Plot favoritism/demands aside, do you think Jaina being around could have altered the course of the War of Thorns?
From The Schools of Arcane Magic
Lady Jaina Proudmoore is a skilled practitioner of transmutation magic. She has developed a powerful variation of the popular mass-teleport spell that is capable of moving a significant percentage of her army with minimal effort. This spell helps make her extremely unpredictable on the
battlefield.
A major negative for the night elves in WoT was inability to transport troops (though this was conveniently ignored twice in the BfL). Could Jaina have teleported more troops including Stormwind’s army in time to the battlefield?
Jaina has powerful ice magic and could have prevented a lot of the initial burning of forests (in Darkshore and Ashenvale) that took place, or even significantly reduced the fires in a city like Darnassus. Ofcourse, Teldrassil is a huge tree so putting it out may not be easy, especially considering she would be taxed after fighting the Horde.
Jaina could have teleported Malfurion to safety, allowing Tyrande to get back into the battlefield early. Ofcourse, this is assuming that Tyrande still has a decent army left to actually keep fighting.
Even if everything else occurred the way it did, Jaina’s use of frost and teleportation could’ve recovered a lot more survivors from Teldrassil, perhaps a lot more efficiently than was done.
I think Jaina should feel a bit of guilt for not being present during the WoT considering it was definitely a battle where she could have made a difference.
I mean…Jaina just shows up at Lordaeron with no explanation whatsoever and appears to have first learned about Teldrassil when Anduin is having a conversation the Sylvanas in the throne room.
I’m not joking either, Blizzard has never explained why Jaina went from raising her father’s boat after leaving the Kirin Tor to attacking Lordaeron.
Honestly a better storyline would have been having Jaina burning Teldrassil and framing the Horde, but we cannot allow anything to happen to precious Waifu Jaina (that’s how that works right, that’s what I’ve been told as a Sylvanas loyalist for over a year now).
And yes Jaina could have prevented Teldrassil the same way she could have prevented Varian from dying on the Broken Shore.
Wasnt the fire that burned Teldrassil from azerite munitions, i dont think she could have stopped the actual fire. She definitely could have crushed a lot of the horde forces though and stopped them before they got to the tree.
That was an early theory, but no there was no Azerite involved at all. That would have been far too clever and on point. It’s literally just fire balls from physics-defying, intercontinental ballistic catapults with flames fed by the shamans.
That’s it. All that speculation and it was just a few catapults. It’s amazing Teldrassil didn’t already burn from a stray lightening bolt or campfire.
You think that’s a better storyline I think that makes even less sense than what we got. Jaina hates the Horde, she’s not about to commit genocide against her allies to get to them. Even at her worst she wasn’t that insane.
Funnily enough some trees do combust like that by design. If Teldrassil was a dry enough tree in the stump section a stray fire could cause it to ignite no matter how green the top is.
Basically, they were created with the purpose of being able to hit the night elf fleet from really far away, and the magical fire was to allow it to spread rapidly over boats and even on the surface of water. Shamans further encouraged the fire to spread.
It succeeded in its task for driving off the night elf fleet, and was later used to strike Teldrassil.
I don’t understand this logic. I mean, I get it’s followed- but do the writers really understand the consequences of what they’ve written?
Any city, any town, any village, any object or person now becomes easily destructible with mediocre magic. All Azerothian physics and biology be damned. And that should reflect in the story with destruction all around, but are they really willing to show that?
She would definitely have an impact on it, but it’s unclear how she could be written in an acceptable manner. The more she does, the more absurd her power becomes relative to everyone else’s. The less she does, the more absurd her presence is (similar to Broken Shore, how she’s there mostly to make a bridge but is then conspicuously absent for the bit with Varian at the end.) She certainly can’t fight Sylvanas, because at this point there’s no way to handle that in a even vaguely believable manner (this was true even without the Saurfang duel and the Bolvar fight).
…
Thinking on it further, this also reminded me of how absurd her role in BoD was. she doesn’t teleport anyone out but rather makes the Alliance retreat with boats. She fights the Horde on their boat, creates an ice island to keep fighting them, and almost loses to a bunch of horde grunts and Nathanos shooting one arrow at her. She could have avoided all of this by just sinking the boat. Oh, but shes then fully healed by the next cinematic (but Mekletorque is on life support in his little pod).
ignoring plot demands? Absolutely. The Horde wouldn’t have stood a chance if Malfurion had another powerhouse there with him.
Which makes it all the more annoying that Jaina raised up her floating ship from Theramore and started making her airborne voyage across the ocean towards Lordaeron without any indication of why she was heading there at probably the same time as the Horde was marching its army through the Barrens and about to head into Ashenvale.
(Commentary): The War of Thorns is a narrative mess when you get down to it. Sure, Jaina could’ve mass teleported vast swaths of Night Elves from Teldrassil. The entirety of the Void Elf race could’ve been strategically interspersed and opened up Void Rifts and probably evacuated the ENTIRE population in a matter of minutes. The Lightforged Draenei could’ve swooped down with the Vindicaar and saved half of the populace within minutes. The Draenei right next door could’ve opened portals to their islands and saved all of the Night Elves.
Probably not. Sylvie was just too sly and cunning for her own good. Even at the Battle of Lordaeron the combined force of Anduin, Greymane, Alleria and Jaina couldn’t stop her. They all stood there clueless in awe as Sylvie smirked at them while dumping a bunch of stinky gas on them and flying away and smirking some more at them from her floaty ship. All they did was stare at her smirk.
It wouldn’t have mattered if Jaina arrived to aid in the War of Thorns. All they would have done would have been the same thing, which is just staring at Sylvanas smirk as she escapes and flies away. If Jaina couldn’t just freeze Sylvie’s ship at the Battle of Lordaeron then Jaina would do nothing in the War of Thorns. Even Bolvar was powerless to the power of Sylvie’s smirk.
I mean, any number of things could have changed the outcome of the WoT. Jaina showing up on the SS Daddy Issues. The Draenei’s giant orbital laser. The Draenei taking five minutes to sail east, and help out. Cenarius remembering Mal and the Night Elves are his bffs. The actual Night Elven military actually being present. Even Sylvanas frames both Mal and Tyrande being present at the same time as a nigh insurmountable obstacle. Not too mention actual catapult physics, and actual tree biology should have made the burning impossible.
But that Horde favortism and power fantasy: illogically overcoming the Night Elves since 2004.
The problem with characters like Jaina is that the answer, OP, is of course she could have changed the outcome.
So she had to vanish from the story. Just like in Legion. But she’s not the only one. Blizzard constantly introduces powerful characters and abilities when convenient for the moment, and then forgets them when they are not.
Hey, did you know that goblins used pocket nukes way back in Cataclysm questing? So why, you might ask, did the Horde need to use catapults to burn down Teldrassil? Who knows! As has been pointed out many times on this forum, the Dranei have an actual spacecraft. Could have been useful during the recent war, right? Or the goblin’s mega-cannon?
You’re not wrong, OP. But Blizzard pays so little mind to the logical consequences of power levels that I’ve given up caring much about them.
Yes, she could have changed the outcome. Even if she couldn’t stop the tree from burning, she could have shielded the city of Darnassus, or a part of it, long enough for the portals to remain open and evacuate everyone. That is a feat that’s completely in line with the power level she has displayed elsewhere in the game (walls of ice all over Stormwind in the extraction scenario–actually, isn’t it implied that she did most of the work in putting out Zul’s fires?–and freezing a large stretch of ocean in the Dazar’Alor raid).
Not to mention she could have helped with teleporting the inhabitants herself–teleportation is her other big thing, apart from ice.
I was actually more wondering based on her earlier power depiction rather than the Lordaeron or Dazar’alor feats (which I attribute to current plot favoritism towards her) if she was capable of making a difference.
For instance, she still retains her mass teleport but there are limits to her power like she cannot freeze an ocean or freeze quarter of a zone at once.
Is this from the Azshara questing where they bomb Naga? I imagine the nukes couldn’t deal lasting fire damage to a world tree and that’s why they needed shamans to burn it. Something also tells me that Sylvanas didn’t just need the people on Teldrassil dead, she needed Teldrassil itself dead.
On that note, couldn’t she just use mana bombs? But do remember, at that point of time she wasn’t planning on burning the tree, rather occupying it, so we already know why she didn’t bring nukes.