Do they not count because they weren’t Team Garrosh?
Does fighting for his people only apply if it’s against the Alliance?
And does that only count if he’s 100% happy about who he’s fighting?
If that’s the case, the problem here isn’t Baine, it’s the overall narrative.
The Horde keeps getting cast as the bad guys in these stupid faction war storylines.
Baine can’t be Baine if he’s mindlessly loyal to genocidal warchiefs and he’s happy to fight an Alliance that isn’t doing anything heinous he needs to actively fight against.
Not any “anti-Alliance” bias, dear. Simply the humble expectation of development for a HORDE racial leader propelled by his interactions with the others HORDE LEADERS in narrative plots heavily involving the HORDE.
I’m sick of seeing Baine get developed just to favor the Alliance and to screw up the Horde. If devs believe so much he’s Alliance NPC material then they should just make him reroll, period.
I think this might have worked better as a Cold War scenario. Basically, the expansion would have started with Magni gathering the Alliance and Horde leaders and explaining the Azerite situation. All parties would agree that letting the planet bleed to death would be detrimental to them so set out to try and fix the problem.
After sealing the fissures in Silithus, they notice that the Azerite is still there. It turns out that, like with any other creature, they can stop the bleeding but they can’t put the blood that’s already been lost back in. So it’s just going sit there. Both sides quickly realize that this is an extremely valuable resource that’s ripe for harvest. This leads to a race between the two factions to secure fissures, leading to a rise in tensions between them. Magni finds this distasteful but is wiling to put up with it, reasoning that it’s added motivation to find the planet’s wounds.
Magni then reveals that there is some darkness, most likely related to the Old Gods, that is trying to prevent the planet from healing. Both sides begin mobilizing their armies to deal with this new threat, further raising tensions. They both decide that they need new allies for the coming war against the Old Gods, and possibly each other. This prompts the Alliance and Horde to court the Kul Tirans and the Zandalari respectively to secure naval power.
While this was all going on, we would see efforts on both sides to try and ease tensions. This would take the forms of npcs from both sides meeting for diplomatic discussions and quest lines where players engage in what are essentially good will missions. We would also see agents of N’Zoth try to destabilize the situation and drive the Alliance and Horde towards war. This would lead to players eliminating said agents and trying to deescalate the situation.
This would go on until the end of the expansion which would end in N’Zoth being defeated. However, a stray shot would be fired, someone would panic, and the Alliance and Horde would suddenly be fighting. This would lead into the actual war expansion. A legitimately moral-grey story where neither side wanted a war but now that it’s started, they don’t know how to stop it.
I think that would have been a great idea. It doesn’t sit right with me that right after sorta banding together to take out the Legion, we’re right back to AvH again. Makes me feel like everything is just so pointless.
I like this because it would make Azerite into a more clearly limited resource. They’d have to come up with something else to use for every second WQ reward, but I’m okay with that. Maybe you could get something to imbue the Heart of Azeroth to enable it to use the Azerite that’s in it more efficiently, or something.
Baine’s interactions with those characters are mostly conversation and sometimes being in the same battle together. In the real crisis situations, it’s Baine + various Alliance characters that have the resonant story. The biggest problems of Baine’s rule so far have been the Grimtotem incident (when only Jaina could help) and Taurajo (we all know how that went). Neither of those resulted in Baine bonding with his Horde allies–the opposite, in fact.
Huh? I’m not sure how you think I think Garrosh figures into this.
Yes, it kind of does, because Baine’s narrative problem is that he’s too cozy with the Alliance. Fighting against a different big bad usually results in working together with the Alliance–so that doesn’t really show that Baine truly belongs with the Horde rather than the Alliance, or that he is willing stand up to the Alliance on behalf of his people.
I’m not sure I can put a percentage on it. But if I don’t come out of this hypothetical scenario convinced that Baine truly fits with the Horde and will defend them, then it won’t have worked.
Baine is absolutely a casualty of the narrative. The problems go hand in hand. But that doesn’t change the fact that a facet of Baine is being neglected that needs to be there in order to make him appealing to Horde players.
When I say I want some evidence that Baine really belongs in the Horde, I don’t mean that his attitude should be “My warchief, right or wrong.” That wouldn’t help anything.
As an example, I 100% believed Vol’jin belonged in the Horde and would stand up for those he ruled–and he certainly wasn’t loyal to his warchief.
Taurajo actually was fairly heinous in the way it went down, regardless of the good intentions of Hawthorne. But I agree that opportunity has already passed, and there haven’t been any direct attacks on Mulgore since then. I’m not sure what the best chance to fix this would be, given the way the story is being written right now.
Well towards the end of the expansion when it comes time to divvy out the spoils of war they could have the Alliancr actually be something other than sickeningly righteous and try to take more than perhaps they are due for their part in dealing with Sylvanas. To which Baine stands beside Saurfang in putting their foot/hoof down.
Love the insight into the story. I think the biggest problem with the story is that they didn’t really get the morally grey aspect they were going for so they kinda changed the story half way through (kinda like WoD). Maybe if we had more quests dealing with the war and actually got to characters express how they felt we might understand it better. But then again these are the same people that turn the warchief into a bad guy every expansion because of honor when really the last time the horde wasnt changing its mind every quest on what honor was in Warcraft 3
![:grin:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/grin.png?v=6" ":grin:")