Another Purge Thread

It’s time to return to the story forums favorite topic the PURGE OF DALARAN! But today we aren’t covering the old complaints, oh no, we already have enough threads about the exact defintion of genocide and if the elves deserved it! Today we are talking about WHY IT IS POORLY WRITTEN!

Ok now that the intoductions done and overwith, time to talk about why i pesonally hate the purge from a writing standpoint. First and biggest point. What. The. $@^#. Is. Happening. The entire set up makes no sense, the Horde story shows the portal was from the Vale to Darnassus, like straight there and back, why is there a portal in Dalaran? Even if they used the Dalaran portal Network, they didn’t even open one in the city itself. It says it’s a sunreaver portal, but it doesn’t connect even the zones! A simple fix would be to have the portal be in Dalaran, in some Garrosh Loyalist Basement.

Following that the fact we aren’t given an actual name of who used the portal network to teleport it. This sucks because, despite us knowing hordewise that the majority of the sunreavers are innocent, we don’t have the actual name of the traitor. This makes it a lot harder to sympathize with them allianceside, which i feel is another missed opportunity. Your Sympathy is supposed to come from the “The blood elves were gonna join the horde” line from Varian, which also serves to make Jaina look like a fool to prop varian up (A running theme of mist it seems). If you really wanted the event to be morally dubious, make it appear MORALLY DUBIOUS ALLIANCESIDE! You have no problem doing it hordeside, so why not let the alliance actively be a bit evil. I’m sure the alliance players won’t care they hate the horde, and you’d let the horde have actual grievances.

Finally, it amounted to absolutely NOTHING! Dalaran was neutral again next expansion, the Horde wasn’t allowed to be upset by it in universe, Jaina’s character became a cluster@*@^ that only got any resolution allianceside (Which i feel was rushed), hordeside it was just “jaina no longer hates you for some reason”. Rommath and Lorthemar became irrelevant again. It was completely pointless! And thats the worst a narrative event could be, pointless!

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it wasn’t pointless it was so the belfs can stay in the horde and nothing less.

I’d give it an hour or two before this is completely untrue.

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Was it ever stated what happened to the Sunreaver prisoners in the Violet Hold? I thought that was going to become a big plot point, maybe mirror what would happen to the captured Theramore civilians, but… they just sorta got dropped.

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apparently they were released between the end of SoO and Warcrimes.

maybe less!

Jaina Did Nothing Wrong.

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But the writers sure did!

That was a plot point added solely for the Varian scolds Jaina moment. While hinted at before it was never gonna go through.

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That’s not true. It lead to a survivor of the Purge throwing Baine under the bus so he’d have a shot at getting revenge for his friends and family!

Then we team up with Jaina to prevent her from being on the receiving end of justified revenge because she happened to decide she was pro Horde Living that day.

All of this, of course, coming right after a big raid in which Jaina leads an offensive that causes the death of a Horde character’s beloved father and said character shouting how she will have her revenge.

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I just check some youtube video, Alliance side the portal did connected to Dalaran and in fact the portal Jaina found was a portal straight to Dalaran. My best guess is blood elven goons loyal to Garrosh opened said portals after the Horde PC left, Garrosh wanted the event to prevent the blood elves from joining the Alliance.

The Alliance is not suppose to sympathise with the Horde! The point is the player was not suppose to know that only a select few even knew about the whole divine bell plot thus justifying the purge itself.

Because I doubt the goal was to make the Alliance “evil”. The whole fantasy of the Alliance is to be the guy who fight with rightous fury. The point was a “fist bump” moment not a “oh your now worse/as bad as the Horde” moment.

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I think her complaint is that Hordeside, the player goes straight from Pandaria to Darnassus with no Dalaran in between.

If I remember right, the magi who open the portal were labelled “Silvermoon Mage” or maybe Reliquary - not specified as Sunreavers. While the beta had a confrontation with Aethas to show that yes, this was done by some of the Sunreavers, that got removed and any specific detail of Sunreaver involvement with it, so it’s not obvious to Horde players why the Purge was started.

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“Players receive a 30 minute buff - Darnassus Invader - that grants stealth in order to travel through Darnassus. They also receive an ability button - Sunreavers’ Portal-Charm - that can be used, with a 60 second cooldown, if they lose their buff.”

You can either look at it one of two ways, the Sunreaver colaborator was trying his his/her best to hide their involvement. Or they were actively leaving clues so the Alliance would create a divide with the blood elves.

To the Horde player the reason should be obvious, blood elves were helping the Horde hence. Nazgrim tells the Horde PC the Alliance discovered the Sunreavers were helping the Horde. If anything I find the subtleness of said clue interesting.

We finally have proof(thanks to that ability button) that the Sunreavers did help in stealing the bell.

To me, the Purge was Blizzards attempt to try and appease the Alliance playerbase and give them something in return for the Bombing of Theramore. The problem stems from your final point though.

It literally amounts to nothing. The Horde are allowed back in, Jaina goes back to sympathizing with the Horde and we still have a crater in Dustwallow Marsh. Nothing in the middle needs to make sense, because it never needed too.

The Purge is either dismissed, or used so sparingly that it could have not happened in the lore and we wouldn’t know the difference. If the Horde were still expelled from Dalaran, and they needed a different hub city in Legion, that would be a different story. But as it stands? Totally pointless. It’s why the details of how/why it happened don’t even matter.

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Frankly all of the blood elf-angled mechanisms for fanning faction hostility were extremely forced and unnatural, being driven too often by the Alliance reacting to actions on the part of blood elf individuals who were invented solely for that purpose, and whose sympathies are never really put on display from the Horde player’s side of things, let alone remotely implied to reflect any prevalent attitudes of their people at large.

I mean, for all intents and purposes Theramore’s bombing and the theft of the Divine Bell were both in no small part the doings of blood elf magisters - at least some being Sunreavers - who were apparently so insanely loyal to Garrosh that they were glad to keep Lor’themar in the dark and implicate an uninformed Silvermoon in their actions for the Warchief’s benefit. Evidently not one of them batted an eye at the idea that Garrosh didn’t trust their own people’s leader with knowledge of what he was having them do, even though it would have been obvious to anyone involved that Silvermoon and its citizens abroad (i.e. living in Dalaran) would take the brunt of the blowback from their operations.

Yet conveniently, these apparently ultra-patriotic “more-Horde-than-sin’dorei” elves spontaneously evaporated from the story immediately afterward, never to return in a meaningful capacity so we could all act like there was no actual basis for Jaina’s conclusions about what had happened.

What’s worse what little hint we saw of something coming of it vanished as well when at least Thalen - whose over-the-top gleefully vicious behavior while betraying Theremore and Dalaran frankly made him seem more like a Legion plant than just a Horde loyalist - appeared during Garrosh’s escape in War Crimes only to once more vanish along with any hope of a coherent resolution to the absolute circus of random agencies and miscellaneous characters who showed up to collaborate in Hellscream’s jailbreak.

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The only mention of the sunreavers at all in the horde questline was the portal was called a sunreaver portal, but as you said, the sunreavers didn’t even open it hordeside. It’s so stupid, like you wanted some sunreavers to be evil, have the sunreavers be evil. Don’t just shove a completely different portal in the alliancequest and have them not show up at all hordeside.

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I was about to hold Jaina accountable for this, but then I realized that it was elves we were talking about.
#goodjobjaina

In fact, that’s what I’ll call Jaina from now on. Good Job Jaina.

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is like one side got the cannon version and the other got a vision of n’zoth.
hell maybe 50 % of the horde experience is like this.

aethas betrayed her, while she got a little emotional is not like one day wake up and decided that it was a good day to kill elf.
and plus, she only targetted the horde ones, if she was really racist she should also target the helfs under her command!
#jainadidnothingwrong.

She also killed Aethas’ guards before she even asked any questions and ordered the Purge. Then put the group expressly created because they hate the Sunreavers in charge of the Purge without looking too closely at how they went about it all.

So she did something wrong, by her own admission even, it’s just that Blizzard doesn’t care to put a number on it so it doesn’t count. Oh and she got played by Garrosh of all people, which is absolutely hilarious.

I’m at the edge of my seat waiting to see if Blizzard is going to treat the Burning like they do the Purge or not. If Sylvanas pulls a good guy play out of her hat and the Burning becomes necessarily to save everyone I might actually laugh myself right back into the hospital.

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Both the Purge and the destruction of Theramore where things I had to learn of, I’m pretty sure on these forums. Hell until reading this post I honestly couldn’t have told you if it happened in Cata or MoP.

Theramore is decidedly still there in my game world as I was never directed to do the quest that blows it up. Side bar - that was the least interesting cutscene imaginable for what was described as a dramatic event.

And as for the Purge bit, the Horde are never excluded from going to Dalaran. And as I’d come back into WoW with Legion I had no indication the Horde and Dalaran were ever at odds. I didn’t really question why it was Forsaken guards instead of the Sunreavers I just figured they weren’t present because they weren’t terribly relevant to the situation.

Like say whatever you will of Teldrassil and the Undercity but I think it’s going to be pretty damn difficult to not notice those missing.

not really, aethas should have to run directly to tell her and not wait until he was confronted.
She was right when she said that he only spoke when he had no choice.
like i said, she kinda go a little emotional and the situation get out of hand, but she was right, the sunreavers betrayed her, again.
i would be really angry if she simply acts like they didn’t nothing.

Hmm? garrosh was being written as a military genius who was willing to do anything for victory. weird jab right there.
if anything that would make everyone else, horde and alliance leaders like complete clowns. not just her. considering that he almost won.

i don’t think that is going to happen, but not gonna lie that would be funny how the forums would implode. and of course those who are going to get blamed for it are going to be horde players. just pure madness.

the ingame representation was absolute garbage, you really need to read the book to know the implications, and emotions behind it.
also, that cutscene has no soul.

it was like the war of thorns, ingame is just… a mess. like it is embarassing.

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I will still argue the War of Thorns was great until it wasn’t. I still remember one of the WQs where Highborne ghosts are possessing Horde and Alliance soldiers alike. I ran out of Horde to free and killed the ghosts controlling a Nelf, who still being identified as hostile I just attacked immediately after. Then she said something to the effect of ‘So much for honor’ as she died.

I then discovered the freed Nelves would pause, give you a /nod and run off if you didnt engage them.

“Wow”, I thought “Through gameplay I, the player, get to decide how brutal this war will be? Gold star Blizz that’s really cool”. Man. I really miss being excited for a Blizz narrative. Short lived excitment but man that start was promising until the rug was pulled out.

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