They had enough mages capable of opening portals to evacuate a sizeable portion of the population of Teldrassil in a very short time. The exact same number of mages could have been used to open portals for the transport of Azerite, and the portals wouldn’t have had to stay open for as long at a time.
Anyway, even if you think portals aren’t an optimal solution, they’re definitely a viable backup in the event that Darnassus is, y’know, not an option for naval transport anymore. So wiping Darnassus off the map isn’t going to stop the Alliance from sending Azerite to Eastern Kingdoms.
We’ll never know, since the game didn’t go that route. But I’ve just remembered that Jaina Proudmoore alone can mass-teleport armies, so I wanted to mention that. And Jaina would absolutely volunteer to keep Azerite out of the hands of the Horde.
Have we ever seen Azerite transported via portal? It’s basically titan blood, crystallized Arcane magic. I wouldn’t be surprised if it reacted poorly to arcane translocation, but if so, they haven’t actually shown us this.
Aside from that, I believe Dayon is correct- the personal and resource costs of sustaining portal networks is prohibitive; the stable portals we see in-game as a travel convenience don’t exist in-setting., and Elegy mentions mages reaching the end of their endurance in the space of an hour or two.
I’d say they have. It’s just another thing that BfA’s narrative has dropped the ball on.
The biggest issue with Azerite is the classic Show Vs. Tell.
We’re told Azerite will “change everything”. We’re told how incredibly powerful it is. We’re told that weaponry made using it would be unparalleled.
But we aren’t really shown that. Azerite weapons aren’t game changing. They’re about as effective as what we’ve been using. Hell, the first time the Horde used their fancy Azerite Warmachine, it was quickly destroyed and was outshined by the Blight.
Azerite is supposed to be extraordinary, but is hardly shown as such. And now, with the latest patch, it almost feels irrelevant. The only time I can think of where Azerite’s destructive power was showcased was when Ashvane’s pirates tore through that one place. And that’s it.
Yeah, it does kind of butt into player power in a few less than great ways. Above all else the players are supposed to be facing challenges they can overcome, so it wouldn’t have felt very good if the Alliance couldn’t beat that thing.
I was personally convinced of its importance in Before the Storm, though. The only good chapters in that book were with the Goblin and Gnome duo running experiments.
We take portals all the time wearing the Heart of Azeroth itself around our necks.
Yes, and they evacuated a lot of people during that time. So opening a portal for an hour or two a day should be enough to send a day’s worth of Azerite through.
I don’t see any evidence that it couldn’t. It all comes down to whether you think a good portion of the population of Teldrassil is more or less than a day’s worth of Azerite mining.
Also, they didn’t have every single mage in the Alliance working on the evacuation portals, just those who could be rounded up at short notice.
Since we’re getting into quantities we can’t possibly know the full measure of (number of miners, number of operations, number of mages on duty, etc) we can’t possibly get further into this point without speculation.
The conclusion that I"m making, and that I think Kirango is, too, that based on what information we have about the nature of spellmagic, it’s more prohibitive than seafaring transport because of a few reasons:
Sailors and laborers are more common than mages
Sailors and laborers are probably far cheaper than mages to employ
Mages have a limited endurance
A mage’s skillset is far better utilized elsewhere
It’s fine that they beat the tank. It’s not fine how they beat the tank. There was no struggle. No strategy. No counter-weapon. They just hit it until it exploded.
Compare the Tank with the other super weapon that was used; the Blight. Which, when deployed, nearly routed the Alliance’s army and required a deus ex Jaina to overcome.
Or compare it to when the Horde tried to use a chokepoint to herd the Alliance into a meat grinder. The Alliance responded by using strategy to teleport friggen mechs in.
But no. Just stab the GAME CHANGING TANK THAT RUNS ON MAGICAL PLANET BLOOD until it explodes. I’m so impressed.
And that’s fine too. I haven’t read BtS, so I haven’t seen the exact context. But it leads to another problem. I shouldn’t have to resort to a novel in order for the game’s narrative to make sense. I’ve always been against Blizz using novels in that way.
Even if I accept this for purposes of the argument–as you say, we’re getting into unknown quantities, so it would come down to what the writers wanted to do–that doesn’t mean that taking out Darnassus leaves the Alliance with no way to ship Azerite. Which was Sylvanas’s premise for attacking it.
Again, even if I accept that for purposes of the discussion, it is not a big enough gain, in my opinion, to justify starting the war, let alone the burning of Teldrassil.
Minor semantic quibble, but that’s more of a Jaina Ex Machina. A Deus Ex Jaina would be if, say, half-blue-dragon/half-humans turned out to be natural conduits for PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER.
It would have been enough to justify holding it, however, as having that many hostages gives you a lot of leverage- see my post above the one-line-post arguments about azerite for more on that.
And while Feralas does have shipping capabilities, it is not a civilian port and may well lack the infrastructure to move large amounts of material on-and-off ship- most Kaldorei war assets are self-propelled, and do not require much in the way of support staff, whereas mass unstable mineral shipping would likely require quite a bit.
If you’re inviting me to rewrite the start of the war, I’d have done it differently from the get-go. It wouldn’t have started with the Horde invading Ashenvale and destroying Teldrassil at all.
I would have started with rival Alliance and Horde mining operations, then sabotage, raids, and skirmishes that kept escalating. A real arms race.
Mmmmmmmaybe, but I still find it flimsy. As I said above, I don’t consider depriving the Alliance of one way to ship Azerite to be enough reason to provoke them into war, and I don’t think they did a good job of presenting the situation as one that wouldn’t lead to that.