Lol, 'Morally Grey'.

I'm disappointed, not gonna lie.

I was desperately hoping they were gonna have Jaina show up, mass teleport the civillians out then burn down the tree herself - turn what everyone thought was gonna be a horrific act into a win.

Also super cheap they didn't kill off Malfurion.

Also, I get 'subjectivity' and all that, but that was NOT better than Jaina's Warbringer, lol. I didn't even realise it was the Warbringer trailer until it ended and I was like 'What? No song? LAAAAAME'

 

I haven't watched it yet.

No sing though? Literally could have just re-recorded Lament of the Highborne ..

 

It doesn't >_>

Where is this morally gray thing coming from, btw? Sylvanas just decided to kill countless civilians, many of which children. Not really any room for moral grayness unless they were all about to be tormented for eternity by those old gods Agayek mentioned.

 

It's from Blizzard's marketing. They made a big deal about how the whole conflict was a mess of grey areas, with no real good or bad guys. Then fed it some more by being all coy about how Tel'drassil burns down and why it sparked the deeper conflict.

 

... As a long time Horde player I'm so fucking happy I stopped during Cataclysm. Mists I could've lived with for how it treated the Horde, having us fall under the command of Garrosh and him going essentially mad with power I can live with. But there's nothing morally grey about Sylvanas murdering innocents after the battle is won, and I really don't see how I can be expected to cheer for my faction when this shit is going on.

I know the Alliance has always been the heroes, but before the Horde was at least led by people who wanted peace, even if sometimes we came into conflict. Since Cataclysm we've had Thrall call it quits and then Garrosh go insane (and have us put him down). His replacement of Vol'jin was solid, but he died and left Sylvanas in charge and she's gone full psycho "kill everything" now, which taints my opinion of Vol'jin because he supposedly did this based on a vision of the future?

Of our original four faction leaders, three are dead and the fourth went insane. Some of the new ones show promise, but having Sylvanas pull this shit makes it feel like this is the new story cycle for the Horde. We're gonna overthrow our leaders, get someone else in place, and then eventually overthrow them too (or their successor if we're lucky). How exactly are we supposed to buy that we're in any way morally equal with the Alliance? Or even further, how the fuck do we still exist as a faction after this? Who's holding us together, and could they please put us out of our misery already?

 

sigh...
Seems Sylvie is going the Arthas route...

Also, while I'm not defending the Horde...
The Horde was never morally equivalent with the Alliance. It just wasn't. It had morally justified spaces in between.
And lets not kid ourselves.
The core Horde players are still there. Waiting to ambush with their whole effing guild on anyone who teleports into Argus or any of the flight points...
Making it almost impossible to do anything with war-mode on and without a team in the broken Isles.
(Yeah, I'm a little bitter, if you can't tell).
These guys wanted to play the Anti Hero.
Having been killed over a dozen times in an hour, I am now ready to enjoy killing Sylvanas in a Raid.

Also, I wanted to see the effing shan'doodle and his princess die. (IlliBro all the way Yo. I've lost count of the people saying "I'm glad your fcuking tree burned" after watching that Illidan's last message quest.)

And ironic isn't it that the princess runs away without helping her people. Am I the only one who finds Tyrande becoming cheesier by the day?

Okay. Rant over.

Good news for those leveling toons though. Lvl 40-100 the lvling requirements and monster hp has been reduced this patch. The maximum impact is in lvl 40-80. So good time to lvl a DK if anyone plans to. ;D

 

To me, Sylvanas had always been one of the more compelling Warcraft characters, simply be the sheer amount of interesting plotpoints surrounding her circumstances. Her story of revenge against Arthas for the crimes against her people and herself and then finding herself the leader of a faction of people with similar experiences and being responsible for them is a compelling one. The Forsaken themselves were story gold in that respect. Being abominations against life but that wasn't due to choices on their own, it was something that happened to them and now they have to deal with that. Now they are a faction who are hated or at least heavily disliked and distrusted by everyone else with hard problems and advantages that come from their very nature, there is a lot of interesting stuff there. They have a hard-limit on population that bring up heavy questions on what to do. They exist now and they don't really have to be monsters and just killing them all to put them to rest isn't really the answer there but inflicting their condition on anyone else isn't something reasonable as well.

I dunno, there is just a lot to do with them and all this "hurr durr Sylvanas is even more evil now" is just squandering a lot of potential. I admit, i am not completely up to date on everything Forsaken related. I played Wc3, vanilla Wow and a bit of modern wow here and there and wiki crawled a bit so I am probably missing important details but it's just...frustrating from what I have gleamed so far. Sylvanas has a lot of potential, especially as Warchief now and if this story does go corruption by old gods, I'm going to be disappointed but I will also be disappointed if this is Sylvanas just being evil. I mean, yeah, one can like characters that are evil and not all character development has to be positive, some characters can just become worse people due to their fucked up (un)life experiences and own choices but still, Sylvanas shouldn't be doing this kinda thing imo.

Lol, I mean, is that really an accurate assessment of horde players rather than just MMO players? Anecdotal sure but I played Horde back in the day and there were more than plenty of alliance players corspecamping you in Stranglethorne and crossing that piece of land without mount was pretty dangerous. That's just MMO players being assholes because well, that's how many people in MMO's behave rather than one type of person being more drawn to a specific faction. Always plenty of people who will kill you because they can, can't imagine that being a problem more prevalent on the horde side.

 

You're not. You never were. Warcraft was never about two opposite faction whose only difference was color preference.

Horde and Alliance stand for different things fundamentally. The Horde only ever had brief periods of looking for peace under Thrall, and that had half the Horde plotting against him almost from the get-go.

 

There was this theory a while back when the Zandalari were announced that the Troll Loa of death Bwonsamdi would resurrect Vol'jin to kill Sylvanas, since he hates the Undeath and Sylvanas basically wants to raise everyone into undeath nowadays. I think they were based on some lines for leveling in BfA and the Shadows of the Horde book.

From Wowhead:
"Bwonsamdi sees undead as abominations and cannot stand their "unbearable taint" in his temple."
"Bwonsamdi regards Vol'jin as one of his favorites."
"Despite being the caretaker of deceased trolls, he is willing to put other races into his care."

I hope that comes true now, no matter how cheesy it is. It isn't like WoW has ever been some great standard of storytelling and we've seen way to little done with Vol'jin. I think Ion Hazzikostas said (or alluded) in one of those Q&As that Vol'jin's story wasn't over yet anyway.

 

Oh god the Tyrande scene here was arguably as cringe as everything Sylv does.

It's almost like everything Sylv is doing is irrelevant insomuch for her as a character. It's all to make the Alliance go hulkmode - if that's the plan, and they offered up Sylvanas to get it done gj. I know I'm going into bfa waving my #TeamJaina flag proudly, so mission successful.

Btw, there's a theory going around that all the world trees are corrupted by the Old Gods, and Sylvanas is going around cutting them off - which is kinda plausible. I've seen the corruption and knaifu never lies, then there's the Void going crazy when Alleria sees her sister etc. Still dumb though.

 

The tree being corrupted by the OGs could be true, but Sylvanas isn't cleansing the world of OG influence here. She went into this war explicitly to prevent the Alliance having a supply chain of Azerite and capture the tree. She just basically ragequit her entire wargoal that was in her grasp, capturing the objective (tree) because some nameless NElf said she felt sorry for her and that she was never gonna win.

So that theory would only be plausible if she's being influenced to do so and the OGs are always the ones doing the influencing. What do they stand to gain from burning their own source of corruption down?

 

Unless they completely go back on what they've just put to paper in comics, the OGs are absolutely not influencing Sylvanas.

When the three Windrunner sisters met recently, Alleria's link to the void was going crazy and screeching at her to kill Sylvanas.

The void fears Sylvanas.

On the other note, there's lots of shit that happened 'off screen' that we don't know about - what Sylvanas saw when she touched the Azerite, her bargain with Helja etc.

She could have told her chiefs that the goal was to cap Teldrassil but always intended on burning it, and as cringey as it is, she could have left the killing blow of Malf to Saurfang because she knew he wouldn't do it (again, super cringe. I'm putting myself in their shoes though).

It's just a theory that I saw floating around. I'm working on the assumption that they're not oblivious to the fanbase, and they're fans too.

Having said that, let's just say I wouldn't be shocked if I was wrong to give them the benefit of the doubt...

 

Saw this take that I liked.

 

Know what else would have worked? Killing Malfurion and hanging his corpse over the Temple of Elune.

 

Fighting against extinction is not a new concept for the night elves, most of their greatest moments happened fighting against the greatest odds. Sylvanas not just fails to break the nigh elf spirit and kills thousands of war prisoners to threaten the Alliance but unites the whole alliance against the horde and loses her homeland.

Killing Malfurion will just piss of the night elves and most important Tyrande.

 

Maybe not morally equivalent, but at the start of WoW the Horde was something you could be proud of being a part of. The Orcs had done fucked up shit previously, but Thrall's Horde was a return to pre-corruption Orc culture. Under him, they saved both the Trolls and the Tauren from annihilation, and brought them under his banner to fight the Burning Legion.

The Forsaken were probably the most interesting race to me at that point, because none of them had chosen to be what they were, but the Alliance (where most of them were from before their death) didn't give a shit and wanted to exterminate them. They joined the Horde out of lack of options, and Thrall accepted them in order to have a stronghold in the Eastern Kingdoms. Not the strongest ties to the Horde, but they share the narrative of being outcasts with nowhere else to go.

Conflict between the two factions was most satisfying to me when it was driven by old hatreds on both sides. We had two factions where even if the leadership in both wanted peace (and not all did), there was too much history for that to be easy or even doable. I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the two factions stood for "fundamentally different things", but as a player I could log in, like my leaders, like my cause, and have fun killing both monsters and players.

When Garrosh pulled his shit I was okay with it because I could see why he did what he did (at the start at any rate, full disclosure, I never finished Mists and only know the highlights), and it was a novel idea that Thrall's handpicked successor was driving the Horde back to being full on villainous. Having the players work against him from the shadows and prepare for his fall made it feel like a validation of the new Horde, that even if our Warchief fell to the old ways we and the other leaders would stand against him and bring us back to who we were.

Having Sylvanas do the same or worse though? Now it feels like they're sacrificing half the players on the altar of the other half's righteousness.

I'm not saying we should be a glorious beacon of justice, the appeal of the Horde was always that we were warring with our demons and the temptation of conquest. But I'm not really okay with having everything just always be our fault so the Alliance can sweep in, clean up our messes, lecture us on how horrible we are compared to them, and ride off into the sunset.

Full disclosure here, I stopped playing in Cataclysm (came back for a bit in Mists but dropped it soon enough), and have only kept up with what's happened through watching cinematics and trawling the wikis, so it's entirely possible that I'm missing things. Would love to be actually, because I really hate what I'm seeing so far.

 

LOL, 'pissing on the NE?'

Instead she does that anyway and now has nothing to show for it.

Or do you think the Alliance will be more okay with the murdering of civilians and the burning of a world tree because, phew, at least Beloved didn't die, right?

 

Of course not but can you say the same of Tyrande?

What I tried to say was: I can't see how Sylvanas could successfully break the Nigh elves' spirits.

 

The part that really baffles me is that Sylvanas stated goal was to kill Malfurion, precisely to break the NE's spirit and end the battle before it could begin.

It's like "Yo, I see we just captured our primary objective in this entire war. You go take care of that while I go do this other thing that's really quite a bit more important."

It blew my fucking mind when I saw that happen.

 

That's exactly what pissed me off the most. Proper dumb Bond shit.