Is BfA the Horde's lowest point?

Lore Story Forum
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As we approach the end of BfA we, Horde players, look back and can’t help but wonder: what was the point? In an expansion centered around a faction war there’s only one word to describe the Horde: failure.

Let’s see, there were 5 major battles of this war: Darnassus, Lordaeron, Arathi, Dazar’alor and Darkshore. Of these battles we only won 1: Darnassus, and it was a pyrrhic victory at best since all it did was unify an enemy that, up until that point, was unwilling to fight. It also served no strategic objective since our great leader decided to burn the biggest prize of the battle just to teach one Night Elf a lesson, brilliant. Remember, WE started this war and the campaign in Darnassus was supposed to end the inevitable war before it started. That worked out well didn’t it? The worst part is: as bad as Darnassus was, that was our high point during this expansion, because after that it’s failure after failure for the Horde during BfA. We lose literally every battle after that, if it weren’t for Azshara sinking part of the Alliance navy, then the Alliance domination would’ve been complete.

There’s also another thing this expansion showed us: joining the Horde is bad for your people. Besides the war there were 2 other major plot points of this expansion, the storylines of both the Zandalari and the Kul Tirans. What did the Kul Tirans get after joining the Alliance? A unified kingdom with a strong navy rallied behind a united Proudmoore family. What did the Zandalari get after joining the Horde? A dead king, a raid on their capital city, a destroyed navy, bunch of dead Loas and a weaker kingdom.

If the Alliance won both on the battlefield and on positively affecting their people’s lives, at least we can say we fought with honor, right? Well… no. Doing the war campaign on both sides you see that for the Alliance the main objective is: ending the war asap, minimizing casualties and focusing on getting Sylvanas. While the Horde missions were mostly about killing as many people as possible, being cruel and pretty much causing as much damage as possible.

Therefore, at the end of this war we can say that we lost militarily, socially and morally. All that we succeeded was helping a psychotic villain achieve her goals.

Thanks, Blizz.

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On the Zandalaris part Rastakhan was an old king well past his prime that allowed his pride and arrogance to overlook the cult of blood trolls to be seeded through-out his Empire.

Plus had he lived I seriously doubt he would ever join the Horde with the likes of the Banshee Queen running it into the ground, as any leader worthy of the title could easily tell by the events of Teldrassil that to join the Horde at the time was to be the Queens lackey than a leader in their own right.

Blizzard usually don’t keep our identities as a faction in mind until it becomes covenant for them story wise for them to lever it, no matter how contradictory it is for them to do otherwise, leaving us the disjointed mess that is BFAs narrative.

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I don’t have to read the entirety of your post to confidently say yes, BFA was the Horde at its worst.

For the peaceniks, tons of innocents were killed and chance at long-term peace with the Alliance was shattered with Teldrassil, so it was the worst.
For the warhawks, a bunch of utterly baffling choices were made apparently in service to a Warchief who was trying to get as many Hordies as possible killed, and also saw an icon of the Horde actually get introspective and have feelings about all the bad stuff he’s been a part of, so it was the worst.
(also they canonically lost pretty much every major battle)

For the pro-Sylvanas Horde, they saw her flip everyone off and go swooshing away into the sunset, and then tell them, “Thanks for staying loyal but it literally doesn’t matter. Bye”, so it was the worst.
For the anti-Sylvanas Horde, they saw her drive the Horde into the ground and prove to everyone that all it takes is someone yelling “FOR THE HORDE” to get them to all fight and die over nothing (while having to lick Sylvanas’ boots the entire way), so it was the worst.

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I’d say the years between WC2 and WC3 were probably worse. But in WoW, for sure.

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This is the worst part for me. If we look at the Horde’s history, we can say we’ve done a lot of questionable things but, at least after the Mannoroth’s corruption was cleansed, the Horde tried to stay true to the Orcish concept of honor, to avoid unnecessary bloodshed and to pretty much survive in a world where they’re, canonically at least, the clear underdogs.

What drew me to the Horde was always the fact that they were a bunch of people united against what’s clearly the superpower of Azeroth. Stormwind is definitely the richest city in the game, and the Alliance has vastly more natural resources than the Horde. Yet, despite all of that, we managed to survive by forging alliances, negotiating with the “enemy” and standing our ground honorably. Everything changed in Mists when Garrosh did what he did, but I thought that after that Blizzard had learned their lesson and would have us go back to the “true” Horde, but I guess not…

I definitely found myself hating playing as Horde this xpac, hearing Nathanos every WQ and War Campaign pretty much call me an imbecile and having us do dishonorable things to win the war. In the end we lost not only the war but what held us together as well, and just to make it even worse I had to sit and watch Saurfang say he hoped the King of Stormwind would save the Horde from Sylvanas, admitting we can’t even clean up after ourselves.

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It looks that way to me. It not only repeated MoP’s story, but it effectively repeated WoD’s moral as well that the horde doesn’t need to be magically manipulated into happily going along with horrible things twice. It painted a picture of the faction being unable to learn lessons and in its apparent attempt to bring it back to a WC3 state of needing repentance and redemption, made it even worse than before.

I think part of what made the faction sellable was that by the time WoW started, the bad things the horde had done were slowly making its way into the past, along with only one member race actually having taken part in the WC1-2 stuff. If you wanted, you could play your character as an old orc who was there, but there was more than enough wiggle room to distance yourself from it if you were interested in a full-on trope inversion of “good monster”.

Now you’re chronologically roped into having supported it unless you play vulpera, who should have enough information by now to know what the horde’s done again and again yet still chose to shack up afterward anyway. So if you like the concept of a good monster, your best option is the god damned worgen of all things.

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Exactly, the Horde is a faction that doesn’t evolve. We keep making the same mistakes over and over again. At least for our actions during WC 1-2 and in Draenor we can say “hey, the only reason we did all that was because we were corrupted by Demon blood. Demons that only came after us because the Draenei landed on our planet and, despite having lived peacefully with us for hundreds of years, never though it’d be wise to warn us they had a Legion of demons after them who’d do anything to wipe them out”. What we did after is wrong, no questions about it. But we can say that we evolved, we freed ourselves from Gul’dan, Ner’zhul and the Legion. We grew.

However, after that it seems to me that we regressed. I liked reading “A good War” because I could relate, it made sense to me that that could be a ‘good war’ in the Orcish sense. A war to end all wars. However, after Sylvanas’ warbringer videos all of what was said in the book was reversed and every race in the Horde, besides the Forsaken, should’ve jumped ship right there and then. Instead, we follow her orders like sheep.

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I enjoyed this expansions as a member of the Horde.

The behavior of the main characters felt as it was real: tricks, lies and dishonor.
That’s what the real war is about - power and strategy, not honor.

It was the main reason why the War Campaign of the Horde to me was ahead compare to our opponent. Alliance felt generic, as usual. The Horde allowed me to experience real feelings like excitement and unrest.

If we look at it from personal perspective - yes, the Horde isn’t at its best. But from the narrative point of view I love what currently is going on.

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Well, the Alliance has always been the WoW version of generic Tolkien fantasy tropes. The thing is: the people who play and like the Alliance like it because of that, don’t get me wrong there’s nothing wrong with that, but the difference is: they usually get from the writers what is expected from such a theme.

However, the Horde is portrayed as this faction bound together by ideals such as honor, loyalty and the struggle to survive. However, Blizzard ends up writing us as the worst sort of mustache twirling villains. To me, the Horde’s writing is lazy because it’s easy to make the Orcs and zombies be the bad guys, and if we’re to be the bad guys then come out and say it. I’d jump ship but at least it’d be out in the open. The problem is, Blizzard says we’re something on the panels at BlizzCon and in the books, but writes us as another in the game.

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I dunno about all failures, militarily. Darnassus, Lordaeron, and Dazar’alor had their down moments but seemed to be more obvious failures for the Alliance than the Horde. And getting to fly away cackling from Lordaeron, after bleeding the Alliance for every brutal inch, was personally a wonderful moment for the Forsaken. Spite until the bitter, teeth-gritting end. Not much fun for Orc RPers, I admit, but for the zombies this was a cracker of an expansion.

That said, I would say that BFA is a low point in terms of the quality of the Horde’s writing, conceptually, and especially with regards to Baine/Saurfang/Thrall and the ‘Honor’ Horde. It takes a lot of incompetence from the author to be up against Sylvie and still be written as so incompetent and repulsive that the Loyalist option was worth a shot just in case it turned around at some point.

I mean, come on, how many times do we need to tell Blizzard that ‘Honor’ has to mean something other than killing Horde who don’t agree with us? Between killing sunreavers for Jaina, and killing Horde to spare Baine’s hands the task of bending open a cage he admits he could have, this was just a parade of incompetent character moments - how did they screw up ‘doesn’t want to work for the evil murder lady?’ so bad!?

In the end, Blizzard’s only successful way to make the Sylvanas loyalist think twice about obeying her was to have her order them to play along with the other side. Let that one sink in a bit - the solution to ‘how do we make them dislike Sylvanas’ was to have her order her loyalists to behave like a Saurfang follower. Yikes.

And then, in the end, for the Big Solution to be Saurfang issuing the challenge he could and should have made right at the start of the Expansion? Clown world. Absolute clown world.

I came into BFA ready to say goodbye to Sylvanas as she had caught the villain bat. It’s kind of a rite of passage for Horde, at this point, and I had made my peace. It took some heroic blunders for me to end BFA cheering her on to get a few more kills off before they end her in Shadowlands.

So yeah. 100% a low point. Rethink your approach, Blizzard.

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canonically maybe but dazaralor looks cool and there are a lot less elves running around especially with void elf now on alliance

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And how many of those did the Alliance win?

The War of Thorns was a massive victory for the Horde and made them able to gain new land, wipe out an Alliance race AND achieve peace.

The Alliance didn’t win Darkshore or Arathi, they defended their zones, but not when it mattered. When it mattered they failed and had a genocide commited on one of their races.

Lordaeron was not an Alliance victory either, it was a Sylvanas victory and the Battle of Dazar alor only happened because they wanted Talanji to become queen. When the Alliance was close to victory, Anduin abandoned the mission.

After all, the Horde still got to completely annihilate the Night Elves and take their zones, and didn’t suffer any losses that are even close to be comparable to that. And they achieved the peace they wanted.
Meanwhile Sylvanas fans are mocking everyone in GD and other places because the story played out in their favour.

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I consider this a failure, because according to this expansion it was gathered around 2 options:

  • no black and white
  • faction pride

They failed to deliver on both. Horde players were told to have faith and pride in their faction, only to get told later they should feel guilty.

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To answer the title, I would say that is entirely subjective. In my opinion - No.

There have been pretty bleak moments. Nerzhul being tricked and dooming his people was pretty bad, to begin with. I could go on from there, but it would feel like a rote narrative of the Horde’s history. They have had many low points.

That holds true if we limit it to the WoW era. I found much of the Garrosh era nigh unplayable. I was unsubbed for alot of MoP.

I would say the over all purpose was excising Sylvanas from the Horde. There are a few reasons Blizzard could be so eager to do this:

Blizzard is running out of steam, and has few cards left to play that may seem a big enough threat. So, Sylvanas could be a narrative anchor to future ideas.

Or

To make her the belle of the ball of her own showcase, like many of those NEFPAs seem to hope for with their engorged pillars of hate.

But imo, I feel like:

They want the Horde to turn super sweet and cuddly, and Sylvanas is too mean. (Baine sending Anduin pieces of his horn will forever stain the Horde. Blizzard even had a scene where Sylvanas tells Baine he can’t play with Anduin anymore :man_facepalming:). So they upped the super-witch vibe, to make her exit easy for them. They tried everything they could to get the player base to see the “awesomeness” of their hamfisted narrative, but it came off as a MoP retread. And almost a bait and switch.

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Once again, the Night Elves were NOT wiped out or “completely annihilated”.

False.

:pancakes:

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Story wise yes. This expansion was clearly written on an Alliance pro peace perspective where the warhawks were converted and bowed to the golden boy while most of the Horde cast was just meekly on the crazy drive of the screecher and then on Anduin’s without a word on the matter.

Aside of the Zandalaris joining(but at great cost), this expansion was really ill-spirited to the player-base in general as it wanted to just tackle on something it can’t be, a piece of propaganda about how war is bad as we’re going to be on each other neck in a few years because of gameplay

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In WoW’s playable lifetime absolutely yes, though I’d put the pre-WC1 attacks on the draenei as worse overall.

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At least we actually had a Story…
I don’t think the,12 or so alliance players left enjoyed being shoved to the background while the Horde fought itself again.

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I actually think the Horde has a lot of potentially interesting places to go but Blizz just, isn’t doing that.

Take Thrall returning and basically being de facto Warchief. I get it’s a council but in SR he’s still the one taking charge and driving the Horde’s plot forward.

Now you’d think the Orcs would have mixed feelings on Thrall. He forged a real nation and place for them on Azeroth, but then he also abandoned that nation. He creates the monster that is Garrosh and when he finally deals with that he up and quits to go farm in Outland.

Now I think they’re going for like a George Washington esque Only those who don’t want power should have it thing. But uh, like Garrosh was a pretty glaring example about the flaws in the system and rather than changing anything he just hands the keys to Vol’Jin and dicks around with his alt universe family. And that same pretty huge flaw explodes in the Horde’s face again.

So you’d think there’d be a reconciliation there or something but Thrall’s just back and everybody’s fine with that. Which I get from a meta perspective because the Horde’s harder to villain bat with Thrall around. But there’s a lot you could’ve done there that never gets brought up.

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No… whatever the state of the Horde is in now, they’re not in the concentration camps post 2nd War. With the exception of Lordaeron, they are in a stronger position now than they were in Vanilla.