No, It’s not that he looks like that after being burned alive. It’s the whole look. If he was burnt like that but had some armor on without a helmet it would be better. It just seems dumb and arbitrary to have him be shirtless with only shoulder armor on. And his voice is annoying, but like you said it makes sense to be like that and the voice actor does a fantastic job. I just personally find it annoying whenever he talks.
Hey not gonna fault you on the voice, different strokes and all. It’s like how I hate some orc female voices cause something about it grates on me, fact of the matter is at the end of Wrath all Bolvar has in terms of armor was one Pauldron and his greaves, so I assume they kept with that same aesthetic for his armor design.
I do apologize if I attributed a false intent to your words, but that’s the way I interpreted them.
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I stopped reading right here because bolivar was a paladin… he died going paladin things… and lich kinged in the most paladin way he could
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It’s also important to note that all of these characters were/are humans, and the Holy Light is their primary religion. “By the Light” is a similar statement to, “Oh my God!” except fantasy-flavor. (Similar to how humans in Warhammer 40k use “Throne” or “By the Throne” as statements.)
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Hot take here, but I really don’t see the issue with Bolvar getting punked out.
Everyone’s talking about how powerful he is, as if he’s Arthas-Lich King. But he’s not. Arthas gave in to the Helm, gave in to the blade, gave in to the power and all that. Bolvar didn’t. He struggled against it. He didn’t want to be the new Lich King, just the Jailer of the Damned who kept the Scourge at bay. He was never shown to be Arthas-level power, only that he might become an Arthas-like threat if he went too far.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m missing something, some quest line or novel mention that said he’d gone fully in on the whole Lich King stuff, but I’m just not seeing it.
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The issue is this monumental, iconic villain in Warcraft just got dunked on by Sylvanas with no explanation. Like Sylvanas didn’t even struggle at all, she just beat Bolvar’s butt who was supposed to be the Lich King.
Of course now we know Bolvar was fighting the Helmet the whole time and so his power was likely halfed, AND we know Sylvanas has been drinking Jailer juice, the guy who made the Lich King helmet. So it makes sense that she was able to beat Bolvar, but we didn’t know that at the time of the trailer which is why many people hated it I think.
Also, we are going to fight out that Arthas, even though he gave into the Helm, still fought off the Jailer’s influence because he didn’t want to be a part of his evil plans. Just you watch.
I’m not sure they’d even need to do that. It wouldn’t surprise me if Arthas was just unwittingly on his way to becoming the Jailer’s tool by pursuing his plan to Scourge Azeroth. The psychic power of the Lich King - which comes from the Helm of Domination - is magnified with every new soul added to the Scourge, and Bolvar’s struggle with the Helm indicates that the very power itself has a “will” of its own that he had to keep in check. So it could turn out that if Arthas (or Ner’zhul for that matter) had successfully Scourged the whole planet, the resulting increase in power would have become overwhelming and subsumed their identity, making them puppets of Helm - and so the Jailer - in the process.
Which could account for the Jailer seeming to consider Bolvar a usurper for holding the Helm in check, while not seeming to have cared about Arthas or Ner’zhul having actually used it. By actively utilizing the Helm of Domination’s power while feeding it more and more souls, they may have been unknowingly doing exactly what the Helm’s true master wanted, right up until Bolvar stepped in, donned the Helm and deliberately resolved to not use its true power.
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He was a paladin before donning the helm of domination. Feels like this is the natural progression of how things are supposed to be
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I think this is because to anyone following the story at all, Sylvanas was the obvious villain in this scenario, and showing her struggling would downplay the threat that she’s supposed to represent. She’s this expansion’s Illidan, Arthas, Deathwing.
Bolvar may have looked the part but Sylvanas was the real “lich queen” analogue in the cutscene.
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So far, this is the only expansion cinematic that I have yet to watch in-game, on release date. I haven’t watched it multiple times, which is weird because I normally love those cinematics. I watched it… Once? Maybe twice because I didn’t believe it.
Like… Everything you said is correct. Sylvanas was roided up on Mawjuice for however long. However, Bolvar being unable to beat her applied phlebotinum doesn’t make him look cool. Even if he put up a better fight than most, he still didn’t land so much as a single hit on her, and wound up looking like this:
https://nerfwire.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/sad-bolvar2.jpg
It was just another cinematic to show us how cool Sylvanas is. If by the end of Shadowlands, Sylvanas is defeated, then this will just be a trailer hyping up the main bad guy. If not… Then meh. Until then…
#NotMyLichKing
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I mean… But Bolvar isn’t that. That’s Arthas. They are two entirely different characters. Arthas was iconic. Bolvar was not. Bolvar wasn’t even a villain. His allegiances were ambiguous, but he hadn’t made a single hostile action against… Well, anyone at that point. Last time we’d seen him, he was helping us save the world. Bolvar was, at his most threatening, Diet Lich King. Nothing we’d seen from him even suggested he should be held to Arthas’s standards. Nothing hinted at by the time of the cinematic put him in that weight class.
I feel you’re all giving more weight to the title than the man attached to it, and I don’t think there’s anything to warrant it.
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This is a good point, though I’d note that not all humans worship the Light or swear by it, see Kul Tiras for an example. However, I think that in the case of Bolvar, Darion, and Whitemane, their personal history with the Light is probably what leads them to continue using that phrasing rather than just general Stormwind/Lordaeron human background. Darion in particular didn’t grow up in a normal human society, as he was a very young preteen/teenager not even old enough to fight when Lordaeron fell. Instead, he spent his adolescent years living with the remnants of the Knights of the Silver Hand as they tried to fight their way through a zombie apocalypse, and I doubt the priests and paladins of the Silver Hand swore by the Light as just a casual cultural mannerism. Alexandros certainly didn’t, anyway. Whitemane has a similar background, though I believe she is at least a few years older than Darion, since she seems to be around the same age as Renault. I just find it interesting that those two still use that phrasing considering their…complicated history with the Light. Whitemane would have reason to be upset that the Light didn’t keep her from being raised, and both Darion’s deaths involved the Light in a major fashion. I don’t know as much about Bolvar’s relationship with the Light, since we haven’t been told as much, but he was a paladin before the Wrathgate, so I doubt he mentions it now solely as a casual habit.
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What bugs me about him is how easily he slips into just being human again. Being in constant communication with crazed scourge (and no one else) for even a short amount of time has got to leave its mark psychologically, and change you a bit, if not a lot.
The fight itself I thought was fine. Maybe if it went a bit longer and showcased a few more abilities other people may have liked it better. If he’d actually landed a glove on her she would have been toast, and it was pretty clear (Chains etc) it was the Jailors power that brought him unstuck.
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It isn’t just these two characters, it’s the lich king as a whole that makes it feel like such a disservice, Arthas was indeed a stronger king but during the battle with Syl Bolvar finally submitted to the full power of the helm of domination and the vast power it accrued dominating souls that where raised into the scourge, for a being with that much lore and the build up Bolvar was getting throughout legion then BFA when Vol’jin visited we would assume that he would at least have been able to land a blow out cause a wound. Where a SIMPLE ORC WARRIOR did more damage then the Lich King ever managed.
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Sylvanas is the WoW equivalent of Batman with prep time.
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And her only prep was a quiver of arrows and some extra power from daddy jailer, heck the plan doesn’t even seem to be hers.
See, but he didn’t. We know he didn’t. Because he tells us he was resisting the Helm. He tells us that right in Icecrown before we head to the Shadowlands.
And even if he was lying, even if he did just then submit to the power? He had zero experience with that power. None. Not a single battle fought as the Lich King. Hell, this is the guy who looked at your death knight during the class campaign as possible competition, something Arthas never did for any of the death knights he specifically made to be super-soldiers. While Bolvar’s getting built up during the Legion class campaign, it’s always with you, the death knight, as a very real threat to his power.
Bolvar was not, objectively, in Arthas’s weight class by any margin. He was more akin to Emmarel Shadewarden from the hunter class campaign, or maybe Rexxar; probably outclassing you, the PC, but not by a lot.
Yet throughout BfA, we’re seeing Sylvanas isn’t the Banshee Queen of pre-Cataclysm. We’re seeing that in her attitude, her personal prowess, her raw power. Just the idea of a duel with her had Thrall telling Saurfang “you cannot win”. Not you might die, not you’ll probably lose; You cannot win in a 1v1 fight with her, period.
And it took him pulling off a surprise blade-split, after throwing her off her game, after she toyed with him at the beginning of the duel… And he gave her a superficial injury. Because he was so far out-classed, the best he could do when the odds lined up in his favor for a brief window was to gash her eyebrow.
By contrast, Sylvanas walked into that duel with Bolvar with all the odds in her favor. The Scourge? They were never a threat in small numbers, and only were dangerous because they were overwhelming. Bolvar let her skirmish with a small group. Bolvar himself? She already had a plan for that fight, and she followed through.
This isn’t Arthas with the Helm and Frostmourne, and himself in full alignment with his power. This is a paladin who spent his few years wearing the helm fighting the helm, wielding a depowered artifact weapon, in a fight he knew was coming but against a foe he knew little about in terms of fighting strategy.
I’m not saying the cinematic was good. I believe they wasted a potential future villain with Bolvar, and have now rendered him to little more than the new Khadgar. But the fight itself didn’t seem unrealistic given how the characters had each been built up. I wasn’t mad that Sylvanas out-smarted and out-maneuvered Bolvar; I was mad that she fought Bolvar to begin with.
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He tells us he was resisting the helm up to the battle with Syl, if you read the four horsemen short story all the horsemen who are sympathetically linked to Bolvar see the fight and feel the full power of the lich king finally suffuse his form.
To quote from we ride forth
For a moment, it felt like it had caught fire. No. It wasn’t heat that Whitemane felt. It was the searing cold of frostbite, slowly enveloping the Lich King’s Presence.
It’s happening. “Highlord, is that—?”
“Yes,” Mograine said. “This is what Arthas felt like. The Helm’s power. Bolvar isn’t holding it back any longer.”
“He’s fallen?” Whitemane asked.
“Yes,” Mograine said. Whitemane heard him speak in a soft, mournful tone, “Bolvar, I don’t understand . . .”
So in the story yes Bolvar was batting at around Arthas level, and to say he was still “holding back” is at this point inaccurate.
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Also my complaint is not that she won, my complaint is that the Bolvar iteration of the lich king did 0 damage. Sylvanas has more been a character of guile so if she had won through superior tactics instead of just “Oh I’m just going to effortlessly dodge any blow this guy throws, even one in a snowstorm no one can see I’m.”
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The rest of my point remains.
He might have had access to the full power of the Helm, but he also only just got it. He’s got zero experience using those powers, let alone using them in a fight to the death. It is literally his first real battle since donning the helm. He’s not at Arthas-level power any more than me logging in to some Mythic raider’s character and trying out the latest raid tier makes me at their skill level. I got the power, the soul binds, the gear and the legendaries. I don’t know how to use them. Add to that, assuming your quote isn’t missing a big gap of content, he only finally reached for that power… Moments before he’s defeated.
So me on the mythic raider’s character, but doing so in the middle of a boss fight.
I never said he’s holding back. I have no doubt he was fighting to the best of his skill level. But that skill level was never going to be at Arthas’s level, never at Sylvanas’s level. He was never portrayed in that light, so I was never expecting him to be at their levels.
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