With the Shadowlands wrapped up and the Jailer defeated, are the Scourge less of a threat in-universe? Would it be possible for the Scourge to be rehabilitated and join the ranks of the Forsaken, or Ebon Blade?
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9.2.5 shows that the Scourge became a major nuisance for Quel’Thalas(that we had to resolve) and that the Blood Elves can only imagine what Northrend looks like!
Suffice to say: Grizzly Hills, Howling Fjord and Storm Peaks are going to be smoldering ruins just like Dragonblight, Icecrown, the Lost Lands of Sholazar Basin, Zul’Drak and Borean Tundra.
The Scourge attacks on Elwynn Forest were still going on when we did the Bastion Covenant Campaign and Lakeshire was attacked by Scourge during said Campaign despite being in no condition to fight them! Lakeshire is lost.
Most defenses and backup were sent to Darkshire, Three Corners and Goldshire in Eastern Kingdoms so every other City, Town or Village in Elwynn, Duskwood and Redridge Mountains is lost while these 3 vantage points as well as Stormwind City survives and weathers the Scourge rampage.
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Probably not. Luckly we will know soon enough with the new Northrend book.
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It depends on which Scourge undead you’re talking about. I think the intelligent ones could be rehabilitated, but that means they also have their personality, so some can refuse to be rehabilitated and might even try to take over what’s left of the Scourge for their own goals.
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Yes that’s important. There are various degrees of intelligence and sentience in the Scourge so that depends which “race” you’re talking about. By all accounts, stuff like “regular” Undead races (be it Humans, Trolls, Vrykuls, Nerubians, Quilboars or whatever), San’layn and Banshees must have regained their free will by now, so what they’ll do is up to them. Then you have Zombies, who are individuals who went a bit further into Undeath, and Abominations ; those are often of questionable sentience, but on occasions they were shown to remain somehow decently mentally functional, so some might decide to join whatever there’s to join. Finally there are Ghouls, Skeletons, etc, who might never gain their sanity back, so they’d be a bit of a stretch.
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I liked the one in Western Plaguelands that just wanted to be a farmer.
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I felt bad for him. Poor guy just wanted to tend a farm in peace 
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After Sylvanas’ judgment, Darion and Bolvar have dialogue that reveals that the Scourge remains a threat as the mightiest of the Scourge vied for supremacy, like vicious warlords in the wake of their king’s death. Which will be shown with patch 9.2.5 with the San’layn Vorath leading his Scourge forces against Quel’thalas.
I could see something like that happening. Like we have some Scourge who are emerging as Warlords and then others who have regained their free will and head out to seek their own place in the world.
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I think the Scourge will be a perennial threat but not a massive world-ending one after this. What we’re seemingly seeing in 9.2.5 should have been what we saw all expansion instead of hippity hoppiting to the afterlife.
The weird thing is, the warlords aspect has been a thing already since Cataclysm, with the more intelligent Scourge branching out via their own forces to try and carve out kingdoms. What Bolvar seemingly did was hold back the masses of mindless undead, so it could very well be we’ll see an increase in the various forces that work with those rogue elements.
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He was killed off too soon! I liked the idea of Gory just chilling with his farmer friends while the Alliance and Horde kill each other.
I mostly remember the EPL storyline, with the scourge infighting being a massive advantage to the Argents, who were offing any potential new leaders that they could identify. Maybe after SL the scourge will return to that status quo, possibly with the scourge even slightly weaker than that.
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It’s interesting to me, because I think the state of the scourge is one of the things left over from the original SL plot that shows how good it might have been.
WoW regularly makes interesting commentary about war. The underlying Sylvanas commentary is (almost completely hidden) a message about nuclear disarmament. Even in EoN, Sylvanas expressed incredulouseness about the there must always be a Lich King sentiment. She straight up challenged that. She hated the helm of domination. The SL prepatch cinematic revealed that— in many ways— Sylvanas motive was always the destruction of the helm. Bolvar and the leaders present for the fall of the Lich King all kind of accepted the position that The Helm, though an abomination, was necessary to protect them from some threat.
Through Sylvanas’ efforts, and with the help of Zovaal (both victims of Domination magic) the Helm is destroyed, forcing disarmament. Now, we are in a situation where the philosophy is challenged. Did doing so doom good people, or was it the right thing to do to ensure no one would be violated again?
But we couldn’t have that story. We had to have Sylvanas join satan and be just completely insane. Zovaal had to be the bad guy, because reasons. Its just super annoying.
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This is why I will never like Zovaal as a character. Blizzard kept switching between him being this misunderstood guy who was trying to do the right thing just with the wrong methods and literal Satan. Someone who is just pure evil with no redeeming qualities. It is why the cinematic after his defeat is the worst one out of the raid finale cinematics. I didn’t think Blizzard would make a worse one than the Ny’alotha finale but they did it. (i’m talking about story reasons. So if Terron Gregory somehow reads this, your team did a great job as always).
Honestly the discussion about, “there must always be a lich king” is interesting. Because that idea comes from two souls that were trapped in Frostmourne. Well soul fragments now. That being Uther and King Terenas II. So you have two victims of Frostmourne and Domination saying it is a necessary evil. Meanwhile you have Sylvanas, a victim of Frostmourne and Domination who argues that it isn’t. Just destroy the helm and wipe up the rest of the scourge.
Clearly the side of “it is a necessary evil” won as Bolvar became the Lich King. Sparing Tirion of that fate. But even for that minute or two when there was no Lich King, scourge managed to break free and we see in the Cata plaguelands you had several factions claiming to be the scourge. You had Darkmaster Gandling and his faction of the Cult of the Damned. You had that random Crypt Lord and the Banshee we fight in Stratholme, along with the new Baron Rivendare.
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Yeah. In fact, I think Blizzard would be wise to continue having that debate as long as WoW exists, the scourge should always be this thing that pops up and makes us say, “Man… should we have kept the helm?”
Blizzard made a story where Sylvanas was unquestionably wrong. And that story sucked. Meanwhile they clearly had a framework in place for a story where Sylvanas was not unquestionably wrong. That at least didnt suck as much.
Yes, many people would have been furious with anything less than Sylvanas being unforgivably wrong. None of those people were made happy by the narrative anyway.
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This is one aspect I felt Blizzard missed the mark. The ending of Wrath with both Uther and Terenas was building up to this big massive event if the scourge was not contained. And yet when it finally happens… the scourge is an afterthought. They showed up in the pre-patch and a section of a quest chain in Bastions covenant storyline until 9.2.5 that is.
I feel like this approach was bad imo. It made sense in Legion where he went straight for the head of the Legion with Argus. Since our original plan didn’t go the way we intended (thanks Velen). But having it be for the whole expansion doesn’t work. Having this big event that was foreshadowed to be something horrible only exist for a pre-patch event is anti-climatic. I feel like the scourge should’ve been the primary focus of the first part of Shadowlands but that would require a complete rewrite of the expansion. Due to the way Blizzard writes their expansions in contrast to other MMO’s.
I feel like the scourge could’ve been something to Destiny 2’s expansion launch seasons, mainly the soon to be over Season of the Risen. Which happens concurrently to the Witch Queen campaign and is connected to it. In fact unlike Season of the Undying in Shadowkeep (which happens after the expansions story, including the raid but is separate gameplay wise) or Season of the Hunt in Beyond Light (which is concurrent to Beyond Lights story but is not connected), you need to do the first chapter of the Witch Queen campaign to begin the seasonal content.
Or we saw more of the scourge rampaging through Azeroth throughout the story instead of a section of a quest chain that is locked behind a covenant.
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Excellent perspective on Sylvanas and the helm.
I wonder if we’ll ever find out what the intention of Zovaal’s character was, whatever nuance or depth he had was presumably nuked fairly early into SL’s development.
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Pretty sure Blizzard never wrote Zovaal as misunderstood, that was a thing the players were hoping for because the story was bad.
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I’ve heard they’ll go back to how they were used in Cata. Where you have powerful necromancers like Darkmaster Gandling or Aurius Rivendare controlling swaths of them.
Hope that’s the case at least as then we could have a Lich and a Scourge army turn up now and again whenever we meed some enemy variety. I hope they do something similar with the Legion, as with Sargeras gone I imagine it’s become a pretty brutal power vaccum. Pitlords or Eredar turning up with a battlegroup could be fun.
As for rehabilitation there is exactly one recorded case of a Scourge being rehabilitated I know of, and that was Nathanos Blightcaller. It took Sylvanas’s considerable martial skill and resources to just detain the then ghoul Nathanos. Then a tremendous amount of patience from her to walk him through physical and mental therapy, with true love also playing it’s part.
Beyond that the Cult of the Forgotten Shadow attempted to free the soul of Devlin Aggamand from the clutches of the Scourge. It fails and you’ve to kill his restless spirit though Shadow Priestess Malia says;
“Ah, how unfortunate. Perhaps the Scourge’s dominion over Devlin’s mind remained too strong. Or perhaps our methods are simply not strong enough. It’s also possible that Devlin was too simple-minded to comprehend what we were asking him.”
So they might have better luck next time. But this was to free his soul. You destroy his body and bring the remains back to the church in Brill.
So trying to free someone bound by the Scourge seems extraordinarily difficult. Requiring both true love and the disposable resources of the Forsaken to manage once.
Though the KotEB and Forsaken could make use of non humanoid Scourge. The Forsaken already employ abominations though it is unknown if they turned any from the Scourge or simply made all of theirs in house. And at least one gargoyle is used by the Forsaken as an attack dog.
As for the KotEB though they could presumably just use their own necromancy to seize control of swaths of Scourge from the CotD.
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I think having the Forsaken working with the Argents to channel their mad science towards curing Scourged undead of their madness/domination (whether that be freedom from mental domination or liquefying their physical form!) would be the most practical near future solution. It gives them something positive to contribute without compromising their … quirks.
I’d be cool with that in regards to the Scarlet Risen. The story is extraordinarily vague on what they are or how they became undead. But they’re the undead PC race model wise and seem to be directly enslaved by Balnazzar. Who we now know was probably using Domination Magic.
So we could say either his death or some event in SL released them from the Sire’s control. There were like two cities full of em so that handwaives any lingering concern about the ever unclear logistical population worries and it’d give Voss, Calia and Faol something to do.
Plus it’s a ready made excuse for Forsaken Paladins. There are tons of undead paladins in the Risen so, they’re in game just need to make them playable.
I’d be against saying the Scourge can be essentially cured. It kind of immediately defangs them as a credible threat and moreover retroactively makes tragic every single Scourge army we crushed. Because hey turns out those were essentially just sick people that could’ve been saved with some TLC. Whoops.
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I mean the Primus invented the scourge the plague of undeath the helm of domination. It’s all his ideas. Why don’t we hit him up before we leave and be like “Hey death Gandalf we need some wizardry here. Turn off the scourge.”