Emperor Palpatine voice
Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational catapult!
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I know! That’s the most mind-boggling thing.
I’ve heard a couple of comments along those lines through out the years. If it’s true then I have a lot more sympathy for the writers than my posts reflect.
That’s gotta be rough for someone to come into your room and be like “Hey we need you to think of a good reason that the Horde will burn down Teldrassil and kill most of the Night Elves. On my desk by Friday plx.”
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I disagree. This is not about realism, it’s about verisimilitude - basically, believability. In a nutshell, this means that your setting can be as fantastical as you want. But once you establish rules, you should follow them.
Having dragons, zombies, or catapults hurling magically enhanced ammunition - that’s all fine. Having range and distance that inexplicably vary according to the needs of the plot is not. It breaks immersion. Once a rule is established, it should be set, unless breaking it is explicitly explained in the story.
If Teldrassil was always within catapult range of Darkshore or catapults had always been established to be able to launch projectiles vast distances (like, many miles), that would be one thing. But neither of those is true, so it just comes off as plot convenience. That has nothing to do with realism in the sense of Sanderson et al.
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And maybe why the zone stories are actually really good, and it’s just the overall story that is lacking?
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" TELDRASSIL 
on 
FIRE? 
You Won’t Believe What Happens Next! CLICK AND SUBSCRIBE TO FIND OUT"
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Yes, but it’s also perfectly valid in a high fantasy setting.
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Verisimilitude is the mortar that keeps the bricks of a setting together. Sure, some things are easy to ignore when other pieces fall into place, but when everything is misaligned? It becomes much easier to criticize failings like “Why does this catapult have the range of a ballistic missile”.
In A Good War, they very clearly establish the range of the very same demolishers (spoiler: it’s not that huge), and they could have handwaved it in a more believable way by going “It was a secret Azerite payload that she was trying for the first time” and had it fire from the ships around Teldrassil instead of the demolishers on shore, but instead went “No, it’s just… uh… it’s magic fire. And wind carried it across the ocean. Yeah.” Zero thought.
Edit: I have been informed that the cinematic features catapults, not demolishers as used in A Good War, but that sincerely does not account for the range.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/567791119245508618/622860544885391403/overthinking.jpg
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The fire was magically enhanced by shammies to burn better. So that part is quasi-plausible…
EXCEPT:
Teldrassil had 999,999,999 druids who control nature and plants to counter it.
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If it came from outside the writing team then the writing team needs to ignore them in the future… what Sylvanas has originally intended was to subjugate each alliance race and make peace treaties with them…
then ultimately target Stormwind and break it’s power structure, so the horde can forever live in peace.
Sylvanas literally lost her bargaining chip with the Nightelves by burning Teldrassil and then rezzing night elves.
If you think too hard on gibberish, you will numb your own mind.
Let us continue.
Herein lies an issue that A Good War can help inform:
This is proof that not even Saurfang or the operators of the machinery are certain of the range.
It leaves much open.
In the intro to Stormheim, Sylvanas declares the Horde’s catapults are faster and more powerful than ever, and that the Goblins are to thank for it.
Orcs ruminating on the range of Goblin catapults seems to be conjecture on their part.
Also… as far as the payloads; from A Good War:
“… You will be outnumbered. You will be outarmed. They will kill every one of you if you are spotted. Even if they do not, your fellow Horde soldiers may do the job for them and slay you by accident,” Sylvanas had told them. Then she had smiled. “Now … how many of you would like to volunteer?”
Everyone gathered before her had raised their hand, including Morka. What a story this will make for my children, she thought. Even if she did not survive, they would sing songs about everyone who took part in this raid, she was certain of it. “Very well,” Sylvanas had said. “Siege crews, stay under cover until you see me enter the northern forest. Only then will you roll out onto the sand and begin your bombardment. Raiders, begin your swim the moment Saurfang launches his attack.”
As ordered, the volunteers had organized themselves into small groups. Fifteen per ship—that was how it would shake out. Against a full kaldorei crew, each group would indeed be outnumbered.
But the goal was not to win in a fair fight, oh no. Sylvanas had assigned magi to each siege crew. When the Horde fired back, they would do so with unstable, explosive, arcane-touched payloads that could set an entire ship ablaze.
Morka stripped off her armor and kept only a couple of small daggers lashed to her leather belt. She would swim beneath the artillery barrage to eliminate the ships the Horde’s siege engines could not reach.
Or even better, Morka thought, take the ships for the Horde.
Warchief-approved piracy. Was there anything better?
All that aside : Darkspear Mages helped light the flames, and Darkspear Shaman helped the flames be efficient.
Were they Darkspear or Shatterspear?
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Those Goblin allies of ours must’ve done some serious work with those Catapults back in Legion.
They’d literally have to break the rules of physics to have catapults so small cover such a vast distance and burn a moistened mass so large with such small burning projectiles so quickly and wholly.
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That is a good point.
The Shaman seemed Darkspear but the Mage was described as Troll. Which could be Shatterspear representation.
The Trolls seemed down either way, and helped the burning.
It’s not a fetish for fantasy realism, though. Storytelling needs rules that are internally consistent, even if they don’t match the rules of the real world.
Blizzard’s problem is that they continually undermine their own world for things that look cool in the moment, like having Jaina there through the entire Broken Shore scenario and then just removing her when her teleportation powers would be useful, or ignoring the existence of the Vindicaar because what was “cool” in Legion didn’t fit “the story we want to tell” for BfA.
Without some sort of reliable structure to build on, Blizzard makes their entire story meaningless because anything can happen at any time.
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You’re not wrong.
My question is now what is Saurfang’s characterization? I understand that he’s honorable and such, but wasn’t he also supposed to be a competent general? Usually, and I guess this doesn’t have to be the case, generals at least have a foggy idea of the capabilities of their own assets. Maybe not EXACT details, but a rough shake of it before any engagement. Also, when I mention their own, it’s any allies’ as well. Anything that they are reasonably expected to utilize.
What I’m saying is regardless of range, why didn’t he run ANY tests on the catapults before they would reasonably need to be used? Also, if he doesn’t have a foggy idea, the operator would have at least a foggy idea regardless of technological upgrades. (maybe not magical ones though…). The answer to this is because “it’s cool”.
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Yeah, non-writers, or people who write their own stuff, often don’t realize how restrictive it is to write licensed tie-ins. Writers get blamed for a lot of stupid stuff that they had no say over.
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I don’t think it’s proof of that at all. I think it’s an example of Saurfang allowing the demolisher operator to hang himself with his own words, by admitting he knew he was too far back to fight. It’s a fairly common technique that shouldn’t need to be explicitly spelled out for readers to understand it.
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Not to mention “A couple hundred yards” is nowhere near “several kilometers”.
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You could hit a tree that size with a nuclear weapon and it wouldn’t go up that quickly.
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