He diiiiiiiiid go on a murder spree of Grimtotem at one point. It’s a fairly low level quest where Baine is forcing out some remaining Grimtotem on the border of Mulgore.
I’m annoyed that Blizzard recently changed him a bit to be quiet and when he did speak up, it was just to go run to the Alliance. I thought he was much better when he was kicking Grimtotem tail in the lowbie quest.
This quest, while it doesnt match the persona they gave him in the past 2 expansions, feels a lot more like the Baine we were meant to have.
And the circumstances and problems you run into don’t care about your traumas. When you take up the role of a leader, it stops being about just you.
If you need an example, here’s one: James Kirk from Star Trek. He has his share of emotional baggage and has had plenty of moments of uncertainty. The way he deals with it is by limiting himself to one confidant (Dr. McCoy). In front of everyone else, he keeps it together and gives no hint of difficulty because his role as captain affects morale and how those outside would see him and the Federation.
The same applies to Baine. Regardless of his traumas, he has to put that aside when he stops being “just Baine” and becomes “Baine Bloodhoof, high chieftain of the Tauren”. If the story needed an everyman reaction to the Dragon Isles centaur, a second tauren should have accompanied Baine so the two can play off each other. Mind that this doesn’t need to make Baine emotionless or detached, but for him to stay in character he has to lean towards being the voice of reason.
Honestly, I would have used a 3-man search party for that questline. Baine, everytauren, and Mayla. Everytauren would have the emotional reactions (the whole “they’re centaur just like the ones on kalimdor”), Baine would try to keep it under control but show signs of distrust, and Mayla would act as Baine’s confidant or at least the person he can share his uncertainties with.
I think a key thing that’s being missed is Baine’s distant past, when he was much younger he was captured by centaurs and whatever they did to him completely broke Cairne’s spirit. He was like catatonic, unable to lead his people.
Rexxar and another guy, Bovan, rescued Baine back in the day, but that Bovan guy being captured and killed by the centaurs all this time later wakes all that up again in Baine. It’s classic PTSD. He has shouldered everything all this time, the murder of his people, the murder of his father, and he’s turned the other cheek over and over and over again as he tried to be the moral center of the Horde and lead and preserve his people despite his desire for revenge.
Everyone has a breaking point. This seems to have been Baine’s, before he reels it back in again.
Being a leader does not stop someone from reacting to something awful that happened to them.
You also can not compare one person to another when it comes to trauma responses. It strikes everyone differently, and even if comparing the same person to themselves, Trauma will react in very different ways each time.
You cant always just push down a reaction, especially for something related to something so awful. This goes outside of "human"s as well. Every living thing has different reactions to trauma, and different reactions each time as well.
It WILL make you react if it wants you to. You can not stop it if it does not want to be stopped.
I’ll just write it off as a unique form of PTSD. Baine is incredibly not-racist when it comes to the Alliance, but Alliance races also aren’t a multi-generational threat to the Tauren. The Tauren see centaur akin to demons or devils, believing them to be a curse upon the Tauren tribes.
So while Baine is posterboy for cross-faction understanding, he is still very much so racist towards what he understood to be manifestations of evil.
To react is one thing. To lose control/have an outburst is another. Baine does the latter. And as I said, problems/circumstances don’t care for your traumas. When you represent more than just yourself, keeping it under control is paramount. That’s the burden of leadership.
More in line with the OP, let’s also note that the Horde somehow didn’t have anyone gathering intelligence for them since people started going to the Dragon Isles. Which is extremely hard to believe. Baine setting foot on the isles without even a basic account of what’s been going on is just /facepalm.
Yes? And…he doesn’t. Baine is an imperfect leader and an imperfect person, and that actually makes him a better character.
Honestly, that vibes with me more than infallible, perfect tropes. Especially Baine, who has been portrayed as midlevel ineffective and unflaggingly forgiving, it’s good to see him getting some depth of character. There isn’t a single leader in the game who doesn’t falter and get it wrong sometimes, not even “Green Savior” Thrall and Varian’s Chin Can Do No Wrong managed to be perfect. All of them let personal biases and vendettas and desires get in the way sometimes.
Doing a flip on the level of Jaina during MoP tarnishes his character, not enhance it. What needed to be done (if it needed to be done at all) was show cracks in the armor, not break the armor into tiny pieces. And for that, he needed other characters to play off so that he can show hesitance and have his own misgivings (because, as you said, he isn’t perfect) without flipping out.
I have no issues with the story needing an everyman reaction, but the everyman reaction should not come from the high chieftain of the tauren. He should be the one doing his hardest to keep it together. Hence why I said that the questline should have been Baine, Everytauren and Mayla.
Baine acting like an inconsistent idiot does not give him depth of character.
Granted, the set up was not good. As I said, Baine should not be setting foot into the Oh’naran Plains without having at least a rudimentary understanding of what was going on. He should have been aware of the civil war between the centaur, if not have the list of the clans and who’s who in hand when he sets out on the journey. Assuming the Horde had someone gather information for them.
I mean…he’s a character, not a person. He can’t really be “tarnished”. He didn’t actually make these decisions, or any decisions. But as characters who are leaders in the Warcraft universe go, he’s still at a very low level of making a bad call sometimes in comparison. At least this one actually follows from the story that was set out before, unlike Sylvanas blindly believing the Jailer’s stated motivations.
Why? Other than the tropey principal that it’s just what a good leader should do? Are Tauren supposed to be somehow immune to flawed decision making unless they’re appropriately color-coded? They’re obviously trying to show that sometimes he’s not a good leader, as a person, and that in this case he made the wrong call because of his previous biases.
Is he still the best qualified person to lead the Tauren, though? Probably.
Yeah idk what they’re doing with Baine’s character anymore, I’m more so annoyed that the totem weapon looks like a two hander but is supposedly a one hand mace? My tauren can finally get a dang totem weapon and it’s one handed? If this proves true I may just say to the maw with it and not worry about the job on my tauren till my shaman gets to the isles. Is there some requirements to get the weapon btw as WoWhead says there is some secret requirements for the weapon but don’t know what they are
He went from little personality in bfa, no personality and sl to a total ragy butthole now
You can totally tell differnt peeople made the quests and didnt talk to eachother. They really need a whiteboard or notepad of how differnt charterers should act
It is for Baine. Since his friendship with Anduin started in Cata Baine started to learn to put past grudges behind him. He has also been the one to voice his opinion for peace instead of conflict and has even aided situational enemies several times, most notably Jaina. Baine should have felt some uneasiness being around Centuar, but he showed blatant prejudice towards the Maruuk Centuar. Even though he knows they have no relation to the Kalimdor Centuar