Even when Tyrande loses her status as Avatar of the Night Warrior in the story, there’s no reason why Night Elves character customization can’t continue to select black eyes.
That sounds like no downsides, which would conflict with your premise.
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Did it not? Even if it was a horrible cutscene, that kind of stuff should be mandatory for these kinds of narratives. Yet another ball dropped.
As for the victory being in 8.1 or 8.3, I think it really boils down to we have no stinking idea when anything happened this xpac. This timeline is whack.
Yet he still had Shandris and Night Elves present, just not the Army of the Black Moon.
And those don’t say “Won” or “lost”, they say, “Winning”, and “losing”. That means the battle has not ended, just that they’re making good progress.
Then this happens, implying the Alliance was dangerously low on available troops. That implies they either have not won those contested areas, or are so spent from winning them that they have no hope of closing the war on their own.
Because Teldrassil had not burned and Tyrande was not the Mortal Avatar of Elune’s Wrath. The stakes are much higher this time around. And despite his newfound rage, Malfurion is still the leader of the neutral Cenarian Circle and would not kick Hamuul and the Horde druids from Hyjal.
And no, the Horde is not in a position to take any hits after a second civil war and power struggle. And the Horde has taken hits, just generally not from the Alliance. It’s generally self-inflicted, but we take them nonetheless. Now should the Alliance have been allowed to give the Horde some bigger hits? Absolutely, it would have benefited both narratives, but here we are and the war is now over.
A more bearable alternative would be to have the Kal’dorei make their forceful push, successfully securing Ashenvale from the weary Horde stationed there. The Horde scrambles as they are routed again and again, but finally rally at the borders of the Barrens and Azshara, stopping the Army of the Black Moon and leading to a stalemate. Without Alliance support, it is clear that the Kal’dorei will not make it much further. Most of the Alliance leadership deny the help, citing the armistice and a desire for peace. The Horde meanwhile are far too taxed from the Fourth War to manage a counter-push and settle for fortifying the line, the new council deciding that losing Ashenvale was probably for the best.
You then have a scenario where both sides have a reason to zealously guard their borders from the other, giving opportunity for small skirmishes and small stories about how Tyrande or Thrall feel about the conflict as well as give rise to new minor characters for both sides.
Banning all Horde races from NE territory (all the Horde druids) and having the forest’s borders lined by Horde corpses on pikes would be a pretty cool thing to see.
Having all Horde ejected from Alliance organizations and territory would be a big help in remedying this situation.
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Only Tyrande is the avatar of the Night Warrior. Only she received the powers. Those are the powers that have a downside.
All the black eyes customization options shows is that some Night Elves personally witnessed the ritual, and/or fought under the Black Moon in Ashenvale. But the customization option doesn’t confer any actual powers in and of itself.
bro the horde doesnt even like the war
No more than any other customization, true.
Still, as I said, I don’t think the vilifying of the Night Warrior matches the intention of the customization, though.
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Anduin also never sent troops to Darkshore, so his farmers and the fleets lost to Nazjatar wouldn’t actually have had any impact on the Night Elves’ efforts in Kalimdor.
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they ever explained while the Alliance put their entire army on an entire fleet to chase one ship?
If its a chase why burden yourself by carrying so many troops?
I don’t see it as villainizing, as the idea is not that the Night Warrior is evil. It’s that it’s power a mortal was not meant to wield for any extended period of time. It’s a power that always ultimately destroys its wielder.
It’s something only to be called upon in a moment of desperation by people who feel their situation is so desperate, that they’re willing to risk their own destruction to see its power invoked. It is dangerous, and not just to the Night Warrior’s enemies.
News flash. I’m gonna put it in bold for ya.
The Horde player already feels bad.
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Shandris, and presumably her troops, also fought in Darkshore, but were present in Anduin’s forces and were committed to his cause.
If the Horde had already been routed from Darkshore/Ashenvale, I find it hard to believe that Tyrande would not have descended on Orgrimmar, especially given her refusal to accept the armistice and the War’s conclusion. I find it far more likely she was still tied up in either territories.
Anduin’s comment still holds, even without the Army of the Black Moon.
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why would she want to work with saurfang He holds just as much blame for the burning as sylvanas
Not in the same way. My bad feels are a direct consequence of what the Horde and its playerbase participated in.
Your bad feels are essentially “Yo why are my leaders so dumb?” which trust me both factions share in equal measure.
So first you said Horde players never can be made to feel bad in any way, and now you’re saying it doesn’t count if it’s not exactly the same.
That’s called moving the goalposts.
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Version 2.0. Trying to take in comments and suggestions regarding my first draft…
Have Tyrande become less and less herself. Most avatars of the Night Warrior would have died by now, as this is a power no mortal is supposed to possess for this long, but Tyrande endures. The Night Warrior persona is slowly taking increasingly greater control over her. It’s granting her even more powers, but at some point, it stops being in her control as a means to dispense justice and takes over with its goal of lashing out in pain and vengeance. At some point, Shandris or Malfurion try to speak to her, only for her to reply something along the lines of, “I am not Tyrande. I am not Elune. I am their pain. I am their suffering. I am their vengeance.”
Now under the near total control of the Night Warrior persona, Tyrande and the Army of the Dark Moon start to become an even greater force. Using Darkshore as their base, they spread out from there. They move into Ashenvale, Felwood, Moonglade, Stonetalon, and Winterspring, but they don’t just restrict attacks to military settlements. They also attack civilians, Horde Druids. Really play up any friendly/neutral Druids, Tauren, Vulpera, or Blood Elven deaths.
Meanwhile, the Horde council doesn’t want a full blown war, but they can’t just sit by and do nothing while Tyrande’s forces ravage their villages and kill indiscriminately. They send the hero to help evacuate people and bolster local defenses, but the Army of the Black Moon keeps advancing.
So the Horde leaders go to Anduin, Genn, Malfurion, Shandris, and other Alliance leaders for a solution. Genn doesn’t want to intervene, arguing that the Horde deserves this fate. The others, being the much more forgiving people they are, don’t wish to see every Horde man woman and child wiped out either. Shandris and Malfurion are primarily concerned with getting the real Tyrande back. They also explain how having the Night Warrior in mortal form means that only half of Elune is currently locked into a mortal entity- which means the rest of Elune is only at half power.
The best course of action is determined to be separating Tyrande from the Night Warrior. Tyrande gets to be herself again. Elune is made whole. The slaughter of civilians ceases.
So begins some quests to gather mcguffins, interspersed with some skirmishes with agents of the Army of the Black Moon. Under the leadership of Shandris and Malfurion and alongside the Night Elf forces who are not part of the Army of the Black Moon, they’ll face the Night Warrior and her army.
It all ends with a big climactic battle in which Aduin is fatally injured, and after some big emotional beat or after she attains her “FINAL FORM” and we defeat her, Tyrande is able to break free of the Night Warrior’s influence for long enough to see what she’s done, and how the desire for vengeance at any cost has only resulted in more death and is on the verge of plunging the whole world back into war again.
Tyrande manages to excise the Night Warrior from herself and Elune is restored to her fullness. Anduin dies, and in Before the Storm he actually named Genn his successor. So Anduin gets to die a tragic death as a saint, and the new King of Stormwind is a guy who really doesn’t trust the Horde. Since Genn’s also not a blood heir, and the King of Gilneas, you could totally start another storyline inside the Alliance, where the people of Stormwind -especially the nobility- refuse to accept him, and he sees challenges to his throne and authority.
Meanwhile, the territory gained in the fighting remains under Night Elf control, with only the southern parts of these territories abutting Horde lands being contested. Genn holds firm on this, as he was always sympathetic, and doesn’t want to give the Horde anything.
And thus, we return to a cold war state.
No the Horde player can never be made to feel bad in any way as a direct result of Alliance action against them…
Similar to how the Horde playerbase got to invade 3 zones and burn one of them for fun at my expense I will never get that opportunity because of the reason I described above.
No, its implied context.
Yeah just give the alliance the horde story, that’ll fix all our problems totally Just what we need right, more stories about the victims becoming the villains all while ignoring all the evil the horde has done, what about the horde owns up to its mistakes and tyrande forgives the horde because they actually do something good for the alliance for once in there miserable lives, and stop being the selfish faction
That’s every Warcraft story. Every antagonist is, at some point, a decent person who got put into a terrible situation where they either got seduced by evil, tortured by evil, or enslaved/possessed by evil. And most of the time, the evil is less petty and sadistic, and more like someone who saw a flaw in the cosmology and decided the best way to fix it was by destroying everything and killing everyone.
Even then, I’m not even suggesting that the Night Warrior is evil. The Night Warrior is the yin of Elune, and without her yang, and when crammed into the body of a mortal, especially one in the throes of grief and trauma, god-like powers can be very bad thing.
It’s not even an original story conceit. I’m basically ripping off popular retellings of the Phoenix Saga. And Akira.
very much untrue, sure some of the villians have reasons like this, but yeah you know why your idea is really bad? Nothing to do with tyrande being evil, but asking for mop 3 right after we had mop 2 lol, THIS TIME ITS DIFFERENT CAUSE THE ALLIANCE ARE THE BAD GUYS
yeah right
maybe you should play alliance side a bit more before you suggest stuff for us, you dont see me saying the horde coucil should be killed off already so gallywix should rise as the new warchief and blow up gnomes now do you