The impact of Teldrassil

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts here suggesting that Teldrassil’s loss isn’t really a big impact for night elves, or in particular, night elf players, because NPCs lost are nameless. I thought I could explain the reasons I perceive it to be a loss, particularly because of something I feel that is often overlooked- the state of the Teldrassil NPCs.

When the writers wrote the burning, they failed to provide a count of NPCs that survived and those who were lost, as well as give us any names. The very fact that Teldrassil was used as a prop is a problem for night elf players, because all the Teldrassil NPCs are now stuck in limbo in the burning. We do know about some who died- Astarii and likely the other priests seen with her in the TotM. Unless Blizzard states otherwise, we have lost a good amount of these NPCs.

Now one can claim that Blizzard can always bring them back, saying they survived, but there is a threshold to which they can do this- 10%? Knowing that this threshold is low, Blizzard would rather avoid using most of these NPCs in the future. Practically, this amounts to us losing upto 90% of our Teldrassil NPCs- including Corithas, Laurna Morninglight, Sentinel Amara, Denalen, Tarindrella, Sister A’moora, Mathrengyl Bearwalker, and so on. This is a big impact upon our story and are significant consequences, and for people to claim they are nameless NPCs is kinda absurd because it doesn’t take into account the story consequences we now face. The NPCs in Undercity do not hold a problem because they didn’t face a genocide and were mostly evacuated.

One can argue that I do not know which NPCs are lost, so my claim is invalid, and although the above addresses that (threshold limitations), suppose Blizzard does put out a list of NPCs who survived- do you think the number would be large? Are the ones who died insignificant?
I also think that saying Teldrassil’s losses are pointless doesn’t hold up in retrospect
when in the future, Blizzard could hypothetically announce such a list. This means that night elf players have a shadow looming over their heads as Blizzard could at any point of time announce such a list.

My other argument against Teldrassil being insignifcant is that it was a blow to morale and pride, which are big losses for a playable race, although not unique to night elves (refer Sylvanas’ opinions on the Horde, MoP battles). But the weight of that loss is centralised on a single playable race unlike the losses of pride that the factions themselves face.

Tldr, Teldrassil leaves a vacuum in story for night elves because of the limits of using Teld. NPCs in the future without a list of survivors, and the loss of pride and morale is also a major loss; therefore, this event cannot be considered an insignificant loss.

Edit: I may not respond immediately to this thread but I wanted to create a discussion separate from the existing arguments and victim threads.

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The NPC reactions certainly imply it was significant, although it may be more of a morale/culture hit than a physical one. We all know that Blizzard pulls armies out of a magical hat, so population is almost irrelevant. That said, the Kaldorei were able to pull together a sizeable enough force to kick the Horde out after the fact and still make up a decent chunk of the Alliance military right now based on invasions and the like, so if you use that as a clue then either not many people died in Teldrassil or most of the people who survived became soldiers.

All in all, logic would dictate that it was a tragic loss no matter what, and the real world shows us that an event doesn’t necessarily have to have a massive cost in lives or anything to have a lasting impact. Teldrassil was a kick in their continued sense of superiority and showed that they were just as vulnerable as any other race.

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I agree with your arguments, but I also think “they’re just implied characters” or “they’re just pixels” is such a terrible argument it’s not even worth engaging. Nothing in fiction is “real,” so “they’re not real” is a stupid disqualifier for having meaning.

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A loss is a loss and War of Thorns was a pretty brutal showing of it.
In a way we haven’t seen before displayed in warcraft by one player faction on another.

Night Elves were targeted by Blizzard because people care about what happens to them. If you showed Orgrimmar burning I doubt as many people would care.
As for Night Elf power fantasy, that piggy died in Cataclysm with so much of Ashenvale overrun and darkshore blasted to smitherines.
But regarding this comment:

If the Night Elves were as vulnerable as any race then the entire Horde did not need to mobilize and still need the element of surprise to best them but I think everyone knows this is just Blizzard’s lame attempt to be dramatic.

Just as Andiuns “Oh no Alliance has failed… oh look its Jaina! So epic!”
The problem right now is Darkshore left everything up in the air.

The only information we have is from interviews.
The Night Warrior accomplished absolutely nothing on screen than get punked by Nathanos and some nameless mobs we have been killing since they were first introduced.

Now in Shadowlands we learn how bad this Night Warrior thing is and we need to get rid of it ASAP.

Saurfang didn’t pay, the Horde didn’t pay, Sylvanas is a big mystery, NE lands are still destroyed and left in limbo.
Honestly what was the point of it? Some ugly black eyes some intern put together?

The problem with Teldrassil is that it had zero payoff and shadowlands won’t fix it because it didn’t accomplish anything. Lets even assume Tyrande kills Sylvanas.
So what? The race is still ruined and barely hanging on life support.

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(Commentary): I’m laboring under the assumption that this thread is speaking more to emotional impact, over lore impact. With that in mind, I cannot help but agree with the OP that we never knew a lot of the Night Elf NPCs in Teldrassil well enough to feel the loss beyond the portrayal of the War of Thorns itself. The War of Thorns was a very dark chapter in the history of World of Warcraft. Teldrassil’s burning isn’t as bad as the war itself because we never had to be exposed to the actual burning. Even as an Alliance player you only spent five minutes or so flying around Darnassus on fire. If a proper movie-quality cinematic had been devoted to seeing people burned alive, the screaming, seeing animals backed into corners of caves as flames approach, watching Night Elven and Gilnean children screaming in agony, then the emotional impact would’ve been drastically more intense.

(Statement): But that would’ve been an absolute nightmare for Horde players who really had no choice in the narrative direction.

I will try to avoid the one-upmanship, and focus on this:

Has that been stated anywhere? I do not recall any statement on numbers.

Anduin calls it a genocide, but that is not a solid number. He also says “too few remain”, but that is vague. If only one Night Elf died, Anduin might think too few remained, because that one should not have died!

Also, the Mission Table has the evacuation of Teldrassil as an on going thing.

I just wonder where your threshold comes from. We could even find out there were some sort of Termite-Elves who dug escape routes through the tree.

I am just wondering where you got your 10% threshold from. Because you did see my argument already. I would argue the numbers are vague, and so is exactly who died. Almost any Night Elf NPC can come back and be like: “Phew, I made it. Lets go!”

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I have talked about the impact of Teldrassil a few times, and its honestly super damaging to the Night Elves as a people. Sylvanas didn’t just destroy a holy sight, she robbed the Kaldorei of their future, and from an OOC perspective, she undid everything any Alliance player did between Classic and Cata.

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I think Teldrassil and Dazar’alor are perfect examples of cases where the defender feels the loss much more strongly than the aggressor feels a sense of accomplishment.

Other than the ‘lol dead nelfies’ subset of posters, there weren’t a lot of Horde players that I’ve seen who felt proud of the Burning or felt that it was a sensible move for the Horde which caused more benefit than harm to their faction.
Similarly, I’ve seen few Alliance posters who fist-bumped over the Battle of Dazar’alor, and most argue that it ended up hurting the Alliance more than it helped.

But both sides strongly felt the loss. And that’s why arguments rage over these topics, because both sides feel cheated.

As for Teldrassil specifically:
I can’t speak for anyone else, but part of why I picked the Alliance was because I liked the theme of being a person from a badly-damaged society who steps up to protect the remaining homelands and safeguard the surviving civilians who live there. (And more personally, I am a healer. My job, my instinct, is to keep people alive, and I spend a lot of time making sure I can do so.)

The Burning of Teldrassil showed that not only did I fail, not only did I fail horribly, but oh yeah here’s an impossible quest to show off just how many people you failed and bunch of paragraphs in the short story showing just how much terror and pain these civilians you failed felt as they died.

It’s not just a failure, it’s a failure at the one core responsibility of the faction.

It’s a failure that shows just how utterly sadistic and inhumane the side perpetrating it must be.

It could have been one heck of an inspirational event - as another poster calls it, it can be an Alamo moment. But then, the night elves react by…

…doing nothing for a patch. Ok, fine, so there’s something big planned, right? Yeah! We got some cool armor sets and… got to fail again at the theme of protecting people. And watch those people we failed say ‘you suck so much I want to kill you and everyone else you’re trying to protect (and I was trying to protect 30 seconds ago, too)’. And get told that this is their absolute free will to want to do this.

Well, okay, we’re getting a continuation of this, right? Yay, a tweet says we reclaimed Darkshore! And Ashenvale is, uh… well, guess I’ll have to wait another patch and hope for another tweet, because apparently that’s all there is. Can we resettle? What can/can’t we do about the blight to make it habitable again for all the civilians we fought this war for? How are the refugees in Stormwind doing? But it seems they’re not metal enough for Blizzard to want to write about them, so they just disappear.

And then, the war wraps up. Surely, if the story wants peace, it will spend as much time bringing down the emotions that it stoked as it did in building them up?

Nope, Sylvanas insulted the Horde, so time to forgive them for cheering for the chance to massacre your civilian population and actively destroying a tree full of fleeing refugees. You don’t want to do that right now? Boy, you must be an utter villain consumed by vengeance!

What’s that, the Horde is rounding up Sylvanas loyalists in chains on their end? Nah, not worth mentioning to the Alliance. They got to send a bunch of people on a suicide run so that they could TP the troll capitol before fleeing, isn’t that revenge enough?

Gah. The more I reflect on this plot, the worse it seems.
It had potential. It spiked tensions and emotions to an unprecedented level… and abandoned them there with a hurried ending.

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I’ll admit, I do not have an exact idea of the threshold for what constitutes the genocide. My only next sources for basing a threshold would be on NPC reactions and quest instructions. In the quest you are directed to save upto ~1000 (982?) NPCs in a short amount of time, and a player can maximally save upto around 90-100 civilians. This would mean upto 10%. 10% is also a common statistical threshold for most impactful events to show differences between two scenarios, and that’s another reason why I used it. I can extend this arbitrary number to ~50% and it would still be a huge loss of NPCs. Also, most of these NPCs cannot be soldiers due to Delaryn’s dialogue that only innocents remain. So a range of 50-90% of the Darnassus NPCs are now dead, either on the path to Darkshore or in Teldrassil itself. This is no small number.

Either way, I did raise the next point:

If Blizzard was infinitely expanding the lore to cover a list of the NPCs who survived, this number cannot be a big one because it would quench the impact of Teldrassil. (which itself must be impactful lorewise from dialogue by Tyrande, Anduin, Sira, Saurfang Shandris etc.)

I would guess that Blizzard would choose to therefore:
-Avoid it, and causing a lore limbo for most Teldrassil NPCs (which has basis in its past actions, see: Theramore civilians)
-Only show a few handful of NPCs surviving to uphold the impact of Teldrassil

I’d beg to differ, I’ve said this before but, aside from Saurfang, it seems that NOBODY in the Horde (NPC-wise) even acknowledges Teldrassil. Ofcourse, therein lies the problem. If there is a large chunk of the Horde that does take issue with the mass slaughter of civilians than you end up in riot and rebellion from the getgo, maybe people are fighting because “The Alliance will never forgive us for this, but if we win this war…Sylvanas and those complicit will have to answer for this.” But Blizzard doesn’t address it and in the Horde war campaign it is never brought up. So a big theatrical event like Teldrassil didn’t have sufficient follow-up.

THIS, more than anything else as a Horde player is what drove me up a wall and made me sick to my stomach whenever the War Campaign or the War was focused on. All I could think of is “Don’t I deserve to lose? My faction doesn’t even seem to care that we committed what is tantamount to genocide” Give me what the soldiers that obeyed the orders were thinking. Blizzard wanted something big and flashy to draw attention but didn’t seem to think how it would demoralize people to play the game (and the damage to RP realm populations speaks for themselves

It’s infuriating as both a Horde fan and a Night Elf fan and is what is making Shadowlands be the make or break for me because I do not like having my intelligence and my integrity insulted.

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Ironically, many Alliance NPCs acknowledge it immediately whereas Horde NPCs react to it only after Sylvanas is gone (such as Lorthemar or Thalyssra). Blizzard retroactively showed Teldrassil’s impact on Horde characters rather than actively displaying it after Teldrassil.

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The real impact of Teldrassil burning is that a half-corrupted world tree was destroyed and lots of plant nourishing ash has made it’s way to the Kalimidor soil.

A real boon for nature!

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I don’t recall seeing anything of the sort. Do you know where I can find the source for this?

A poor argument because nature doesn’t replenish instantly and Teldrassil was a font of natural growth. Most animal wildlife on Teldrassil is now extinct. Very few seeds can actually survive the burning and Teldrassil was probably a very huge loss of ecosystems.

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I can’t accurately make broad sweeping generalizations of the factions, but I suppose a fast version of my earlier post is this:

I play a hero to protect civilians.

Teldrassil showed off just how much I failed those civilians.

I don’t particularly care if the ones who died are named, I don’t really care if it was 30% or 70% or 90% who died, I care that I was doing all that I ever did to keep them safe and I failed utterly.

In that sense, I would rather have lost named characters than a chunk of unnamed civilians. If Malfurion had died holding the Horde off just long enough for the last civilian to carry her child through the portal, I’d feel just as incensed against the Horde but also proud of my faction for its defense. That is the reason why Malfurion is fighting as well, after all.

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I know you are trolling but Teldrassil hasn’t been corrupted since early Cata.

I think Moon Guard only has 2 active Nelf guilds left… When in Legion, the Kaldorei RP community had a whole Argus campaign with more than a hundred people showing up…

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Aren’t they yours and what was it… Ru Thanas Ethoril or something like that?
It’s an odd name so it’s hard for me to remember though the second one is iffy considering it allows nelf RPers that are really crappy nelf RPers.

Old_Soldier_(Horde)

[Lor’themar Theron]

A part of me will always wonder if this would have happened had I acted sooner. If I had confronted Sylvanas in the early days of the war. If [Teldrassil] hasn’t burned.

It is not an easy thing to watch a dear friend tread a dark path, to recognize when they have gone astray. I thought I knew her, and Saurfang has paid the price for my error in judgment.

I have tasked the [Farstriders] with tracking down both Sylvanas and [Nathanos]… though I am unsure we can find them at all. They were Farstriders themselves, once.

But I cannot simply stand idle while they are out there. Not anymore.

[Mayla Highmountain]

[My people are new to the Horde, and there have [been times] in this war when I wondered if joining it was a mistake.

But then I would think of Saurfang, and what he represented, of the Horde he fought for. That is the Horde my people joined. That is the Horde we must strive to be.

I can think of no better way to honor his memory than by continuing that journey.

[First Arcanist Thalyssra]

I only knew Saurfang for a brief time, but I respected him for his courage. It is not easy to challenge [your leaders], even when you are [in the right]

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Didn’t it’s nascient corruption only get stopped by the blessings of a few of the dragonflights?

The very same dragonflights that are now depowered?

Yeah, it is a lot bigger than mine and that is probably why. My guild has always been a bit tightly knit though. If there are any other active guilds around, I haven’t seen them.

No, the Kaldorei purified it on their own, and the Aspects blessed it as a reward.

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