Realize, Blizzard has a very simple view of it all, and thought Undercity was parity.
They really believed that they solved Teldrassil at the beginning of BFA. (Which is crazy.)
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I’ll never forget the original version of the Darkshore quests on PTR, where the fight with Nathanos was so one-sided in his favor that even Red Shirt Guy had to @ them and go “Um, this is really bad”.
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Even the war that followed is just a drop in the bucket to the number of souls you’d get from the entire rest of the universe combined. All the war did was bring everyone that’s going to stop the Jailer right into the perfect place to do it.
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And yet, you can find souls from Azerothian races all over Torghast and the Maw, because Blizzard is so lazy. 
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Do you have a link? Not doubting you, but I’d just like to have it handy for future reference.
I know they have said that they plan Expansions several years and advance, but Shadowlands doesn’t feel like it. If they had anything planned for it they may have rolled it forward an expansion or two when they realized they were losing interest from the players.
At that point I don’t think she was ever supposed to be aligned with the Jailer. I think that came towards the end of BfA. I do think Sylvanas, in a twisted sense of purpose and righteousness saw Undeath as the solution of the Hell she saw after she threw herself from ICC, and believed that slaughtering and raising the population of Azeroth as Forsaken was a better fate. Kicking off the Fourth War would have accelerated that goal for sure.
I also don’t think Blizzard expected the player-base to fracture as badly as it did with BfA, splitting divisively as Red vs Blue, but also on Red side as “Loyalist” vs “Honor”. Remember, those options were added after intense feedback.
In all honesty they probably wanted to treat her more like a Illidan, with hindsight allowing players to see why she made the choices she made (much how they did with Illidan in Legion), however she was so polarizing they needed to fall back on something else.
Everything from Azeroth is supposed to be special. The World Soul is unique, the Blood is unique (Azerite), the population is unique, the Heroes unique, etc, etc. You would think that they would have a line in there about the Anima from Azeroth being more potent than others, and with Night Elves being as old as they are and having accomplished much over a 10,000 year span that theirs even more so. It wouldn’t have been great but at least it would have added something.
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It was during an interview, some months ago, but I’ll be honest I’d need to wade through a mountain of Discord salt to find the proper source. So for the moment I’ll just say take it as hearsay from me, because my brain is an unreliable deathtrap.
Blizzard has never been good with population numbers. We now know that all souls only started going to the Maw after we killed Argus, which is not a very long amount of time before the War of the Thorns. Blizzard might expect that natural death rates across the universe aren’t that high compared to a war on Azeroth. Or maybe Blizzard would have populations of whole other planets be no more plentiful than patch zones, as compares to the infinite Azeroth races that always bounce back no matter how many genocides they go through.
Nonetheless, through Blizzard’s story telling, before the burning Sylvanas was still struggling against Malfurion, then after the Fourth War she mopped the floor with Bolvar, so Blizzard had presented it as a considerable difference in how much power Sylvanas was getting from the Maw between those points.
As much as I hate to defend blizzard’s current writing. We don’t know the scale or status of the universe.
A bunch of worlds were destroyed by the legion, with that stopping recently. We don’t know the lifespan of the other races, and then there’s the narrative that Azeroth is special. Maybe Azerothian souls are special too.
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I’d buy that if we didn’t see almost zero implication that the souls matter outside of just being souls. There’s, what? Twelve souls total that matter to the Jailer (the crystals he had when you grab Uther’s soul plus Anduin, Jaina, and Thrall) out of the thousands that have ended up in the Shadowlands over the years.
I still would’ve liked it if Sylvanas sided with Zovaal either after her failed attempt at corrupting Eyir or when she was down to 3 Val’kyr following the Darkshore Warfront. As both of those scenarios hint towards her eventual perma death. I mean it took 3 Val’kyr to resurrect her back in Cata when she was killed by Godfrey.
Just not have the burning of Teldrassil at all. Have it that after Genn told Anduin about his reasons behind the Worgen vs Forsaken conflict in Stormheim and what Sylvanas had planned. The Alliance attack the Undercity first. Then have the Darkshore warfront be the actual invasion of the hordes forces. I am sick and tired of the Alliance being the reactive faction. it is why I love Stormheim. For once we start the fight.
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In the end Sylvanas wasn’t worried about losing the Val’kyr, as we saw in the raid:
- Highlord Bolvar Fordragon says: There are no more val’kyr to protect you, Sylvanas. You will die here–for the last time.
Sylvanas Windrunner says: The archer does not mourn the loss of their arrows, Highlord.
Related, when I was looking up quotes of the souls that were in the river in the Maw one of them was:
- I trusted in Sylvanas…
Along with the Forsaken souls we can save from Torghast, Banshee Sylvanas was willing to sacrifice the Forsaken to oblivion just as much as anyone else she got killed for the Jailer’s freedom.
i still think there’s not to the cinematic when Sylvanas talks to Anduin that gives hints to her motivations that we won’t find out until the book.
She says “We can’t even control who we…” she cuts off but then she lets out a defeated sigh. I think she was going to say love because the next line is important. Up until this point she was using present tense, and she switches to past tense “We couldn’t control anything” She’s talking about her relationship with Nathanos. She felt like they couldn’t control anything that happened to them, and in Shadows Rising it was revealed that they spent a lot of time separated in life and longing for each other.
Steve described them as star crossed lovers. That would be motivation enough if Sylvanas thought that through the Jailer she could somehow change the past.
More about their relationship will feature in the new book, so we are really not going to know for sure until it comes out. I imagine it will give us way more context to their relationship and make them both way more sympathetic. (Sorry to say for all the haters out there)
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As covered at the top of the thread, Blightcaller and Marris are two different characters. Any new hypothetical empathy for Marris is unlikely to overall reward Blightcaller with any new sympathy.
I disagree. After Shadows Rising I saw many people who previously hated Nathanos on Reddit now saying he was more of a likeable character despite using children as bait and threatening them in the same book.
All they have to do is making Blightcaller relatable in his humanity, he is still human (he is a human but talking about the state of being not the race) despite being undead.
Obviously all either of us has is anecdotal. On the official forums we saw significant people celebrating getting to see Blightcaller killed as a world boss.
Not just the universe, either. Danuser said that souls of the dead from alternate realities all go to the same Shadowlands. So it’s all the souls of dead people, per day, from ALL universes combined.
To be fair, those number of souls should be insignificant compared to all the souls that have ever been sent to the Covenants across all time. The joined forces of the Covenants should have made the Mawsworn army look like a town militia.
Right, I just meant in comparison to the Night Elves killed at Teldrassil and the casualties of the Fourth War. They’re just a drop of water in an ocean compared to the amount of souls flowing into the Maw on a daily basis at that point.
My point is thinking upon numbers in Warcraft only leads to further numerical inconsistencies, not expectations of sensibility.
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