There are quite a few topics within Warcraft lore one might consider METAL AS FUCK! One such of these that boggled my mind is the Path of Glory. Now, this wouldn’t be Lorehound if we didn’t give you a back story on what exactly the “Path of Glory” is and why its brutal origins are quite possibly the darkest in all of Warcraft’s extensive story. In case you don’t want to hear it from me you can go ahead and click the link above. Keep in mind that this link also cannot be credible as it mentions Me’dan and we all know that dude doesn’t really exist. LOL.
The Path of Glory is located on the Hellfire Peninsula in Outland. It is a paved road that stretches straight from the Hellfire Citadel all the way to the Dark Portal that connects to Azeroth. What’s interesting about a road you may ask? Well, this road is paved with the dried up remains of the massive amounts of Draenei that were used as souls that powered the Dark Portal itself. The path is quite literally piled with dead Draenei so much so that you cannot see the dirt underneath it. This massive genocide of the former Eradar from Argus, the Draenei that followed Velen that is, removed about 80% of the population that resided on Draenor. If you saw the movie, you have got an idea of the evil that went on around here.
…but how many dead purple furry horned alien people actually find their final “resting” place here?
It’s rather simple math once you find the pallet parameters that Blizzard uses. OH HEY! THERE IT IS!
Look at where the skulls repeat and count. Since we can’t actually tell where the beginning and end are in this pallet, Blizzard blends it rather well, we’ll just count every skull including the four circled. This comes out to be about 30-34 skulls give or take since there are some that may look like skulls and we could say that counts. We’re going to round up to the nearest five to make it 35. Now we’ll count across the major large repeating skulls within the pallet to the end of the path. The section of the path I used was just about where the first braziers start in the picture below.
From a high altitude, we can see the pattern of skulls a bit more clearly, which I simply counted across which I saw. Since this was a larger portion of the path, I made sure to get the width of the path that was somewhere in between the more thinner parts of the path and the thicker ones. Total plots counted were roughly 23. A little high school algebra – who said you never use it in real life? – makes it 23 multiplied by 35 equals 805 skulls, just within the line of plots in a single pallet. From the first set of braziers to the second set, it’s about 45 plots. Plug that in and we get 36,225. This is just the rough total between the four braziers.
As you can see above, the next row of braziers is about double the length from the first to the second. We have to multiply our total by four and we get 144,900 skulls. Then we add 144,900 for every other set of braziers since they’re pretty close to being the same distance in between each other after that. In total there are about 7 segments all the way to the end of the path. *cracks knuckles * 144,900 times 7 is our ultimate amount of skulls at a grand total of one million and fourteen thousand, three hundred dead blue goat squid people. Yup, 1,014, 300 bodies. Well, actually heads but dead either way. In my personal opinion, as “Draenei Destroyer” was one of the very few things I sought after in Warlords of Draenor, that number is nowhere near high enough. I require additional dead space goats!
For a point of reference for you guys, I went ahead and took some screens of the ENTIRE path from max flight height, or close to it, from the very line I started my count from, all the way to the steps of the Dark Portal.
What sort of things have I been doing as of late? Well, as you can see I’m really bored and uh, well. I thought this might be an interesting post. Break it down however you want, it’s not hard science. I did do a rather rough estimate on a number of skulls are through out, but at least go easy on me. I tried. I challenge you to go out and find your own path of death and do numbers and math because math is good and you can too! So the next time someone asks you how many draeni died to power the Dark Portal you can answer with confidence. You’ll be the star of the party (if it’s one at BlizzCon)!
