The Emotional Side of MoP

As I've been levelling yet another alt recently, I've realised that the storyline of this expansion has quite a lot of emotional hooks in it, especially once we hit Siege of Orgrimmar territory.

There are NPCs who have cropped up over and over as our characters level up, progressing along with us, and then meeting nasty points in the story.

We see it with Ji Firepaw and Aysa Cloudsinger. If you've levelled a Pandaren to the point of choosing a faction, you see the relationship between these two develop, then stop as they are separated by our factional divide, then the sadness surrounding the circumstances of them reuniting in Siege of Orgrimmar when Ji is close to death and Aysa takes him out of there (if you're lucky enough to be in a group that pulls the adds torturing him anyway).

It is the story lines like these that tug at the heartstrings that have made me realise why I love the way the Blizzard tell us the story of what is happening, and I feel that we have been involved on a more personal level this expansion than before.

If you play as horde, you will have encountered Nazgrim quite a few times before finally having to kill him in Siege of Orgrimmar.

You first encounter Nazgrim in the cold north of Northrend:

He is only a Sergeant there, but it starts a journey. You interact with this same NPC throughout Wrath content, Cataclysm content and then Mists, and you see how he progresses also.

We have fought alongside this NPC through a large chunk of our playing history, and then we have to kill him. Granted we also have to kill the Klaxxi, but they warned us which side they would choose should it come to it. Nazgrim is just a casualty of his own honour, he made a vow and he is sticking to it, regardless of the outcome.

Many of us ignore NPCs in our mad dash through storylines and to get gear, but Blizzard have made a point of placing certain NPCs throughout our journey to defeat Garrosh that should tug at our heartstrings - Gamon the joke of Orgimmar, Nazgrim, Aysa and Ji - I salute you Blizzard in making me care about your NPCs as much as any one else!

And I'm sorry Nazgrim that we had to come to this.