Almost Heaven, Western Plaguelands
Cursed blood fountains, Thondroril River
Life is dead here, deader than banshees
Older than Sir Marwyn, colder than crypt breeze
Mottled Roads, Take Me Home!
To The Plagues, I prolong!
Western Plaguelands, Malformed Matron, Take Me Home, Cultist Roads
Believe it or not I’ve never 100% completed this area before. I’ve certainly seen all the content in bits and pieces on one toon or another but pre leveling revamp you’d typically outgrow the zone even if you avoided BGs / Dungeons.
I also never went directly into it after completing the Tirisfal questline. On a normal playthrough it ushers you to Silverpine which is the more polished story so I can see why.
But flying from the Bulwark straight into the 1st Battle of Andorhal is pretty intense. If you’ve never been, Andorhal is in the middle of a chaotic 3 way war between the Forsaken, SW and the Scourge. The Battle itself is truly a melee. Forsaken and Human troops will take down abominations only to immediately fight eachother. A bone altar is spewing endless waves of skeletons. A Lich stands in the center commanding waves of slavering corpses. I genuinely am upset I couldn’t play this in it’s heyday as I imagine on a PvP server this would be complete bedlam.
Anywho the 1st Battle of Andorhal wraps up with you attempting to take down Darkmaster Gandling. This goes poorly as he’s scheduled to appear in Scholomance later and is only defeated when Thassarian and Koltria Deathweaver, the DKs commanding SW and UC forces respectively, jump in.
I tell ya Blizz really missed an opportunity to make this pair the first gay couple. I’ve very close bonds with friends I’ve known since childhood, and I’m just not picturing myself pulling punches should we find ourselves on opposite ends of a war map, because my loyalty would be foremost to the soldiers who are putting their lives in my hands. If it were an ex I still had lingering romantic passion for? Yeah that’d probably cloud my judgment.
And Deathweaver’s judgement is notably clouded. Keep in mind this was a 3 way open war. The Forsaken and Stormwind did not declare a truce to fight the Scourge first. That’s awfully dumb but not as stupid as when they did that inside the Lich King’s lair so w/e. What is uniquely dumb here is Koltria deciding to let SW retreat and regroup just to do his bro a solid. This leads to both more Forsaken casualties and as a result, more Forsaken resurrections so wherever you stand on that matter Koltria certainly dropped the ball.
So you double back to the Bulwark and are tasked with handling the breather infestation cropping up next to Tirisfal’s border. This is an interesting juxtaposition if you’ve gone from Tirisfal to Andorhal then through the Bulwark gates as the rehabilitated forest really does look viscerally off putting. Everything’s been haunted and gloomy and this spot wouldn’t look out of place in a E.H. Shepard illustration. Ya really do understand why the Apothecary seems outright grossed out by it.
So you respookify the place with some goo after killing some Alliance Foxhunters to destroy their food sources, but I like to think the Shadow Priestess who sends you on that task foresaw the Vulpera and decided to nip that problem in the bud.
This is where you run into Lindsay Ravensun. Who was a Forsaken in Andorhal who was vocally unimpressed with Koltira’s leadership. In retrospect it should’ve been instantly obvious this was a disguised Sylvanas Windrunner as in addition to summoning valkyr, she also speaks through them.
You use them to raise some farmers who are immediately on board with being undead and following you into battle. This happens both here and in Silverpine, completely contradicts the Deathknell storyline, and is never adequately explained.
Idk maybe they already weren’t thrilled about being ordered to work a farm in spitting distance of a hostile nation’s border and had already made peace with this highly predictable outcome.
At any rate the weirdest thing about this questline is Sylvanas then orders you to aid the Cenarion Circle and Argent Dawn. In a pre Before The Storm Azeroth this made sense. The Argents have always been welcoming toward the undead, have no ill will toward the Forsaken, and even serve as a convenient dumping ground for goody two shoes undead like Apothecary Judkins. Letting them have the northern chunk of the region and sending Forsaken to help them out as a show of good faith is a sound strategy. Even if Sylvanas personally loathes them they’re a banal presence who’ve never wronged the Forsaken and were instrumental in killing their enslaver. So, no reason not to be friendly.
But in a post BtS world it is even more hilarious that Sylvanas is worried the Forsaken could learn they can coexist with humans. Because- what does she mean by could? Hearthglen is up the road from Andorhal and she actively sends Forsaken there to see if they’ve any odd jobs what need doing. The cats not just out’ve the bag, he’s been sunbathing in plain view and meowing at people for food for years now.
Well anyway I’ll get to the Cenarion Circle and Hearthglen stuff in a followup post as this is already too long.
The 2nd Battle of Andorhal starts and here’s where I’m interested in the Alliance playthrough as they do something pretty uncharacteristically stone cold here.
They straight up just send a mob of conscripted peasants, wielding farming equipment and wearing makeshift ramshackle armor, to charge the Forsaken’s rear. There’s no brilliant strategy here they just send wave after wave of untrained share croppers into a meat grinder, hoping their bodies will gum up the gears of the Forsaken war machine. This goes predictably wrong for Stormwind.
What is of note though is that you help break the tide of sharecroppers by issuing air support to an abomination via somebody’s pet gargoyle. There’s also one gargoyle randomly hanging out in Horde Darkshore and I always wondered what their deal was. Turns out my first guess, that it was somebody’s pet, was correct.
So anywho deciding to hand the Forsaken a ish ton of dead bodies backfires as they translate that into a ish ton of new Forsaken pretty much immediately and turn the tide. I guess Thassarian can be forgiven for just assuming Koltria would not use the Forsaken’s attrition uno reverse card as he’d been pretty bad at command thus far.
So the Forsaken win the day more in spite of Deathweaver than because of him. And Sylvanas manages to one up Darth Vader in the “you’ve failed me for the last time” game by opening a portal to the UC that sends out meat hooks that drag Deathweaver inside. Making this far and away the most harrowing ending to an episode of Undercover Boss.
Bit extreme but tbf she was giving him pointers in disguise that he ignored, leading directly to Forsaken casualties and nearly losing the city. This plot-thread actually ties up in Legion where Thassarian rescues Deathweaver from the Undercity. Turns out he was where they keep prisoners. Took Thassarian years to figure that out. These two are clearly meant for eachother, they’re both idiots.
So all in all, yeah it’s pretty good. I’ll write something out about the neutral content when I polish it off but the Red content is at worst serviceable. The actual battle is really quite hectic and easy to get overwhelmed in if you’re not careful. The Forsaken are written wildly inconsistently and Sylvanas’s actions retroactively make very little sense but what else is new.
If they ever revisit the area it’d be cool to see a completely Forsaken Andorhal. The place is so phase mined it’s impossible to hold RPs there and the Forsaken really only have Brill in terms of towns. Their holdings to the south are more bases than population centers and after Dazar’Alor / Boralus I’m really into the more open air city approach.
Plus it’d be an interesting staging ground for some assault on Caer Darrow. Per Legion at least the CotD still holds it but they’re weak enough that Legion aligned Warlocks just bully them out of their relics. Idk if I were part of Forsaken high command I’d be interested in the island fortress with a subterranean academy that holds immense occult knowledge.
Also the tomb of Uther Lightbringer is here and man. How many pieces did that man’s soul get broken into? His ghosts there too. Swear to God the man covers more ground in death than he did in life.
