wasn’t the xenedar doing their last stand after a milenia of fight? what if they just ran out of gas and that’s why their shields failed?
because the vindicar had a pretty strong shield with their golden version.
and true the horde beats jaina until we almost kill her, but it was a raid of players “the strongest horde soldiers”, the zandalari empire,the horde reinforcements, talanji fighting with one of her elementals,rokhan was busy with some kultiran forces and nathanos was freezed and had to be saved by players.
all while she creates a massive iceberg and stop the zandalari fleet.
and we don’t even know how exactly she escapes.
Now, what she could do with all that backup behind her?
or worse, with another demigod character like alleria or malfurion?
she had some kultiran forces,but not all of them,
Yup, that’s pretty much the problem. Like the OP said, the power-scaling itself isn’t inherently the problem (though it does have problems). Its that the power-scaling has not remained consistent for both factions, with the Horde not receiving any of those “One-Man-Army” like demigods to keep things balanced (in fact our only one is MIA being angsty).
Malfurion; Tyrande; Khadgar; Jaina; Turalyon; Anduin; Velen; Alleria … just look at this crap. The Horde has to throw entire armies at these people and we still can’t kill them (they always escape). Worse, we get a bundle of new Racial Leaders … and two of them are Warriors (when the hell was the last time a warrior other than Varian relevant?) Why is the Horde so devoid of Shamans?
The Faction Conflict is flawed in many ways, but yes part of the reason its flawed is because of how unbelievably unbalanced the two factions have really become. This forces the Horde to rely on WMDs and Blight, and the Alliance to pull their punches to tell any semblance of a story… It really is in many ways a SUPER HIGH fantasy faction (Alliance) vs a fairly LOW fantasy faction (Horde) atm.
In 8.1 there’s an Iron Horde ship that shows up during one of the incursions, no idea if it gets destroyed or not since the video I was watching was from a Horde PoV.
Hopefully that means we’ll get to see more Iron Horde tech.
I’m pretty sure there’s an Iron Star involved in a wq somewhere in 8.1.
Also, gronns with cannons need to be a mount since they brought them over.
Iron Horde Tech is based off MU Goblin tech, just without the blowing stuff up part. So it should be pretty high quality and not outdated.
As a note on Jaina: while obviously it’s going to be written to make her more of a threat, she does mention that it’s not her retreating, it’s her drawing the remaining ships into a trap. It’s not like a Thermopylae thing.
Regardless, point I was trying to make is that the power level of characters varies depending on the situation. Yes, canonically our characters are extremely powerful, but you do still see differences in power levels of characters. Look at how powerful Malfurion is shown to be in BfA but in Legion he was pretty incompetent.
Very well said, Jellex, I completely agree with you here.
This has become a pretty wide-reaching issue within the plot, in my opinion. Many, if not most, of the core problems with the current storyline seem to be at least somewhat connected to this.
It’s worth pointing out that Sylvanas had to get a random power-up this expansion, or the horde wouldn’t have even been able to achieve any success at all. That should speak volumes, i think.
What explicit power up did she get? She did “threaten” to Rez Blood Elves during SoO. So rezzing non-humans has been a thing for awhile, it just hasn’t needed to be shown yet.
Outside of the fation conflict, the horde gets basically no development. Even the only real horde novel in YEARS, Shadows of the Horde, was forced to include an alliance character for parity on blizzards orders.
This leads to the issue of the horde being out of focus, and failing to get required development, which i believe has to do with the fact Horde is often done after alliance. The Major story beats are already in place, so the horde gets ignored, not a true bias, just how they develop there stories. This is why many characters that either could go horde, or are horde, are turned into raid bosses, and why Dazar’alor is such a horrible city (They prioritized it being a raid for the alliance over being a functional player hub).
We get villain batted because blizzard writes the alliance perspective firt, the only time they didn’t was escalation, which was at least partly because the alliance story, Varian’s Trials of the High King, were so poorly received they canned it.
Cataclysm was the only time the horde had a planned narrative importance of a similar scale to the alliance, whih is what made thrall as powerful as alliance characters. We have several characters who should be able to rival them, Rommath, Thalryssa, Vol’jin, Talanji, Hell, even gallywix with his insane cash and talented inventors should be able to make a high class mech, but they never get the focus needed to make them seem to be as powerful as there alliance counterparts.
We have the characters, we just lack the importance to make said characters relevant.
It’s more that the writers just cannot think within the Horde mindset unless they are villains. Their creativity has stagnated to the point the story is plain for all to see. There are Sparks of it here and there throughout, but the ones behind them must not have the clout to put it into the story, where it would matter most.
That being said, I do agree with a LOT of the other posters on here. The incorporation of Blackfuse Tech; Iron Horde tech; BE and Nightborne Arcane proficiency; Forsaken Medical chemical and biological tech; and above all the manufacturing power of the Underhold (which we’re never allowed to use for some reason) … and the Horde could be a real contender.
You want to compensate for our lack of “Gods on Azeroth” then distill the power of those we SHOULD have had into the Forces themselves. If we’re not allowed to have superheroes then give us the superior manufacturing and military tech. Let us make Iron Fleets. Let us make Juggernauts. Let us be building a grimrail depot through Kalimdor. Let us be the Warhammer style faction that Blizz clearly thinks we should be … because ATM we’re just SUPER weak otherwise.
In short, if you want to balance out the factions have the Horde have the superior Forces and the Alliance has the superior Heroes. They have the Seven or Eight one man armies, we just have the better armies in general. Rather than having the Horde having to rely on entire battalions to distract a single Alliance Hero, have it be the Alliance has to rely on those heroes to make up the difference.
I didn’t hear about this at the time. What’s the story? There was supposed to be more TotHK?
Ironically, that’s exactly flipped from the way the two sides were presented in the RTS games. The Alliance was supposed to be the side with superior numbers and tech, while the Horde made up for having lower numbers by having each individual orc (etc.) be the equivalent of several humans.
Exactly. Its not such a bad thing to balance the Factions out, but not have them have the same strengths and weaknesses. Even with our oversaturation of Warrior leaders, if they’re competent field commanders leading just stronger forces … it should offset the Alliance “Plucky Heroes” strength.
However, that’s the failure of this current Horde/Alliance dichotomy … it doesn’t feel like the Alliance NEEDS their heroes to compensate for the Horde forces; it feels like the Horde forces are having to do anything and everything just to compensate for the Alliance Heroes (including having the Alliance pulling their punches … which doesn’t feel good for either faction).
Ironically it looks like the Horde and the Alliance will completely become flipped. The Alliance will have the superheroes, blue warchief. While the Horde will have the army, alliance styled factions. A lot of people do not see the Warchief position lasting after this expansion.
If they’re concerned about the Alliance perspective then why do they focus more on the Horde’s inner conflict? Even the Alliance gets roped in by believing it’s just Sylvanas’s fault.