…who?
The way things went with Garrosh Hellscream and Sylvannas Windrunner says otherwise. It was a good show for why having a dictator is a bad thing, especially when said dictator is supposed to be there for the purposes of a military campaign.
Hoping for a good tyrant is, at the very least, a fool’s errand.
The DF stuff was lame.
As I’ve said before, when the alternative is lobotomizing everyone to justify a conflict between factions, I’ll happily take banding together to save the world from eldritch horrors.
They weren’t the only Warchiefs and they didn’t develop the leaders afterward. There is no way to know what they prevented by developing nothing.
What went afterward was Horde having any real story in the MSQ and any faction fantasy.
They could have instead never made those two Warchief, handed it to Cairne or Vol’jin and never have killed those two off.
Warchief role isn’t a dictator. They just went crazy, because Blizz forgot they changed the Horde in WC III and can’t seem to figure out new stories for the Horde that isn’t killing off leaders and creating a schism within the Horde.
Did not say that.
They did this anyway to force everyone to be besties forever. It was lame.
You are Alliance. Of course you would. Most of that focused on Alliance characters and was boring as hell.
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In the new horde? Yes, that were the “only” warchiefs aside from Thrall (who is the writer’s self-insert) and Vol’jin (whose run was comically short).
Overall not a good record. Not even counting the old horde (Orgrim Doomhammer, Blackhand the Destroyer).
The warchief position is indeed a dictator, as they are the central governmental figure. They call the shots and are in an position where they can do what they want unless someone is brave/arrogant and strong enough to challenge them to mak’gora. And lest we forget, members of the Horde were made to swear an oath of absolute obedience to the warchief.
This is why the warchief going crazy/psycho is so disastrous for the Horde. It’s also why they had to move away from that position when given the chance, as leaving things unchanged while expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.
Edit: Whoops, forgot to reply here. You are partly correct in that Blizz has difficulty writing stuff for the Horde. That will continue unless the Horde can break out of its arrested development. It would also help if Blizzard would stop wasting settings.
Aside from Zandalar, which should have had an entire expansion instead of just the first act of BFA, my recent foray into Undermine showed me Blizzard once again squandered a good setting. Imagine an entire expansion set in Undermine centered on the goblins and the handful of people (including the player) that somehow made their way there.
You just did by saying they could have given it to Cairne or Vol’jin. That’s asking for a good tyrant because the ones picked by the writers were bad.
The worst we got with this direction was dialogue that ranged from awkward to bad, and the ending of that Arathi Highlands questline.
What we had with forced faction conflict was characters doing absolutely illogical things that would be detrimental in the short and long run because “wAr iN WaRcRaFt”. Also killing off characters in pairs instead of making each character death mean something.
Because Blizzard made it that way. They created insane Warchiefs that for some bizarre reason the rest of the Horde slavishly followed.
What’s even more ridiculous is the deal the rest of the races had was with Thrall and only Thrall. They had zero reason to follow Garrosh or Sylvanas.
Sadly, I don’t think this is going to change anytime soon. Midnight is already a mess with Silvermoon being neutral while the Blood Elves within it aren’t - basically the Blood Elves effectively don’t own Silvermoon anymore.*
* Or it’s a very “doormat” behavior by the Blood Elves to allow freedom of movement within their city (and their borders) and getting nothing in return.
P.S. I was hoping this expansion would be the time for the Blood Elves to shine - for once. I am sorely disappointed.
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So they weren’t the only Warchiefs.
It means half were fine and the others weren’t because Blizz decided to degrade the Horde instead of develop it. That didn’t change with the council introduction.
They are a tribal leader who can be challenged. Not a dictator. Stop trying to view non-human leadership through a human, real life lense.
So not a dictator since challenging them is part of the leadership role.
What’s disasterous for the Horde is lack of new stories.
They didn’t leave anything unchanged. They kept killing off leaders. The only thing unchanged is them doing the same stories over again. Which they’ve done even after changing the Horde.
It’s asking for good leaders. Neither of them were tyrants.
So we got bad and boring. I don’t want to quest with your NPCs. I definitely don’t want the Horde changed for this boring standard you seem to have.
You can have faction conflict without all out genocide. We had that in Vanilla. You can also have appointex leaders without going to war together. Most of the leaders in this game are still appointed.
They still have done this after the council.
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Nah blizzard has !@#$!@ the horde, We have lost so many leaders compared to the alliance it’s so sad.
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I’d say that oath of absolute obedience is why most follow the insane warchiefs. Leaders like Vol’jin in Cataclysm and Baine in BFA have also shown they’ll follow to prevent the Horde as a whole from fragmenting.
I also think that many in the rank and file simply lack the strength/skill/plot armor to beat an insane warchief in mak’gora. Garrosh Hellscream was pretty strong even before he got all the piercings since his first mak’gora with Thrall ended in a stalemate (technically it was interrupted), so I doubt random orc grunt or troll headhunter with warchief aspirations would stand a chance against him. Sylvannas was able to kill Varok Saurfang, which in terms of power level is crazy given how long Saurfang was around (“beware an old man in a profession where men die young” and such).
“Develop” would mean growing and improving. And that necessitates change, not things staying exactly the same. The issue is more that the stories to be told due to the change in Horde politics are internal because that’s bound to bring societal shifts. Which is unfortunately inconvenient when your model for expansions is that every expansion has to take place in a new continent…
An idea I’ve had on this would be creating something beyond the heritage quests we’ve been seeing. Call it civic quests or something just to show what’s going on in the horde capitals with this change in government. It might be “boring” because you’re not out killing things but I’d take that over hearing that the worldbuilding is being done in some unrelated novel yet again.
Challenging the warchief has been treated as a last resort measure by pretty much every leader other than Cairne Bloodhoof (and even then, this was the case because Cairne was getting killed off). Be it due to conditioning (again, oath of absolute obedience), lack of power, or a desire to keep the status quo running because the alternative is the Horde breaking apart.
You again fail to see that giving absolute power to one person is asking for trouble. You’re complaining that they didn’t make Vol’jin last longer than an expansion or that Cairne could have been warchief, but you’re still asking for a good tyrant because the power structure still had the warchief at its center.
Instead of saying “we’ve seen what can happen when a psycho is made warchief, so maybe we should try something else”, you’re saying “let’s keep making warchiefs and maybe we’ll get lucky and get a ‘good’ one”.
Things have stayed the same despite their changes to leadership.
How about have ideas for your own faction. And it’s not about killing the Alliance. It’s about developing the Horde outside of leader goes bad, there’s a schism, we get rid of our own leader. We just killed Gallywix despite there being a council. The council thing has not prevented this. It’s also about not ruining faction fantasy with story plot. Which they did with BFA and then their solution to that being the worst thing they could come up with. Just put a leader in charge that isn’t a psycho. Easy.
Removing leaders shouldn’t be taken lightly. We still should have a Warchief. If you want something different on your own faction, push for that.
Your side also gives absolute power to one individual. It’s all in how writers handle it.
Because Blizz likes to make the Horde the villains to make the Alliance heroes. And it’s not about luck. Stop acting like this is real life and it’s a chance at something. Writers control it.
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The problem with this mentality is that, in terms of lore, those who survive can’t fill the shoes of those who died in battle.
At least in the Horde…
I dunno, ask restaurants when they ask soup or salad. Who the hell’s picking salad?
(jk I’m old now and often go salad for the fiber and lower calories… god life sucks)
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