Well, yes, Anduin as well, because he also sucks, but I assumed he was referring to a previous thread where he had gone at me for preferring Sylvanas to Baine.
I mean, I would take Sylvanas over a lot of characters, because even though she’s a super villain, at least she’s interesting. It’s like saying I’d take Cersei Lannister over Jon Snow. One bores the crap out of me. The other doesn’t. And this is a game. It’s supposed to be entertaining.
But BFA Sylvanas is still an evil villain who obviously shouldn’t be the Warchief. Sadly.
Edit: However, I also don’t want any of the characters I like to replace her, because it is a cursed job. Hmmmm…maybe I’m coming around on the Baine idea…
I think the Horde rebellion plays into splitting the Alliance. Two factions of Horde confuses the situation and the morality of what the Alliance should do, especially since both parts have participated in the war.
An honorable victory involving sending assassins to sneak attack the Night Elves so they’d be all softened up for the main Horde force, which outnumbered them eight-to-one…? The point I was making is that Saurfang taking out Malfurion while he fought with Sylvanas and thinking that was dishonorable is insane considering what else he was party to. Especially since he seemingly just doesn’t care that it would cost Horde lives in the future.
Shandris isn’t Night Warrior’ifyed, and she’s not part of Tyrande’s army.
Anyway, there’s a difference between being inefficient, and having goals that contradict each other.
Zandalar is still one of the Horde’s best strongholds on the Great Sea, the place from which they marshal their forces in the war. And by “pressing”, I wasn’t just referring to the Zandalari, the Alliance gains an overwhelming naval advantage and seems to just do nothing with it.
Or maybe he just recognized that a wound could hurt in more ways than the one he had brought up way back at the start of the story. You keep acting like the Gilneans were this ironclad, “THIS IS THE WHOLE POINT WE’RE DOING ANYTHING” motivation, when they were just one thing that Saurfang first brought up at the start of the planning phase. The idea he expresses more at the end is holding Teldrassil hostage, but I don’t know why he would ever think that was viable if he was never prepared to follow through on the threat.
Your analysis doesn’t show her thinking to be flawed in that way though. You mainly just continued to insist it was emotional or scatterbrained, without much evidence.
First off, as far as your interpretation goes, it’s quite a stretch to say that a character which has been repeatedly stated as being calculating and cunning to totally fly off the handle and senselessly destroy her own plans for absolutely no reason.
Second, for my interpretation, there is in fact quite a bit of evidence showing that she always intended to destroy the Night Elves, as well as the rest of the Alliance. Her idea of slaughtering all of Stormwind, how she hesitated to attack once Tyrande had left, how she literally thinks that the tree was always going to burn. Maybe she didn’t want to do it at that point, but it was always on the table. And as I noted before, she continues to say now that things are effectively progressing according to plan, meaning her plans weren’t thrown away by some last minute emotionality.
But also, that last part, about admitting that the Alliance would unite? My interpretation was that this was also a lie for Saurfang’s benefit, in order to keep the Horde united by allowing them to fight as they wished while she directed things more specifically behind the scenes. It was never the only way.
She hadn’t even tried yet. Again, she only makes the consideration at the end of her dialog, right before Delaryn interrupts her. She probably hadn’t even considered how this current situation in Darkshore could be taken advantage of, she may have thought that she’d have to recreate the entire scenario on a different front, who knows.
Not to mention, the entire thing from Saurfang coming back to Delaryn engaging her is like, one, maybe two minutes? The fact that she even manages to take stock of everything I noted before in that time is impressive, if she was really raging so badly she’d have probably been busy arguing with/killing Saurfang in that time, but instead she immediately sets that aside to focus.
And you say Delaryn pushed her over the edge, but really their conversation just helped Sylvanas hit on a good idea. Burning Teldrassil evoked exactly the reaction from the Alliance that she had previously wanted, and she immediately knew what their target would be. Sure it didn’t split the Alliance at that exact time, but in the first version of events the idea was that it would take years.
Saurfang’s ideas of honor are nonsensical, nobody could understand them or predict that he’s spare Malfurion in that situation, especially given everything that he had just done as part of the war effort.
Not sure how not reading the vagaries in the same way as you and thinking that she has a hidden objective (Which was directly foreshadowed multiple times in the story and arguably outright stated back in BtS and maybe even here) somehow equals me actually seeing the same things you are.
I don’t know, that sounds like an argument from popularity to me.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
But it is? Tyrande and Genn clearly disagree with Anduin’s strategic decision making, both of them almost certainty aren’t aligned with his ideals of peace towards the Horde, and both of them have united the bulk of their forces to engage on their own front, not coordinating with Stormwind. Yes some Night Elves and Worgen are aiding the Alliance, but their contributions outside of Darkshore aren’t hugely substantial.
But the Darkshore warfront is still ongoing. And frankly, it would be better to push the Horde out of Northern EK entirely rather than devote resources towards retaking one zone close to the Horde’s main powerbase. I know you’ll come back with stuff like “Well Malfurion sometimes regrows trees at the end of the battle so Darkshore is an Alliance win” and all that, but the fact is it isn’t over yet, and even if it was, it’s not a massive victory.
Which is why orchestrated a massive misinformation campaign and enlisted all those Rogues and invaded with an overwhelming numbers advantage and praised an assassin that tried to lure him into a trap, yeah totally. I’m sure it was totally reasonable that he thought Malfurion was having an honorable duel with Sylvanas despite just earlier being told that he didn’t care in the slightest for dueling.
Saurfang was downright OOC in that situation when considering everything he had just been doing.
But she predicted that they would do that. It was even part of the original idea, Anduin desperately lashing out to try and end the war immediately. And they still were nearly destroyed. And their unity isn’t what it was before, just as she says at the end.
The main things undermining her plans isn’t her lack of ability to read people, it’s insane out-of-nowhere savior moments for the Alliance that nobody could possibly foresee. And in the next patch she’s still going to destroy a huge chunk of the Alliance fleet by leading them into a trap. I’m not even saying she’s good at understanding people, I’m just saying that’s not really the cause of the setbacks with the Alliance.
But throughout the story he also hates the idea of Horde lives being spent in the meat grinder of war. So why should he be happy about letting go of someone that could kill countless Horde soldiers, even stymie an entire battlefront by himself? Again, his ideals make no sense.
There’s only so much they can set something up and not pay it off. Ignoring Tyrande and the Night Elves now would be like doing nothing with the Blood Elves in BC, or cutting Jaina or Sylvanas out of Wrath entirely, or, well, not even having them show up in SoO.
I’d rather have Tyrande tell Anduin he’s wrong, actually. Or even Anduin come to Tyrande’s side. Hell, at least if Anduin moralized at her Tyrande would still be doing something that made sense for her in a story she should be heavily involved in. They can’t just cut her out of Azshara only to have her do nothing.
Also Anduin getting all preachy at her doesn’t carry much weight when most players seem to be in the mindset that she could do literally anything to the Horde and have it be justified.
I mean, I’d say that said confirmation is in fact the existence of status quo information and the assumption of things to the contrary of said information is headcanon. It’s not reasonable to need constant updates on something in order to say it’s like how it was last presented, the universe is just too large for that.
I think that wasn’t much of a major position. People mostly have just wanted him to do things and firmly be on the side of his people.
I mean, I could also say that people want Sylvanas dead, so should Blizzard do the opposite because of that? I don’t think so, contrarianism isn’t exactly a viable literary style.
Well they seem to only really know how to copy Horde drama, given all the High King stuff. I’m also not sure they can actually write distinctiveness and independence without friction, they’ve never really been able to do it for the Horde either.
Hell, what would that even look like? Even just making the Alliance races “more different”, how does that help them with always being reactionary, absurdly good, and seemingly always on the same page with each other? They could just give some races a facelift - But in the case of the Night Elves, it seems like you’re arguing against said facelift actually addressing any of those issues, or any of the things people have wanted changed about their story practically since the start of the game.
I think you’re too worried about that. Despite what they say, I doubt Blizzard can ever give up the war. Worst case is probably a Jaina-boss scenario where you fight her as the Horde and she just escapes.
And even if she did get the full bat? That would mostly be to Blizzard’s detriment. Like I said, a lot of people are behind Tyrande doing anything. Any lecturing from Anduin would probably just get people to hate him, not her.
It kind of depends on where he’d go, but really I don’t think one patch of helping the Night Elves and maybe some text indicating he did some more would be much of a reprisal.
Also I’m not sure the whole Night Warrior thing would go for the atonement angle.
Yeah, I’m sure all the people against faction homogeneity would like that. But more importantly, I’m not sure how that could even happen in the current setup, both in terms of the game and story.
I’d really rather the factions just dissolved and each group did their own things, working with, competing against, or being antagonistic towards each other on a case by case basis. Blizzard is probably too incompetent to write that, but I’d still trust it more than an “everyone joins together” thing.
I’m kinda bummed over decisions Blizzard writers made. In fact, I’m only getting more bummed at the thought that we’re not all here because we’re “sad for lore”.
Well for the assassins bit that’s not something necessarily he does himself, concretely, for him it’s something he planned in the abstract so it’s more easily rationalized. Where as when he interferes with Sylvanas and Malfurions duel it is concrete, so the feelings it invokes are immediate for him. “I just interfered in an honorable duel, from behind, when I should not have.” This isn’t just marching through ranks of soldiers, where everything is hectic and allowed, it is a one on one between two leaders in which he throws his axe into the backs of one of them by surprise. So, say what you will about whether it’s insane or not, it’s obviously some type of part of old Orcish honor which Sylvanas misjudged.
Overall I agree with Malfurion though that the entire war lacks honor, and I think the story has been Saurfang coming to terms with that too. That Sylvanas lied to him. That she lied him into a war that was not, in fact, Good for the Horde.
The goals weren’t contradictory. Anduin said they would go after Sylvanas after the Zandalari fleet was no longer going to support her.
Anduin thought this meant by getting the Zandalari to agree to be neutral (without telling anyone that’s what he thought).
And Wyrmbane did this by blowing up half the Zandalari fleet and making them no longer a naval force that would be a threat any more.
Either way, their goal was the same, and achieved, even if the means to the ends were different in their minds.
Which was my point in that character motivations are bent and distorted by what Blizzard wants to prolong and get to.
I keep acting like the Glineas were the ironclad point of anything because neither Saurfang or Sylvanas ever come up with any other way that the Alliance would split, as the burning of Teldrassil sure didn’t break the Alliance’s hope or spread festering dispair like Sylvanas rambled about.
My analysis is there for anyone to read. You can continue to insist what’s there isn’t there without actually analyzing yourself for why, but that won’t actually change my posts above no matter how many times you want to claim it’s not much.
We have very different interpretations of Sylvanas. Edge of Night definitely makes Sylvanas into a person who would fly off the handle and senselessly destroy anything she discarded.
Sylvanas definitely could have thought she was lying, but if she did she ended up ironically telling the truth with that line.
What? She wasn’t arguing with/killing Saurfang because her face was so flushed (can an undead’s face go flush?) full of rage that she didn’t want Saurfang or Nathanos to look at her.
Night Elves even went to Lordaeron. But yes, you are right, she was right in knowing the Alliance would come for Lordaeron. Because she had told Saurfang that was what was going to happen if the Horde tried to win dishonorably.
Which Sylvanas should have known his ideas of honor were abitrary before even asking him to plan the attack, or at the very least realized it in the middle of their planning when he sent our “honorable” rogues to sneak attack the Night Elves. Telling him to win honorably without being able to predict what he thought was honorable would be extremely foolish.
You don’t have to see the same things as I do. That’s how vagueness works. You do, however, have to admit that the whole passage was filled with vagueness.
Sure is. Oh, wait. Nope. Because argument from popularity is the assertion that because my point was popular it must be true. I didn’t say it must be true. Rather that what you think isn’t necessarily true, either. And you being one person who disagrees with me not really mattering or diminishing that other people might agree with me.
To be fair, I don’t think Worgen will get Night Warrior character customization. But if they do, that would be pretty sweet.
Both Shandris and Genn will agree with working with the Horde coming up in Nazjatar. And Genn himself was even personally at the Battle of Dazar’alor.
Nah, I’ll come back with something like:
Malfurion regrowing trees is just a rebuttable against the idea that Horde damage to Darkshore couldn’t be undone or would limit Night Elf resources.
As addressed above, completely arbitrary idea of what honor is, yep. Saurfang only cared that he himself and his solders were being honorable (whatever that means at any given moment), not that his enemies also had to adhere to his sense of honor.
I don’t disagree with you there, as, once again, Blizzard distorts and bends character motivation to be whatever they need it to be to get to the story they want to get to.
And destroy a huge chunk of the Horde’s remaining fleet as well.
But yes, Sylvanas really needs to stop betting against miracles, because it’s consistently not been paying off for her.
Spent in a meat grinder of a war that no one could win. What Saurfang wanted was a war that would bring prosperity to the Horde. Or glorious death in defeat. Lok-tar ogar. A meat grinder war where honor was stripped away would not bring glory.
Zekhan: Yes, of course, but... If I do fall, may it be with honor in glorious combat.
Varok Saurfang: There will be no glory today.
Varok Saurfang: Only pain.
If Malfurion lived and brought the fight back to Teldrassil, the Horde could have tried it’s best to fight him off, and at the very least could have kept their honor if they were defeated.
They barely showed up to SoO. The Night Elf forces didn’t even go into Orgrimmar itself. They just held the door open for everyone else.
I don’t have the kind of faith in Blizzard to think they wouldn’t do just that.
Given how desperate Horde players are to find any fault in the Alliance to justify fighting against them, I could actually these types of Horde players actually jumping onto the Anduin band wagon so that they could boo and hiss at Tyrande since they’ve lost Jaina and Genn as their warmonger motivation.
It’s entirely reasonable to need constant updates on something in order to say it’s like how it was last presented, because it is unreasonable to say something is still like how it was last presented without confirmation.
You are right in that assuming what hasn’t been confirmed (a change from what was last presented) would be headcanon. Because assuming canon is what headcanon is. And I am right in that assuming what hasn’t been confirmed (that nothing has changed from what was last presented) is also headcanon.
I don’t assume canon. I speculate and propose what I see is likely. But I don’t declare my views to be canon like you have. That’s what I don’t like about your status quo stance.
People are rolling their eyes and predicting that they’ll make Sylvanas Kerrigan 2.0 exactly to be contrarian because people want her to be Garrosh 2.0 instead, you know.
I don’t think they’ll ever get out of the Alliance being reactionary, no.
But they can make the races more distinctive and independent exactly the way they did with the Darkshore Warfront and giving the Night Elves their fangs back: By focusing on their aesthetics and spending time making them look impressive and, you know, not boring.
The entire Horde BfA storyline has been to Blizzard’s detriment, and that hasn’t stopped them. And Blizzard clearly hasn’t learned their lessons from Cataclysm, MoP, and A Little Patience, so I don’t put faith in them not repeating their same mistakes again.
One patch is already way more than what I would expect Blizzard to go with.
And Tyrande as the Night Warrior forgave Maiev, who also tried to kill Malfurion and murdered a lot of Tyrande’s subjects, so the Night Warrior isn’t blind to atonement.
People against faction homogeneity at least have Classic to go back to if that’s what they want to focus on.
As for how it would work, it could be like the Pandaren, but opposite. Horde and Alliance until level 120+, and then you unlock being able to play with the opposite faction.
The point is, there has been nothing to suggest the “political crisis” levels of “division” in the Alliance as was planned by the Horde. For all intents and purposes, the faction is still united. Especially in comparison to the Horde, whose whole war campaign quest chain is rapidly becoming about disobeying and inciting rebellion against your leader.
What if the faction subplot of the next expansion is the Night Elves and Worgen launching attacks against a Horde led by someone like Thrall or Baine, while Anduin tries to stop them?
That would be kind of cool, and finally a reversal of the faction dynamic we’ve had since Cataclysm.
You’re probably right. But, man, that would make almost no story sense. Why would you rebuild right next to the people who are more than likely going to sucker punch you again?
I just want the faction war to end for good because they never gonna actually make it something that satisfies most people. It should have remained a side plot for open world PVP and battlegrounds, not an all consuming story line.
Most people are satisfied. They’re only interested in either the PVP or the PVE awards and really couldn’t care less about the setup that leads to them.
I was under the impression Wyrmest Accord and Moonguard were the largest RP servers. Either way, from your perspective the rpers there are fine with the direction of the story?