Ah yes the mercy of a King who has been absent for three or more years (idk how long Dragonflight is in universe. All I know is that it is a 3 year time gap between Shadowlands ending and Dragonflights beginning)
I don’t want to get my hopes up but there seems to be a few things hinting to this. Gilneas being retaken feels like a nod in that direction.
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Funny thing they gave the Horde Silverpine and Hillsbrad to even out the unfairness of vanilla launch where the alliance had 9(!) zones for themselves with no downsides. Weirdest decision to reverse that when things are still not right at all with Stromgarde and Gilneas being reclaimed now. Seems alliance biased writers are in power again.
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I think they just want the 7 human kingdoms back into play. Now 2 of them aren’t human fully anymore. Lordaeron is undead and Gilneas is Worgen. Hillsbrad/Southshore will likely be Worgen
Southshore might but Hillsbrad will remain a contested zone with Forsaken and Frostwolves primarily in the east and northeast. They’ve shown no interest in abandoning those areas and if anything doubled down with fortifying the entrance to Alterac.
Orcs just have Durotar. Tell me you never created a non Warcraft MMO that has factions.
If in Midnight they expand the zones to be lore consistent it would be amazing to see Alterac Valley in the actual zone. They merged and crunched in Alterac into Hillsbrad Foothills/Dalaran (Crater) and Southshore/Tarren Mill.
Lore wise these zones are massive. Each worthy of their own section similar to what we see with the Dragon isles. Southshore was the town and Hillsbrad was the regional city and Tarren Mill was the outskirts leading into Alterac Mountains. Lore wise all these towns were condensed into themselves along with the Dalaran Crater to save space and make the game playable in 2004.
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And we can go back to playing PVP football with Tarren Mill
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War Mode erases all the previous problems that came from that so I highly approve.
I think it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to see Southshore’s existence as an existential threat though. A Stormwind-influenced port, which served, canonically, as a major landing base for Alliance invasion of southern Lordaeron.
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I’m presuming the Forsaken must have a port somewhere, honestly. They seem to make up a significant portion, maybe even a majority, of the Horde’s navy.
But Southshore’s an incredibly important Alliance port. This was emphasised in Warcraft 2, and was the place where Stormwind’s refugees all landed after the First War. It’s not an insignificant place, strategically. I’d be surprised if the Forsaken weren’t at least a little threatened by it.
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If the Alliance was planning on a landing base it would just use Gilneas. You know, which happens to be closer to Capital City.
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Unlikely. The Forsaken just assisted the Gilneans in taking back their entire country, and that’s far closer to the Forsaken than the southern shore of Hillsbrad.
I’m going to level with you here. It’s far and away more likely based on the direction the story and game are going, that the next Alliance NPC seen within walking distance of Tarren Mill is just a dwarf with a cart full of booze who is hoping to sell his fantastical brew that he claims can even be tasted by the dead.
He’ll ask Horde and Alliance champions to help him gather jugs or barrels that fell off when he tried to get past the Yetis, for a small sum of gold.
The factions are calming down, cities are being opened up to everyone, it’s more likely that we’ll be taking quests from everyone instead of only red quests, and only blue ones.
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Why not a two pronged attack? Tarren Mill and Andorhal would be much more directly threatened by Southshore.
Frankly, a bit of a shame. I agree with a lot of people that the faction war hasn’t exactly been satisfying, but a cold war is much more fun than everyone holding hands and smiling.
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Why bother with these smaller towns when we have see the Fourth War just land the entire army right at Capital City’s doorstep.
It is outright criminal that Bfa reversed literally all of Cataclysm for no other reason then alliance appeasement.
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Yeah, any claims that Southshore is/was somehow a threat because it was a port is completely invalidated by the fact that Tirasfal and Silverpine are already ocean-adjacent areas, and the entire military might of the alliance was able to storm in and completely obliterate Undercity’s military from the north. You don’t need a working port to make landfall.
Not saying it isn’t possible for a Horde leader to think that and act accordingly, just saying it isn’t actually true.
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I’ve been saying supersize and separate the zones again for a while. Even wrote a whole thing about a new Alterac.
The point more so was the Forsaken show no indication of releasing the lands they currently control (most of Hillsbrad) to the Alliance. They may tolerate or allow Southshore, and thats fine, but Tarren Mill and the areas around aren’t going anywhere.
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Agreed! I don’t want the Horde to lose any holdings they have a legitimate claim to. Terran Mill, the Sepulcher, even Hammerfall, should all remain with the Horde. The citizens of Lordaeron are the Forsaken, and any settlement they were able to reclaim in Classic is their’s by right. Hammerfall has been a Horde village since the Internment Crisis and was a refuge for victims of it. Orcs were originally brought there against their will and made it their home. They have just as much right to it as humans had to Theramore. Plus it’s named after a totally dope power-metal band Samwise did covers for. 
The only village I don’t think should be rebuild or resettled is An’gorok. And that’s not for any ideological reason or anything, it just makes the area really lopsided for the Horde and gameplay-wise that can get really annoying.
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I’ve been trying in my free time and as a time waster at work to re-imagine the old world (how unique for everyone here 
) with a bit more of a ‘realistic,’ ‘practical,’ and ‘logistical’ spin on it. These aspects of the world aren’t a focus for Blizzard at a reliable scale, we know this. Also a pretty firm believer that if a zone isn’t neutral or largely uncontested by either faction (as in its so empty who cares: Badlands, Tanaris, ect), it should be contested and available for both factions to partake in. No more contested yet one sided zones.
But Hammerfall, since ya brought it up, kept being a headscratcher for me. I’m not a fan of bringing back An’gorok either, really was only a military installation, but it did secure a northern supply route and western area of control.
The best I could come up with was carving a giant canyon/gorge through the mountains north/northwest to Jintha’alor to connect with our Revantusk friends who control it. For Hammerfall to exist otherwise means some real constraint, goodwill, or weakness from the Alliance (maybe even all three) given they have Arathi pretty locked down geographically at this point. Smuggling supplies through the broken western portion of Thoradin’s Wall isn’t exactly what I’d call an efficient strategy. Really explore that whole southwestern region of Arathi too. All of that mountain space and then small coast could be explored and expanded with another redesign.
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