Honestly the orcs could go a long way if some of their shamans would be written to step up and notably assume some positions of commanding leadership, instead of so often being portrayed as their society’s passive spiritual guides who meekly step aside and let hell break loose whenever the warriors want to run amok destroying the land to fuel another conflict.
After all, the pre-Horde orcs were at their strongest when they heeded their spiritual elders (such as when the united clans and the elements took down Goria) instead of just arbitrarily ignoring them whenever honoring the spirits and not defiling the elements gets in the way of waging another war.
Thrall and the newly remade Horde went out of their way to revive the shamanistic traditions of the orcs, only for those traditions to rarely be shown as having real traction in guiding their society. The orcs largely just pay lip service to the Drek’thars who condemn reckless bloodlust while still idolizing raging killers who seek to solve every problem in the world with an axe.
It frankly was one of the things that always irritated me about how they handled Aggra’s Horde-hating influence on Thrall as he started his journey to become World Shaman - an influence that was never really conclusively addressed, and so left holes in his portrayal ever since. They had her playing up this false dichotomy of having to be either a shaman or a leader, and ne’er the two shall meet. Since then Thrall’s hovered in this area of not being Warchief not because it feels practical and necessary, but because thematically we’re supposed to swallow the idea that being a shaman and being involved in the Horde are in some way mutually exclusive. As if we’re supposed to think the only choice for an orc is to be a navel-gazing mystic who doesn’t get involved in with the Horde, or a war-loving butcher who indulges its worst impulses. Like somehow the orcs’ own spiritual focus is supposed to be fundamentally incompatible with the temperament of the orcs themselves.
The orcs don’t need some exotic turnaround to set the ship aright. They just need to actually be more like what we’re constantly told that they really are, so what we’re told actually bears some passing resemblance to what we’re shown.
I mean, orc shamans can be pretty hardcore when they want to be. They can be as tough and implacable as any orcish warrior, but the narrative insists upon removing their spines whenever they might be expected to address how the latest bout of blood and thunder is routinely demolishing and violating the very elements they’re supposed to revere and protect.
I’ll admit that part of it’s possibly that shamanism more than any other “school” of magic has been tagged as “neutral” since Cataclysm, so the important shamans all tend to routinely step aside or have other things to do the instant their own people engage in something faction-related. But that’s frankly no reason to deprive the orcs of an entire half of their cultural “kit.” Druids still interact with night elf society. Blood elf and human mages still do stuff at home with their kinsmen. So why did everyone’s shamans specifically (and in both factions, really, but most glaringly with the orcs) become so permanently shackled to the Earthen Ring that they’re forced to abstain from participating in their own peoples’ respective societies in any meaningful way? I get that somebody’s gotta keep the lights on at the Maelstrom, but did they really all have to abandon their homes and, consequently, their relevance to the stories of their own peoples? Did Aggra’s bogus “lesson” stick so well that it’s been decided shamans have to be a bunch of isolationist shut-ins who abandon all ties to the outside world so they can sit around their Order Hall exclusively talking to spirits and other shamans while ignoring anything else?