It doesn’t have to be a total retcon, you can retcon HOW it happened if you want.
I absolutely would. It completely ruined any chance of a good end (or really any part) to the faction war storyline. I’m someone who wants the Alliance to do something more questionable or ‘’’’‘morally grey’’’’’, and the Burning of Teldrassil completely negated that, because anything short of complete obliteration of every member of the Horde can be pushed off as reasonable revenge for genocide.
Now whether to make it a total retcon I’m not quite sure about, but I’d 100% retcon how it happened.
e: nevermind I made up my mind I’d 100% retcon it.
In a heartbeat. I hated the whole burning of Teldrassil and everything surrounding it. It ruined several things in this game I love - the Night Elves, the Horde, and Sylvanas.
But, if I had to burn Teldrassil, I would have everyone escape first. Yes, the Night Elves would lose a home, but there would be none of these stupid debates about genocide that crop up every week.
As an action taken by Sylvanas, it was monumentally stupid and ruined any perception of her as a functional character. It was a worthless hissy-fit that gained nothing for her side.
As a loss suffered by the Night Elves, Blizzard is incapable of capitalizing on it. Suffering a terrible loss can be a good and interesting thing for the growth of characters, but you have to be willing to spend time exploring the consequences of that loss. Blizzard’s storytelling doesn’t do that, it never really spends time on anything.
Except Orcs, I guess?
For the Burning to have actually meant anything, Tyrande would have needed to be the Saurfang of this expansion. We would have to follow her continuously across multiple content patches, multiple cutscenes, and see her grow over time.
Now, if I could go back in time and change things before it happened, then yes I would change it. But now this far into BFA, no I’m not going to retcon what happened and mess with RPers who reacted to the event or were present etc. I feel retconning it now would be cheap. The way it was done is not how I would have done it, but I"m not going to retcon it just to make Sylvanas look better or something.
Yes. Let’s assume Teldrassil and Undercity are gonna go.
Alliance attacks first, following through on their long standing issues with the Forsaken and Varian’s promise to retake Lordaeron, pushed by people like Genn and Rogers. Undercity is lost but with less warning. Lot’s of Forsaken throwing themselves onto fires to escape the Alliance, etc., fulfilling Sylvanas’s vision. This makes her future paranoia more understandable.
Horde reacts, attacking in Kalimdor. War of Thorns is more of a grind but still works out more or less as in game, until it comes to Teldrassil. Instead of burning it, the Horde capture it, only to find a mostly empty city. In a rage, Sylvanas orders it burnt, along with any Alliance stragglers.
If I were to keep the burning but change the way it happened, I’d have Lordaeron happen first, attack on Teldrassil second. It burns not from Sylvanas having a hissy fit and wanting genocide, but battle gone too far (imagine a huge battle that ends with some of the battle damage igniting the tree). Saurfang sees what will happen tries to stop it directly but is poisoned by Nathanos and nearly KO’d.
Sylvanas doesn’t care about battle going too far and lets it happen.
The main thing I would retcon of the War of the Thorns is the reasoning.
Sylvanas makes it very very clear their goal is to kill Malfurion and Tyrande. She makes it clear to Saurfang that his plans must account for that. She also makes it clear that should that plan fail, they will inflict a wound so great in it’s place that it’ll send the Alliance reeling. Saurfang knows going in, that he’s expected to kill those two above anyone else and failure would likely mean sacking the city.
And he fails. Let it be honor or the like, he fails. And Sylvanas decides to torch the tree and the people living in it, which is not what Saurfang had in mind. Take it sure, displace the civilians and keep them hostage, sure. But torch everything? Nah.
That way, they keep the story beats they want of Saurfang getting depressed and mopey and Sylvanas being evil cray cray, but makes everything clear from the jump.
That’s one of the strongest parts of it for me. The Burning of Teldrassil motivated my Night Elf Huntress as nothing before ever had. Deathwing was a force of Nature… Sylvannas is personal.
So much as I miss Teldrassil, I would not roll that event back.
B. Put more focus on Silithus. Have things really escalate there. Goblins show up and start mining. Alliance spies get some, realize how dangerous Azerite is, and they start sabotaging the Goblin efforts. The horde doesn’t like that, moves forces in to protect their miners and attack the Alliance spies. Alliance moves more forces in. Soon the zone becomes a powder keg of escalating forces.
Then something happens. Nobody knows exactly what. The Azerite both sides have been fighting over goes off. Nobody’s sure 100% if it was the horde or alliance or a third party, but the zone goes up. Alliance blames the horde, horde blames the alliance.
That’s the setup for the war story. Both sides start mining azerite wherever they can, and fighting to stop the other faction from getting more of it. The alliance not trusting the Horde to have because of Sylvanas and what Garrosh did not so long ago, the Horde seeing this as the Alliance overstepping its bounds and oppressing them.
You have a root of conflict where you can see where both sides are coming from without resorting to making one side burn city tree full of civilians with no means of defending itself. You don’t make two races homeless without wanting to resolve that plot. You don’t vilify one factoin. You don’t burn Teldrassil just because it’s a cool visual with no plans to really DO anything with the night elf story afterwards. You don’t have the travesty that was the battle of lordaeron where the Alliance is totally unprepared and so Jaina has to be buffed to save the day. You don’t have to retread MOP so heavily. You don’t have the Horde face essentially the same inner conflict as before.
If Blizzard wanted to burn Teldrassil, they should have done it in a story where the night elves could take center stage. Not burn teldrassil, throw in some token npcs into the battle of lordaeron, then ‘conclude’ that story by making Darkshore a warfront with no canon winner. If you didn’t want Tyrande and Malfurion to be main characters in this story, then DON’T BURN THEIR CITY. If you want to burn their city, DON’T SIDELINE THEM FOR MOST OF THE EXPANSION.
The night elves have been the punching bag long enough for horde/alliance conflict. At least in MOP when Theramore was bombed Jaina was an important character. The night elves just get their little darkshore story isolated from everything else without a conclusive end, while Jaina and Anduin and Genn and Shaw go onward as the important alliance characters everywhere else.
There could have been more content as far as the purpose of its burning. Like concrete reasons being stated and displayed.
If Sylvanas herself said she burned Teldrassil because it was a base of operations for the Worgen, that would be something. If she framed Genn’s assault at Stormheim as an assault on the Horde and it’s Warchief, the Horde might have agreed that Teldrassil could not be allowed to stand.
Maybe she could have given the Alliance one day to evacuate and then burned it down.
Sylvanas to Anduin: “Due to Greymane’s assault on the Horde’s Warchief, we will not tolerate the Alliance abomination of Teldrassil so near to the Warchief’s seat in Orgrimmar. This tree will burn. You can waste your efforts foolishly delaying the inevitable - or spend them saving what people you can. The choice is yours.”
I would add that the Risen Night Elves like Sira and Delaryn blame Genn for being a warmonger who brought death to their home. And it would explain their anger at the Alliance, because Alliance commanders picked the fight against Sylvanas after the unity at the Broken Shore.
Blizzard has fundamentally failed to understand the consequences of making the Horde complicit in genocide, and not allowing the Kaldorei vengeance past one Val’kyr and an eternal stalemate. Yes, I would absolutely retcon it - they’re not responsible enough to do it properly.
Absolutely, I’d retcon it in a heartbeat. Nothing was furthered by the burning. It only existed for shock value and there was nothing gained narratively by doing it. It’s done nothing but further polarized discourse and Blizzard’s made it abundantly clear they have neither the means nor will to address it in any meaningful way.
As for how, like many others, I’d have preferred Lordaeron happen first. There’s plenty of precedent to justify Alliance aggression there. They have their choice of reasons to go with whether it’s Varian’s vow, warhawks within the Alliance, building tensions or misinformation about Azerite, or (though ideally I’d retcon the novel, too) what happened in BtS.
Then, Alliance would be able to actually be proactive for once, which I think a number of people on both sides would really prefer. And we’d be able to have a battle that reflected the trailer that sold us this expansion to begin with. A righteous and aggressive Alliance? A united and underdog Horde? Yeah, I wanted that expansion.
And then the Horde could retaliate. If the burning needed to still happen, then do it without the massive civilian deaths that apparently mean nothing to this narrative. Let the Alliance save all their people and the burning be purely a last ditch effort to score at least a point after the objectives of holding hostages failed.
But don’t make an entire playable faction actively complicit in what the writers outright called genocide. Especially if you can’t cash that kind of check with your follow-up.