The ending of Wrath remains the dumbest plot twist in WoW for me. Seriously I thought The Scourge was terrifying because it was basically a zombie apocalypse hive mind controlled by a super villain. The idea that taking out the Lich King would somehow make them more dangerous- when they’re presumably now just mindless zombies who could easily be lured into shambling right into a massive pit full of nothing but flame elementals and internals - was always ridiculous.
But let’s for a moment just pretend it’d be a disaster. In fairness Blizz did show plenty of Necromancers and Lichs were still tooling around and maybe they could’ve marshaled the remaining forces not controlled by Bolvar into an equally threatening force.
So, why didn’t Bolvar just go ahead and force the Scourge into the magma in Mt.Doom? Or just throw them up against Deathwing, the Iron Horde or the Legion with reckless abandon until nothing was left?
I don’t think I’m nitpicking here. Bolvar threatens to unleash the Scourge against the demons in Legion if the Ebonblade doesn’t get it’s ish together.
So… I mean why didn’t you? Granted it would’ve been a much different expansion if the Legion’s invasion just got swept up in one of those tidal waves of ghouls from the WWZ movie but I don’t see why that wouldn’t have worked.
Just, weird to have them sit twiddling the wretched claws that were their thumbs up in the emo artic for like a decade when it’s not like Azeroth wasn’t dealing with threats a zombie apocalypse army could’ve sorted.
Could be handwaved as in he didnt had that much control over undead, could be they only wanted to kill and he just… turned off the switch like a janitor.
Lore reason, perhaps there was to many of them to just march into a death trap. There’s apparently enough to swarm the globe after all. Could have taken years to pull that off if it was even possible at all.
Meta wise, it would have been a waste of a plot point. The idea was to have the Scourge be available should they want to do something again, and having them all destroyed kinda nosells that.
I think he would lose control of them outside of Northrend, and they would just recklessly attack everything, not just the Legion- like he could only control so many when they are so far away.
I suppose he could go with the Scourge, but then he’s putting himself at risk, and the frozen throne at risk.
This is an interesting question, that gets me thinking about the End Time. Apparently everyone decides to make their last stand against Deathwing in Northrend, so I imagine they were fighting on the same side as the Scourge.
Is it headcanon or fact that the new reason the Scourge would be such a threat is because without the LK the Jailer would take control of the Scourge and run rampant? I can’t actually remember.
The Helm of Damnation doesn’t come with an instruction manual. It took Ner’zhul and later Arthas years of “sleeping” on the frozen throne respectively to learn how to wield its power and effectively control their minions. And that was with the Scourge forces under their control nominally having the same goals and objectives as them. Bolvar would presumably have needed a similar amount of time to gain that same level of control. And, as you noted, the more sapient Scourge under his command probably didn’t appreciate their new King keeping them locked down. So they’re probably resisting him all that time. Unsuccessfully so, but still.
Because at that point we were still trying to keep the world from realizing that the Scourge hadn’t been so much destroyed as knocked out and locked in the basement. Sending those armies south might’ve stopped the Legion with less effort then we expended, but then you have to explain to the world why there’s an active Scourge at all. Which really should be the case now but Blizzard gunna Blizz.
It’s because all the twisted remnants of the Scourge - Would then have their own ambitions. So imagine Arthas - One free-willed dangerous undead loving maniac, then times that by as many undead are in the ranks of the Scourge.
The story of how & when Sylvanas made her pact establishes this well – Bolvar was pushing back the tide of the influences of ‘The Crown of Dominance’ and the dark powers that came with it by will power alone. He simply had the roaring command to ‘stay put’ for the Scourge. When he saw Sylvanas on the pinnacle he did nothing, she jumped off (Suicide) and died.
After Sylvanas died, the Val’kyr who were there aimlessly flying without command due to the restraint of Bolvar had then approached her and they made a pact. He had a sense of dread and recited the words of Terenas Menethil II, he tried to beckon the Val’kyr back to his command — But could not, for they now served a new purpose, along with a new master with new plans and also thus had freed themselves forevermore from the crown’s shackles. Bolvar then understood the gravity of the situation and tightened his grip on his new responsibility more seriously and let the dark powers & influence flow through him.
So without the influence of the Lich King - there’s essentially more threats like the Val’kyr & Sylvanas, running amuck with their own ideals, plans, goals & ambitions - whether they be good, bad or mild: They would most definitely be colossal.
The thing I find stupid, is that the Scourge without a holding master is supposed to be ‘Oh sugar honey Icecrown and Taz’dingo’ moment — which would be all hell breaking loose from the numerous undead to which even the Legion feared (Literally partial to the reason of why they created the Lich King in the first place).
So I hope in the pre-patch we’re just ‘stemming the starting tide’ of it all, and not ‘Yay we defeated the entirety of the issue & broke the Scourge. All done.’ because if it was that easy, we should have had just yeeted the crown off into the abyss in the first place and it essentially retcons lore / renders what I stated at the start as a mockery.
That’s exactly what happened. Two of the four horsemen are working with the argent dawn to continue fighting off the scourge throughout the expansion because we plainly do not stop them. We’re trying to stop the Scourge by stopping the Jailer.
I don’t remember him saying anything about it. It seems silly to hold the scourge back just to keep everything a secret, but, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, I guess.
That’s good to know. It would have been really sad if the Scourge was mopped up in a short pre-expansion event.
It goes far and beyond that, but I don’t know how much you care about spoilers. Suffice to say, I’ve sufficient evidence to believe that “the lich king can’t control the scourge” is false (at least, when the Jailer isn’t intervening, anyway.)
I personally don’t care about spoilers. My assumptions were based off of the fact that the Cult of the Damned was operating independently of the Lich King during cata (iirc) and that the domination of the Lich King was weakened after Illidan damaged the Frozen Throne. I thought of it as the Lich King losing “signal strength”, but maybe that’s not the best way to think about it.
Cult of the damned was using necromancers to control undead. If you remember Cataclysm, Grandmaster Gandling assumes direct control of both Lilian Voss’s body and soul.
Anyway re: spoilers: Take a look at what was datamined.
The quests and daily quests and bosses give to us in the pre-patch frankly make the Scourge look like a underwhelmingly insignificant threat, despite the quest text trying to hype them up.
The event frankly makes Bolvar look like this was a bluff the he was luck he never had to reveal, as the Legion probably would have walked all over the Scourge, and Bolvar counted on us walking all over the Legion instead.
Keep in mind that the Scourge is comprised of a lot, a LOT of undead. We’re talking most of the entire population of Lordaeron, which was the largest and most populous kingdom at the time, plus something like ninety-percent of all High Elves. And that’s not even counting ALL the dead who didn’t die in the Third War that were probably also raised from graveyards all over both kingdoms and the crypts from prior settlements up in Northrend.
Bodies don’t need to be that intact to raise, it seems, so we’re talking hundreds of years worth of corpses coupled with all the people newly killed. That’s absolutely enough to swarm the world, not even considering the more intelligent Scourge, once free, would happily continue the work and continue raising as they go, which we see in Cataclysm, liches and such who have shrugged off Bolvar’s control and continued on.
But the Scourge up in Northrend, and most likely many more elsewhere, certainly outnumber the living at least ten to one. At the time, it made sense to just hold them back, especially since Bolvar has the will of one person, as opposed to two merged beings. The end of Wrath, the power creep hadn’t quite set in yet, and thus a rampant Scourge was a much larger threat. The writing was also markedly different and less comic book, and definitely more grounded in terms of who could do what.
I’m pretty sure the writing on the wall with the prepatch event that leads throughout all of Shadowlands is that the Scourge was every bit the threat that everyone – including Kil’jaeden himself – worried it was.
I got the impression that he didn’t have Arthas’s level of control, and it takes everything he has just to keep the Scoutge dormant. At least until around Legion.
This. And i believe he states somewhere in SL that he more or less kept a lot of the Helm’s power locked down/turned off so he didn’t get corrupted/let the Jailer into his mind.
