The forsaken couldn’t even manage to beat the Worgen, after launching a suprise invasion on their territory and than launching the plague within Gilneas. The forsaken were always the weakest of the hordes armies. It’s why they always had to resort to dirty tactics and less than ethical means of warfare.
Sorry, but the forsaken aren’t as powerful as you want them to be and I actually enjoy the forsaken as a race. One of my favs horde side.
They won Silverpine, Hillsbrad and Andorhal. Their victories speaks for itself. Stop being deluded.
You…you do realize the forsaken were forced to pull back during Silverpine questing right? Thats how badly the worgen were kicking their teeth in. Sylvanas had to capture Darius daughter to force a stalemate. They only won Andorhal, because Sylvanas had to show up and use her Val’kyr to win the fight. In two straight up fights, the forsaken were loosing badly.
I mean…Jesus dude, they almost lost to FARMERS in andorhal.
That was the fault of Koltira not the Forsaken.
Koltira was the FORSAKEN commander. So, it still counts.
He is a DK and mostly neutral. Sylvanas turned the tide around. Forsaken always win when Sylvanas is in charge.
Forsaken suck without her. Which says a LOT about the crappy state of their entire army, when you’re so reliant on one person bailing you out every single time.
That’s not a good thing Erevien
The forsaken are only weak in what they are allowed to do within the constraints of the story, and the flavor of the story that blizzard has the habit of telling.
They have more than enough grunt to match anyone upfront through constructs and knights. They have powerful mages, more than competent archers, artillery, a broad selection of biological and chemical wmd’s and equally nefarious means to deliver them. Some of these (blight) can be used for area denial as they themselves are immune.
In addition there is a host of unexplored ‘research’ that could be revealed in the bowels of undercity. Just see the stillwater experiments for example. Add to this the Deathstalkers. They can easily sneak into areas to carry out fumigation tasks on whatever pest needs dealing with.
Those same farmers defeated the alliance I guess.
The Forsaken are the best. The Orcs are just a bunch of brutes who lost to the alliance back in the second war every single battle. Orcs are trash. Expecially the green ones. They have nothing on the cooler parts of the Horde which is where the Forsaken lead by a large margin. Just give it up. Orcs suck. End of debate.
I know it’s common now to say that nothing makes sense in lore and that we can’t make assertions about it simply because it’s random.
But leaving aside this tendency to trivialize everything, the lore has always been very consistent in the way it represented forsakens in wars.
The steps are always the same, they invade, they think they will get an easy and crushing victory, suddenly they find a stronger defense than they thought, they start to lose their ability to expand the front, suddenly they find themselves retreating and losing territory, and finally they use the plague because they are being defeated. All quests involving them in wars are like that.
Now we can say this is random, or we can say that Blizzard portrays them that way for a reason. All races of the Horde and Alliance without exception find this forsaken strategy of using the plague cowardly and contrary to the precepts of warfare that factions usually employ.
You can say that forsakens have very efficient conventional forces, but it’s not portrayed that way. And they’re weaker than ever, as they don’t have valkyrs to replace their fallen soldiers, and they can’t produce the plague on a large scale as I highly doubt the orcs would let them use Orgrimmar for that purpose.
It’s hilarious to me to think that forsakens are this power house, when they got their asses kicked by the kaldoreis pathetically on Darkshore even when the kaldoreis had just suffered a genocide and were weaker than ever. I don’t know how you can make such hyperbolic assertions about certain aspects of the lore when there is actually nothing to support it.
First up. Get a dictionary and look up hyperbole. There is nothing hyperbolic about the list I made. Its a simple list of their assets. There is no exaggeration.
Point two. You can say the same thing about the horde proper. They’ve lost every war against the alliance. A handful of elvish shopkeepers stalled their advance in the WOT. At least the forsaken were fighting against actual soldiers. And lets not forget that in bfa 1 solo alliance adventurer single handedly turned back the horde attack on Brenadan and subsequently followed this up by burning the horde base in the area. But lets not get to carried away with that.
The point I was making maybe not as clearly.
The same is also applicable to the horde.
Or to put it another way. One sided trope writing is an adversary far too overpowered to contend with.
The Forsaken would win but often times they are held back by the moral standard of warfare imposed on them as part of the Horde.
Pretty much every single thing that the Forsaken have done since their inception in TFT (and even before that) are things that they did because they were weak. They needed to work with Garithos to defeat the Dreadlords because they weren’t strong enough to do it on their own. They needed to join the Horde to even hold one city because they weren’t strong enough to do it on their own. They needed to develop a superweapon in the form of the Blight because they weren’t strong enough to fight without it. They needed Val’kyr Necromancy because they were too weak to fight any kind of war of attrition.
Their biggest military successes have all involved either betraying allies (TFT) or attacking barely defended villages filled with civilians, and to even dislodge places like Southshore and Hillsbrad Fields they needed their Blight. Their attempts to attack any kind of well-fortified target with experienced defenders (Gilneas, Stromgarde) were unmitigated disasters for them.
And even with all these things, Horde support + The Plague + Necromancy they still lost to a concerted Alliance effort to remove them from Lordaeron by force (an Alliance effort that seemed to be somewhat rapidly cobbled together at that.)
They aren’t strong. They’re weak. Their weakness is almost as big a deal to their development as the fact that they’re zombies is. And now as of Shadowlands they have never been so weak. They’re even weaker than they were in TFT. Any continued presence in Lordaeron they have going forward is going to be because the Alliance accepts it, either de jure or de facto.
It’s actually fairly consistent with how most zombie genre fiction goes (including the Scourge in World of Warcraft.) Element of surprise + lots of soft targets filled with civilians to convert and the Zombies will rapidly gain ground. But against enemies capable of fortifying and defending themselves, their momentum grinds to a halt.
Even the Scourge faced this same problem and they had far greater numbers and more tools at their disposal than the Forsaken did. Even in the Third War I don’t think that they ever managed to take a fortified target by force, even absent war preparations by its defenders. Stratholme required the use of a bioweapon + the element of surprise. Capital City required the corruption of Arthas and the infiltration of its defenders. Ditto for Silvermoon.
I don’t think Tyr’s Hand or Hearthglen ever fell to the Scourge despite them being right in the middle of Scourge territory. The Scarlets even managed to hold parts of Stratholme from Vanilla all the way to Cataclysm and the Scourge couldn’t dislodge them despite Stratholme serving as the Scourge’s de facto capital in the Eastern Kingdoms.
The only case I can think of where they took a fortified position by force is Dalaran, which they couldn’t hold for very long because by TFT it was back in Alliance hands.
Undead are actually pretty bad at war whenever confronted with people who are capable of effectively fighting back. They really need to capitalize on the initial shock of their presence because once that wears off all you are left with is sheer numbers of low-quality troops.