On this note, I do headcannon that the Silver Covenant were either asked to leave at the beginning of Legion, or left on their own, after the re-admittance of the Sunreavers.
The Sunreavers weren’t just allowed to live within the city again… they actively defend it (Sunreaver Spellblades) at the top of the Violet Citadel.
Yet, not a single Silver Covenant member in sight in the floating purple city.
I mean here’s some hope? If the Horde can turn Jaina from peace lover to what she is now, just give Sylv some time to work Anduin over and make him suffer some. Maybe he will drop those overtly idealistic ways and kick it into gear.
Mana ![:clap:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/clap.png?v=6" ":clap:")
bomb stormwind
Or Blight. Blight seems to be the go to for her.
complete sentence
Except for Quel’thalas, of course~.
Radiation Bomb Non gnomes
This is why we can’t have nice things.
Especially Quel’thalas
Seriously though I would be down with losing the war to the horde if it meant we could get rid of sleeping beauty’s castle as our capital city
let anduin exorcism chokeslam sylvanas 2019
Yes please.
He does that and it’ll be the first time one of his battle plans actually succeeded in its stated objective.
Then maybe we’ll finally have a good reason to have him as military leader.
It’s just written on a board behind him when he calls all the Alliance leaders together in 8.3 or 8.4.
I think people like their favorite faction, but not everyone is automatically super bitter and full of hatred for the other faction.
I usually prefer the Horde, but I don’t really care about “defeating the Alliance”, I just want to see the Horde do cool things.
I suspect a lot of people feel this way, because it’s the difference between the well-recieved launch cinematic and Warbringers: Sylvanas.
In the launch, you see all the races doing cool things, but you usually don’t see the people they’re hitting, and when you do, it’s typical either very brief, or not the focus of the frame (and usually a bit blurry).
You see a Tauren charge through a barricade and several soldiers, but the camera is focused strongly on the Tauren, not the things in his way.
You see Dwarves and Night Elves both shooting, but you don’t see their targets.
Etc.
You’re seeing the races be cool and doing cool things, and you’re thinking to yourself “I want to make a [race] [class], now!”
By contrast, you don’t see anyone do anything cool in Warbringers: Sylvanas. You see catapults shooting, but you don’t even see their pilots, so they may as well be faceless machines. And, honestly, they’re not even cool by those standards. Compare them to the Iron Star Of WoD. The camera focuses on the Iron Star - something you should be very familiar with the power of, if you raided SoO - and the music grows tenser as it spins faster. The catapults are just there long enough to fire in Warbringers, that’s it.
There’s nothing really fun about Warbringers because it’s just 100% about seeing one faction get hurt, not seeing anyone on either faction do anything cool. It’s something that could work in a story, perhaps, but it’s not really meant for the narrative of a video game. A book or movie is supposed to evoke emotions in you, but a video game needs to make you invested and excited, it needs to make you want to do the things you see. It needs to motivate you.
I guess you could argue it succeeded since it motivated raids of Alliance players to run non-stop raids on the Horde capitals for a few days, but that’s pretty short term. As soon as that rage passes, it’s just going to turn to bitterness if they don’t find other ways to motivate Alliance players. Not to mention the division it creates out of game.
I can only hope Blizzard realizes how much they are shooting themselves in the foot in the long run by doing this.
I hope this as well. I hope this so very much…
All of my Draenei [LF] characters are highly confused as to why they’re even participating in a war against a faction that just assisted in the defeat of Legion. They get that Sylvanas lead the Horde to annihilate Teldrassil, but they don’t feel that killing Horde members in retaliation is the answer. There’s too many partnerships between them and Horde members that makes them want to battle them.
[IMO] The BFA story would have been 100% better if the Alliance had preemptively attacked the Horde and with the cinematic, it’s literally what I thought was going on. I love the Alliance, they’re my main faction, so to see that we were attacking Undercity to retake Lordaeron had me PUMPED. Then we learn that Sylvanas preemptively attacked us…and not just us, the friggin’ Night Elves. The friggin…Night Elves… Had Sylvanas not heard of all the human potential in Stormwind?
My Horde characters don’t even understand where the hell their loyalties lie any longer. What bothered me the most is that they’re adding player agency within the story a bit late. Would have been pretty damn great to refuse aiding the attack on the World Tree Blizzard… wouldn’t have cared if that meant my character had to spend a week in the stockades, they would not have attacked Teldrassil.
It was really dumb, yeah, because the Alliance already has two excellent candidates for aggressive, proactive moves: Genn and Jaina, both of whom have not only strong leadership qualities but powerful personal motivations. Both of them have never made a secret of their desires; both of them on occasion have clashed with other Alliance leadership over the problem of the Horde.
So, allowing them to come to a quiet agreement and then act on those desires would have been a lot more interesting, especially for Alliance players. Suddenly your faction–at least, a good-size segment of it with motivations that are understandable–is mobilizing. And then you’ve got the element your Draenei represent, which are the people who may not want another war with the Horde. Bam, instant compelling inner division in the Alliance.
And the Horde suddenly isn’t the mindless aggressor. They could have 1) held Sylvanas back from tipping a$$-over-teakettle into the abyss, keep her genuinely interested in protecting the Horde and being shocked to find the Alliance actually stepping up, or 2) maintained her course of growing evil but kept it a subtle, slow-burning thing to be sprung on us later. Either way you get a Horde whose fears of being annihilated are validated, a Horde that can go back to war with its old enemies without the ponderous baggage of "sigh we did another genocide guys, guess they really hate us now!"
No, really, I’ve decided it’s extremely lazy of them to keep hitting Horde with the genocidal evil bat. It’s distasteful at best and uncomfortable at worst, especially for real people whose heritage is immersed in actual genocide, people who may not want to have to deal with it in what should be their fantasy escape. It’s juvenile and insensitive, the way they treat it; something done for the massive edge factor but not treated with any nuance. But it’s certainly also just lazy, because as I’ve just demonstrated, even a disgruntled layman like myself can outline in five minutes a way to flip this nonsense and make it interesting again.
But of course, it went as it always does. And like a lot of people, when I first heard Undercity would be targeted, I got excited. And then came the Teldrassil spoiler. I sighed my soul out of my body. The writing team–whether it’s the actual writers or the devs, I have no bloody clue anymore–has failed both sides. They’ve failed to give Alliance a compelling angle aside from perpetual quiet victims, and they’ve failed to give Horde a fresh situation that doesn’t rely on the same old “let’s go burn old Alliance ladies” device.
What would have been interesting is if Sylvanas actually knew about an impending Alliance attack, but thought it was going to be on Orgrimmar. So she decided to let it happen, with her fleet standing nearby to repel the Alliance once they had done just enough damage to the city to galvanize the rest of the Horde behind her.
And then it turns out they actually planned to attack the Undercity and deliberately seeded misinformation so that Sylvanas has to scramble and nuke the city in order to escape.
Now we get Sylvanas still being shrewd and calculating, the Alliance getting to be aggressive and victorious, a moment of divisiveness and a hint for future Horde conflict.
But I guess this whole “Horde is a genocidal war machine for reasons” is fine, too.