Yeah, I meant before / during the useless DF timeskip.
I would say some of the people know the concrete details of it, as we do. I agree most probably donât know the details. But, I would argue that with very few exceptions the VAST, VAST, majority of the population knows it exists. When your leaders, heroes and even some soldiers just came back from it you would know it was a thing. And people would be talking.
And think about it, it is well known that Forsaken existence is not a good one. So, even without being sure the afterlife is a thing there arenât going to be many that would choose the to be Forsaken. Add in the afterlife knowledge and those that would actively choose to be a Forsaken would be very few in number. Not zero, sure. But still, not a lot.
I agree that there would be some. But not enough to represent a significant population increase.
The impression I got was that most of the remaining scourge fall into one of two categories.
- Mind completely gone and just walking monstrosities.
- Evil and still pro-scourge.
Most of the scourge we see are just wandering mindless undead that attack anything and have no real organization. Those that do seem to have some will or mind left are usually trying to rebuild and restart the scourge. Neither of those seem to be something that would help the Forsaken.
We already knew that. Tyrande and Malfurion handed leadership off to her in Belâameth at the end of DF.
We also knew that. We saw Genn step down.
Then some minor corrections:
That is not accurate. Geyaârah thought that when she saw the child with the sword before she realized it was just a kid trying to protect his home.
It was the 7th Legion Auxiliary. I donât know for sure how Blizzard is dividing them from the 7th Legion army, though the use of Auxiliary does indicate some difference. So, we canât conclude much about the size of the 7th Legion.
A leader I would agree. The leader is not something that can be concluded from what we have seen. We donât even know if Blizzard intends for the Horde to ever be under a single leader again.
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Maybe former Syndicate, Argent Crusade, Dalaran, Stromgarde or Stormwind, yeah.
Still a bit off, though. In the Ashbringer comic they barely found any reinforcements outside of Lordaeron. And since then, things have got worse rather than better in terms of population.
Given that the Helm of Domination has been destroyed, any halfway intact undead should get their free will back.
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From my understanding, the refugees were in central Arathi , which leaves Hammerfall open.
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How many centuries old was Aegywnn when she had Medivh again? Even Menopause itself bows before the powers of an archmage.
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Wasnât Aegwynn a Guardian, though? Which Jaina isnât ⌠though she is stupidly OP, so maybe there isnât much difference 
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Yeah Aegwynn was able to keep herself young because she was a Guardian. It takes a lot of power to do that. Even Senegos needed some help (via certain artifacts) in keeping himself alive beyond when he was meant to die.
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I enjoyed this a lot, I feel the best way to add nuance to the races and factions again is to return to Vanillaâs style of having internal issues that undermine a larger goal, as opposed to open faction war.
Marran is interesting because some of her issues, on the surface, sound justifiable, if not her methods, until you actually remember prior lore. Her point about the Alliance demanding a lot from member states without giving anything in return sounds plausible, until you remember the Arathi Highlands were only fully restored and taken from the Syndicate and ogres due to Alliance sending a ton of resources north. Even as far back as Vanilla, the League of Arathor had âbenefactors in Stormwindâ.
So Stromgarde was retaken after it fell to ruin, due to Alliance efforts, and now six or so years later sheâs claiming the opposite and stoking the flames of a false pride.
Geyaârah is a bit of a weird character for me, since she comes from what I consider to be the most out of pocket bit of writing Blizzard has ever done (more than the War of Thorns), and her characterization has always been all over the place. I liked her in this, though it makes her bickering with Turalyon in the campaign kind of wonky, timeline wise.
I do hope they do a lot more of these.
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Also: Death Knights.
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Yeah pretty much. So if you want to villain bat an Alliance character she and that night elf chick from seasons can be a two for one deal.
I hope we see more of Marran and Zatacia. As others have said, they could make for good Alliance-based villains (maybe someone will break Marran out of jail, or sheâll escape). In fact, Zatacia already feels like she could be the Alliance version of Nathanos.
And Iâm glad Geyaârahâs moving out of her âangsty teenâ phase.
She definitely has some of those traits. Does one need all fascistic traits to be considered fascist, or only some? I donât think Marran has the sexism or fascistic economic views.
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The coat and trousers are the leather set from Castle Nathria, but the hat with the feather is a cosmetic item that can be bought in Dornegal, as are the boots. Iâm not sure about the belt, but thereâs a few similar to it that are cosmetic.
To be fair, Galen was still alive when he took over Stromgarde, and he somehow managed to keep it secret that he murdered his father rather than Thoras dying in battle or of natural causes. He didnât end up undead until much later, and by that point he had the backing of the Forsaken to take and hold Stromgarde as a puppet ruler for Sylvanas. If he hadnât had the brilliant idea of both rebelling against Sylvanas and attacking the Ebon Blade during Legion, he might still be around, or at least would have made a more logical Horde NPC for the Arathi warfront.
So, with Marran, that makes two recent Trollbanes that have been traitorous, homicidal, and foolish. Itâs not a good look for the royal house that the patriarch who is a literal undead harbinger of apocalyptic destruction is one of the more sane and comparatively nonviolent members of the family.
Setting aside the disgusting comments she made about Stormwind and Dalaran, she (a) lied to her sovereign about what she was doing as regent and refused to follow his instructions, which was a betrayal of her duties as regent, (b) conspired with her lackeys to intercept correspondence that would reveal said betrayal, and (c) lured the head of state of another Alliance nation into a trap, attacked her, and later threatened to kill her. Considering that Danath is only the ruler of Stromgarde in the first place because his cousin Galen decided to become a discount Arthas, anything that even remotely appears to be an attempt to overthrow the rightful ruler is something to take extremely seriously.
The events of the Ashbringer comic were 15-20 years ago, and the Scarlets havenât been confined to the borders of old Lordaeron since they gained a fleet at the beginning of Wrath. Also, while the Plaguelands are still dangerous for them, the amount of Scourge running around has drastically decreased since the early days of the Crusade thanks to the efforts of the Forsaken and the Argents, as well as Naxxramas leaving and Acherus rebelling against the Lich King. Itâs theoretically much easier for Scarlet recruiters to move around now than it was in the early days, and so they keep on popping up like cockroaches.
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Yes. But I was more referring to the pool they can draw from. In Ashbringer, they gathered all the humans of lordaeron that were left. (Plaguelands, Tirisfal) Those are dead now.
Where do they get reinforcements?
The Argent Crusade? How did they go from 100 men to 10,000 in the first place?
The people of Hillsbrad? Dead or worgen.
The Syndicate? Regularly decimated by Alliance, Horde, and Ravenholdt.
Stromgarde? On the brink of extinction.
Stormwind? After 20 years of war, they too should be struggling with population loss.
This army out of nowhere, it just doesnât make much sense to me.
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Her views on gender equality and economy were not explored (well, we do know Stromgarde has a feudal economic system), but thatâs ultimately irrelevant because what matters is less âdoes Marran meet the criteria to be accurately described as a fascist in a real world contextâ and more âis she to be interpreted as a fascistâ
Marran is an ultranationalist driven by a fabled Golden Age of Arathor fantasy whoâs willfully fuelling xenophobia by spreading lies about the Orcsâ nature and intentions among the Stromic population in order to advance her reactionary Make Arathi Great Again imperialist agenda
Thatâs enough to call her a fascist because thatâs clearly what sheâs meant to evoke
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Put it into perspective and that army is a lot less impressive. Firstly itâs predominately raw recruits, secondly they were fighting both Gilneas and Forsaken at their historical weakest point.
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WoW has literally never cared about numbers in a way that would make this analysis useful. No conclusions can be derived here.
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Perhaps they should start to care. Itâs becoming implausible.
Furthermore I donât need numbers when dialogue, quests, and environmental storytelling show that ânothing or almost nothing is left.â
I may be overestimating the Scarlet Crusadeâs manpower here, yeah.
I guess weâll see in the future.
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The fact that its leaders persist being in the front lines should not help either like Maraan said âplaying heroesâ.
To be fair we canât forget DF were Tyrande after a literal rebellion because of lost immortality from the Druids of the Flame when give the choice to re-gain immortality she CHOSE for all her people not to be immortalâŚ
When I read that I understood the reasoning but, STILL I know a lot of her people would NOT be happy⌠who in the right mind like to get sick and die of old age even in a fantasy setting?! Thats one of the main reasons necromancers, warlocks, vampires (SanâLayn) and Liches exist in a fantasy world!
As a GM this choice would be exploited once again by some other villain if its not already being written in as one of Xal plots to feed her power of that rage.
lol you canât make this stuff up⌠in true honestly I would love to know, what was the thought process going through the story devs mind, when they decided to write Tyrande to make that choice for her people, knowing that not all would agree after the so many tragic events due to the lost of that. I would think they are setting it up for Azshara return with Xal at its shadow⌠but thatâs just speculation on my part.
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Still doesnât explain how the Bloodfang pack, the same group that gave the forsaken such a hard time in tirisfal, lost fenris isle to a bunch of recruits
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One notion I play with in my mind:
What if the Arathi that are far away have been able to send volunteers one by one to secretly boost the Scarlet Crusade with some sort of Light based transportation ⌠but they werenât able to keep up with the losses at that rate.
So the Arathi Emperor found a way to transport an experimental armada using the Light - but it didnât go where he wanted it to go, and ended up in Hallowfall.
Maybe after they fine tune their Light Transport process, they will move bigger armies to more important places with better accuracy.
And thatâs how we get from âthe farmers are nextâ to more humans than humanly possible .
(More human than human as others have said)