There was a statement shortly after Darkshore came out that “Tyrande got her revenge” and the night elf story arc was over. That definitely gives me the impression that they initially had no plans at all to follow up on the Night Warrior stuff. https://www.wowhead.com/news/tyrande-got-revenge-for-the-night-elves-mmorpg-interview-with-blizzard-291733
As for whether the introduction of the Night Warrior itself was last minute, I don’t know how much evidence there is for that but throughout BfA I definitely got the impression that the devs (somehow) vastly underestimated how much night elf players would be upset over Teldrassil, so I wouldn’t be shocked if it was something cobbled together after they realized people weren’t just moving on.
Besides of flying we never saw Tyrande do anything she couldn’t do before. And she never really accomplished anything with that power. There was no point for it other than to further Sylvanas’ story arc.
Ok, to better reply this since you did in good faith and my question wasn’t exactly well worded, I’m sorry for that btw.
1 - nathanos being the warfront boss could work for sure, and I’m not exactly happy at what happened to Syra, but, at the same time I kinda see why that happened, the team probably wanted the boss of each faction to have similar mechanics (and here i go by assumption that the horde faces maiev in a similar fight, since i dont play horde at all), and they love to make wardens go crazy for some reason, Wardens are powered by vengeance so it makes sense that they are easier to corrupt, I dont necessarily think Nathanos being the warfront boss would be better or worse than Syra.
About him being killed, when the warfront came out and he flew, I was upset as well, but with how he died in the Shadowlands pre patch, to me, was better, and I think that being the second kill on him would diminish that, also I think killing a Val’kyr was objectively a bigger feat of power when we didn’t have knowledge of the jailer, so in retrospect I dont dislike that he escaped.
About the Tyrande vs Sylvanas, I half agree, I do think Tyrande should have the upper hand for most of the fight, but not kill her, because I honestly like the plotline of drawing the night warrior power into the new tear of elume that became Amirdrassil, but instead of the power seemingly fading, I would love that something would made Tyrande hesitant, and that would be the cause of the power to fade, her own incertainty (i already think it is the case, but i would make more clear). I dont think killing Sylvanas only for her to come back as a raid boss would be satisfactory for the retribution storyline, her being in hell as is now for me is much better.
For now in DF we see the spirits of the kaldorei fused with the tree tending to it, that to me is good and I hope this tree manages to do something more amazing to night elves than we are seeing now.
Tyrande never needed Night Warrior power to go melee. As a Priestes of the Moon she is already proficient at melee weapons being their Moonglaives the prefered one for that spec. Basically she goes melee mode in most of the books she’s in.
No worries.
I will respond to this wholey and in the spirit it was written, breaking down every point and responding to each is simply unmanageable and we got better things to do tonight than go over this with a fine tooth comb. So if I don’t address something completely its not because I ignore but because in the overall scheme of things I consider it inconsequential.
Lets not forget that the premise of this discussion is the enjoyement. Quality of things seen from a certain side while not being absurdly unfair to impact the other side. Like nuking Orgrimmar from moon orbit if you will.
I disagree completely simply because, and again I want to stress this point, we are in a faction war, the Horde has genocided the Night Elf population and their response is to retake their wartorn land from… a Night Elf victim. It is extremely in poor taste, its like even when they win they are losing which was and still is a big big part of the constant frustration by players.
Killing Valkyr is not a big deal, we were killing them by the truckload in Wrath of the Lichking, we even captured a few and had them fight champions in a Colosseum. Killing Nathanos the first time would give us some cathartic satisfaction.
When he is rezzed by Sylvanas, and you can only imagine the fallout from this story event for Horde players and Sylvanas character interactions…
When Nathanos is rezzed and serves as our enemy commander with the same fight mechanics if necessary in the shadowlands prepatch the players from both sides have one final event in not tracking down Nathanos but taking the fight to him and the remaining loyalists in a great battle with Tyrande killing him in spectacular fashion but we see the darkness of vengeance that is starting to consume her.
I am sure I am not the only one that would think this change would be a much more enjoyable scenario. And yes some lore facts would not have played EXACTLY but this would have been infinitely more enjoyable.
Tyrande thrashing Sylvanas does not remove the story of the night warrior power going into the seed. Everything would play exactly as it did, you show Tyrande’s punishment on Sylvanas, you would see how that power is killing her and the player would be in more favor of it stopping and we see Sylvanas getting a beat down and maybe this humiliation could be used as a cataclyst for the “I WILL NEVER SERVE” line.
Sylvanas would not die, I think you are misunderstanding, as I explained she will be beaten within an inch of her life but she would escape and she would become a raid boss, maybe even more emopowered than before by the Jailer.
Ok, I understood everything. I dont think your ideas are bad to be fair, I pointed what I think i dont agree already, so no need for more back and forth.
When the developers refuse to remain semi consistent with how powerful characters are, a ‘power boost’ as the sole actual benefit of ‘character development’ is pretty dumb imo. If you compare what she was capable of before through all sources, Tyrande seems much stronger. They allude to Night Warrior’s being OP but do nothing to show it, so actual demonstration of power makes them look weaker…
But then they also simultaneously retconned Elune to be an entity tied to a cosmic force that we really only see maybe one or 2 sources implying she’s connected to, but otherwise are presented with the idea that beings like Cenarius draw their ancestral connection to nature from MALORNE, not Elune. Like it is only ever presented as inheritance on his side, which makes the idea that Elune was always a life goddess silly, even beyond her powers being pseudo-arcane and holy and shadow, and even pseudo-death magics.
Yep, it was definitely an afterthought, that is why the nightwarrior didn’t show up after 8.1 and only in the pre-patch. She didn’t even bother to show up for 8.2.5. But another thing to note is she was actually shown to be much weaker in the PTR in the fight against Nathanos, he chains her and laughs at how weak she is until she has to run into the darkness and get Malfurion to help her, she still does that but breaks the chains immediately, then he like attacked her down to half or something, but then they changed it so he couldn’t really hit her. If people didn’t point this out during the PTR to get these extremely minimal changes it would have just been MUCH worse.
They had no plans for the night warrior and that was made pretty obvious from that “the night elves got their revenge” with Tyrande just disappearing from the game after the 8.1 scenario ad not showing up to Org when they were going to fight Sylvanas.
Then just look at what she did in Shadowlands, she shows up to jump in at the start and then disappears again until one max level ardenweld chapter. She doesn’t actually impact the story, you could remove her and the nightwarrior and nothing actually changes, the Sylvanas fight was actually pointless and until she turned into a comet to surprise Sylvanas she was just fighting sylvanas to a stand still until she threw away her weapons and did some pointless flips before sylvanas flew away.
You can tell they put zero thought into the night elf story after WoT, there was also another interview where they said they thought Maiev would become the night warrior, you know because of the avatar of vengeance, but they said she had her story in legion for some reason. The night warrior power really served no purpose and could just be removed from the story, as they removed it in Shadowlands, and nothing would have really changed.
Yeah, that was pretty silly, was just a random orc too. Then we can’t forget how she is not vengeance incarnate and says she will never let another enemy live again or something to that respect before of course sparing Belmonte almost immediately after saying that.
I had no idea why Tyrande needed that power anyway, it did nothing for her and seemingly made her weaker especially in the intro cutscene, she cut through all those enemies herself to even do the ritual then needed help afterwards.
I think Tyrande overall suffered from willful mismanagement, followed by the abrupt change in leadership. Afrasiabi likely did not plan to ever do anything with the night elves after they were pushed to Stormwind, just like WoW has never done anything for any refugee population forced to live somewhere else. The Gnomes have been doing such since Vanilla after all, and the Worgen since Cata. There was never really a strong outrage about any of those and he was too busy trying to drag Sylvanas through the mud to spite Danuser in their little feud and drinking himself silly to consider possible outcomes despite how much dissent his actions were causing in the team.
After his unceremonious ouster the staff that had disagreed with the War of Thorns tried to do what they could, but at that point the die were mostly cast. Its like trying to change course for a cruise liner ship. Add to that the fact players responded to having a genocidal effort put on their screens they helped cause this time very poorly… the outcry was huge, putting pressure on them to do something about it yesterday. Their effort was rushed and mostly bungled by all the hoops they had to jump through to navigate what already was made. Every time people rejected the Night Warrior arc, they seemingly has a serious case of suck cost fallacy going on, so they kept trying to double down to make it pay off so people would like it.
It was all a mess and there was never going to be a real way to salvage it… so honestly, they likely should of cut their losses a lot earlier.
This is all kind of speculative, there was no disagreement or concern about it at the time up until his ousting, then in typical blizzard fashion they just blame the unpopular story on someone else, just like they tried to do with Exploring Kalimdor, the author said he didn’t know who put the parts people on twitter didn’t like in the book but it wasn’t him. They never really “doubled down” to try to make anything pay off for the night warrior, it was a pointless plotline in Shadowlands that centered around getting rid of the powers from BfA that never really did anything then, without actually showing what they can do.
You can’t just blame everything on Afrasiabi, it took a whole team and they seemed pretty happy about it, even making “logs of teldrassil” smores in the cafeteria right after. But yes, it’s pretty clear they had no plans for the night elves after WoT, but you can’t really say they tried to please anyone with the pointless wheel spinning plot in shadowlands or doubling down. They couldn’t even be bothered to move the refugees out of stormwind AFTER a time skip so they’ve really been in stormwind for almost 10 in game years until 10.2 where we go kill more night elves after night elves were the bulk of the primalist forces we get to kill more night elves as druids of the flame.
I also don’t like using Afrasiabi as a scapegoat. Don’t get me wrong he’s an awful person and awful writer, and he can be blamed for the initial pitch. But he didn’t go in and singlehandedly write every quest or the two short stories, and the story’s still been bad since he left. The other writers’ hands aren’t clean here.
Lets be honest. Night elves have never been a favorite of writers. Whether before or after Afrasiabi left.
A conversation between Tyrande and Varian in MoP. Terrible dialogue in Val’sharah. Ignoring night elves after WoT. Quick change of Night Warrior from Maiev to Tyrande because they felt that Tyrande would have nothing to do in story. (Seriously, writers didn’t foresee a role for a leader of the race whose capitals they wanted burned down. XD) Terror of Darkshore was never intended to be a thing, it only came thanks to Terran Gregory who insisted to make it. In SL, Tyrande’s story was redundant.
DF isn’t better. At the beginning of expansion, we must killed NE Primalists with Teldrassil burned scar. They got the weakest Heritage Quest where we see killed and corrupted NE souls, again. Even on ptr the newest patch we kill Night Elves again in the form of druids of the Flame. And of course Malfurion useless sacrifice. How can I be mad at Afrasiabi about story when he hasn’t been in the team for over 3 years?
I feel like the Guardian of the Dream is supposed to be a big apology cake for Night Elf players. However, what I see in ptr and the rest of dragonflight still worries me. I must admit the level of writing is slightly better than in SL or BFA but, it is still not fully satisfying story.