Sylvannas is the second in command antagonist who gets a redemption arc at the end. Pretty typical character archetype, if you ask me.
Anduin is the hero.
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I feel like Anduin has no agency to be the Hero and doesn’t resolve anything. He doesn’t fix the crown, he just kinda…gets dunked on. Anduin is the Princess who has like one good insight that whole time. I can’t call him a hero. He does the least amount of anything that whole Xpac. He’s borderline useless.
Anduin is Princess Peach. Always in the other castle. 
But I think that was setting up for him to be the main focus in WW.
I mean I don’t know if WoW will ever have a main focus. Anduin couldn’t even really hold the Alliance together super well during BFA when Tyrande just did her own thing and so did Genn. Which makes sense because Anduin wasn’t even old enough to drink yet, ordering people who were older than him several, several times older.
No real conventional experience or wisdom to really see him through that. The idea of Warcraft is no one is an island that cooperation is the only real method of winning any conflict.
I don’t acknowledge Blood Elves as Horde as you guys tried to defect to the Alliance in Cataclysm, MoP, and BFA. Your race being so incompetent is the only reason y’all failed each time.
Sure, you’re right. Warcraft isn’t just one storyline. I suppose there are also different teams working on different parts of it.
The idea I’m trying to get across isn’t about the amount of spotlight everyone gets or how successful everyone is, or even how’s that portrayed in the game (some people still believe the Alliance lost the war in BfA, when it’s the opposite). It’s about roles.
When there’s a danger, the Alliance is the hero who saves the world. Their role is to be the beacon of hope, to suffer losses for the greater good, to fight the big baddie.
Meanwhile, the role of the Horde is usually to provide villains to keep the story interesting (and to provide some conflict for the Alliance to solve) or to just tag along as the Alliance solves the problem.
If you remove the Horde from Legion, the main conflict remains more or less the same. It’s still a conflict in which the main characters are either Human, Night Elves or Draenei.
BfA is a story about how the Horde suddenly becomes an evil faction (the blame gets progressively put on Sylvannas alone so the game can continue to exist, but it should have made sense for the Alliance to dismantle the Horde, which can be said about Pandaria too). All this so the Alliance can have an enemy and a motivation for war. They’re the good ones who are forced to defend themselves and then go on to save the world from the real enemy. One way to tell is to see who won the war. Of course the good guys won.
Shadowlands is, again, a story about how Alliance heroes have to save the world. Compare Anduin with Baine’s role. They’re both the faction leader kidnapped, but Baine gets quickly discarded as irrelevant and the story focuses on Anduin. Sure, it can be said that the real counterpart to Anduin is Sylvannas, but, then again, Sylvannas is the second in command for the main villain. Btw, the face of the expansion and character who leads the army of the heroes is a former Alliance hero.
While this expansion has been mostly neutral so far (the forces of good are led by dragons who don’t seem to take a special preference for one side or the other), this patch is all about the Alliance having to once again save the world and the Horde just kind of being there because this is a game.
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It’s definitely time for the Alliance to get similar treatment.
Have the Alliance tear itself apart, murder most of the important NPC’s, have Siege on Stormwind as a raid, etc.
And have it last a long time. Four expansions should do.
Oh, and nerf all the Alliance racials and buff the Horde ones.
And make sure Horde lore characters are front-and-center of everything from in-game dialogue to promotional artwork.
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Don’t remember this happening in Cata. Definitely in MoP, but it was the other members of the Horde that stood up to Garrosh. And we didn’t try to defect in BFA.
To the OP: the Horde burned down the Night Elves old world tree, now it’s time to settle up!
Yuck! That article was clearly written by someone who never played Alliance during Vanilla. Alliance does not have it better than Horde in the travel department in general.
Horde has several instances where there are two flight paths in one zone: Ashenvale, The Barrens, and Stranglethorn Vale. Alliance has one: Feralas. One flight point takes you to a remote island where the majority of the quests offered require you to go swim or take a boat to the mainland which takes forever. The other flight point takes you to an area where there are no quests and nothing of interest while leveling.
Several Horde settlements and flight points are generally located in the center of zones. Alliance has several instances where their settlements and flight points are located on the edge of a zone. The majority of your quests are given at that settlement which then tell you to go do stuff on the other extreme of the zone. Leveling while Alliance feels like playing a jogging simulator especially since so many quests have you playing messenger.
Horde connects all of their starting zones with Zeppelins so it is very easy to choose the race you want to play and the zone you want to level in. Night Elves have to make the horrible journey through high level zones if they want to level in any of the other Alliance starting zones.
Scarlet Monastery is a major dungeon for both Alliance and Horde in terms of quests available and loot. It’s located in a Horde starting zone near a major Horde city. Alliance has the option of going through an end game zone and then past a Horde fortified bulwark to get there or take forever going through lower level Lordaeron but still having to dodge Horde fortified settlements. Although Gnomeregan does not compare to Scarlet Monastery in terms of loot, Horde does have quests to do there. Are they required travel through Alliance fortified zones to get there? Not at all. They can literally teleport to the dungeon from Booty Bay which is easily reached by boat from Ratchet.
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Cool, and will you keep complaining once Alliance gets back on even footing with the Horde? It sounds like you want a one-faction game, you’re just too cowardly to admit it.
Horde’s primary problem is it just doesn’t make for good protagonist material if you’re trying to be heroic. Unless you put the elves on the box, but then you’re defining the Horde via elves. Is that what you’d settle for?
As someone who prefers Alliance and loves Night Elves, even I think it would be nice to see more non-Night Elf NPCs to interact with. The Emerald Dream is tied heavily to druids, sure you could say more so to Night Elves specifically due to their closeness with the green dragonflight, the flight charged with protecting the Emerald Dream. That being said it’s still druids who could regularly interact with the Dream. The most non-Night Elf druid NPCs I’ve seen was doing the quest where you put party hats on sleeping druids. I want to see more Tauren, Trolls, Worgens, and Kul Tirans that aren’t barely noticeable because they’re sleeping!
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Your race betrayed your Warchief again.
Did it in Cata, did it in MoP, and did it in BFA.
Blood Elves aren’t Horde. They’re parasites that would be Alliance if the Alliance trusted them enough to take them back after all their betrayals.
Garrosh and Sylvanas used the position of Warchief has a crude shield to hide from criticism and to justify their atrocities. That the position no longer exists to be abused that way anymore is a good thing for everyone in this faction.
Horde was fine until Cata came out.
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Uh, no it really wasn’t. Nothing, and I mean nothing in the Horde’s visual language portrays them as ‘heroic’. Hulking beastmen, sharp tusks, inhuman proportions, sharp edges, intentional distrust, and lack of technological prowess are not ‘heroic’. Since the game is ostensibly about being a hero, that comes across as a massive problem. Look at how many people now, within and without, regard the Horde as the ‘evil’ faction for nothing more than having a monstrous countenance.
Horde was so bad in Vanilla that TBC needed to throw them Blood Elves else the faction might actually have gone extinct. If the race had actually been Ogres, then Horde would have gone extinct because unless the Alliance got gibbering monsters of their own, the imbalance would only have grown.
Remember, the cinematics are meant for outsiders as well as players, and many outsiders will look at the sharp-toothed tusk-bearing hulking orc with confusion when they’re told that that is actually the hero.
Horde was always supposed to be the darker/more pragmatic/ruthless of the two factions, especially with the Forsaken on their side, but it was MEANT to be the Conan/Wolverine style of heroism, not King Arthur/Superman style of heroism the Alliance was meant to be representative of. Then at some point the game gradually decided that there could one and only one kind of hero, Anduin Chirst.
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Your post should be carved in marble for the ages to read.
The problem is Conan is still a Human fantasy, not an Orcish one, and Wolverine’s edge makes him unpalatable to anyone that lacks a certain preference. Wolverine is fine as a supporting character and even as a brief main character, but he sucks when he’s the full-on face of an effort.
Right… almost makes up for that statue out in front of Blizzard HQ… almost