Let’s take a moment to discuss just how mind numbingly dumb the Burning of Teldrassil actually was, shall we?
First off, the distance: There was no way in hell the catapult weapons used were capable of flinging projectiles that far out into sea. Catapults, by design, are intended to fling projectiles up and over walls and defenses, not over great distances. Artwork and descriptions of Teldrassil put it a fair distance away from shore, but even if we use the in-game distance as canonical it is still way, way too far a distance for those bloody catapults.
Secondly, it would not have burned. You ever go camping? You ever go camping and have it rain? Wet firewood is hard to burn. Now imagine a giant, colossal city sized tree parked in the middle of the Sea. The OCEAN. Imagine how utterly saturated with moisture that tree would be.
What if the fire the Horde used was special, you say? Well then how come said fire had no effect on the very wooden catapults used to propel said fire. So apparently the Horde used small wooden catapults to fling fire as hot as white phosphorus or napalm as far as 20th century artillery into a giant, ocean drenched tree that ignited as if it was doused with gasoline. I’m sorry, but “what about magic!” is a colossal ***pull and a complete cop out.
Y’know what I think? I think some beardy middle-aged higher up at Blizzard who listens to crappy metal music and wears the band’s crappy T-shirts took a look at Teldressil and thought: “Aw man, wouldn’t it be so cool if we had the Horde burn it!? That’s metal AF dude, yeah man!”
That’s how Teldressil burned. If you operate entirely based on what looks “cool” and forget basic story telling ideals, you get really big, really dumb “cool” moments.
I think you have it wrong. More likely, the new writing staff which recently replaced those beardy middle-aged higher-ups thought to themselves that they could redo MoP better than those guys did, so they thought that burning Teldrassil would be a huge shocking clickbait moment which would one-up Theramore’s bombing.
It had nothing to do with having a big dumb cool moment. If it was supposed to be cool, they wouldn’t have harped on about how terrible and tragic it was.
I just think it was foolish, because it painted them into a corner. They had a faction leader butcher a city of the opposing faction, and then scorch earth their own city. They gave her a civilian kill count that is rivaled by like, Arthas and Deathwing.
Now they either have her doing 4D chess and making basically everyone else look moronic in a garbage attempt to somehow redeem what has become a really cringey character, or they over throw another psychotic warchief.
The latter is something the Horde player base need not be subjected to again. The former is treating the Alliance player base like they need not even exist, save to hug the person murdering them.
I mean, I agree that the burning turned out to be a bad decision because of what it did to players’ sense of agency on the Horde side, what it did to the willingness of the Alliance to consider anything outside their own moral self-righteousness, and how it forced almost all important NPCs to completely wreck their characterization when Blizzard went on to act as if this were business as usual.
But on the other hand, I also loathe the fetish people like Brandon Sanderson and Shadiversity have instilled for “muh fantasy realism” and think things like “catapult range” are some of the least important aspects of certain types of fantasy, as Stephen King and his ilk prove over and over again. Wow’s appeal is not and has never been built on clever use of a meticulously constructed set of rules for its magic, and criticizing that is akin to criticizing Pokémon for not realistically addressing how deadly battling would actually be.
It was a mistake to write this type of dramatic story if they don’t plan to continue/end it properly.
Now they have a few night elves with absolutely nothing left and their story is pretty much over. Flawless writing!
Now we can move on and fight alongside the horde to save a world where we have no place in - Perfection!
The problem I have with the catapult range is they told us what that range was in A Good War:
A short distance away, behind the main lines, was another group of siege weapons. One of the unit’s officers, an orc with a sour expression and a false smile, sat near a pristine demolisher.
“How far back are we from the front lines?”
“Several hundred yards, my lord.”
Saurfang growled at the officer. “And what is the maximum range of these weapons?”
When I saw the Sylvanas Warbringers for the first time, the complete idiocy of using catapults was the first thing that I thought about. How a tree that is so large it contains an entire landmass in its canopy can be hit by normal-sized catapults on a distant beach. I was genuinely shocked at how mind-numbingly stupid that is. Rules of magic in a fantasy setting are one thing, but basic rules of gravity and distance are another. I mean, the payloads were hitting halfway up the trunk. Can you imagine how much power you would need to achieve arcs of that height? And it’s coming from dinky little wooden catapults. It’s been a year and I still can’t get over how insultingly dumb and lazy it is.
what is more interesting is that these catapults did a lot more damage that the mana bomb on theramore that needed the focusis iris to be this powerful.
but look at the damage that 3 catapults caused in just minutes! killing even more people!
i am just saying that these catapults did caused more damaged to the intended target because i am sure that teldrassil is far more bigger than theramore.
who needs nukes when you have these “regular” catas and not need to steal a focusing iris.
Indeed. This is a pretty huge discrepancy… and it’s not like it was something that was “oops we forgot about that detail that happened three expansions ago, sorry”
No, this was in the same story. Not a novel that took 10 months to write. It was a short story that looks like it took 10 hours (or maybe 10 minutes).
As much nonsense this is, the best thing, (the only thing), we can do is come up with semi-reasonable headcanon to make up for it. Shamans magic is pretty much all we’ve got.
I believe it was something about the actual game developers choose the direction the expansion takes and the writers come in afterwards. This is the underlying reason the story and direction are so awful, they are trying to hammer square pegs into round holes.