Is this because you think this would be a good story point, or is this because you want to spite people you disagree with it? Because that’s poor form.
More on topic, I think someone had something like they hoped to find out that the reason Elune was only able to give such little support is because she may have been busy with something else. I like to think that she was expending almost all of her energy to directly stabilizing and healing Azeroth after it was stabbed by Sargeras.
Of course, I also like the theory I had heard that she’s an amalgamation of Light and Shadow.
Honestly, I’m fine if they never reveal what she is, specifically. It’s okay to have some mystery. I hope that’s what actually happens, honestly.
Gods stop being interesting when they’re revealed. And with Blizzard’s current writers anything being revealed is guaranteed to be ruined. So I’d rather she just remain obscure.
Shadowlands I can only assume will both reveal Elune and ruin her and ruin Tyrande truly beyond repair in the process.
Cant it be both? Look, I really doubt Blizzard added that hint back in Cata(during a lore q&a no less) for no particular reason. I mean sure maybe the most recent dev teams have a different idea now, but I actually believe they will make her related to the light in some way. Hell, Legion furthers the connection.
Also, if you want to call out someone’s poor form, start with the person calling people who disagree with them, Blizzard drones first.
I am of the opposite belief. If Warcraft as a series will end(dont get me wrong, I dont expect it to end for at least a decade, maybe more) I prefer all the mysteries solved.
I wonder how they wanted to do that. Alliance also had heavy casulties in BoD and they only attacked the backguard. Then they fled from returning of Zandalari main army . How they wanted to press advantage at Zandalari stronghold that was additionally protected by wildgods?
Especially when they said right before the very raid they “they’d lose direct confrontation with Zandalari empire”. Their main army is still there, only half of the ships are missing.
So what exactly changed that Alliance was so confident in claiming that they would be able to press it in Zandalar successfully? As far as I am aware Kul’Tiran ships can’t climb stairs.
Mind you, it’s more of a hypothetical question. Could be that these hack of the writers can’t make up their mind. Nathanos and Genn were meant to be in Darkshore after all but they changed their mind and ported to other side of the planet and Jaina was so much beaten up that she shouldn’t be walking anytime soon, but she was perfectly fine 5 minutes later and leading a charge to Nazjatar again as if nothing happened.
Well the wild gods didn’t do didly squat when the raid happened.
As for what the Alliance could have done was use their new naval superiority to attack a soft undefended spot like Silvermoon from the sea. Maybe use the navy to surround and hold the Sun Well before the Horde could react.
Horde’s army could stay on Zandalar unable to leave or assist anywhere because they are stranded.
That’s precisely it. Why even bother with Zandalar, their one advantage was their navy which is now gone. Attack the soft targets while the Horde is stuck on Zandalar.
They did, Bwonsamdi summoned additional guards, resurrected Grong to occupy Alliance, and Pa’ku thrown Azerite machine to the sea. They were there in the background.
I’d actually like that.
Yes, I also agree that entire raid was pointless. If Alliance was really smart they’d turn Zandalari even against the Horde. Either by using Gallywix mining Atal’Dazar or frame them of some other sacrilage. Or as you said, pretend to attack Zandalari, make Horde send their reinforcement there. Blow ships and strike back at Kalimdor.
Why wasting Alliance troops especially in such a stupid way on Zandalar.
And they did had scouts of various kinds. If Alliance spying organisation was so good, why they couldn’t make use of the information they already had? The point of having secret spying organisations is to cause mess without involving even armies!
Horde was shown time and time again that Zandalari aren’t totally on board with them and that they have to prove themselves. Sabotage that! Use Zandalari against the Horde. Don’t send your soldiers on suicide missions!
but I guess it’s still better than retardness of of Horde warcampaigns, graveyard trips and acting pretty much like child in the mist. While being in possession of transformation potion so instead of using that to get intel on how Kul’Tiran army works, they used it to spy on lone orc.
This had to be a result of brain decay I got no other explanation.
Oh for Christ’s sake. You know what, why not give the Nelves their Red analogue’s BFA treatment in SL?
Tyrande is a gibbering maniac who commits crimes that should by all rights churn Night Elf stomachs. No Nelf stops her but Malfurion occasionally looks concerned and some Cenarion NPC who was never part of the Alliance gives lip service to how bad this is. In the meanwhile you make Forsaken allies by shooting them with tree magic. These newly barked undead hijack the narratives of Nelf military efforts.
Then your story just stops after Tyrande flies off on an evil fart cloud. That’s all you got. For awhile.
Then the story focuses on a Naga who was made a Nelf by Fel Magic, somehow, who’s been just talking to Belves this whole time. She walks up and says “I will take care of the Bark Forsaken” then leaves.
it wasn’t pointless we got some cool fights and cool transmog!
because that is how blizzard works, they twist the story to have new raid tiers and expansions and not because they actually made sense.
even i think that jaina should have been left wounded at least a patch and not 5 seconds, i guess that the alliance has really good healers.
and the post raid dialogue is, at best mediocre, they don’t even explain exactly how we are gaining in all fronts. and what does they even mean with pressing the attack on the zandalari? or it was in another key part of the world? who the hell knows.
also, i like how they ignored suramar completely. does anyone even cares that they exist?.
and, i think that the naga should have attacked right after the end of dazar’alor.
and god where is our legendary naval battle ?
When I first heard she was going to be a raid boss but survive, my first thoughts were “Whoah, cool, they added that staggering/injured animation this expansion too - we can have all sorts of faction characters as raid bosses, show how badly maimed they can be by the other faction without permanently losing them as characters!”
But noooo.
Edit: I do hope they use this in the future - I do think that letting the players knock a nemesis lore character down a peg, even if they don’t get to kill the character, can be cathartic if they can see that it really did badly injure and inconvenience the character for a while. And it would open the doors to more faction bosses without requiring they be killed in the fight.
I’m not suggesting every Nelf fan is. But I do get very fed up when I hear ‘Well the Horde should suffer like the Alliance did’.
And just blow it out your bum. My favorite race, the sole reason I persist with this abusive relationship betwixt man and monstrously large corporation, has gotten stuffed through a meat grinder.
Like there was at least Tyrande and Greymane telling Andy off in that cutscene. It ain’t much, it ain’t what Nelf fans deserve but it’s something.
The Forsaken are in the same boat, meanwhile. I don’t want to hear a damn thing about Nelf casualties or w/e because last I checked all but a handful of critically important Undercity NPCs vanished to be replaced with gormless refugees spouting repeating dialogue at eachother. Same as Nelves only instead of Elegy we got nothing.
Only there’s not a leader left to say anything cool. Our best heir apparent is someone I send out on Mission Table quests. There is no middle finger big enough to give to Blizz for what it did to my beloved dead bois.
But BFA so throttled me at this point I don’t even care so long as there’s a PvP vendor. Because I’ve outright stopped caring about the Star Trek writer’s attempts at squaring the Forsaken. I’ll write my own ish just stop.
It’s best to disregard Zerde when it comes to Night Elf matters, as he has openly admitted he has no interest in them, and in general Zerde is against mystery and uniqueness within the Alliance, and would rather everything be spoon fed to us in generic black and white simplicity.
Lorewise it was imo pointless, and mog does work nicely as some sort of equivalent to Darkspear heritage armor.
But overall there is a massive plot hole. Pa’Ku warned Rastakhan about incoming sethrak invasion before it even happened. So yea, all she had to do was to appear in front of Talanji and say “Ey, invasion is coming from the other side”. And all this big plan would go to waste. They created a mist in Nazmir not in entire Zandalar. And Pa’Ku is both loa of skyes and seas. I’m just really upset over Rastakhan’s death. I wish he was saved.
Honestly, I don’t see why Delaryn herself couldn’t have survived. During the pre-patch, I actually expected she would survive and become the leader of the resistance, which would have been cool.
I also kind of expected the Night Elves to have a new hub somewhere in the area–a resistance HQ, probably just a fortified but large camp that would be the new de facto NE capital. It would have basic amenities, and the NE high command would be stationed there, discussing strategy. I’m honestly still kind of astounded that they didn’t do this.
Furthermore… Why did Nelf/Forsaken refugees go to SW/Org when they have much closer allies?
I mean, we all know the answer… Blizzard doesn’t want to mess with TBC zones. Which is an infuriating truth.
Honestly, they could have double downed on the Fall of Quel’Thalas imagery by having the night elves settle Bloodmyst Isle with the help of the Draenei. Making some sort of reference to Blood Elf name origin.
“Bloodmyst Isles… A fitting homage to our murdered people.”
Forsaken living in the Ghostlands would have been cool too… It has a cultural relevance with Windrunner Spire. Which would be a fitting capital even after Sylvanas’ betrayal, as the Forsaken have a history of settling the seats of power for those who wronged them.
But no… Blizzard can’t be bothered with something like that. Better to just let the story deviate from logic as much as it needs to just because they don’t want to deal with it.
It’s like an oppression Olympics around here. Incoming tl;dr ramble.
Both sides are unhappy with how their faction is being treated. A few Horde players do dig being villain-batted and are pretty gleeful about getting to burn a thousand or so civilians alive and would love to do that moar pls, and whenever I see them I try to remind myself they’re not the majority (at least on RP servers; idk about the others). A few Alliance players want the Alliance to go all Blizzard-style “morally grey” genocidal (because genocide is so freakin’ “morally gray” omfg I cannot even) and nuke a few Tauren villages or something because “they did it to us” and I try to remind myself whenever I see them that they’re not the majority.
Most Horde players and most Alliance players who I see posting here do understand that both sides have it bad. We do understand that Blizzard has done some pretty wretched things to our favored races, or else has ignored them completely – or ignored them and then murderated them and then ignored them again to go fight some other guy over something else entirely.
I agree with the OP on pretty much every point, and I’m not super clear on why it is that some players seem to think that saying “I would like to stop feeling like my faction – and especially my favorite race – is only here to get curbstomped by the Horde so the Horde can feel bad some more” is somehow equivalent to saying “I would like Horde players to feel bad because their faction is bad and they should feel bad and also let’s destroy their lore and story even more tyvm.”
I also don’t get why some players seem to think that saying “the Horde has been villain-batted so much and I’d really like for that to stop pls” is equivalent to saying “the Alliance should just shut up about how bad they have it because we have it bad too, or worse.”
And I REALLY don’t understand why these threads always devolve into a point-by-point comparison of how bad one side has it versus how bad the other side has it in some sort of weird attempt to prove the other side should stop feeling bad because the other side has it worse. It isn’t a competition. Everyone gets to have the sads, we don’t go find the one person in the world who has it the worst of everything forever and ONLY THEY get to feel bad because for everyone else, someone else has it worse.
It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, and we don’t have to talk about it as though it is. The kaldorei getting some great moments does not have to mean that the Horde players have to get villain-batted more or lose more beloved NPCs or or or. The Horde getting pushed out of Darkshore and Ashenvale in-game on-screen so freakin’ Lor’danel and Astranaar are not blighted or on fire anymore isn’t unreasonable. It isn’t asking for the Horde player to lose – the area can be phased, the questing can stay just as it is, but level-capped characters could find themselves in enemy territory if they go there. Maybe the Alliance getting pushed out of the Barrens would be a good trade-off – phase the area for lowbies, make it enemy territory for level-capped (though pls don’t take away Ratchet as a neutral port, I love that place - maybe we could make neutral port somewhere around Blackfathom to balance it out).
And yeah, some Ally-side players have it in for the Horde and want Horde players to suffer, but trust me that there are plenty of Horde players who have it in for the Alliance (especially nelfs, for some reason) and are thrilled by how wretchedly the kaldorei have been treated this xpac and would love more of that (like that weird blog post I ran across by the Forsaken player who leveled on a PvP server and got killed a lot by nelf players (and I promise you by a lot of of non-nelfs too), so now they hate the playable race itself as well as the players and they’re super happy about burning a bajillion NPCs alive and super SUPER happy that nelf players are unhappy about it, like, dude, do you know how many times was murderated and corpse-camped by some level-capped Forsaken rogue? Do you know how many times I was dotted to death by a Forsaken warlock when I was just trying to turn in my stupid quest? I spent more time dead than alive leveling on a PvP server honest to f— but it was a PvP server for crying out loud, everyone has to deal with that, come on, man, okay, wait, I got sidetracked but it was a really weird post).
But in the main, both sides recognize that the other side has it bad, and saying "my side has it bad in these ways and here are some ways I’d like to have it better* is NOT the same thing as saying “my side has it bad AND YOURS DOESN’T” and and it isn’t typically saying “my side has it bad and I want you the player to pay for it.”
Ugh, idek why I’m here. I just feel like we’re all actually on the same side if we could stop arguing long enough to realize it. We can have differences of opinion without… without hating on each other. Can’t we?
Wait, which time? During the pre-xpac event the Sentinel in Astranaar says it seemed the Forsaken rounded up the survivors…and then was too horrified by the atrocity to say exactly what they did, but I mean, it’s the Forsaken, we can be pretty sure they didn’t give them cookies and juice and let them leave healthy and whole.
Astranaar is an odd point as far as lore is concerned, as the presentation of it in Elegy and A Good War are completely incompatible with the Horde questing during the in-game event. In the novels, the Night Elves themselves placed bodies of Night Elves that had fallen earlier in the war all over Astranaar in order to lull the Horde into a trap.
Even weirder, Delaryn makes reference to this when the Alliance player showed up for the event:
And in the novels the Night Elves for the most part escaped after the trap didn’t work out, while the Horde did take losses, as Nathanos analyzed in A Good War:
He returned to Astranaar, berating himself. Dozens of night elves, including Malfurion Stormrage, had escaped the village after their assault. Nathanos had only tracked down two, and he doubted anyone else had gotten a single one. Even Sylvanas would probably return empty‐handed.
But then, she was tracking the biggest prey of all. He had no excuse.
Astranaar was no longer in chaos. The wounded were being tended to, the dead were accounted for, and the living had returned to the business of war, albeit a touch shaken. There was nothing quite like facing a creature who had commanded the wilds for more than ten thousand years.
