The work of forging the armor went remarkably smoothly. Replicating it should have taken at least a week, but under the leadership of those two fanatics, Aoth and Kael'thas, one obstacle after another was overcome. In just over two days, they had already cobbled together a suit.
Although this suit still fell well short of the armor depicted in the plans, after numerous failures, its underwater combat function was largely operational.
Armor that allowed its wearer to fight underwater carried extraordinary significance. Rex had sought armor with this capability not only to deal with the Tidehunter, but also to prepare for two other races in the sea: the naga and the murlocs. These two races dominated Azeroth's boundless oceans and were their undisputed overlords. The naga were stronger but fewer in number, while the murlocs were more numerous but individually weaker.
Their vast numbers, however, were already enough to compensate for the murlocs' shortcomings.
Neither of these two powers was content to stay quietly within its ocean territory. Instead, they gathered along the shores from time to time, took over stretches of coastline, and frequently came ashore to stir up trouble.
The naga were one thing, but the murlocs were the real problem. Every sparsely populated coast was their domain, as though dry land held some attraction for them that ordinary people could scarcely imagine. Dalaran's mage institutions had studied this for years, yet still could not explain why murlocs were so fond of the shore. As sea creatures, murlocs could not survive on land for long. Moreover, if they went without contact with water beyond a certain time limit, they lost much of their fighting strength. Yet even all these drawbacks could not dampen their enthusiasm for coming ashore.
In game terms, the explanation was that monsters had to