It turns out the hardest part of getting back into Warcraft is starting a new character.
Not deciding on one. That’s easy enough for me — I always stick with Night or Blood Elves and typically default to DPS before anything else. (This time around, I’m going Alliance and running with a Night Elf Demon Hunter named Tetsuri.)
No, my real problem, I think, seems to be with the story and power progression at lower levels.
You’ve probably heard or thought about this before, too. It was one thing back in Vanilla or The Burning Crusade when you’d level your character and throw down with Onyxia or Kael’thas. Even Arthas and Deathwing weren’t that much different as “big bads” in Wrath of the Lich King or Cataclysm. But now, the stakes have become increasingly absurd — as have the power differentials between new and veteran characters, level squish be damned.
And in the case of a Demon Hunter, the narrative disconnect is particularly jarring.
After all, they have a long history. You can’t really understand a Demon Hunter without knowing at least something about Illidan, the Burning Legion, the Well of Eternity, or other large swathes of in-universe backstory, all of which date back beyond The Burning Crusade and Warcraft III. Maybe you pick one for the glowing eyes or glaives, sure, but the glowing eyes and glaives are themselves part of the lore of the class.
Nor were things made any easier by the real-world production schedule. When Blizzard announced that they’d introduce the first hero class, the Death Knight, in Wrath (2008), players immediately began to speculate about potential future additions. The Demon Hunter was an obvious one, not least because of the depth of the aforementioned lore — and yet it wasn’t for another eight years that Blizzard finally sent them live.
So, when you decide to roll a Demon Hunter, you’re rolling a character that has a bit more depth than any other amateur Hunter, for example, and you expect Big Things.
And Blizzard delivers for the most part. The introductory questline for Demon Hunters puts you amongst the ranks of Illidan’s army years before his defeat in The Burning Crusade. You fight some demons, find yourself imprisoned, and then join forces with your captors to fight some more demons. Maybe not Big Things, but not too far off.
The issue is that when you’re dropped into Stormwind to join the Alliance (in my case), you’re dropped back into a world in which the most dangerous things around are wolves, a boar named Princess, and rat-men with a strange affinity for candle hats.
It’s perfect for a fresh-faced adventurer. The stakes are much lower, if they even exist at all, and quests are a matter of harvesting wolf pelts or delivering meat pies or love potions. Dragons and world-ending plots don’t have a place here. Unfortunately, the same can be said for battle-hardened demon slayers.
Somewhere along the developmental highway, they got left behind — or, more accurately, were overlooked and never fully reconciled with the layers of narrative worldbuilding. Demon Hunters might work well in Legion when the fate of Azeroth depends on their cooperation, but they don’t need tutorial questlines anymore. They farmed their own wolf pelts and moved on long ago.
To be fair, though, all of this is a problem of my own making. I could pick a different timeline and level up there instead, maybe exchanging the rat-men for snake-men or dragon-men in the process. And there’s definitely nothing stopping me from just playing through Legion and continuing to fight demons until I get “back up to speed.”
But then that raises another question: Without player choice, does narrative continuity still actually mean anything? Or does it matter at all?
You see, here’s the thing: When I was kid, I loved Elwynn Forest. It was absurd. I hated the human character designs, but I loved their starting area. No matter which other race I rolled, I’d run to Elwynn Forest just for the sake of spending the first few starting levels there.
Almost twenty years after launch, I still want to do the same thing. It’s the nostalgia factor. I want to try to remember things I’d forgotten, or uncover something new I’ve overlooked over the years. If I have to give that up just to have a coherent narrative (i.e., a linear progression in strength and development that leads me to stronger enemies), I’m not entirely sure it’s worth it.
And so I’m seemingly stuck without a viable solution. On the one hand, I ignore the underlying story for a trip down memory lane. On the other hand, I give up the past in an attempt to follow a semi-cohesive thread into the future. The Demon Hunter doesn’t get to have it both ways, at least not without abandoning the narratives that birthed it in the first place.
Until that changes, I guess I’ll just keep killing kobolds and taking their fucking candles.
