Both WoT and BFL the Horde was the one taking action and having Agency.
Both those times the Alliance was there in shock and awe at how evil/awesome the Horde is.
For someone who calls out other’s head-canon you seem to use your own often.
Keeping in tune with my Teldrasil simile: I don’t see how the Alliance came out bad in the Teldrasil scenario considering the Battle for Lordaeron and what happened to the Horde’s super awesome army.
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Saurfang literally says “this was your plan all along wans’t it?!”
Come on dude…
Yeah the Horde won despite the defense and almost wiped out a race as recompense. GG I guess.
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Besides Droite every Horde player has been nothing but a troll lol.
It is a nice sentiment I accept but not all that realistic with how toxic the community has become.
It is human nature to justify your position.
These threads devolve into cesspools of negativity solely because one side is constantly using false equivalency and falsehood to pretend they are equally mistreated and hence the other side should be quiet because they already got what are asking for.
Lordaeron was a trap that the Alliance slipped the noose of, thanks to Jaina rolling in on the U.S.S. Nobody-tell-her-ships-like-that-can’t-fly.
Because my portrait is blue, and we have a binary attitude on these things, I’ll elaborate a bit. What she did is a combination of the burning of Moscow following the battle of Borodino, and Garrosh luring as many enemies into Theramore as possible before dropping the bomb. In the callous calculus of such things, it was absolutely brilliant.
Had she been successful, she might have decapitated much of the Alliance right there, and left the remainder rudderless and, possibly even stranded in very taxing natural territory. But for Jaina, Anduin walked the Alliance army right into a deathtrap.
Is it a Horde or Alliance win? Well, this isn’t a binary situation is the problem, so framing it as such is doomed from the outset. Consider the aforementioned burning of Moscow- it worked- Napoleon was forced to retreat through the storied Russian winter, forever ending his conquest there. However, 3/4ths of the city was destroyed utterly, including museums and libraries. The city was a long time in recovering, and the damage was so extensive they re-planned the whole thing from the ground up.
Had you been a resident of Moscow in 1812, would you mark that in the “W” column? It probably wouldn’t have felt like one.
Lordaeron is very similar in that regard. The Alliance was forced back, driven out of the area. There’s not a warfront or continued major activity there, the Alliance doesn’t hold Tirisfal or Silverpine the way the Horde holds land in former Night Elf territory.
Comparatively, Lordaeron played out much better for the Horde than Teldrasil played out for the Alliance. That’s fine, I don’t demand absolute parity- this is just part of the story. Sylvanas was, again, utterly brilliant in many ways in both cases (save perhaps the actual burning itself with all the questions involved there). She took Northwestern Kalimdor (largely). When the Alliance came for her, as she knew they would, she walked them right into a disastrous situation which was salvaged not by the ability of skill of the Alliance, but Jaina’s unexpected entrance.
In both cases, Sylvanas out generaled her opposition. She all but secured a large part of Kalimdor, and denied the Alliance Lordaeron. The Alliance lost on the ground in Kalimdor, then had massive casualties in the panicked evacuation of Teldrassil. The Horde had a more structured evacuation, and while took not insignificant casualties in both conflicts, inflicted a massive amount on the Alliance at Lordaeron.
So, in the end, you can’t call Lordaeron a Horde win. It isn’t. They didn’t gain anything, they only lost a city. But the Alliance attack was a failure that did not meet its own objectives and nearly met with complete disaster.
It is one of those things that doesn’t go in either category. It just is the series of events that it is, and the consequences that flow from those events.
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I respectfully disagre. Running around Dire Maul, I see a lot of potential for a capital city with repairs made to the crumbling/ruined portions and marrying classic Highborne architecture with the more modern designs the night elves used for Darnassus in rebuilding it. Sure, it’s a husk of what it could be now, but that didn’t stop Light’s Hope from building up into something impressive.
Light’s Hope still looks like a shed on the world map. Everything nice you see about Dire Maul is not on the world map the way Teldrassil was.
YES! The Horde is literally just whatever b-listers are still alive and the newcomers right now, aside from Thrall and Sylvanas.
Garrosh? Extra?!
Dude, the guy single-handedly carried the Horde plot for 3 expansions, how is he extra?
Yeah, a character that is seen with nothing but utter contempt by the vast majority Horde playerbase.
You aren’t looking hard enough. There’s literally already more major characters from the allied races than there are characters remaining on the base Horde.
Still a decent Alliance win overall, though, it vastly weakened the Horde overall by diminishing its’ main fighting force.(Orcs)
Yeah, but it’s still being written for the gameplay.
It won’t wash our incredibly bloodied hands, but it will make me feel a whole lot better.
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Garrosh was new, wasn’t he? Is being new what makes you a b-lister? I don’t think it does. And extra because you still have Thrall now that he’s back, so you’re not really short an Orc leader. Even have Saurfang now as an additional extra Orc on top of that (I truly hope Saurfang stays alive).
But if being new doesn’t make you a b-lister, then I’m not seeing a shortage of Horde characters. Thrall, Saurfang, Vol’jin, Rokhan, Baine (even if Horde players don’t like him, he’s still a Horde character), Lor’themar, Liadrin. And then you do have plenty of what I would consider b-listers as well. Ji, Rommath, Eitrigg, Rexxar, etc.
Could you list out what groups of the Horde you think are short of characters besides maybe the Forsaken? Who frankly I think need to take a backseat for a while after BfA.
Goblins, I think. That’s why they’ve reestablished Gazlow as Horde instead of him being neutral any more, though.
Would make me feel better, too.
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I really don’t get why Horde players aren’t agreeing that Alliance just needs a win. No caveats, no tricks. Just a win. It doesn’t have to be as humiliating or debasing as what Alliance has gone through, it just needs to be a win.
Don’t Horde players just get tired of winning all the time? Do any Horde players honestly feel like the Alliance is a threat to them? The only time I felt this way was during the fighting in Gilneas. I actually felt like the Alliance were competent adversaries and the mission into the countryside felt really dangerous with the packs of elite Worgen running around.
Meanwhile in the Horde campaign you’re mowing down scores of Alliance with ease. Take the lead-up to Dazar’alor for instance. For Alliance it feels like an act of utter desperation. Everything is hinging on this battle, and Alliance have to sacrifice a lot just to get it to work. Horde easily brush away the pathetic Alliance gnats with a giant golem of death, and when they’re tricked in the end and you have to rush back to the raid, you don’t really feel like you lost much against Alliance after you’ve just slaughtered them en masse.
For the supposedly “winning without a hitch” faction, things seem a lot more dire than they do for Horde. Aside from Sylvanas kvetching that they’re on the back foot, you’re never really made to feel this in game.
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Sylvanas won the Battle for Lordaeron by surviving and losing the city on her terms. The Alliance made no gains, fulfilled no objectives, and only lost manpower and resources by fighting that battle. Meanwhile the Horde successfully evacuated it’s people to safety and left the Alliance unable to even use the city. Worse, the Alliance was now forced to focus its efforts on maintaining it’s push into the Northern Eastern Kingdoms, as opposed to trying to reclaim nelf territory in Kalimdor.
Sylvanas sacrificed a city she knew since the Cata era that she’d never be able to hold onto anyways, and she made the Alliance bleed for it.
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but the Vulpera have more of a reason to ‘roll’ Red team so to speak.
I just wanted to correct something right here. The Vulpera make a statement"The dunes have everything we need" after the Horde helps them overthrow the faithless. In Nazatar Neri says that Nazjatar isn’t their natural home. The faithness were a smaller threat. However the naga threat threats to harm everyone including the Vulpera. When you throw Hobart into the mix and how much they help the horde in Nazjatar, I’d say they are playing probably an even more important role and have even more reason to join the horde.
Not really other than the initial success against NE (which they only won because it was entire horde vs NE) the horde hasn’t really won anything. The entire war campaign is countered by the allaince. Nothing has gone right since, been one loss after another.
In the grand scheme of thing the horde always looses to the Alliance. We know this will happen again, but I do wonder what will happen afterwards. Surely it won’t be a slap on the wrist again.
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He was introduced all the way back in BC and carried Catacylsm’s Horde narrative, then drove the entire plot in MoP, and then still managed to create another plot with WoD right before he died, and even after he was dead it was because of him that Legion even happened because of the AU Gul’dan he had created.
Garrosh is easily the most influential character in WoW’s chronology.
Is he, though? Thrall has not been firmly on the Horde since he first dipped in Cataclysm.
“We’ve been at these crossroads again and again, Amadis.”
“It always falls apart.”
“What’s different this time?”
The only A-listers on that list are Thrall and Vol’jin, Lor’themar’s really close but hasn’t gotten his “big moment” yet so he remains B+ at best.
With pleasure.
Orcs-Pretty much just Saurfang and Eitrigg, Thrall is still on the fence, and even then is that really it? Orcs are the face of the faction, they need more than 2 b-listers(one that’s incredibly far behind in development) and a Thrall on the fence. And don’t even get me started on Rexxar and Garona, both whom are just randomly re-inserted into the Horde narrative with very little explanation.
Trolls-Vol’jin is still very much dead(hoprfully the writers remember that arc they started with his ghost, cuz there’s absolutely nothing on it in 8.2) and Rokhan, like Eitrigg, is so far behind in terms of development. It took for the trolls to lose their main rep for years, for the writers to finally pick up a character that fans have been clamoring to be used for years. His recent lore relevance is only 6 expansions late.
Tauren-Nobody likes Baine and Hamuul never seems to be worthy enough to be used in the Horde narrative, because god forbid we have a Horde druid around to protect life rather than destroy it.
Forsaken-The only race that I honestly think is fine, we don’t need much more than Nathanos and Lilian imo.(after Sylvanas inevitably gets booted) Forsaken don’t need that many reps cuz they have relatively little diversity in ideologies.
Goblins- Gallywix; a fat, greedy, pig whose people absolutely despise him and Gazlowe, a character so on-again/off-again with the Horde, that he makes Jaina’s boyfriend/emotional rotation look like merely different shades of black. Seriously, Gazlowe should just join the Horde already.
Blood Elves- Another race that’s admittedly well represented in all aspects of their civilization. Halduron=Rangers/Fairstriders
Liadrin=Blood Knights/Spellbreakers
Rommath=Magisters
Aethas=Sunreavers
Lor’themar=Literally everything else
My point is, the Hordes’ been straying a bit from what it’s supposed to be. The 3 Core races need a bit of love: Orcs, Tauren, and Trolls. That’s not to say the Elves and Forsaken need to be pushed back into the side and we need to go back to Orc-based warchiefdoms, but we DO need to bring back Orcs as the race that binds the faction together.
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Doesn’t the Horde achieve all their war campaign objectives but later on in the Alliance war campaign we just kind of undo those progress so really its just a stalemate?
That’s what I mean’t by setbacks.
The biggest Horde defeat was the ships blowing up which could have been achieved at any point. This win was negated by the fact that once again Alliance had this somber quest that we had to send Humans, NE and Worgen to their deaths just so… we could raid zandalar to kill the troll king?
It is all very hollow.
We never had a Alliance event where we show up, defeat the horde and go home. There is always some sort of terrible thing that has to happen first.
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Pretty sure the Kelpin say something similar about the ocean.
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Dazar’alor was framed as that ‘defeat’, and the Horde is/was apparently losing on all fronts, so by Blizzard logic Horde’s about to come back swinging.
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Meh, at this point I don’t really care about the War Campaign. Its gone off the rails, and all I’m hoping for is us Horde getting out of this without losing too many of our Racial Leaders. I’m interested in my new Goblin model of 8.2.5; my Goblin heritage questline; my Goblin AR; and the stories I’m most looking forward to are the Dark Ranger Velanora one in SM and a continuation of the Vol’jin storyline (seriously, this thing is awesome).
Strangely … I just want the war to be over and done with; is that wrong? I’d rather focus on things like … is it going to be the “Return of the Black Empire” or “The Shadowlands” as the next expansion? Will the Dragon Isles teaser be meant as a full expansion, or merely a major content patch? What about Yrels Army of the Light … I’m actually REALLY interested in that conceptually (as the Light has always sort of been a monolith up until now).
Basically OP wants to destroy the horde and have the alliance take the spotlight. Sorry pal but that will never happend. The alliance playerbase are mostly casuals that spend more of their time making dumb fanarts of their OC or some sexual draw of a lore character/gay pairing.
The moment that faction get better players that actually plays the game, then maybe blizzard would start to give some attention and actual storyline
Not really, though it certainly bites to know that a lot of others probably feel the same way. Everything that’s been done only for people to want it to be shuffled off is something of a raw deal, but as a kaldorei fan I did somewhat expect this would be the outcome. The time for them to actually give some real comeuppance and show the night elves as not weak was back in 8.1, and they half-assed it at best.
When your favorite race gets put through the wringer (again) it isn’t exactly nice to see any sort of plot resolving the problems to be shuffled off or hamfisted in equal measure.
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