World of Warcraft®

Calling all warlock wiz's! I've got a few questions about how soul shards work nowadays, RP wise.

Background: back in the day, the only way to gain a soul shard was to kill the victim while casting soul drain. This simulated sucking out the very life essence of the victim, and the entire soul trapped in a crystalline form.

Recent patch: Corruption now has a chance to randomly generate soul shards with each time it does damage. This means you can now get multiple shards from the same victim.

Questions:
1. With a corruption spell, does this mean you're fragmenting the soul? Like the spell is ripping and tearing at your soul and random pieces just fall out in crystalline form?

If the answer is yes, then these questions follow:

2. Does this mean you can use a victim as a soul shard renewable resource? (like a thrall to a vampire?)
3. What does fragmenting the soul do to the victim? Change their personality? Create visible deformities? Or do they appear virtually unharmed as they recharge their spirit energy?
4. If the victim is alive, and the soul shard is unused, I'd gather there is still a link between the two, allowing the warlock to use the shard to control the victim through some spell. But what if the soul shard was then used/consumed for a spell, such as summoning a demon? Does the demon now have a link to the victim? Does the demon take on a personality trait from the victim? And if the demon dies, what happens?

Really it comes down to some heavy WoW religious stuff: what is the soul? Is it an energy storage we can simply renew? Or is it hardwire coding into our personality and memories, that, if torn apart, those pieces are lost until magically restored?

I see it like Diablo in Heroes of the Storm: "That's a nice soul you've got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it!" *ahem* Seriously, though...I don't think they ever adequately explained the nature of soul shards. Soulstones, yes. Soul shards, not so much. Although with my undead warlock (being affliction), I have his soul shards manifest as verdant spheres, but I digress....

As for the nature of the soul itself, I would say that there are elements of both to a certain extent. Often one talks about a "void in their soul" (or some similar phrasing) following a personal tragedy; I would imagine that having part of your soul essence drained for a soul shard would be a literal void, but as in the metaphorical sense during one's emotional low points, I would imagine that something could come along to fill that void.

04/12/2016 11:20 PMPosted by Valmy

I would imagine that something could come along to fill that void

I have to agree with Valmy. I wouldn't think of the soul as something solid, but more ephemeral, able to be restored given time and care. So the pieces warlocks get are like soul batteries, something not solid put into a manageable solid form maybe?

We also know it can become corrupted, and that corruption does manifest as major changes in physical form, i.e. a corrupted draenei turned demon. Maybe when something is pulled out, something creepy gets put back in?

Lots of fun RP stuff I would think are available here. Let us know what you come up with!

I treat it a bit like how the Winter Knight and soulfire affects Dresden in the Dresden files. Your soul is renewable, but you can expend it to do stronger magicks. It's not limited to warlocks, but Warlocks are practiced in using the souls of others instead of their own.

Hmm, I like that idea where corruption swaps a piece of crystalized soul for a piece of corrupted void. I can work with that.

This particular notion is for my priest character - trying to balance light and dark. By nature she's a good person, but her current questline is leading her to rely on darker magics, and she sold a piece of her soul to a warlock for information. I was trying to figure out what his options are now to do with that shard, and how it's been affecting her.

I'm thinking about it leading to her becoming more in tune with her shadow powers (shadow spec insanity and shadow form, ftw), and her light powers struggling to keep up until she either trades something for the shard back or finds another cure to remove the corruption.

Thanks guys!

Just keep in mind that at some point she'd need to deal with the Old Gods for her shadowy powers.

There's always the horcrux approach to separating off parts of the soul...

Creating one Horcrux gave one the ability to anchor one's own soul to earth if the body was destroyed. The more Horcruxes one created, the closer one was to true immortality. Creating multiple Horcruxes was suggested to be costly to the creator, by both diminishing their humanity and even physically disfiguring them.

It may not apply directly to the given situation, but then again, it could add an interesting dimension to it, especially since it's supposed to be excruciatingly painful to recombine soul parts after they've been split.

04/13/2016 03:38 PMPosted by Thaettir

There's always the horcrux approach

Horcrux? You mean a Phylactery.
*Grins wickedly*

04/12/2016 07:51 PMPosted by Cerulana

Really it comes down to some heavy WoW religious stuff: what is the soul? Is it an energy storage we can simply renew? Or is it hardwire coding into our personality and memories, that, if torn apart, those pieces are lost until magically restored?

Those are some great questions. It would seem to me (based solely on game mechanics) that since soul drain deals damage then it must ultimately kill a person whose soul is being trapped. This tells me that in WoW of all the things a soul might be, it is certainly an energy source. Can a Life's Essence (a soul) be renewed? Yes, in time. The how would be explained by which ever religion in Azeroth you'd follow. But if you expend that soul utterly then you leave nothing behind to renew; or is a soul eternal? I wonder how WoW deals with reincarnation. That's something I've never really explored. *puts on thinking cap*