So your suggesting we get the Forsaken to Dump Blight onto Arathi’s End in Azj-Kahet?
The Nerubians would suddenly move their entire invasion force to the Trickling Abyss to invade the Ringing Deep until it gets Blighted then move to the Ruptured Lake to get back to invading Hallowfall until it gets Blighted angering the Haranir whose World Tree is growing into the Ruptured Lake.
Best hold off on the Blighting of the Ruptured Lake(but not the other exits out of Azj-Kahet) until the Black Blood starts infecting the World Tree’s roots then hit it with the Blight gaining the Haranir’s thanks for purging the Void Corruption.
Actual answer: why would the Forsaken travel to the other side of the planet to a place they’ve never been to blight a bunch of spider-people they’ve never met? Generally you want purpose, motive, goals, etc. before the blight canisters start flying.
That is, unless, and hear me out here…
… we get a cinematic of Faranell dancing in a musical piece reminiscent of a Disney Princess mashed up with Agent Smecker conducting an invisible orchestra, all while blight canisters explode in the background and Nerubians are flailing about with faces and limbs sloughing off. I can disregard the utter lack of justification for these circumstances if you give me that.
The Forsaken has a whole cult based around shadow magic, which has been shoehorned into void magic. It’d make perfect sense for them to investigate the void infested hole in the ground. Heck, they’d probably also be interested in Beledar’s void state for that matter, and you can’t do proper science with spider people mucking it all up.
It doesn’t take much of a creative flex to make that happen. Those Forsaken themes are just kinda… wholesale ignored. They’ve also been parceled out to the void elves as well, but the only one we have running around is Alleria.
Admitably that probably would’ve been a good idea and completely have thwarted Xalatath’s vague black bug plan. But Blight is up there with Draenei spaceships in terms of things the plot has to forget we have.
Omnicide Gas is pretty extreme but it’s about as W as Win Buttons get and seems pretty warranted when we’re fighting the cosmic concept of entropy.
But frankly I’d just be happy if the story remembers the Forsaken have an innate resistance to shadow magic and magical mind control. Seems like that’d come in handy when battling the shadow magic that mind controls people.
Something to keep in mind is that the nerubians were specifically noted for being immune to the Scourge’s plague agents (which arguably makes even more sense with Azj-Kahet lore revealing the nerubians as basically having an ancient cultural tradition of genetically engineering themselves), so it’s quite possible that the Forsaken Blight would fare no better and manage only to render the battlefield impassable to the Arathi and their allies while having little to no effect on the nerubians.
It was established during WotLK that adding a new race to the Blight’s range of efficacy is a whole involved process in and of itself, and with the nerubians in particular it might be extremely difficult or even impossible to modify a strain to consistently work on their altered physiology, which is likely fortified against biological attacks of that very sort.
You know, the “go to” for the evil Forsaken is the use of poison. But the fact is that poison being “evil” is pretty much a western idea, that was hardly universal even there.
From the tvtropes website…
" Historically, this trope is most traditional in Western Europe and its descendants — others rarely cared unless there was a breach of [Sacred Hospitality] or fair duel. In tropical regions hunting with poisons was widespread; in Hindu tradition, poisonous critters are just another fact of life, and cobras even revered sometimes. China didn’t see poisons as something special, nor did Steppe peoples , Russians shrugged"
The point of the Azj-Kahet storyline is that we’re here to perform surgical strikes on the rulers that have been corrupted by Xalatath so that the uncorrupted opposition we’ve allied with can take their place, not genocide the entire civilization.
I don’t think they’re “getting away” with anything. The Forsaken used a metric ton of Blight during the Battle of Lordaeron and there’s cannisters of the stuff plainly at the ready in Legion Dalaran.
They just use it on hostile targets. Because bombing everyone including your own allies is completely insane and was only done once by a madman staging a coup.
And yeah it would’ve been cool if like the Horde and Alliance forces feinted a retreat in the Hallowfall Battle only for the Forsaken to utterly fumigate the Nerubian’s forces.
But that’d be a bit anti climactic from a gameplay and story perspective.
You say it would be anti climatic.
I say you are vastly underestimating insectoid biology on adapting to nerve agents and poisons.
An initial success that leads further to later generational immunity would be a valid plot point that would both showcase the fact that the horde is here, present, and not a backdrop as well as bolster the threat of the nerubians.
The Blight was shown against the vrykul in Howling Fjord to have similar limitations to the Plague of Undeath (unsurprising given its development likely started with samples of that original plague.) The Forsaken came to Northrend with their Blight ready to kill races they’d encountered (and a bit more tweaking left to go to increase its potency against the Scourge with its magical nature), only to meet a new race and find that it only showed limited efficacy, making the vrykul lethargic and ill, but not killing them. So further development was necessary by way of the player collecting blood from a particular vrykul leader to make it lethal to them as well.
Similarly, the original Plague of Undeath unleashed on Lordaeron was specifically made to target humans; it had effects on some other races and species, but the outcomes were unpredictable and not even always lethal. Hence the mutation of animals and plants in heavily plagued areas instead of every beast being systematically killed by it and raised undead like its human victims.
The later Ghoul Plague was effective across a broader spectrum of races (specifically within the Horde and Alliance), likely because the Scourge had been continuing to experiment on captured enemy subjects ever since the Third War and incorporated further vectors of infection into its strains.
So even beyond the nerubians, the Blight seemingly works the same way, needing to be modified to properly work against new species. It’s not as simple as just showing up in a strange new land and lobbing it at a new foe; if it’s a race that hasn’t been previously added to its scope of contagion, then it’s unlikely to reliably affect them the way it’s meant to unless further development is done to add them to its “list” of viable targets. Which might prove difficult if their physiology is extremely different from anything else it’s designed to infect and kill.
Forget the Blight have their Warlocks harvest a bunch of demonic soul gem/shards and then use that to infuse the “star” with Fel and really start having a proper Hallows Eve in Hallowfall no less.
That last place Sylvanas had directly ordered the Horde to be was the azerite tank.
She never called for a retreat.
The forsaken walk out of the gate with their blight throwers throwing.
Anduin confirms what we see with our own eyes: that she and the forsaken are intentionally killing her own troops.
“b-b-but npcs say they walked into the blight!”
yeah, we also see them run into it after that cutscene plays, after she intentionally kills and enslaves the souls of the horde that she betrayed.
I have no personal opinion on the blight in future content though, outside of personally feeling it’s a one trick pony.
Would much rather have DK Anselm pull a Ketheric. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKgbJ0zjuEE
Christ, I had somehow forgotten about Jaina and that stupid damn floating ship.
Hadn’t forgotten about Sylvanas blighting her own troops and raising them as undead. It was an endless source of bewildering amusement for me that Baine’s line in the sand was not blight friendly fire, but having the temerity to raise Derek Proudmoore into undeath.
The fact we don’t have a segment of Forsaken going rogue?
Why would you fumigate a good portion of the land? To show they can do it? That’s idiotic at best and completely deranged, borderline no frontal lobe development thinking at worst.
God damn I’d love that.
This entire expansion was a fever dream from a troll high on voodoo, you can’t change my headcanon