Behold, the Mighty Power of My Hearthstone!

So, yeah, I'm in Northrend. Took the boat there, and Bellwether's been sending me all over the place. It's crazy! Like, apparantly, if I spend all my time in the Howling Fjord, I'll miss the robots that I can engineer into pieces in the Borean Tundra. But if I spend all my time in the Tundra, then I miss out on pirates. I'm not sure why I have to go to the pirates, but taking down that insane guy and then killing his bear with no back-up will be some good practice.

Anyway, I started out in the Fjord. Pretty place, but there's way too many giant smelly guys who apparently just love to work out their frustrations by running headlong into our base. I don't know what they're so angry about. Perhaps not everything is to scale? But, what a way to compensate.

Well, there's this one quest there where you have to go into some sort of shadowy area and there's these winged ladies who are wearing too little clothing flying around, and you find out that you humans are the offspring of the giant Vrykul (nice to know your whole race is just a weaker deformity of a larger race, no?). And guess who's there?

Arthas. Oh, I was ready to give him a piece of my mind. Except replace "mind" with "axe" and "a piece" with "the entire bladed head." However, Arthas is apparently too much of a pansy to take me head on, and froze me in some sort of bubble. It was pretty weird. I kind of just froze. I couldn't even bubble myself, and that always works!

And then, as I'm a captive audience and the guy loves the sound of his own voice, he started yammering on about if I "feel it" and "languishing" and "souls" and "eternity." I really only caught the "eternity" part because it so accurately described the self-important spiel. And you know the winged bitches were bored, too, but they're scared to death of him.

He looks kind of fat in his armor.

Anyway, this whole time he has his back to me. I suppose it's dramatic? And then he starts going on about how I'm not powerful enough to serve him yet and it's not my time. If my eyes weren't frozen in place, I'd have rolled them. Well, it seems at this point the Bitch King had decided that I needed to die to prove a point, and that just wasn't in my plans. Weird that some almighty undead monster of a man can stop even a pally bubble with his weird stasis thing, but he can't defeat the power of the hearthstone.

What a scrub.

Unconscionable

World of Warcraft has never been a bubbly, friendly place. Most of your quest objectives require the death of all sorts of different species, people or “abominations.” But, with few exceptions (like Stitches), you’re always the “good guy,” or the heroine. There’s not much recrimination for what you’ve done. Sure, if you go at war with the Booty Bay goblins you get friendly with some pirates and they give you a hat and you get a title. That’s actually a reward for going “bad,” and goblins outside Azeroth don’t seem to really care.

What WotLK seems to focus on, intently, is guilt and consequences.

Look at your quests. Several involve torture. Many involve willing genocide, the capture of infants, or deaths of once-allies. In early quests you do what the Kirin Tor are too good for, and then you kill a sorcerer forced into service against her will, and receive a letter from a grieving parent who doesn’t know you did it.

Face it, you’ve always done “bad things” while playing WoW. You’ve killed other players over flags, you’ve killed ogres for a piece of paper they drop (ogres who call you their king, even), you’ve invaded castles and jungles and just wreaked havoc so you could get some gold or gear or sometimes save the world (not necessarily a bad thing). You’ve decimated the populations of entire species for achievements and Nessginwary.

WoW is just finally making you notice that maybe, just maybe, what you’re doing may not always be okay. That you might not always be in the right, and you can’t always be the hero. Not even a paladin’s armor comes out untarnished, nor a priest’s. Everywhere there is genocide, racism, mistaken identities, dirty secrets and righteous causes that have terrible costs.

I have not yet experienced the culling of Stratholme, so I cannot speak for it. But from what I have experienced so far, WoW has stripped away the shiny veneer of the quintessential “hero” with a heavy application of guilt and bloodshed. It’s much more real now that your actions have heavier consequences than simply a frown or an “oops.”

For the Heal Chest

To get the Lifewarden's Breastplate, there is a series of quests you need to complete, ending in an elite who you will need a small group to complete.

The chain:
The Archmage's Staff is a quest in Netherstorm which you receive from Ravandwyr in Area 52. You will have to complete this quest, the next step (Rebuilding the Staff) and then the third step (Curse of the Violet Tower) to gain access to the actual chain which ends in the breastplate.

This quest is called Malevolent Remnants, is from the npc Custodian Dieworth, and is six steps long. The last quest is called Destroy Naberius and, after you kill him, you are rewarded with your leather healing chestpiece. Congratulations!