Side note question? Does Azshara actually die in the raid, or is she just sealed in some way?
Did you play WoT as Horde? Every step we took we were hit with a guilt trip. Elves had death lines that were designed to say “You are doing something bad here.” It was blatant.
Has there been any actual exchange of territory in game yet? I guess we have to wait to see what happens to the destroyed zones afterwards. I don’t think the faction borders will change here. I can’t argue that the cata zone remap was handled well in the story (why couldn’t Southshore have just been the tidal wave it was originally supposed to? etc) but they were making up for running out of time to make the horde in vanilla and ended up seemingly the reverse in Cata.
But, that’s not what happened. The horde was slowly moving through those two Alliance zones while the military was away. We outnumbered the night elf forces 8-1, Horde was actual military, the Night Elves were defending with a skeleton force and civilians. We were still worried about the number and wanted to have 12-1 odds to be safe. Every step of the way we were losing troops, our forces were jumpy and scared of what lay behind every tree. We got stopped dead in our tracks at one point and would not have been able to progress if Saurfang hadn’t sent a sneak attack through a smuggler’s pass. And when we got our supposed great victory it was a cutscene where our warchief acted totally out of character and stuck us in a position where there is no morally grey to go to. There was nothing that gives any wiggle room, no azerite absorbed by the tree exploding due to fighting, no standard tactic accidentally setting off a firestorm, it was just straight up burn the tree and be evil. As for the raised Night Elves, don’t follow too closely the various way they’re super special in the lore so that they can’t be raised for some reason, but I have a strong suspicion that at least one of them is going to end up having accepted it in order to strike at Sylvanas later.
The Horde did win at Teldrassil, but it looks like it is a win that has fragmented the Horde and left it in disarray and probably another civil war.
Barely pulls it off? The Alliance steamrolled over everything the Horde tried to do. The initial force straight up defeated us in hand to hand combat and wiped out the first Azerite super war machine quite handily. Blight was used and then counteracted pretty simply (although does seem odd that they didn’t bring some protective gear) We tried to set ambushes where the terrain would suit us and leave the Alliance at a disadvantage, and still the Alliance rolled through. And because of our total victory at Teldrassil one of our big heroes basically surrendered to the Alliance in a hopes they’d kill the Warchief. And then, when they try for a flawless victory it got lessened a little when Sylvanas escaped and fruitlessly destroyed the city in a hope to take out Alliance leadership, and instead just destroyed an empty city.
I can understand not feeling completely satisfied with the results, but it was a clear Alliance victory and Horde loss.
There’s also the way these things are presented. We spent two weeks on Teldrassil, there was a heavy focus on the civilians, Horde side we had quests to send people away from the fighting, but then when Alliance goes there suddenly there are piles of corpses. The story is ramping up the sympathy for the Night Elves, this is the horrors of war visited on them for no reason. This is why the Alliance will fight. Undercity we jump immediately into the action and oh, conveniently all of the civilians are saved at the start, and let’s not talk about what happened to the people of Brill when it got flattened. There’s no need for sympathy to the Horde. We’re just there to fight and lose. And there’s no inkling of anyone in the Alliance acting in the least bit questionable.
There’s clear motivation for the Alliance going forward, the story feels like it’s a set up for a pretty standard story. Heroes get hit hard, they recoup, gather their strength and then strike back and get revenge for their loss at the beginning of the story. Horde could have had a similarly standard misunderstood underdogs band together and defend themselves from their enemies who won’t leave them in peace. And if we continued on from Legion’s story that may have happened, but instead we committed atrocities with no good reason to.
As opposed to the victory of being stuck in the most inconvenient hub every designed since it was first and foremost a raid zone. Someone many people had wanted to see for years spending a patch as a racial leader before getting killed by the other faction in that raid, which tops off an expansion story line that just bounces from one failure to another, many times at the hands of the Alliance. We’ll get this magic item from the old god cultists over there and use that to strengthen our fleet, oh, the Alliance stole it and used it to lure our forces out of the city so they could ransack it and kill the king. We don’t really have a fleet so we’ll recruit these trolls with an amazing fleet, oh, the Alliance blows it up in a cutscene. We need to stop these Zul cultists and blood trolls from waking up old gods and their minions, oh, we got there just in time for them to achieve their goals and release the things they wanted to, and they marched on our expansion hub and blew up the Great Seal and there was nothing we could do to stop them.
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datamine text suggests she is bound by jaina and thally but it is already too late as the titan energy in our necklace has been used on the chains as lor’themar says n’zoths escape is now just a matter of time and we cant stop it anymore
Good. Her not kicking the bucket means she can return in some way down the road. Killing her off this easy, when she herself invited us into her domain … would be disappointing. That’s good to know.
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i mean she invited us because she needed us, we were like puppets dancing to n’zoths strings the entire time, including when sylvanas sent/lured us into place to fall into azshara’s trap
That’s not true. I made an entire thread devoted to listing the ways the Horde player is made to feel shame for being part of the Horde in this expansion.
Jaina says that if Baine is killed, there will be no honor left in the Horde. She’s certainly not claiming that Sylvanas is the only bad apple.
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Consequently, how stupid will we have to be to inevitably release her?
“I’ll give you the rest of my loot table I was hiding.”
“Hail to the Empress” Kicks lock
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Because the evil actions didn’t make sense, it just exists to push the Vulpera more to the Horde.
Most Alliance want to be lawful evil----committing atrocities that, while terrible, make strategic sense. Hawthorn’s invasion of the Southern Barrens was a refreshing example of this, as was the purging the Blood Elves from Dalaran. But consider the intro to Pandaria when the Alliance is given the chance to execute a bunch of orcs fleeing the battlefield. We just secured the port and at this point the Horde and Alliance are at war with one another again following Theramore’s destruction. Leaving any horde soldier or peon alive is giving the enemy a chance to regroup, yet as Alliance we’re chastised for even considering that option. We’re shamed for not taking the Lawful NobleStupid approach of just letting the enemy go. Even if that wasn’t the introduction to the Sha in MoP it still would have been tactically stupid not to inflict as much damage onto the Horde as possible, when both superpowers were at each other’s throats.
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I think we’re remembering a very different intro, as as I remember it, the orcs were all drowning and trying to get to shore, and the alliance gun them down. Considering prisoners would have been useful in figuring out the Hordes plans on Pandaria, yeah firing squadding drowning soldiers is a bit much.
I don’t think most Alliance want to be Lawful evil. I think they want to be the good guys doling out righteous justice to the villians. The moment it is people who don’t feel like they deserve it or what is done might not be justifiable as right, people tend to become less comfortable. I suspect one reason this situation is so frustrating. They have all this terrible stuff happen and want to punish the ones responsible but the ones responsible are a playable faction and so they get neutered in what they can do, particularly when Blizzard resorts to scapegoating.
This is why I have often said that the Villian batting the Horde receives is bad for the Alliance story too. They get all the motivation in the world to come down with righteous vengeance on the villainous horde and then get told it isn’t the villainous horde but just one guy and their followers and the rest of the horde should get off with a finger waging because reasons.
Horde get forced down a road they don’t want to go down or, for those who actually want to be evil, never has a true payoff, and the Alliance never gets a satisfying outcome because the only real satisfying outcome to the set up they created would require upsetting and potentially driving off half their playerbase.
So we end up with this half assed middleground and go back to what is mostly the status quo.
For the record, if this expansion is supposed to be looking hard at what the Horde is, I think they aren’t doing a great job. If anything the whole thing feels more confusing than anything else. Civil wars aren’t exactly a good way to ‘bring the different parts of the horde together’.
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Orcs who not even five minutes ago were trying to kill you, are physically stronger than the alliance, and preach victory or death. You think allowing them to shore will result in a thank you?
Rell Nightwind: Admiral - I think they mean to surrender. They’re not armed - They’re just trying not to drown!
Sky Admiral Rogers: You don’t think they’ll hesitate to strangle you with their bare hands? GUN THEM DOWN!
Had the horde actually continue to attack, we’d be saying how dumb the alliance was.
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Because Rogers of all people is someone we should be taking advice from.
Regardless, gunning down people while they are attempting not to drown, when you have just won the military engagement and prisoners are not only an option, but could be very important to your war effort, is messed up.
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When I wondered what this expansion was for, I remembered the devs’ response about how MoP was not enough and wanted to try something deeper for the Horde to question itself. I still wonder why replicating the story of an expansion of not so long ago seemed like a good idea to any moron over there…
Is this expansion really serving to show this? Questions? Conflicts? Nope.
Look at situations like this, made to stimulate the alliance to fight and the Horde (inside and outside the plot) to feel discouraged and deconstructed. ^
Exactly.
The Horde was emphasized in its atrocities for months, sometimes its acts became worse on the Alliance side whereas the opposite did not happen. Was there any questioning? No leader did or said anything during the following months to Teldrassil, did not meet with others and questioned what the Horde is or should be. We have had only “stimulating” attitudes that compare the Horde with the Legion; Saurfang abandons the Horde and categorizes it as “Sylvana’s Horde” scorning his entire race or… I do not know, the most significant part of the Horde (players) should not be treated as brainless minions (though this was the only treatment we have had so far in the expansion), again, the most experienced guy in the place does not join in with others, does not question, makes negative assertions without any argument and goes away.
Then we came to the Baine complex, the man who - according to our greatest enemy and savior Jaina Deus ex Machina Proudmore - is the best of the Horde did not follow one of the most basic assumptions of the faction - it was ours at least, before it was given for the alliance, thanks devs - which is about union, he also does not talk to anyone, does not question anything, kills Horde soldiers at random (something that even Vol’jin avoided doing), makes statements about how the Horde is sick, but does not offer any cure, does not mobilize for anything WITHIN the Horde, only helps enemies who have just invaded lands and humiliate the faction’s newest allies.
BfA from the start is admittedly MoP 2.0, but the devs had a brilliant idea of making us question more about what the Horde is (AGAAAIN), but the truth is we are not questioning, nobody is, everyone is just categorizing the Horde (in the worst possible ways) either the characters or the Devs when they put us to commit atrocities that seem to have no limits without reason or obstacle in the plot.
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How many wow tokens do you want to bet that three expacs from now after how badly BfA has been received we get another. “We think we asked some important questions during MoP and Bfa about what it means to be Horde, to make it question itself, but we didn’t really expand on that enough, so in Fog of the Dragon Isles, we want to address that more.”
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Yea… because you guys also take prisoners so we can do an exchange! whoops, guess not! i WILL agree its messed up but need i remind you orcs, trolls and forsaken like to kill stuff for kicks? (not all of them but enough of them for it to be a problem) you are also holding us to a much higher standard that you would hold the horde and that is hypocritical because you are a member of it.
I thought I kept my point kinda neutral, guess not, but I was saying regardless, as in regardless of who you are, blue team or red, gunning down people who are trying to not drown is bad. If the Horde did it, it would be bad, just like how if the Horde also randomly opened fire on a neutral Goblin vessel just because, I would say it was bad as well.
As for the prisoner thing, yes, the Horde does, Saurfang in Lor’danal comes to mind off the top of my head. I hold both factions to the same standard of “Bad thing is bad.”
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While i get you are trying to be neutral.
I acknowledge some horde are capable of this, not all of them take part in such wanton killing, but as you say this i must say that in the patch before that in astranar you killed everyone not even civilians were spared (look for the quest alliance side “A disturbance in Ashenvale”),lately from the horde such behavior has been the norm, not the exception, and for us, going on a killing spree is exceptional, as alliance time and time we are reminded of this difference, we cant keep scapegoating all the faction mindless killing on the warchief this is something that has to be adressed on a satisfying way before the end of this expansion.
on the flipside there will be a new head of state for you guys, i vote lor’themar for president 2020, barring thrall hes the best you got right now and he is better than a depressed orc.
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Yes. Yes she is.
Attempting not to drown after trying to kill the enemy. It’s an assumption that the Orcs will surrender quietly.
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Shrugs All I was responding to was the comment that Horde don’t take prisoners and providing an example that they do. I fully am in support of the Horde as a whole being held up for all the bs that’s happened, not just scapegoating it, as after all, any scapegoating just means the Horde hasn’t really learned the lesson they are trying to drum into us, so it just means we’ll have another dumpster fire tier expac about this exact thing AGAIN where the Horde does more saturday morning cartoon villain levels of evil just because.
Edit: Lesson, not listen. English b hrd languge.
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