow-walk trick. Gets 'em every time. I'll meet you there." and runs off.
  • Parodied in the infamous Tol Barad quest Walk A Mile In Their Shoes. You rescue a member of your faction from an enemy prison. Instead of heading straight out, however, he proceeds to make random guesses about where the exit might be, exploring every nook and cranny of the building even though the exit is right. frakking. in front of him. Unfortunately the quest is just as annoying as if it weren't a parody.
  • In the Dunwald ruins of Twilight Highlands, Caiden Dunwald wants you to accompany him through what he knows damn well is a Twilight ambush. However, he's so powerful that it feels more like he is escorting you.
  • In the battle against Warlord Zaela in the Siege of Ogrimmar, one of the fight's mechanics is that part of your raid must defend the faction leaders fighting Zaela's forces while another part deals with Zaela herself. If even one faction leader falls, you have to start the battle all over again.
• Eternal Equinox: It has day and night changing at the same time (sunrise is at 5:30 AM and sunset is at 6:30 PM; those are Pacific time for non-Oceanic realms and Australian Eastern time for Oceanic realms), regardless of longitude or latitude. That is to say, the days are equally long in every part of the world regardless of the time of the year, and the sun rises all over the world simultaneously. The reason is that some spawns and events are only available during the day or at night, and Blizzard doesn't want to change their availability depending on the time of year.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Several times; it's one of the few Blizzard-approved ways of humanising enemy Mooks.
  • Despite his fall into madness, Illidan's unrequited love for Tyrande apparently remained strong right up until his death — a Memento of Tyrande was found amongst his loot table.
  • Kael'thas had a close bond with his pet phoenix, Al'ar.
  • While investigating the Wolfcult running rampant among the trappers of the Grizzly Hills, you're forced by the questline to tranquilize one of its initiates so the questgiver can force her husband, who's also part of the cult, to reveal what he knows. When asked where Arugal is hiding out, he kills his wife and commits Suicide by Cop, declaring you can't do anything to them Arugal couldn't do worse.
  • During the events of Zul'Drak, the player is similarly sent to kill the ice troll Warlord Zol'Maz in his stronghold to get a key he's carrying. Granted, you need the key to release the rhino god Akali but the price you exact from the warlord and his family makes you really question whether this particular plot token is worth it. To wit, you have to kill his wife, son and daughter to make a magic Tiki mask to fight him with; upon seeing it, he realises you killed his family and is filled with rage, charging at you determined to kill you for your transgressions. As if to further drive home what kind of task you're doing, the daughter calls out for her "daddy" as she dies and his wife fights you with a rolling pin.
  • More recently, Sylvanas Windrunner tried to repair her relationship with her still-living younger sister Vereesa, and expressed interest in meeting her two nephews. In The Burning Crusade she was driven to lamentation upon receiving a locket given to.
  • It has been implied that Garrosh and the AU version of Grom genuinely bonded as father and son between the events of Garrosh's short story detailing his introduction of the idea for the Iron Horde to Grom and the events of Warlords of Draenor.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • From a certain point of view, Garrosh, despite being a warmonger against the Alliance, wants to wage war honorably, and anyone who steps out of line will receive punishments ranging from a reprimand to a summary execution. The Goblins, despite being typically amoral and focused on profit, despise Gallywix for his business practices.
  • It's said that even the most callous of the Mogu, an almost uniformly evil race that ruled Pandaria with an iron fist and considers the other races their slaves, are shocked at the cruelty of the experiments performed on Throne of Thunder raid boss Megaera, a cloud serpent transformed into a multi-headed hydra that lives in almost constant agony.
  • Skadi the Ruthless is a mixed bag. His Dungeon Journal notes that among the Vrykul, who consider decapitating Taunka or wiping out a Drakkari bloodline worthy of being called "the Dutiful", to earn the title of "the Ruthless" requires you to commit something considered "a true act of depravity". In his case, that meant hunting down anyone who harboured their cursed Vrykul children and killing the entire family. The job description makes it sound like his actions were viewed with disgust by Vrykul society at large, but also imply a certain amount of respect for him — if only that he had the nerve to follow through with it.
• Even the Girls Want Her: If the comments at WoWHead and quite a few other forums are anything to go by, Alexstrasza's◊ Stripperiffic Chainmail Bikini-clad elven form has more than a few women just as interested as the men.
  • Even the Guys Want Him: And her "brother", Nozdormu, got this reaction when his topless handsome humanoid form was revealed.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": An unintentional example with Majordomo Executus, the penultimate boss of Molten Core. Almost all players would call him Majordomo or just "Domo," because they had no idea that "Majordomo" is a title for a chief servant or steward.
• Everyone Is Bi: During the 2006-09 version of the Valentine's Day "Love Is In the Air" event. The city guards, around whom most of the event revolves, are all love-smitten, but they don't care what gender your character is, just which fragrance you put on last. And if you want to earn the full achievement for the event, you had best be prepared to swing both ways yourself. Sure, they try to explain it away as some kind of evil magical affliction, but still.... In 2010 the Love Is In The Air event underwent a revamp including a replacement storyline to which this trope no longer applies.
• Everything Fades: All corpses will eventually disappear, pretty quickly once they're looted, and almost instantly once they're skinned/mined/harvested. Except for player corpses, which stick around for up to a week if unclaimed.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Has this in spades. You'll realize this as you count up the hours you spend running away from increasingly violent and aggressive deer, flowers, and moths - on top of the demons, dragons, and old gods, of course.
• Evil All Along: Soulbinder Nyami during the Exarch Council storyline in Shadowmoon Valley and the Auchindoun storyline in Talador. Her Dungeon Journal entry for the Auchindoun instance makes no effort to hide this.
• Evil Chancellor: Lady Prestor, a noblewoman who is secretly the dragon Onyxia. And later Varimathras, a dreadlord secretly working with every other dreadlord ever met.
  • Magatha Grimtotem was this to Cairne, as we find out in Cataclysm she fixed the duel between Cairne and Garrosh so that Cairne died. She then temporarily took control of Thunder Bluff in a bloody coup before Baine took it back.
  • Averted by Spiritwalker Ebonhorn in Highmountain. He has been adviser to the tribe for as long as anyone can remember, and with good reason - it turns out he is a black dragon, but an uncorrupted one, having been rescued from Neltharion's nest. He is not evil, and completely loyal to the tribe.
• Evil Counterpart: Tyrant Velhari in Draenor's Hellfire Citadel. Her boss encounter was designed to invoke an anti-paladin or dark vindicator, complete with three phases which mirror the three paladin specs and a resource meter that she has to build up to use some of her abilities.
• Evil-Detecting Dog: In "The Fate of Saurfang" storyline, the player and Dark Ranger Lyana transform into humans to get information on Saurfang. At one point you try to get information from a dog handler whose dogs can smell through your disguise.
• Evil Feels Good: Arthas! He went from being one of the stronger - if a bit headstrong and prone to acting before thinking - paladins in the Silver Hand to the Lich King's first and foremost Death Knight... and then became the Lich King himself. Saronite and the Old Gods also have this effect on those who remain in close proximity for too long.
• Evil Is Bigger: Most raid bosses are bigger than the player characters even if the lore doesn't explain it. Justified since it makes targeting them (or even just seeing them in the confusion of a 25-person raid) easier.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: The Scourge's headquarters is located in the frigid continent of Northrend and its upper ranks make heavy use of ice-based magic.
  • Heck, the Scourge top brass don't even live on solid land. Icecrown Glacier is just a hunk of ice that sits on/close to Northrend.
  • Death Knights have an entire skill tree devoted to ice spells.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: Fel magic. Just ask Illidan and Kael'thas.
• Evil Laugh: A number of villains do this, but possibly the most well known is Yogg-Saron while he destroys your Sanity.
  • Evil Is Hammy: Yogg-Saron's COWER BEFORE MY TRUE FORM! BOW DOWN BEFORE THE GOD OF DEATH! Watch the hamminess here.
  • The Headless Horseman covers both Evil Laugh and Evil Is Hammy spectacularly.
  • Not really evil, but Mechagon mechagnomes have a rather maniacal-looking laugh animation, contrasting with their Gnomeregan counterparts.
• Evil Makeover: Quite frequent.
  • Sargeras went from being a colossal, beautiful humanoid who apparently looked like sculpted bronze to a colossal, demon-horned entity whose beard and hair is made of fire.
  • The Eredar are an entire race who underwent an evil makeover. This can range from sickly-looking greenish-blue fifteen foot giants to hundred-foot tall, red, bat-winged, spine-adorned goliaths.
  • The naga were once Highbourne, the most beautiful of the high elves, who became... naga. Some of the more monstrous ones have shells and other sea creatures fused to their body, and their Queen Azshara looks like an abomination.
  • Arthas went from a blond-haired paladin in blue and silver armor to a white-haired, glowing blue-eyed monster who wears dark grey skull and spike-covered armor.
  • Demon Hunters, while not exactly evil, get in on this too, potentially sprouting horns, cracks in their skin that glow with fel magic, or scales... and don't forget the wings and outright demonic transformations.
• Evil Mask:
  • Characters affected by sha infestation often have their possession signified by tribal masks that vary in appearance depending on the source of the infestation. They're actually a perversion of the masks carved by the Monkey King that Shaohao used to draw his negative emotions out.
  • In Ardenweald, the Drust are using gnarled wooden masks to enslave the local fae.
• Evil Matriarch: As the whole black dragonflight is evil, its top brood mother Sintharia qualifies. In Shadowmoon Valley, Yarzill the Merc is collecting Netherwing eggs to keep them out of the "wrong hands"; at first this seems to be the Dragonmaw orcs, but Sintharia appears in a repeating event showing that she wants the eggs, and Overlord Mor'ghor is willing to trade. Being an offshoot of the black dragonflight, Sintharia is probably the mother to some, if not all of the Netherwing dragons, and they want nothing to do with her.
• Evil Sorcerer: Necromancers and Warlocks are always this in lore. Though the latter may have player-controlled exceptions.
• Evil Sounds Deep: Many, many villains and bosses.
• Evil Tainted the Place: Pandaria is a continent-wide example of this phenomenon. Although it looks charming, Pandaria is infested with the disturbingly powerful remnants of an exceedingly nasty Old God known as Y'Shaarj. Although he was defeated by the Titans long ago, Y'Shaarj cursed the land with his dying breath to be forever riddled with shadows of "his former self". The curse is thought to be behind the shadowy emotion eaters known as the Sha, as well as other mysterious phenomena that plague the island.
• Evil Tower of Ominousness:
  • Hello, Icecrown Citadel! Constructed entirely of Saronite, the hardened blood of an Old God, engraved with skulls and bones and lit by chilly blue fires. Seems downright welcoming, doesn't it?
  • In Cataclysm, a seared corner of the Twilight Highlands contains a massive, jagged spire leading to the Bastion of Twilight raid. In addition, Mount Hyjal gains a flaming tower that contains a portal to Ragnaros' stronghold in the Firelands.
  • Mists of Pandaria has the Throne of Thunder, crouched atop a muddy, storm-blasted island, where every structure crackles with lightning - and the storm is created by the Throne and its lord.
  • Shadowlands introduces Torghast, Tower of the Damned. Situated at the center of the Maw, it was the in-universe inspiration for the aforementioned Icecrown citadel and is, for all intents and purposes, the Jailer's home base.
• Evil Twin: After using a teleporter, the player may be temporarily replaced by their "Evil Twin", appearing as a shadowy version of themselves for 2 hours.
  • Tinky Wickwhistle in the Borean Tundra tries to use a teleporter to escape from a Necropolis, only to get the "Really Evil Twin" buff; the "really" part is instead of temporarily replacing the Gnome with her evil twin, it permanently summons her evil twin somewhere else in the world. You meet Tinky again in Icecrown, except it's not her, it's the evil twin.
• Evil Versus Evil: Several instances.
  • Arugal's worgen versus Scourge, Dark Irons serving Ragnaros versus Blackrock orcs serving the Black Dragonflight, and Scarlet Crusade versus Scourge in Vanilla.
  • Illidan versus Burning Legion and Black dragons versus Gronn in Burning Crusade.
  • Ice trolls versus Scourge, Black dragons versus Scourge, Yogg-Saron versus Scourge and Scarlet Crusade versus Scourge again in Wrath of the Lich King. Also, the updates leading to Cataclysm caused random portals to open in any area of the game, from which elementals pour out. No matter what kind of NPCs or enemies roam the area, they would immediately engage in a fight with the elementals.
  • Cataclysm itself mostly averts this, as almost all the major villains in the expansion are all controlled or influenced by the Old Gods, and are often seen working together; meanwhile the Zandalari Trolls have not faced any of the other villains. Two exceptions are the Neferset, a villainous faction of Tol'vir who turn against Siamat, a servant of Al'Akir, and a storyline in Mount Hyjal where the Twilight's Hammer engage in a minor territorial dispute with the Legion.
  • During the Midsummer Fire Festival, Evil Versus Evil was invoked by the Old Gods. The Naga summon Frost Lord Ahune to fight Fire Lord Ragnaros, who was summoned by Deathwing, in hopes of sparking another Elemental War.
  • In Mists of Pandaria, the yaungol are often seen fighting against the mantid, and it's indicated that the mantid fought wars with the mogu in the past. Also from Mists of Pandaria, the Alliance and Horde hope to set the saurok against the mogu.
  • In Warlords of Draenor, the Shadow Council fights against the Iron Horde and Cho'gall, who betrayed Gul'dan for the power of a dying naaru. Cho'gall himself and his pale orcs are fighting against the ogres of Highmaul.
  • In Legion, the Lich King forms an alliance with the Knights of the Ebon Blade to bring the Scourge into the fight against the Burning Legion.
• Evil Weapon:
  • Frostmourne, naturally. Shadowlands reveals that it was forged in the Maw.
  • Xal'atoh, Garrosh's Old God-corrupted replica of Gorehowl, which whispers to the player when wielded.
  • Legion introduces "Xal'atath, Blade of the Black Empire", which is not only evil, it will talk to you. And try to get you killed for its own amusement. After losing its power at the end of that expansion, it turns up again in Battle for Azeroth and successfully manipulates the player into handing it over to a different Old God.
  • Remornia, Sire Denathrius's murderous sentient sword. Rather than being wieldable, players can obtain a miniature version of her as a Battle Pet.
  • In Tazavesh, the Veiled Market, the Grand Menagerie encounter begins with Cartel Xy auctioning the Edge of Oblivion, a supposedly demon-cursed axe. In the third phase of the fight, after causing a distraction, the goblin Venza Goldfuse attempts to steal the axe only to find that the curse is indeed real, and the group must kill her when it drives her berserk.
• Evolving Title Screen: The login screen was updated with each expansion pack as seen here.
  • In Vanilla, the login screen showed the Dark Portal.
  • In The Burning Crusade, the login screen again depicted the Dark Portal, but from the Outland side. Outland's Alien Sky is visible in the background.
  • In Wrath of the Lich King, it was a view of Icecrown Citadel, home of the eponymous Lich King.
  • In Cataclysm, it showed one of the walls of Stormwind, half-melted by Deathwing perching on it.
  • In Mists of Pandaria, it shows two gigantic Mogu statues in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. At the end of the expansion it showed the same statues destroyed, mirroring the zone's destruction in-game.
  • In Warlords of Draenor, the login screen once more depicts the Dark Portal, this time on Draenor, set to the backdrop of Tanaan Jungle.
  • In Legion, the backdrop is a massive Legion portal guarded by demons with the Twisting Nether and Legion-decimated planets in the background.
  • In Battle for Azeroth, it shows a wall of a fortress with the banners of the Alliance and Horde and the weapons and armor of their fallen members in the front.
  • In Shadowlands, it depicts Icecrown Citadel with a shattered sky leading to the setting's afterlife above it.
  • In Dragonflight, it depicts Valdrakken with Alexstrasza in her dragon form swooping down from a tall tower.
• Evolving Weapon:
  • Most followers in Draenor Garrisons will gain a new weapon as their weapon level increases.
  • In Legion, every specialization is given one or two weapons that get progressively more powerful as the player progresses.
  • In Battle for Azeroth, you get evolving armor.
• Expanded Universe: Specifically, the Warcraft Expanded Universe.
• Expansion Pack: Nine have been released. The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, Warlords of Draenor, Legion, Battle for Azeroth, Shadowlands and Dragonflight.
• Expansion Pack World: Contrary to popular belief, while World of Warcraft adds a new "continent" in almost every expansion pack, almost all of the locations so far have predated World of Warcraft itself, making it an aversion.
  • Outland, a quite literal expansion pack world, could be visited as early as Warcraft II, and was visited as Outland in Warcraft III.
  • Northrend, introduced in Wrath of the Lich King, was first established in Warcraft III.
  • Cataclysm largely added previously inaccessible, but clearly existent, areas. Access to some of the elemental planes was made available as well, but they were already quite detailed in Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game.
  • Pandaria in Mists of Pandaria was greatly elaborated upon from its previous mentions, but it had also been detailed previously in Warcraft: The Roleplaying Game, not to mention that most people being unaware of its existence and it being isolated from the rest of the world was a major plot point.
  • The alternate Draenor in Warlords of Draenor comes close, but knowledge of and access to this new timeline was as new to the characters in-universe as it was to the audience.
  • The Broken Isles in Legion are a reimagined region that was first visited in Warcraft II before being elaborated on further in Warcraft III. The planet Argus, however, might be the closest, as it was first introduced to us during The Burning Crusade. However, even for Argus, we learned about it at the same time we first met friendly natives from the planet, so it was justified as to why we hadn't heard about it before.
  • Nazjatar, Zandalar and Kul Tiras were mentioned before, but never explored until Battle for Azeroth.
  • The Dragon Isles are now much newer than Argus as far as whole cloth new continents go. The first mention of them is in Battle for Azeroth, although there were generic dragon-themed maps as soon as Warcraft II.
• Expecting Someone Taller: In Torghast, you can find a Maldraxxi prisoner named Bloodletter Phantoriax. When you talk to him, he directly quotes this trope when he says, "So you're the Maw Walker? I expected you to be taller."
• Expendable Alternate Universe: Played with in Warlords of Draenor. Until we could break the connection between the two universes, what happened with their world was a legitimate threat to ours. As part of that goal, we ally with many groups native to that timeline and help them out, to the point where a main universe character even sacrifices themselves for an alternate universe character. However, once our work is done, we go our separate ways despite the help that we could still provide each other.
  • And the continuation of that alternate universe from the Mag'har orc allied race recruitment quest chain shows that left to their own devices, a lot of the perceived 'good guys' have gone stir crazy from the lack of demons to fight and begun forcibly converting the natives.
• Experience Booster:
  • Leaving a character in an inn or a capital city increases the character's blue xp bar, which increases the xp gained by 100% up to a point where gains return to normal after killing mobs.
  • Some of the heirloom items (namely, headpiece, cape, shoulder pieces, torso, legs and rings) don't just have stats scaling with the player's level, but also boost the experience gains while levelling. (The experience boost from heirlooms was removed in Shadowlands and replaced with set bonuses.)
  • Some consumables temporarily boost the xp gains such as a potion from the Draenor garrison.
  • Up until level 90, Monks have access to a daily quest that grants a one-hour 50% bonus for the xp gain.
  • In March 2020, in order for players to fight boredom during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Blizzard granted an unprecedented 100% bonus for the xp gains, which was extended up until the Shadowlands pre-patch.
  • Since the Shadowlands pre-patch, each major new patch is preceeded by a few weeks of 50% bonus for the xp gains so players will have their alts ready faster for the new content if they want. The Dragonflight pre-patch had a 100% bonus, yet again.
• Explosive Breeder: Lindsay is a pet battler in the Redridge Mountains who uses three rabbits, and is surrounded by them; she says she started with two, and now she has lots. It's a good thing too, considering how many adventurers come along and kill her bunnies.
• Expy:
  • The draenei in their Burning Crusade version have certainly been heavily inspired by the Minbari, with their crystalline architecture, accents like Mira Furlan's, and even having a leader named Velen, who is also a prophet.
  • Expies abound in this game. Harrison Jones is a blatant Indiana Jones expy.
  • The Iso'rath bears a strong resemblance to the Sarlacc, being a massive monster with a maw surrounded with teeth pointing downward, leading to a stomach with slow working acids. And yes, it's also surrounded with tentacles.
  • Literally too many others to list.
• Eye Scream:
  • The rogue spells Blind and Gouge, the paladin spell Blinding Light, and the death knight spell Blinding Sleet all do some form of this to the target to incapacitate them. Several NPCs also have spells that will blind players directly staring at them when the cast is complete.
  • A requirement for demon hunters; the ritual to bind a demon soul to them destroys their eyes, but their newfound powers preclude the need for them, anyway.
  • A quest for Horde players in the Barrens is given by an orc who was blinded by a sadistic Alliance officer repeatedly kicking him in the head.
  • During Winter's Veil, one of the toys you can obtain is a BB gun that you can shoot your eye out with when firing.
  • Happened to Atramedes in his backstory: as a whelpling, Maloriak gave him a salve intended to grant him sight beyond sight, but it instead left him completely blind. The mechanics of his fight are centered around this disability.
  • During the Horde Jade Forest intro is Zin'jun, a troll whose eyes were ripped out by hozen and used as marbles. Obviously, this doesn't show up on his model, but the blood gushing out of his head when you first talk to him gives the impression that this happened.
  • In Maldraxxus, Thales, an unfortunate kyrian aspirant, had his eyes removed by the Maldraxxi after they decided they were the only parts worth harvesting for their constructs and wears a blindfold as a result.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: The leader of the Twilight's Hammer has been heavily mutated by exposure to C'thun - he now has an eyeball near where each nipple should be, and two irregular bands of them around his upper arms. And yes, they do move and wink. Sweet dreams!
  • Inverted with the Old God, Yogg-Saron. His head is covered in what looks like many small, toothy mouths where eyes probably would be.
• Eye-Obscuring Hat: Demon hunters get their own versions of certain leather helms that obscure their eyes. Not that it's an impairment, since they no longer have any.
• Eye on a Stalk: An enemy in Naxxramas takes this trope to its logical conclusion, as it is literally a giant eyestalk sticking out of a hole in the ground. The game also features the Makrura, a race of humanoid lobsters with eyestalks to match.

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