How do the preceding events change. Does that just mean the legion takes over easily? Do the other races stand a chance. Do the humans exile to Kalimdor?
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Well the WC3 Alliance of Lordaeron survivors, Thralls Horde etc. would never form, which would likley be a problem to defeat the Legion.
The Blood Elves would likley be even weaker, because a Horde victory in the Second War likley means the fall of Quel’thalas and the Amani Horde alliance would not be broken. This is more speculative though and depends on what you see as the goal of winning the war. If it’s only defeating the human Kingdoms, it perhaps could still have happened like it did (in some way).
Alterac would be the only human nation left standing, and perhaps take over the other human nations to some degree, as allies of the Horde.
With that it’s rather possible that the Horde would never move to Kalimdor, which would lead the Tauren and Darkspear in to extinction.
Those are only some things, but 2 player races likley wiped out is a large thing. Perhaps some Dark Spears could have fleet.
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By the time we got to the Second War, the Old Horde was controlled by Orgrim Doomhammer, who, while still committed to the warpath, was more measured than than the prior “kill all the things” Horde leaders. He just flat out didn’t see any way forward other than war.
A lot of it would depend on how much of a grip he would be able to hold on the more demonic/warlocky portions of the Horde. I could see him reversing the banishment of the Frostwolves, and Alterac might survive given they’d gone turncoat prior. There may even have been peace with Lordaeron, albeit forged from a position of strength. Quel’thalas likely would have been annexed and razed in order to appease the Amani.
Kalimdor likely wouldn’t have been an option at the time, but Northrend would have been. It could go a variety of ways, it would either be Orgrim trying to keep the Horde together and a consistent game of making peace with the fragments of the Alliance, followed by more war as he would consistently need to give the Orcs something to destroy or risk the Horde imploding. Or he would be usurped by the more blood-crazed elements again, and the Horde would rampage again before imploding entirely or just becoming demonic.
Either way, when the Legion invades it would all fall apart and the Orcs would become demons in the end.
I forgot something. Perhaps the Bleeding Hollow would restart their war against the Gurubashi because they wanted to take over the jungle. This would likley cost the lives of many Orcs once more and could even lead to the Amani siding against the Horde.
It’s also unsure how well the Orc clans would, or could work together after such a victory. Infighting could occur. The demonic influence still ran through their veins. It could have gone in quite some different directions.
Quel’thalas is a weird one in that scenario imo because not only are they still clearly aware of Kalimdor*, there were still quel’dorei ships visiting (Winterspring questing has ghosts from one of those expeditions, predating the first war by like a century) and given what Legion established about the troll wars, there’s a fair chance of dragging at least some sentinels into it.
Also any extension of the war likely would have dragged the other dragonflights plus the parts of the reds that hadn’t been enslaved into it as well.
But these are factors that don’t particularly exist in WC2 because the lore was extremely barebones
That said I figure destruction might force the quel’dorei to pull back to the Elrendar even if the kingdom somehow survives.
*I know a lot of people still run off the RPG’s extremely lowball longevity numbers for quel’dorei but one king, alone, ruled for almost half the country’s existence and is at most 2 known generations away from its founding. The timeframe might be enormous for humans but it’s clearly not enough of a generational gap to have forgotten this.
Well, the human nations at the least would of fallen, eventually. The pressure for there to be an Orcish conquest of the entire world would of been hard to repress for very long. Some nations might of weathered; Ironforge once its gates are shut is basically impossible to breach, and the Orcs tried and failed repeatedly to do so. Though, eventually I guess you might be able to siege and starve the Dwarves out.
I doubt that Quel’Thalas would of fallen as Ban’dinoriel would of kept them out, and I somehow doubt the old Horde would of had much to offer to someone like Dar’Khan Drathir.
You wrote the premise… you answer the question. You seem to think that these things have an existence outside the stories in which they are written. They don’t. they progress as the authors intend.
According to Warcraft II Horde campaign victory there are no Alliance survivors, as all of them are executed or sacrificed. Quel’thalas, Stormguarde, Strathholme, Hillsbrad, Khaz Moran, and even Dalaran all fall along with the Lordaeron capital city.
Alterac remains, though how long the Horde allows it to do so is questionable. It could exist as an outlaw outpost but with all the surrounding counties decimated and their population put to the sword or the flame, it’s doubtful that they could thrive amid such ashes and ruin.
Ironforge and Gnomeregon remain safe havens for awhile, but there are precious few refugees and it’s likely that the Orcs will continue to form strong alliances with the Trolls and would probably move into those territories before too long.
It’s uncertain if the Legions time table would move up, however, as part of a Horde victory means that Doomhammers forces would have been successful in wiping out the Twilight’s Hammer and killing Gul’dan when they left the Horde to go to the Tomb of Sargeras.
Doomhammer had crushed the Shadow Council by this point and hated and distrusted the Warlocks, so he might have listened to Orcs like Durotan and proceeded to expel them from the Horde after the successful conquest of the human kingdoms.
Likely instead of working through a human like Kel’thuzad to create a plague of undeath, the demons would have approached the Horde’s Death Knights like Teron Gorefiend (who like him were all Orc warlocks who had their souls bound to dead Human Knights and Paladins) and charge them with summoning the Legion via the Sunwell. Having no real loyalty to Doomhammer, it would make sense that Teron Gorefiend would have been chosen to wield Frostmourne, and he and his fellow Death Knight’s would undertake the summoning in secret.
Without an Alliance or the Night Elves to join forces with, and still under the blood curse of Mannoroth it’s unlikely that even the Horde could withstand the Burning Legion for long. All it would take is Doomhammers death and most Orcs would probably fall in line behind a new Legion friendly Warchief - likely Gorefiend or one of his ilk.
The scouring of Azeroth wouldn’t follow far behind as the combined might of the Horde and the Legion spread across the world. Of course it kind of depends on how the Old Gods and their forces react, since they would all be alive and in the process of breaching their prisons, but a war between the Legion and the Old Gods hardly seems like a rosary future for Azeroth.
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The orcish horde won the second war in the canon lore dude.
For the comedy option, the war being such a disaster basically results in a Cata-like situation where the exile starts getting reconsidered 30 years ahead of schedule because the situation is desperate.
First war is a horde win, second war is a horde loss that also leads to it fracturing
Horde won because they all survived it.
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This makes literally no sense
Also while the horde victory scenario is a passable guide, the problem is that it’s still from a time when a ton of the lore just didn’t exist. Kalimdor isn’t a concern because it’s not a thing, dragonflights aren’t a concern because they’re barely a thing, and so on.
Like we could just as easily speculate that a resurgent Naga empire breaks out the old gods and goes on the warpath.
Alterac was promised to be left alone though. We can’t say if it would be the case, but it’s possible.
I agree. I am kind of curious how the chief tool of N’zoth, Deathwing, would play things. He joined the Horde around that time to have access to Draenor, but would he continue on with his experiments in creating the Twilight Flight and eventually oppose the Burning Legion or would he just let the Legion destroy Azeroth since that seemed to be his goal too?
Not the world itself. I guess. Because this would kill the Old Gods and grant the World Soul to the Legion and that’s something the void really did not want to happen.
So would there maybe be a scenario where Deathwing would try to take the reins of the Horde and turn them against the Legion, while still serving the Old Gods?
I’m imagining him breaking the Elemental planes and unleashing the four Elemental Lords and their armies back into Azeroth to fight the Legion along side the Twilight Flight and a Horde ruled by fanatical Shadow Priests and Dark Shaman rather than Warlocks as well as Azshara’s Naga forces.
It sounds pretty metal.
There’s zero chance Zul’jin would allow them to continue existing.
It’d depend upon the conditions of the Horde winning. A major contributing factor to their defeat was Gul’dan’s betrayal and Doomhammer sending forces to hunt down the warlock.
If Gul’dan hadn’t betrayed the Horde, then it would’ve been a straight-forward win with the continued aid of the Stormreavers, Twilight’s Hammer and Black Tooth Grin clans. Though with the clans still under the influence of the blood curse, it would likely only be a matter of time before they’d run out of Alliance to fight and start looking for more enemies, and irrespective of the deal he’d made with Zul’jin, it’s hard to say if Doomhammer could have prevented hostilities from breaking out between the blood-cursed orcs and their Azerothian allies, or even just between the clans themselves. Moreover since Doomhammer was legitimately trying to save his people (and not just use them as a marginally controllable means to an end), once the continent was reasonably secured he’d have likely started bringing the rest of the clans through the Dark Portal. Clans like the Bonechewers, Laughing Skulls and Shattered Hand who’d been languishing under the effects of the blood curse without foes to fight, under the leadership of mercurial chieftains like Grom Hellscream and Kargath Bladefist. Doomhammer wasn’t the sort to just let that many of his fellow orcs die abandoned on Draenor, but it’s uncertain if he could have kept them under control once they’d crossed over either.
Once the Alliance was squashed and its subjugation underway they’d have probably turned around to do something about the Gurubashi trolls, since unlike the Amani, the jungle tribes pretty much attacked the orcs on sight and weren’t receptive to any sort of accommodation or deal.
Moreover it’s possible that if the Dark Portal had been kept open long enough to do that, the fel energy seeping through Azeroth’s connection to Draenor might have spread even further, continuing to expand the Blasted Lands perhaps to the point of consuming neighboring regions like Stranglethorn Vale, Karazhan, the Swamp of Sorrows and maybe even up into Stormwind proper. When it comes down to it, the reason the Dark Portal had to be closed down in BtDP was because the link it created between the two worlds caused the state of Draenor to adversely affect that of Azeroth, meaning when the former exploded, it threatened to do the same to the latter. Consequently, had the Horde won and kept the Dark Portal open while ushering the remaining clans through, the portal’s effects might have continued to spread, all the while reducing more and more of the vibrant lands they’d claimed to fel-depleted wasteland.
If Gul’dan had still betrayed the Horde, but Doomhammer won by way of abstaining from sending Rend and Maim after the traitors, then that could have led to Gul’dan entering the Tomb of Sargeras with Cho’gall and both traitorous clans’ armies on hand to help, instead of leaving them outside to fend off his pursuers. With their aid Gul’dan might have overpowered the crazed demons inside the Tomb, gotten his hands on the power inside and/or even opened the portal and ushered in a Legion invasion, as had originally been intended by Kil’jaeden and Sargeras.
And a demonic invasion of Azeroth at that time would have probably led to the Legion being victorious, because the world’s peoples would have still been geographically isolated and divided from each other, while the Eastern Kingdoms would have been occupied by a Horde still trying to get a handle on its new territories.
That said, if a Horde victory had come by some other means - like, say, Doomhammer successfully holding the Alliance at Blackrock Mountain until the other clans could be brought through the Dark Portal to reinforce him - then such a victory would have probably been a long, grinding, years-long affair with the Horde pushing the Alliance back to Khaz Modan, digging into Stormwind’s lands and then perhaps trying again to claim Stranglethorn as a source of supplies for future campaigns north.
Something to keep in mind though, is that the old Horde was never really meant to be sustainable. It was basically created for the express purpose of destroying the draenei, then facilitating a demonic invasion of Azeroth, or burning itself out on the blood curse if it failed. So securing their new home in victory would have been an uncertain proposition for Doomhammer. As bad as they were, from a strictly practical standpoint the internment camps did provide the unanticipated benefit of granting the orcs a means of basically weaning themselves off the fel in a controlled environment where their enemies were human guards content to keep them locked up and abused rather than hostile combatants poised to rise up and exterminate them as soon as they ran out of active foes to fight and the lethargy made them weak.
Going through that withdrawal was arguably a necessary step in getting the orcs off the fel, and it would have been an extremely dangerous thing for most of the Horde to suddenly find themselves afflicted by that lethargy while still in the midst of securing their newly conquered lands full of humans, elves and dwarves who all wanted them dead.
That’s very likley true. However, it depends on what is seen as a win here. If the Amani have to be included, because at the end, their pact with the Orcs was already broken. Even though some might have fought until the end. The Smolderthorn and Firetree tribes come to mind. Or not. If not it’s a different scenario and the Amani could have faced the same problem, more or less, as we know it.
However if they are included in such a victory, then there is still the possability that at least some Elves could have escaped with ships. Perhaps not a too large of an option, but nothing to exclude. Zul’jin really only cared for the Forests (and their ancestral land where once forest was).
They won the first war in the burning of Stormwind Keep and the death of King Lane, the Second War ended with the defeat of Doomhammer afer Gul’dan divided the Horde’s forces in his obsession for the relics of Sargeras.