Not gonna lie, seeing Thrall back again gives me mixed feelings.
As much as I laughed at the Thrall ‘killstealer’ memes, it did make sense for the big, powerful NPC to do that. Our entire campaign in that part of the game was literally positioning Thrall just so, all so he could Fire His Lazar at Deathwing and it still didn’t entirely work.
My salt primarily comes from his refusal to accept his role in the corrosion of the Horde under Garrosh, but on the other hand it adds some much-needed emotional, well, landscape to Thrall. He’s proud of his people, he’s confident in their ability to carve out a place in the world without him, and he honestly believes his course of action was correct.
And he’s both right and wrong on all counts.
He’s not perfect. He’s mortal, fallible, trusting of the wrong kinds of people due to his belief that everyone can change for the better.
Having Thrall show back up after Legion, that he’d spent all that time trying to help from the sidelines, knowing that the last time he tried to save the world it ended very, very, very badly for everyone on the planet, he tried to be the supporter and not the hero.
And then he stepped down and sought to live a quiet, humble life with his family and just stay away from the politics and wars and everything he’d been involved with before.
And then Sylvanas started a arms-race for Azurite, which is literally killing the planet faster than anything that has come before it, and now she’s actively trying to murder the few pro-peace leaders left within the Horde.
Yeah, he needs to step up and get back in the game, if only to knock Sylvanas and her supporters off their perch and preferably into the Shadowlands to stop Azeroth being killed. I doubt he’s coming back for the Horde, I really doubt it after all that has happened and all both he and we, the characters, have experienced and may come to feel for each other, but it is nice to see Go’el/Thrall step back into the fight one last time.