Blizzard’s decision to make Night Elves join the Alliance is laziness. When WoW was being developed, they were still riding the success train of Warcraft 3. So, naturally, they wanted all the factions of that game to be seen in WoW. Human, Orc, Undead, Night Elf.
While Blizzard’s trash story telling and tendency to homogenize their world rather than diversify, has only gotten worse over the years. Back in the early 2000s, it was still a problem. The Undead and Night Elves really had no business being in the Horde or Alliance, but it was simply easier for Blizzard to do it that way. Adding a 3rd or 4th faction added a layer a complexity that Blizzard probably didn’t want. So they just didn’t.
Unfortunately, that laziness paid off for them. No one really cared about that shortcut, and WoW became one of the most successful games in history.
I’d venture a guess and state that once the denizens of Azeroth dealt with Archimonde and the immediate threat had passed, it fell back to impressions of the other races.
IIRC, Malf went back into the dream after Hyjal leaving Tyrande in charge again. Though she had no love for humans or other Alliance races, her first experience with the orcs (and therefore, the Horde) had been seeing Grom and the Warsong drink demon blood and kill Cenarius. As is evidenced in Legion with the Nightborne, Tyrande can hold a grudge.
I think that could explain why, if anything, the Night Elves didn’t join the Horde despite it geographically making more sense than joining Stormwind.
Night Elf weakness or strength in BFA is something of a Schroedinger’s Cat situation. The army mostly missed the War of the Thorns, the population was mostly evacuated (see Elegy). Can we say then that their casualties were out of proportion with other combatants? Maybe yes on the civilian front, but even there potentially only slightly, and probably not on the military front. It’s notable as well that the Horde did not move through Ashenvale like a wave, they moved in a line - and this left various conflicts still happening after Teldrassil through the mission tables.
So, I don’t see a reason to argue that their military strength is comparatively impaired when we stack them up against this conflict’s other belligerents, and its worthwhile here to note that the Horde is depleted too. Now before someone gets upset and says “YOU DON’T REALLY THINK THE NIGHT ELVES CAN TAKE ON EIGHTYBAJILLION RACES AT ONCE, DO YOU?” - I do expect that a global superpower generally lacks the ability to crowd all of their armies on one place like that - which seems to be a concern that only Night Elves have to deal with. I’ve also brought up things like chokepoints, geographic advantages, and strong geopolitical barriers, in view as well of Clausewitz’s observation that you can win a war by merely making it intolerable for the other side to fight. So yes, I’m confident that the Night Elves could defend their own territories against another Horde attack outside of the pants-on-head stupid conditions of the War of the Thorns.
This brings us to the question of Night Elf vulnerability - which in the War of the Thorns became a problem specifically because, in order to help the Alliance, they moved their army out of position, and the Alliance did not think it had to reinforce the sectors that they emptied. Again, the bargain here is that if they are attacked, the Alliance will intervene. As I discussed before, not only did the Alliance not intervene, but they were singularly focused on Stormwind’s geopolitical wish list as opposed to retaking core territories of Alliance members.
So, if the claim here is that the Night Elves are in the Alliance because the Alliance will help them against the Horde - BFA proved that to be false. So instead the Night Elves by being part of the Alliance going forward is assuming all of the risk and none of the benefit. If the Horde masses up and attacks them again when they are out of the Alliance, what is the real difference given that they were disinterested in reinforcing or retaking their territories in the first place? Either way, the Kaldorei are going to have to do it themselves. It’s just that in an Alliance, they have this thing on the other side of the ocean leeching off of their forces for fronts that they don’t care about. They are also, in the Alliance, a convenient nearby proxy for when the Horde wants to take its anger out on Stormwind.
So to recap:
If the Night Elves not in the Alliance, they may have to fight the whole Horde alone.
If the Night Elves are in the Alliance, they still have to fight the whole Horde alone, but with the added bonus of being at a much greater risk of it, and having to contribute troops to other fronts.
So why be in the Alliance?
Edit:
My quibble with this is that Tyrande blames the humans for Cenarius’s death too. We see that in the opening to Night Elf mission 4 in reign of chaos. So someone probably had the better advertising package here.
Legion was the culmination of over a decade of Bliz retconing and messing up major elven characters from W3. The only group Tyrande didn’t open fire on at first sight in 3 was Kael’s troops.
It’s like people forgot that Night Elves were just as much aligned with the Horde as they were with the Alliance in WC3. Why would they engage in diplomacy with the humans they hate across the ocean, instead of the orcs they hate that are next door? Especially when engaging in diplomacy with the humans across the ocean just gives the orcs more reason to attack you.
The best answer that I have for this is that Thrall was a weak leader who allowed Warsong Raids into Ashenvale to continue - which is established in the comics depicting the Theramore Peace Conference as something that he’s aware about, and something that Varian has to get him to stop.
Additionally, the world is not rich with histories of adjacent land powers being good friends. Typically their geopolitical interests overlap, and in that overlap, they fight.
Even operating on the premise that the Night Elf military survived the WoT mostly intact and that a large percentage of the civilian population was evacuated, the Night Elves would still have lost the infrastructure and concentration of resources represented by a city like Teldrassil.
I would argue that in order to rebuild the infrastructure necessary to support their military and civilian population that they will have some need for support from the Alliance - notwithstanding their justified anger with Anduin’s pacifist policies.
They don’t really need those things. They have a society that works purely symbiotically with nature. The normal civics of a traditional society doesn’t really apply to them.
This doesn’t account for the nature of the Night Elf economy though. It presumes that their ability to get resources depends on the kind of hub and spoke model that would make a large city like Darnassus important. The fourth mission of the Night Elf campaign in ROC is a wonderful demonstration of why this isn’t the case for them. Resources come from wisp extraction from the forest. Their “bases” can move. When you’re looking at the Night Elves, you have to think of forests as being factories - which creates a terrifying situation for an invading army going up against a defending force that even in Cataclysm was shown as dicing their offensive up into pockets, severing supply lines, and defeating isolated groups in detail.
Yes and No. Yes, they don’t need traditional manufacturing like Stormwind and Ironforge. No, in the sense, that I don’t think that the Night Elves are immune to the need for logistics. They still need to feed and equip their military, and have ways of getting those supplies to their military.
To be brutally honest, Tyrande had made the decision to send her forces BEFORE she got any intelligence from Anduin, most likely given that Shandris was in command at Feralas it was intelligence from HER that had decided her course.
From “Elegy”
The night elves and the draenei were the only Alliance bastions on the continent who could offer a swift counter to a Horde incursion into Silithus, and the draenei’s resources had been depleted during the war against the Legion. Tyrande had since been overseeing a slow but steady buildup of an army that could be dispatched to the site of
Sargeras’s evil sword, should the need arise.
So Tyrande had already started a build up of forces in the South. Anduin’s intelligence served mainly to reinforce an already existing plan.
And keep in mind that Saurfang and Nathanos put on a very good show for Shaw’s benefit.
What ammunition do sentinels use that cannot be furnished through the means I just described? If they made regular use of finished goods like artillery shells, I’d see your point, but they don’t.
Wisps can bring them wood and iron. But that wood still needs to be cut and formed into a shaft for an arrow. That iron still needs to be smelted and forged into an arrowhead. That arrowhead still needs to be attached to the shaft. The glaive still needs to be forged.
This is absolutely true - as I said, not all of the Night Elf criticisms were or should be fair. However, that being said, she was still coordinating with Anduin, and if Silithus was this great concern, then the Alliance as a whole should have had plans for contingencies, including reinforcing core territories.
I like chess analogies, so I’ll make another one - this is like leaving hanging pieces all over the board - you just don’t do that if you want to win.
No it does not. Wisps and druids have demonstrated their ability to shape and manipulate wood, stone, and potentially metals. We are not dealing with typical production processes here, and it’s not as though Darnassus demonstrated otherwise by having any established production facilities.
