Frankly, this entire situation (Horde commits an atrocity because the Warchief is nuts, Alliance doesn’t get the opportunity to punch back because the Horde’s busy ripping itself a new one, and the faction story quickly dissolves into a burning landfill) is why they need to bite the bullet and end the faction war.
Look, I get it. You wanna talk about constantly getting kicked while you’re down, I play a gnome. We’re the kings of this trope bar none. Name the last time the gnomes have made a solid, undeniable win with no caveats attached. Pre-Cata when we managed to secure an airfield and the surface around Gnomeregan? Whoopdedoo.
Point BEING, every time the plot is written around the faction war, it suffers greatly. It relies on robbing every character involved of logic and reason, hands out stupid pills, and typically involves the Horde being hamfistedly turned into cackling cartoon villains less morally complex than the lovechild of Snidely Whiplash and Dick Dastardly while the Alliance take one in the teeth.
But Huxlley is right. There’s not really anywhere you can take an aggressive Alliance so long as the two-faction system exists. If the Alliance brought every big gun it has to bear against the Horde, the war would end in a fortnight and everyone with a Horde character would have to start fresh because their character was killed in sustained bombardment from the Vindicaar.
Going forward? The faction war needs to end. Permanently. It is nothing but a millstone around the plot’s neck at best. I get that it’s unsatisfying to go that way, especially when the Alliance spent so much time taking it in the teeth and unable to properly get their pound of flesh. Think of it like an extremely gross medicine. Extreme unpleasantness in the short run for long-run necessity.
Where is the faction war going to go from here? It’s already gone past nonsensical with numerous factors written completely out of the plot without so much as a passing mention. Where was the Vindicaar in the War of Thorns? Where were the Ancients when the Forsaken and Goblins caused large-scale ecological devastation in supposedly-sacred forests? Why hasn’t Sylvanas used the Bilgewater Harbor cannon in an opening salvo and invaded Stormwind? Why haven’t the night elves used Val’sharah as a staging ground and crippled the Nightborne? Why haven’t the dwarves used Dark Iron mole machines to launch a surprise raid on Silvermoon and crippled the Horde’s magical capabilities?
“That isn’t the story we want to tell” is all the proof I need when I say the faction war is a failure of a plotline, has been for over a decade, and does nothing but hurt the story and demotivate the players. Alliance players feel like a punching bag, and Horde players feel like they’ve lost everything that made the WC3/Classic/BC Horde special in favor of being written as bland, generic mustache-twirling villains whenever the writers run out of ideas and need cheap plot fodder.
The Horde’s already gotten a devastating defeat: they’re written by the current lore team. This is a defeat both factions share in.