I am so tired of the Faction Conflict to the point I honestly want them to just get rid of Factions and the reality is this whole ‘conflict’ between factions was something that was really wrapped up in WC3 but Blizzard dragged its corpse out back in Wrath to promote the ‘WAR’ in ‘WARCRAFT’ and then made Cata and MoP which had a B-plotline focus around it and in MoP the entire story basically revolved around it.
Kept it going with stupid things like the Alliance and Horde fighting for their resources on Draenor in Ashran… Which makes no sense
And BfA aka MoP 2.0 but worse in every way all done to set up an expansion that basically destroyed the lore and rewrote everything in this series to be about le Jailer.
I’d rather we keep to telling stories about individual races and people coming together for a common cause to fight something that harms the world, region, etc doesn’t need to be some cosmic entity either.
I don’t know if anyone noticed… But there has been one war or crisis going on for 40 years now.
Including TWO Invasions of the Burning Legion. THREE Old Gods. The realm of death itself. The LICH KING. …
There is a thing called war weariness. And man. It should be all over the place by now. People want to get a normal life. Marry. Have children. Be happy without the threat of whatever invading.
Not to mention, 40 years of war? That’s a whole lotta dead people. The population of Azeroth would likely be decimated right now. IE. There ain’t enough people to go back to Alliance vs Horde. It’s called World of Warcraft. But it doesn’t say WHO is at war. At this point in time, with all the bad things that has happened, it would be pure insanity for another war between Alliance and Horde. I’m LOOKING AT YOU TURALYON.
The only reason we had a Fourth War was because of Sylvanas crazy undead butt. Azeroth would have likely had a long peace, considering we all saved the world from demons.
That’s totally on Saurfang when he had the war’s objective in his hands and refused to take Malfurion’s life.
Four Wars and numerous “Incidents” pretty much tag them as enemies to each other. One Armistice isn’t going magically make that history go away overnight.
Even some of their own blood ef allies say otherwise, but not loudly.
What punishment did Anduin inflict upon Genn for going off the reservation again?
I agree with this, although obviously we have no way of knowing for sure. There was an interesting thread a while back speculating on what the original plans might have been:
Sigh … no it wasn’t. God, even after Sylvie’s “I’m trying to kill as many people as possible on all sides for SUPER Satan” is revealed, people still spout this nonsense.
Read “A Good War”. Not once in the plan presented was Malfurion ever a target, he’s only ever treated as an obstacle to be avoided whenever possible. Because the plan sold to Saurfang by Sylvanas REQUIRED that strong NE leadership remain intact to put pressure on the Anduin while Teld was occupied; to force a political rift between Gilneas and Darnassus … and weaken Anduin’s overall authority. Saurfang was sold a plan that never hinged on Malf’s death. And it wasn’t Saurfang’s refusal to kill Malf that caused Teld to burn, but Summermoon’s insistence that “no matter who Sylvanas killed it would not create the wound she desired, that would commit both sides to wars of extermination against the other”. Malf implicitly included.
But, it doesn’t matter either way. Because Sylvie was full of crap. Her plan was a sales pitch, little else. Even before the space satan reveal, it was clear that she was pulling some form of Sylvie classic and using the Horde/War as tools for some personal objective; we just didn’t know how absurd it really was.
We have leaks from multiple people saying that Afrasiabi was the one who decided on the whole War of Thorns/Burning of Teldrassil story point. (See threads here and here if you haven’t read about it.)
Best guess people have been able to make is that it was sometime during the development of 8.2. See the threads linked above.
Fully agree with your post.
I’m more than ready to leave faction war stories behind for a while ( mostly because the writers have proven time and again that they are unable to write them ) but now it’s suddenly all sunshine and rainbows and idk, it just feels forced and unnatural.
Enemies to friends is fine if done well but it should make sense and also stay the exception to the rule or it loses any meaning.
That being said, I don’t care much about factions anymore at all thanks to bfa and SL so maybe it’s for the better.
It wasn’t the only thing Sylvanas was wrong about in her janky plan.
She was also wrong about the Gilneans.
Her assumption was that the Gilneans would seethe at any attempt to help the Night Elves due to the status of their own home.
Yet Genn and his people were the biggest advocates for the Night Elves.
Sort of a running theme for Sylvanas was her assumption that people are inherently terrible and will be selfish.
She never anticipated the power of friendship and rainbows.
Reread the first quest on the Horde side of the quest chain. It’ implicitly spelled that the entire point of the Thorn War is to draw Malfurion out so that he can be eliminated.
Right, because he was in the way of the advance of the Horde’s forces; not because he was a planned objective that Sylvanas sold to Saurfang. Sylvanas wanting Malfurion dead privately (she wanted both NE leaders dead btw, so her sales pitch was a complete and utter lie from its very foundation), and Nate being in on that … doesn’t translate into what Saurfang knew, was sold, or built his “capture Teld” plan around. Malfurion was never an objective of the invasion plan. He was an obstacle best avoided as much as possible, then dealt with if he couldn’t be. But he was dealt with, killed or no.
And … if Malf’s death was SOOO important to Sylvie, maybe she should have just killed him herself. Rather than trying to test Saurfang, like she so clearly was with forcing the killing blow on him.
Or she was trying to make him indelibly bound to her plans by committing the one act that would put him past redemption. Saurfang on your side is an asset not to be discarded lightly.
And generally heroes only win when smart villains make mistakes.
I do believe it tries to say the plan was to kill him to break their spirits.
And I cant tell if that was intentionally Saurfang not understanding Kaldorei history, or the writers. Because historically we know killing their peaceful guiding figures ultimately just makes them go berserk. They’re borderline impossible to make quit, even Archimonde acknowledge the sheer power of their passion and firey spirit in Wc3 and the War of the Ancients.
But given they proceeded to retcon the Night Warrior into this edgy ‘grr evul moon demon hunter’ thing, I just wouldn’t be surprised if they as writers fundamentally lost an understanding of the resolve that a player race has, especially since they were willing to ignore that burning teldrassil would upset dragons and nature spirits.
It doubles back to that vague objective, but the functional idea of the plan was to hold the tree under occupation to force that rift in the Alliance; and making it more difficult for a counterattack. And again, it was NOT Saurfang’s failure to kill Malf that ultimately caused Sylvie to burn the tree, but Summermoon’s assertion that had she even killed Malf it wouldn’t “destroy their hope”. Up until that little chat, despite how perturbed she was with the Old Orc, Syvie had no concrete evidence to suggest what he told her about how Malf escaped wasn’t true … and was still planning on “Invading the Tree”. Both in “A Good War”, and in the cinematic. It was Summermoon that was the trigger, not Malf’s survival.
It doesn’t help that A Good War feels like it was written with a different story in mind.
Looking back over it, and it seems Sylvanas’ secret objective wasn’t to “kill as many people as possible” but to inflict as much despair as possible.
That’s why she secretly planned to hunt down Malfurion and kill him.
And it’s why his survival irked her so much. It wasn’t just that he survived, but that his survival was “miraculous”. It was something for them to rally to in spirit.
It was that, combined with Summermoon sass, that prompted her arborcidal outburst.
I would give anything to know what the hell happened during BFA’s development.
You’re both right. The sources don’t match up, and this is only one example of it. Either different writers were working with different versions of a plan that changed over time, or they were working independently and didn’t know they were being contradicted by other material.
Man, I forgot they genuinely tried to spin this LMAO. Trying to hold Teldrassil when the sapient tree that can give the strength of titan water to people is such an absurd idea. Then again they forgot that a depowered Nordrassil was too resilient for Ragnaros to just burn himself and needed to try to perform a rite in the firelands with a stolen branch to attempt it, and just had normal fire burn Teldrassil -way- out of catapult range, so I guess im assuming they’d remember lore where they clearly didn’t wanna.
I mean, we’re talking about a writing team that killed Jin by trash mob to force Sylvie into the drivers seat, solely so she could plot device the Horde into starting another war. Without actual Means, Motives, or Opportunities to do so. The Horde just had to do the bad thing because the story demanded the bad thing be done. Doesn’t matter if it made sense on any side.
You’re conflating Teldrassil with Nordrassil. The only thing the former gave was shelter. And the purpose of the latter was to lock away the Second Well of Eternity.
They don’t match up because Sylvannas gives the Champion the true objective of the war that she purposely kept from Saurfang. She confides in the Champion considerably more than she does the old orc.