Probably depends on your perspective on what “tragedy” means. In vanilla Forsaken were poisoning druids in their sleep and twisting their spirits for some reason. Like seriously, I don’t think there was any reason for it other than the Forsaken wanted to do it. There’s also a quest where you can go raid a small Night elf outpost just because an Orc and his two friends are bored. Like, you just kill all of them because you’re bored. Then there’s the Night elf druids that are killed for no good reason in Stonetalon. There’s a Troll witch doctor who’s like “hey wanna see a magic trick?” and turns a bunch of captive Night elves into wisps. For some reason.
There might be more I’m forgetting. Those are smaller scale than Silverwind refuge just being straight up invaded and its inhabitants being slaughtered as they fled from water elementals, but most things in WoW back then were smaller scale.
So I’m just going to touch on the fire thing, because it bothers me badly.
FIRE DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT.
No, not even with shamans blowing wind upwards.
If you have the scale equivalent of a live, healthy oak surrounded by air of average temperature and let’s even say average humidity despite Teldrassil being in the middle of the ocean, you’re not going to set it ablaze by flicking matches at it from 6 feet away. Even with waterproof ever burning matches. The math just doesn’t work.
It’s a very different thing when the air temperature is near the flashpoint, as in your video. Those fires also generate their own wind system… And even allotting for magic, a big, healthy tree does not burn quickly. They frequently burn from the inside out for days from wherever fire found a purchase on the bark (especially in lightening strikes and I probably would have been less thrown out of the narrative by all the shamans pooling together for a big lightening strike than catapults with normal payloads).
But yeah, I know rule of cool applies.
Still, I wish someone had researched fire behavior or at least applied a little more handwavium to that whole plot beat, because if that was even remotely how it works, I’m never putting on my wildland gear or my bunker gear or EVEN LIGHTING A CANDLE again.
Honestly if you put a gun to my head and told me “we need Sylvanas to be the big bad and working for Zovaal but you can rewrite anything about how things go down before then”
I feel like the best possible way to play it up is to have the tree go up in smoke almost immediately and just have all the Shamans and Druids and Mages and Engineers collectively go, “I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to work like that” and ominously shoot to Sylvanas with the weird white-and-black magic fading off of her. Just start playing up early that this shouldn’t have been an achievable feat. Hell, have Horde Druids and stuff who were banking on the flames being slow and expected it to be a threatening strategy as part of a long siege just sitting there going “what happened, this is horrifying”.
Maybe a questline for Hamuul or something (remember him?) investigating what’s going on, see why Life magic was suddenly so weak there.
There is a reason I prefaced with “put a gun to my head”, but I will add:
It wouldn’t have achieved the dev goals of getting rid of Undercity and Darnassus as player population siphons (NOTE: I STRONGLY DISAGREE THAT THIS GOAL MADE ANY DAMN SENSE, but it was a dev white whale)
While we’re playing with platonic ideals/schrodinger’s plotlines, it’s easy to say “I would prefer X and Y”, but the number of narratives that have been able to successfully pull off “this was all a dream” after an extended period of real-world time is vanishingly small.
that probably won’t work because then you need to rethink the entire shadowlands.
The entirety of BFA was a stepping stone for the Shadowlands story. Both of these expansions were solely a story about Sylvanas and how the entire universe of wow revolved around her story as the main character in an MMORPG.
So anyone else involved in WOT and BFA wouldn’t really work unless you pretty much bin everything and start over. Which is probably what they should have done.
Absolutely agree on both points. My main reason for adding it was:
It’s not so much that the 10,000 years part matters (to me) it’s just that whatever justification may be used as part of the lore (and I don’t deny it does exist), from a gameplay perspective it’s just not viable to have a “super duper” race greater than everyone else combined.
And honestly I’ve never understood technological development in WoW. I’m not even sure what the Night Elves’ greatest technological achievement in the last 10k years is.
Literally all they just had to say was, “Oh, Azerite on the catapults! Magic Titan blood!” Would’ve been super easy.
I’m on-board. Can make it so even Shadowlands doesn’t really happen. Turns out at the end of Legion, when we depowered Sargeras’ sword, the void-corrupted blood of Azeroth allowed N’Zoth to corrupt our minds.
Everything from there on in was N’Zoth trying to lead us to believe we defeated him, so we wouldn’t question the reality of what came next.
Shadowlands was a madness-driven illusion from N’Zoth, desired to show us the Evil Machinery of Death as one of the many possible threats that Azeroth faced.
The Dragon Isles awakening is actually the culmination of N’Zoth’s plan. Whatever it is we’re trying to accomplish, at the end of the expansion, our actions end up finishing a ritual for N’Zoth that required the power of the Titan base on the Dragon Isles.
Once we activated it, the vision fades and we find out most of Azeroth is back under the banner of the Black Empire and we’ve just helped N’Zoth bring C’Thun, Yogg-Saron, and even Y’Shaarj back.
The Dragons whisk us away from the rapidly encroaching corruption to a safe spot … somewhere… that Azeroth created for us.
The entire next expansion is us taking back Azeroth from the Old Gods - zone by zone - reversing their terraforming and trying to save those who can be uncorrupted.
World of Warcraft: The Black Empire - the expansion we all wish N’Zoth had actually been instead of a piece tacked onto a jumbled mess that was BFA.
This framing assumes a few things that don’t have to be true:
That actual home turf defense is unreasonably powerful. Before BFA, hard to imagine anyone making that argument. Belligerent wars are about force projection. A heavily decentralized mass of wilderness dwellers are pretty naturally going to be good at guerilla defense of a vast buffer territory surrounding their very few major settlements, and pretty bad at force projection. Force projection has been the core competency in this setting, especially whenever RvB demands the Alliance and Horde fight over some land new to the both of them.
That core narratives specifically require the conflicts of individual player races which must be tightly balanced. I do not expect the gnomes to be the level of military threat of most other races. Maybe individual units, but Gnomeregan is the rump state of an already small political entity. This perspective is required by the Red vs Blue framing and has not been good for the setting.
I fundamentally reject the notion that Night Elves, Dwarves, Zandalari, and Forsaken – because all of these are distinct and powerful imperial entities with unique resources to their allegiances – must be portrayed as merely “on-par” with other forces. I have vested interest in gnomes, darkspear, blood elves, and Tauren more than those (with Forsaken near the dead bottom of my list) and I think it dumb to show my favorites as being “on par” as political entities. Valuable, for sure. Give them time to shine – in fact, more of it. But in ways that make sense, often as diplomats or specialists, not as vast armies. Part of what attracted me to these groups was the notion that while their cultures were valuable and learned, their numbers were small and their societies in positions perilous. I would love to see them grow, but growth is not the same as just pretending they’ve always been powerful.
Superficial notions of equitable power while lacking equitable respect for concepts + cultures and a coherent notion of the setting merely lays bare the mechanical animus beneath it all; it does not please the imagination and delight the soul. This is acceptable for balancing of player characters, but must be tempered for plot.
Tyrande was, and shes the head of the state, she was allways affraid of a legions return and take matters in her hand to prepar3 for this, the coldness furion descripse in wc3 and the build up of the sentinelarmy served this purpose.
I mean, the idea that Night Elves are somehow an extremely powerful race, more powerful than others, is one that has already been debunked as early as Warcraft 3.
You’ll remember that when Thrall sent Grom and the Warsong Clan to Ashenvale to harvest lumber he found and fought the Night Elves and despite only having a limited number of soldiers, he was able to wipe out the Night Elven forces that assaulted his clan and destroy their military outposts, only being beaten back when Cenarius joined the fray. Then and only then did the Warsong need to drink from demonic blood, becoming fel-orcs which gave them the renewed strength to take down Cenarius and his forces.
They’re an old race, but being around longer doesn’t mean they’re necessarily more powerful than any other race that exists.
There’s a very, very large gap between your statement and …
Every race does not have to score a 5 (out of 10) on “standing military,” “physical prowess,” “intelligence,” “magical ability,” etc. They especially do not all need to have equality in terms of standing forces.
However, for the purposes of an MMO, one race cannot be vastly superior in comparison to all others (and especially not so in all categories). It’s just not sustainable.
The problem Night Elves face is that by lore descriptions, they are often described as being powerful, magical, wise, loved by a true deity, etc. Saurfang estimated they’d need 12-to-1 advantage for the Horde to take Teldrassil (8-to-1 once Tyrande left) assuming they had the advantage of surprise with the Alliance on the other side of the continent.
But in-game events they don’t live up to that standard, because first and foremost this is a game where Night Elves are part of a two-faction dynamic where there should be some measure of parity across factions.
Of course there is a huge gap between those statements.
That was the point of my post: you don’t have to take a dump on the night elves in order to have an MMO where no single culture is dramatically more powerful or focal than all the others, you just need to write different scenarios in the first place.
The burning of Teldrassil required that kind of parity, but the very concept was unnecessary and counter productive. Most of the things night elf fans complain about, in my eyes, are of similar character. I am of the opinion that most of the vocal, long-standing complaints by fans about the story have quite a lot of merit, so this isn’t unique to that group. The greatest defense the writers generally have is that they are often being overwritten in key ways by GDev and don’t have a lot of time to plan before they have to start making assets and committing to beats.
None of that gives them an edge in mobilizing their vast, decentralized peoples on a moment’s notice. In rapid transit to distant lands. In familiarity with combat engineering both mechanical and magical. In unnatural alchemies. In financial leverage. In diplomatic maneuvering.
No one was asking for Elune to show up or to get built up as dramatically more powerful than any other god, everyone was perfectly fine with her being about as active and effective an intercessionist as the Holy Light or the Earth Mother. About the only asked-for “win” for Night Elves that backed the story into a corner was Malfurion coming back, and that was a poor decision that is also arguably mitigated at this point given how powerful multiple faction leaders have been portrayed cinematically now.
This talk of faction parity and made up military and magical strength is and always will be reductive. The point is no player subscribes to a heroic fantasy MMO and picks a race to invest in just to be trodden on as helpless victims to a badly written plot that started and ended horribly.
They literally just wanted to dunk on the Night elves. They literally just wanted to retell the Fall of Quel’thalas with the Horde as the Scourge and the Night elves as the High elves.
They didn’t even bother coming up with an explanation for why the Worgen weren’t helping at the time. The worgen, who are so powerful they completely mogged the Horde (under the leadership of Varian, it might’ve been mostly demigod Lo’gosh doing this but still) in Wolfheart.
They came up with a reason why Draenei wouldn’t help because apparently they were so depleted after Legion that they didn’t have anyone left to help. But that doesn’t explain why the Lightforged Draenei wouldn’t help. They have an interdimensional space ship capable of warping around through space. They are currently in space. They can just load up the Vindicaar with soldiers and drop Light teleporters and rapidly deploy troops and mechs. They literally did this on Kul’Tiras.
Dark Iron Dwarves can also apparently just bend reality around mole machines, allowing them to pop up out of just about anywhere. They could have sent mole machines to Kalimdor.
You don’t even need to go to this “Well ackshually Night elves shouldn’t be as powerful as the whole Horde!” they don’t even need to be. They had allies. They never should have been put into the position they were in the first place.
Blizzard will pull any string, move any mountain in order to clown on Night elves.
“Here at Blizzard we won’t let anything stand in our way of telling truly astonishingly terrible stories. That is our promise. Our mission.”