remember when, canonically, a portal to another world took the tormented souls of thousands of people to make work?
now, we can just open them up, wherever. not much explanation on how we were able to do that.
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The dark portal required many sacrifices, but not that many. The thousands of draenei skeletons that paved the path to the portal were just an aesthetic choice meant to highlight the unbelievable and immeasurable cruelty of Gul’dan.
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I think we’re conflating the Warcraft movie’s depiction of the Dark Portal with the canon one. There was some ritualistic sacrifice utilized, but it was hardly in the thousands (hell, I don’t even think it was thousands in the movie).
Past that, I believe the Dark Portal was the first time a portal to another world was opened on Azeroth (I would count the Well of Eternity, but I don’t know if that was necessarily to a specific world as much as it was just utilized as a deployment point for the Legion in general). Travel between worlds - or that other worlds even existed - was a complete unknown. Nowadays with methodology specifically for it (the Sargerite Keystone, the Ethereals, etc.), it stands to reason that sacrifice is now not the only method of achieving something like that.
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There’s arguably some grounds to speculate that the Path of Glory could have resulted from some mass-sacrifice being needed to establish a portal as large and permanently stable when not purposefully shut down as the Dark Portal (after all, Gul’dan may have needed to somehow basically provide a comparable amount of energy on his end of the process to Medivh’s enormous Guardian power Azeroth-side); after all, it remains notable that such a gigantic number of draenei bodies would end up in Hellfire Peninsula when it turns out that the draenei presence in Tanaan was actually extremely minimal. Meaning either the orcs loaded up bones from all over Draenor to cart all the way there just to pave the road, or perhaps they hauled a large number of draenei prisoners to the base of the Dark Portal for some mass sacrifice event and then used the depleted remains to create the Path of Glory as they prepared to charge through.
While the movie indeed utilized such a thing, it’s also worth remembering that even in game lore, the Iron Horde’s Dark Portal was shown being actively fueled by the ongoing sacrifice of large numbers of draenei and Frostwolf prisoners, whose souls were then being channeled into the ritual of the captured AU Gul’dan and his lieutenants. They may have had to continue tossing victims into the sacrificial pit throughout to keep it active because without someone of Medivh’s power simultaneously contributing how own equivalent of vast energies from the receiving end, they couldn’t just make the connection permanent like that between MU Draenor/Outland and Azeroth.
In that vein insofar as the OP, it’s worth noting that even among portals the Dark Portal is unique in just how stable it is. No other portals of such size between worlds have come across as being permanent fixtures that seem to self-perpetuate without any external power source to keep them going, possibly because Medivh and Gul’dan each anchored their side of the portal to their respective planets’ leylines. Which could be why Draenor’s corruption began seeping into Azeroth while the Dark Portal was opened and why Draenor exploding threatened to do the same to both planets, as a perpetual loop of energy connecting the leylines of both planets across the Twisting Nether could cause such a cataclysmic spike of energies to cross over as the fel had been, resulting in a reciprocal explosion of comparable scope on Azeroth’s side. Otherwise only the felstorm portal in the Tomb of Sargeras has come across as permanent unless forcibly closed, which is likely why the Legion was able to sort of “piggyback” other portals and the teleportation of their ships across its stable connection once it was opened, and with the War of the Ancients going on at the time of its creation, there would have been no shortage of souls on hand for the Legion to have used both Azeroth- and Argus-side in anchoring it enough to become similarly permanent.
Naturally the Well of Eternity was sufficiently powerful to make Azeroth’s side of the Legion’s primary invasion portal stable - stable enough to require the destruction of the Well, robbing it of its source, to shut it down - while rather than keeping it open, the continued efforts of the Highborne were directed toward expanding it to eventually accommodate Sargeras himself crossing over.
By comparison, mage portals - of any type, really - are supposed to be unstable and therefore very temporary. So lorewise there aren’t actually just permanent portals being kept open at all times between Stormwind or Orgrimmar and distant places on Azeroth, much less other planets. Keeping portals open indefinitely is still not really manageable without a serious infrastructure and power source behind it.
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Well the portal system in orgrimmar has been entirely reworked and tied into Azeroth’s ley lines. They are stable and grounded and self sustaining. Only the blue dragon flight and Nightborne know how to make permanent stable portals. But yeah stormwind is still ripping holes in reality.
No they are not. Just like the ones in Stormwind, each portal requires constant maintennce by a pair of mages.
The evacuation portal from Darnassus was maintained by a pair of Highborne mages who sacrificed their lives to allow others to escape.
Gul’dan just did it for fun tbh. RIP to a real one I miss that madlad
Ok. The Nightborne ley line mappers walking around are just engaging in a hobby and occuleth doesn’t literally talk about the upgrades they’re making but ok
Isn’t the mage tower built along a leyline hence why you go through a magic portal to a much larger portal room where one can walk easily. Seems like the High Elf mages and the humans who were taught were smart enough to rig their own version.
Portals and teleportation in general are among the dumbest pieces of worldbuilding this setting has to offer. Don’t think too hard about it.
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Not really. I mean in the Rise of the Horde novel it only took the death of one draenei kid to open the portal.
Presumably the portal was siphoning what remaining life force was in the planet to keep itself active, hence why the blasted lands turned out the way it did.
Yep it is you’re right
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Back in TBC you could make smaller scale ones too with a lot of magic and an anchor, like what the Kael’thas followers were doing to hunt the Draenei in Azeroth. Also caused void creatures to manifest, which i think is a fun idea.
On one hand yes. On the other hand they’re as bad at consistency with travel between locations even without portals and teleportation lmao.
Whenever we wanna go somewhere we should have to call in game uber or go to an in game airport. If we’re flying across the sea we should have to wait the whole six hours to cross it.
It’s pretty well-established the going back and forth between Azeroth and Outland isn’t a big deal anymore because the Dark Portal exists. When the DP was first opened it created a tunnel through the Nether between the two locations, and any subsequent portal - big or small - uses that tunnel to radically reduce the cost.
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There were two big things working against Gul’dan to get the dark portal going:
- He didn’t have coordinates. Portals require a specific set of dimensional coordinates to get across the room, let alone to another planet.
- The Dark Portal was made HUGE. It is the only portal we have in the Warcraft lore large enough to march an army through. The amount of energy to open and sustain a portal ramp harshly to its size and distance.
To resolve this he had to rely on a possessed Medivh to act as an anchor on the other side, and for the portal to siphon energy from its environment. The portal was pretty bad for the environment on both sides.
It is also worth noting the Dark Portal’s lore was written in effectively and entirely different setting. The cosmology underpinning everything has changed so drastically—Back then arcane, shadow, and fel magic were the same thing and worked on slightly different rules.
No? Because the original lore was it took one draenei child(still bad) as a sacrifice to open the Dark Portal.
Admittedly afterwards the Dark Portal was either sucking up or causing all flora and fauna to die in its immediately vicinity.