Because we’re the baddies, by default.
Hold the phone, isn’t this a problem? Isn’t this something we should solve and not simply assume?
Destroying the Vindikaar would mean that the Horde would have destroyed multiple villages and two hubs of playable races in one attack. It would be even worse than the situation we have right now.
10000 years ago, i speak about cenarius wc3, and chronicle even mentiod that. They help, if the night elfs call them, and Cenarius horn calls them to war.
But you genodiced the Kaldorei and a few cringe inducing morons on Twitter yelled FOR THE HORDE, so you should totally feel pumped guys
Kyalin is insisting you should be pumped for an expansion they never played, admitted they don’t read the quest texts or read the various lore sources. You’re basically arguing with a brick wall droite
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Malfurion raises a wall of wisps. The grunts run to it…
Lady Sylvanas Windrunner yells: Soldiers… No! Do not rush the–!
…and are immediately killed.
Lady Sylvanas Windrunner yells: Fools… At least now we know how dangerous the wisps can be.
Best moment of War of the Thorns. Orcs are so stupid they don’t know how a wall works.
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I know. And so much of it seems revolve around “power fantasy” too. Sigh … like I feel like I’m a crazy person being so unreasonable as to demand that a single PC race not be more powerful than 12 on the opposing side… God, when was the last time the Horde was allowed a power fantasy of any sort (beyond that tiny vocal minority that revels in playing villains without risk of consequences)? Probably as long ago as the last time were allowed to even consider having Faction pride…
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Cata? Undeads? Garrosh an thread to the entire world, almost beat the alliance up, and every race in the alliance?
Power-Fantasy? My argument is builded around playerinvestment, one attacke and destroy multiple hubs would be even worse.
Don´t play a victim here, droite, i expect more from you.
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The same forsaken army that got completely embarrassed on their home turf in Hillsbrad, that army you mean?
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I don’t care about hubs. Only the Alliance players seem to care about these things.
The Horde lost one too in BfA, but you hardly hear anyone complaining about the loss of UC. Instead, what Forsaken players are more worried about is Calia Menethil robbing them of whats left of their entire racial fantasy. The Forsaken playerbase lost their capital, their two most developed characters by miles, and are at risk of losing even their own Racial Fantasy … and they don’t complain nearly as much as the NEs. Its a Luxury to care about player hubs.
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And she was referring to Kyalin, and how they admitted they don’t read the quest texts, read any of the lore stories and only big multi million dollar cinematic level wins matter
western plaguelands(Andorhal?), gilneas? Hinterland? Arathi? Silverpine? They lost ONE time, but win in all other cases against the alliance.
This shows a different focus, but no one is to be treated with priority.
… Alright, you want to get into lore details, we can get into lore details. When you pull out “12 versus 1”, we have to have a talk. This is a literal copy paste from post 78 of my thread on SoL - not that hard to find.
Typically, when it comes to Night Elf lore, the lore construction pits the Night Elves in a much more favorable light than does the in-game representation. I think we’re seeing an odd reversal of that with the Darkshore content (and for my full thoughts on that, please see the Expectations and Evaluation Criteria thread up in the lore section). I think the actual lore and logistics of the situation is far worse than how it appears.
I’m putting this up in reply to the claim that the Night Elves are putting up an admirable defense. Summoned in defense of this claim is “oh, well they’re fighting four races at once!” There are a number of factors that boosters of this argument intentionally leave out. Here is an accounting for them.
Factor 1: Kalimdor’s size - and the length of the invading drive
For basis, I’m going to rely on the accounting of the size of Feralas from traveler, cited in post #17, here:
(The forums will not allow me to post links. You’ll have to consult the post)
So, it takes fourteen days to hike across Feralas - a similarly terrained region. I’ll use some simpler math.
Average hiking speed [1]: 3mph
If we assume ten hours per day of hiking, then I get 30 miles per day - 420 miles. I am reserving time for rest, reorganization, eating and sleeping.
If the length of the drive is roughly 1.5 times the width of Feralas (look at the distance from the Mor’shan Rampart to Auberdine on the Kalimdor map - taken from WoWpedia - again, I can’t post links), then the drive is 630 miles long.
For reference, it’s 615 miles from Berlin to Paris. It will take you 203 hours, or about 20 days as calculated. But this is just walking speed. We have to also take into account how long it takes to fight an enemy. For a very favorable example, let’s take the Battle for France, which, unlike Ashenvale, passed through a mix of dense forests and open fields, and which also differs because we were dealing with mechanized armies, not armies fighting on foot. That drive took 46 days, and the starting point was certainly not Berlin. [3] The Battle for France of course is considered to be the country’s most humiliating defeat - and they still catch shade for it today.
For comparative purposes, the average speed of a caravel was 4 knots. This allows them to cover about 90-100 miles per day. That is to say that the Night Elven fleet, if we assume 20 days walking time (which is silly and unrealistic) - would have covered 1,800-2,000 miles compared to the Horde’s 615 [4]. If they are halfway to Silithus, this gives them about five days to be in Darkshore once they are contacted.
Again for comparison, the average speed of a California condor is 55mph. I think this is an appropriate measure for hippogryph flyers. [5] This makes them able to cover the distance of the battlespace in a little over a day, again assuming ten hours per day of movement time. This is important because it underlines how quickly the Night Elves should be able to send a message to their commanders. When we add in the sort of instantaneous communication that is evidently possible with Hearthstones (consider the Alliance MOP intro cinematic), those times shrink even further.
In summary, communication takes a day and change, reinforcements by sea can arrive much faster than the overland attack can proceed, and the sort of blitzkrieg that people might assume Sylvanas’s attack to be took 46 days to cover half of the distance with the benefit of a mechanized army and a proper air force. Given that the Horde does stop to fight, I will charitably assume that it should take the Horde 50 days to complete their offensive - and this is assuming the best conditions.
Factor 2: Ashenvale’s terrain:
Unlike France, Ashenvale and Darkshore are almost entirely dense forests. To discuss their impact, I would consult the observations of the German army in their war against Russia. [6] It took Operation Barbarossa five months to put that army outside of Moscow [8], which, if we take the distance from Warsaw to Moscow as the guide - 784 miles [7], means that to cover 630 miles, roughly 80% of the distance above - through forest it should take four months, or 120 days. This was at a time when the Russian military was highly disorganized, and in chaos after their own problems fighting the Finns during the winter war. You can see that the Russians took about five times the casualties of the Germans, and began the war with fewer numbers of trained military personnel. If we assume the four to one ratio, this situation is an appropriate benchmark.
I’m confident therefore in turning 20 days into four months as a reasonable timeframe, especially considering that Night Elves are supposed to be unusually talented at forest and guerrilla warfare - of the sort that bogged down the Russian Army during the winter war. When we get into four months, we have more than enough time for reinforcements from every corner of the globe to arrive in Darkshore. Caravels, which I consider to be too slow of a comparison for the era of the ships that we see, but that I’m using anyway for reasons of conservatism, can travel 10,800 miles in that time (90*120 days). This is just shy of a round trip from Los Angeles to Tokyo [9]. Given near-instantaneous communication, and that I’m comparing the Night Elf defense to the abysmal one that the Russians put up against the Germans at the beginning of World War II, there is more than enough time for the “entire Alliance” to swing into the fight. But they don’t.
Factor 3: It isn’t four against one, it’s four against three
This one shouldn’t take me as long to go through. The heavy lifting for the most part is done. Dovetailing with the information mentioned above is the complete absence of the Worgen and the Draenei, also in Kalimdor, from the fight. There’s no reason for their exclusion other than “the writers chose not to put them there”. I don’t consider this to be reasonable unless the attack was far more rapid and far more dramatic than is physically possible.
Factor 4 - Concentrations
One problem with waging an attack is that you have to leave some of your military behind in order to defend your own territory. Defenders don’t have the same problem because they are engaging using the military forces that were left behind. In assembling an attack force, the Horde has an added problem of having military forces in Silithus, and they have to have some there both to harvest the Azerite and to keep a target for the diversionary action. Saying “it’s four races against one” therefore assumes unrealistic concentrations of force that we don’t just not see here, but that we’ve never seen, and that would be ridiculous to assume in any situation. You can only attack a country with a portion of your military - not the whole thing, especially when the front you’re attacking on is not the only spot in which you are fighting.
Factor 5: Expertise
I touched on this earlier, but it’s worth pointing out again that the Night Elves are at their most powerful in the kind of forested environment that the Horde is charging through. It’s not just that they are adept at guerilla tactics and forest warfare. It’s not just that they’ve aligned their military to perform well in that environment over the past ten-thousand years. The druids and the ancients are also involved in this fight, and they too are at their most powerful in the sort of environment in which this fight takes place - and their powers include the literal control and weaponization of the very environment that the Horde is passing through.
Consideration 1: How long does the Horde’s attack actually last?
If we use the quests as a guide, no concrete numbers are given, but the text implies a length of time that suggests that Night Elf commanders and leaders are just learning about the attack by the time the Horde has passed through Ashenvale. Assuming flat walking speed and comparing this with the width of Feralas, at least a week has passed before anyone knew anything . If it takes a day or less to inform someone - and by that time the Horde has already gotten to the border of Darkshore - we’re into two weeks. This is assuming that it took the Horde no time at all to eliminate all resistance from the Mor’shan Rampart to Astraanar during that time, and that at no point they were noticed (which is immediately contradicted by Elegy). I’m going to come out and say that a fourteen day travel period for an entire army is way too long for it to go unnoticed, especially for defenders that have the benefit of either being able to contact anyone and everyone along the length of the battlespace in a day, and who also enjoy instantaneous communication as discussed earlier.
The quests do not appear to imply a length of time that’s four months, a month, or even fourteen days. Throughout the questing, the Night Elves are just learning about the attack and are just now moving in forces from Darnassus to attempt to counter it. A day might be too soon, but a week is too much given the apparent rapidity implied by the quests - for an offensive that under the best conditions for the Horde should take them four months - which by itself gives them the benefit of a more modern army and the inexplicable absence of the Draenei and the Worgen.
Consideration 2: Gamescale
The immediate retort I might get from this is the idea that distances have been scaled down because following a 630 mile offensive would be grueling and exhausting, and that this should explain the lack of Alliance reinforcements or the apparent rapidity of the attack. I think this argument implies a sort of reverse fish-eye effect, where gamescale DOES apply in one segment, but DOESN’T apply in others. As an argument I find that inconsistent and hence inadmissible. If you are going to shrink the world for gamescale, you should do that evenly, meaning that the proportions apply in how long the overland offensive takes, and how long it takes to bring reinforcements in. To do otherwise is simply to say “well, the writers didn’t want to bring reinforcements in” - which is a statement on their priorities rather than the reasonableness of the scenario.
Conclusion
In summary, the more I go to crunch the numbers on the reasonableness of this offensive, especially when we consider how long it should take reinforcements to arrive, the more ridiculous it appears. If instantaneous communication (and in some cases transportation - see Tyrande’s presence in the zone) wasn’t a thing, it would be different, but it is. Sylvanas completes a 630 mile drive through heavily forested terrain against an enemy that inexplicably doesn’t have the aid of its local allies, that should be at its best in the terrain Sylvanas is moving through, and this happens in a space of time that can’t exceed a week - maybe two if we’re being generous. To put it bluntly, the Horde’s success in this attack is ridiculous, which marks an interesting reversal of the usual trend of Night Elf presentation being worse than the underlying lore.
But again, this is all page 47-level information. None of it of course impacts how this whole mess was presented and told.
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They lost in gilneas, thats why the forsaken plagued it as they were retreating.
through the plague, they won, that is why the worgen had to leave gilneas and give up their home
Nobody won at the battle for gilneas. It was a pretty resounding loss to both sides.
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you know, if you have to leave your home…then something went terrible wrong
Gee, maybe because the forsaken were loosing so bad, they decided to plague bomb the place so no one could have it. They lost Zair, and it’s okay to admit that
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“After Gilneas fell to enemy hands, Gilneas rejoined the Alliance.”
That was from the cata-wowpage. Its even in wowpedia listed as source
The Forsaken never took Gilneas. A black dragon took control of the worgen there and kept the Forsaken out so they could do black dragon things.
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Through several battles, which ended in the loss of all the Forsaken bases aside from the Forsaken Front, the Liberation Front ended up cutting off most of the Forsaken’s support and eventually removed the Forsaken from the area completely. This was achieved through the aid from their new allies in the Bloodfang pack, and 7th legion support in the form of naval soldiers and submarines (which proceed to destroy the entire Forsaken fleet in the area). The loss of the Forsaken Fleet was enough to turn the tide completely, forcing the Horde from the tattered kingdom entirely; though a small contingent was able to secure the body of Gilnean insurgent and former lord Vincent Godfrey, as well as his henchmen.
Cute how you’re desperate to misinterpret actual events
Driven by their curse and the threat of the Forsaken, Gilneas was finally driven back into the Alliance’s fold, owing a great debt to the night elves who helped heal the minds of many who fell victim to the worgen curse. Lord Crowley and his loyal worgen; the Gilneas Liberation Front, have renewed the war against the Forsaken, advancing as far as northern Silverpine Forest. With the aid of a gnomish submarine used to break the Horde’s blockade of Gilneas,the elite 7th Legion spearheaded a vast Alliance offensive to reclaim all of Lordaeron from the Forsaken, starting with Gilneas The combined forces of the Alliance (including Gilnean and now-allied Bloodfang worgen) quickly bested the Forsaken occupiers of Gilneas City, eventually pushing them past the Greymane Wall.
However, the Horde managed to rally in Silverpine, holding back the 7th Legion and enabling the Forsaken to resurrect Lord Godfrey as one of their own, a fact that none of the Gilneans were aware of. Sylvanas Windrunner’s use of the val’kyr to resurrect fallen humans as allies forced the Alliance to rely on soldiers of other races. Crowley later surrendered to Sylvanas after she took his daughter hostage, threatening her with undeath. This signaled an end to the Alliance offensive in Silverpine, although the Bloodfang Pack expanded their activities into the Hillsbrad Foothills.
Meanwhile, Lord Godfrey rebelled against Sylvanas and killed her (although she was quickly resurrected) and took over Shadowfang Keep as an independent power. Sylvanas returned to Undercity to recover.
He gave up. The leader of the resistance gave up to protect his daughter.