I say out of desperation because one doesn’t generally engage in a ritual that will likely end up eventually killing you even if it succeeds unless the need is great. The whole idea here is that it’s being repeatedly driven home that the risks and cost of the Night Warrior’s power makes it only worth doing if you’re desperate.
It’s unlikely that the first kaldorei Night Warrior decided “gee, I’d like dark eyes and it’s Thursday, how about I go perform this deadly ritual and hopefully get my fancy new look?” The whole ominous framing of of the Night Warrior has built-in the assumption that one doesn’t seek this power lightly; it’s the sort of thing a person would only do if they really needed it enough to risk being killed in the ritual or by the power itself after they’ve accomplished their goal.
Yes, I’m speculating. Hence my regular use of “perhaps” and “what if.” Specifics are indeed sparse, but frankly trying to make some sense of what we have is more constructive than descending into cynical condemnation of any attempts to do so.
Tyrande chose to remain in Darkshore to oust the Horde. That’s why the power didn’t have a detectable effect beyond that warfront. She chose to remain uninvolved in the other conflicts because she was focused on that. It’s the simple, practical reality that she didn’t attack Sylvanas at Orgrimmar or fight N’zoth because she decided she wanted to stay in night elf territory to keep driving out any remaining Horde and secure her people’s lands instead. That was her BfA arc, and it made sense to her state of mind. Or would it have somehow made more sense for some Hand of God to bodily pick her up and throw her at the other theaters of war during BfA whether she wanted to go there or not?
My point is that for them to play up the Night Warrior as being so powerful after its limited accomplishments in Darkshore carries a sense that we might find out Tyrande was “using it wrong” by calling down the purest distillation of Elune’s fury for the sort of reasons and the type of conflict that it’s not really meant for.
After all, we’re seeing even with the OP’s dialogue text that there’s already a notable difference in why the first Night Warrior was empowered. Tyrande called down that power fueled by vengeance, while the first Night Warrior called it down to save his world, preceded by a druid who had attempted to do so for the same reason. Just that difference could potentially turn out to affect how the power behaves if it’s not really meant to be used the way Tyrande is trying to use it.
It’s made clear the first Night Warrior didn’t know the price was actually death. It’s not clear that the first Night Warriors on Azeroth knew death was the price, so it could have actually just been something to speed up their conquest. We don’t know the circumstances for what caused the first Night Warrior on Azeroth to try to invoke that power.
Yes, you can make up a whole host of reasons to tip toe around lack of any significant details and bad writing. What it boils down to it the night warrior was invoked on this other planet to take down an old god, the night warrior in 8.1 was invoked and only accomplished taking down a valk and nothing else we know of.
Essentially this makes me think the night warrior was not really meant to be much of anything until the backlash in 8.1, hence the cut cinematic of a night elf victory in 8.1 and the lack of any involvement of the night warrior beyond the initial scenario. Not even showing up to fight Sylvanas.
We have no idea why she didn’t show up to kill Sylvanas, which seems to be her major focus here. This could have been a result of Blizzard having no actual plans for the Night warrior beyond giving the night elves black eyes and a bad scenario and then realizing they could do something else with it, kind of how they wanted to do more with Bwomsomdi because he was so popular.
We also don’t know the state of Ashenvale, we don’t even know if the homeless night elves in Stormwind are moved somewhere else. We don’t even know if she was fighting in Darkshore up until 8.3 and have no idea what she was doing.
You have her desire to kill Sylvanas being front and center now, but where was she when the alliance was going to kill Sylvanas in 8.2.5? It wasn’t an issue then. But then when there was an old god attacking, suddenly she is absent because she is focused on Sylvanas. Obviously not doing anything. We don’t even know if the night warrior killed one person after the scenario because Tyrande was just wholly absent.
His power could have been summoned by vengeance as well against the old god. We could find out Tyrande is entirely incompetent and was using it wrong and the night warrior powers are only for killing old god’s and their minions and fairly useless everywhere else, but I doubt they are saying it’s powers are so specific.
I’m mostly just going to go off the information they’ve given us so far, which is the 8.1 scenario and dialogue and then this text about the night warrior as well as night warrior Tyrande not even showing up to accomplish her now stated goal, beyond that it’s just making excuses for the inconsistencies in the writing, which they could rectify later, but so far we haven’t seen why Tyrande’s night warrior power would even kill her, since it appears to have been fairly useless in the 4th war.
Also it’s not even like genocide at Teldrassil was the end of it either, they were still murdering night elves and destroy their land all the way up to 8.1:
Deathstalker Commander Belmont says: Your tree… was just the beginning. This entire shore will fuel our armies!
You also have to keep in mind the wholesale slaughter of Astranaar and who knows how many small villages in Ashenvale that the Forsaken assassins swept through. During the invasion event I distinctly remember goblins with flamethrowers burning down buildings, and forsaken intentionally defiling the Moonwells.
After that during the warfront material goblins are clear cutting Darkshore, trapping and killing off the wildlife, and Belmont mentions his task is to systematically blight the whole of Darkshore. Had he gotten to do so it would of been plaguelands 2.0
There is no true proof of it, but given Sylvanas didnt care about the Horde and was not fighting to win you can make an argument she may of been constantly throwing troops at Darkshore just to keep Tyrande occupied, knowing it was not a winnable fight.
Yeah, things like that get forgotten and it all gets boiled down to “only the burning of Teldrassil is bad!” (not only that but they try to pretend Teldrassil is one city instead of an entire zone) when it was a whole lot more. The horde was killing people in Darkshore long after Teldrassil burned and they were destroying the land there as well. Tyrande trying to stop them from their continued genocide isn’t really some petty invoking of this power.
I see a few misconceptions here some small things like saying those two night warriors are the first ones which they aren’t, it’s nether said in the quests and the datamined line about the first night warrior was referring to Caregiver Selenis who is still in Bastion.
Now about the Night Warrior’s power, I don’t think any grand theory about how it works is needed, someone said it before but it’s all because of narrative focus, it’s a lot easier to say “this guy killed an old god with his friends” than having Tyrande kill N’zoth instead of us, or even pushing Nathanos away before the dialogue can fully play out. So sure the presentation of the Night Warrior in BfA was sloopy but WoW is always like that and it was mostly okay with Tyrande insta killing an entire base of Forsaken , avoiding arrows of a master ranger at close range, dropping moons on Valkyr and using some weird spells on elite troops. And in SL, they are even correcting this “insuffisance” by showing how she carves a trail of corpses like it’s nothing in the Maw.
Maybe if it was in the moment, during the War of the Thorns, I could see that. But it was after the fact. It wasn’t about saving her people, it was about getting revenge.
If there was a huge population of Night Elves in camps being executed, I must have missed that and it wasn’t conveyed very well in the story telling. In any case, I stand by my point in that it was a mundane matter. Nobody knew Sylvanas’ attack involved death on a cosmic level. Sure, can read about it in a history book that it eventually lead to that point, but that isn’t why Tyrande picked up the mantle.
There were plenty of times that the world was in a much more dire situation than presented in BfA, which really weakens the lore of the Night Warrior.
Well to use your shotgun blast example, a target closer to the origin of the blast would get hit with more pellets that a target farther away would. Azeroth could get be closer to the origin point than this other world was.
Part of this problem with the Night Warrior history is that we don’t know what it was used for or why it was needed. Maiev says it was to carve out the Kaldorei Empire, but I can’t see why the Night Warrior was necessary when the powers of the Well of Eternity far greater than anything the Trolls could handle. What Blizz should have done was a slight retcon on the history.
In my opinion the Kaldorei Empire should first have existed for at a minimum of 10 to 20 thousand years before WotA and the war between the Trolls and elves should have been settled long before Azshara took the throne. In this scenario, during the war, the Trolls were still loosing but a group of them let’s say the Gurabashi or Amani or both decided to or accidentally evoke either the dormant powers of an Aquir or Hakaar. This gives them the strength to fight the elves with renewed strength and massive power boost. The Elves more realizing that they are loosing need to evoke the Night Warrior. With the NW they fully defeat the Trolls and carve out their empire.
It may be out there but at least it gives some context as to why the Night Warrior was needed in the first place.
I don’t even think the Trolls need to be what the Night Warrior was invoked for. The Night Elves still had to expand over quite a bit of land, containing quite alot of things, before they slowed their growth via their accord with the Zandalari.
Soggoth comes to mind, as someone who would be very bad news if resurrected, and would have been relatively close to the Night Elves’ seat of power. And he would fit with the theming of the Night Warrior being invoked on Fyzandi to combat an Old God and their forces.
That works too. Probably better then my idea actually. In any case the only reason, based on the lore, that they would have evoked the ritual was because of the Trolls. The Kaldorei had no other enemy than them and later the Legion. So basically both times that the ritual was used on Azeroth was a lesser threat than what was happening on Fyzandi. What a mess.
It’s made clear he did know. The first person who tried it was literally killed by the attempt. More specifically, that first person was his own husband’s mother.
But the situation was desperate enough for him to try anyway, despite knowing the only other person who’d tried was killed by the process. Which was why his husband was against him even trying it in the first place.
