She was in the Horde right up until she killed Saurfang in front of Orgrimmar and said the Horde was nothing. She was quite centric in BFA but so were Genn and Anduin, she didn’t really dominate the narrative until Shadowlands when she became a mutual villain. Subsequently Tyrande was very prevalent in Shadowlands while still remaining part of her faction and yet the Horde had to quest with her and Jaina constantly. Alliance didn’t really team up with Sylvanus post Legion.
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My problem with neutrality or bipartisan storylines is that they typically skew toward being Alliance heavy expansions where the Horde is just sort of tagging along and never in a meaningful context.
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It could, and I have no real problem with that. Any faction conflict would be player-driven, like it was back in the day.
Yes. The Horde is the punching bag.
The Horde gets one victory…then loses the entire expansion
The Horde only “destroyed” Undercity as a last ditch effort because they were the punching bag the entire battle. Whatever plan they had was immediately undone by the Alliance. Multiple times.
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And yet, the entire narrative was the Horde in control of what was happening. We even eliminated our own capital, it wasn’t the Alliance’s doing. It took until Dazar’alor for the Horde to finally, actually lose on terms that weren’t our own.
We made the Alliance look like morons three times in the span of an expansion; first at Teldrassil (aw man sure wish someone could spare a ‘Mass Teleport’ scroll right now, oh well guess I’ll just let all these Nelves burn in their sleep because their goddess can’t be arsed), then at Stormwind (just doin’ me a casual BnE in what’s supposed to be the top-of-the-top jail in the Alliance and breaking out two critical Zandalari members), and finally at Undercity (aw shoot they still got some Blight left? we didn’t prep for that even though when Forsaken are in the mix that always pops up, darn it!). At least their deus ex machina worked during the third time so we still had an Alliance to fight.
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The faction war is fine, it’s how it’s been written over the years. We fight each other until we have to fight the world ending boss. That’s what is outdated. Not the concept of the faction war.
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But destroying the capital wasn’t an A. It was because Plan A,BC and D all failed.
Undercity was undeniably a loss for the Horde. They did not want to lose. They did not want to destroy Undercity.
We eliminated our own capital because we lost in every way possible. If we didn’t lose, we wouldn’t destroy it. That isn’t a victory moment for the Horde. That is a loss.
How did we make the Alliance look bad at Undercity when they continuously out played us at every point in the battle?
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Which is why it’s so baffling to see all the “a faction war would be fine with better writing” comments all through this thread. Where is that writing supposed to come from? You could give the current writing team unlimited time and resources and the best you’d get is BFA 2… if you were lucky.
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Did they? We came damn close to killing the High Alliance leadership right then and there. Again, if Jaina doesn’t show up with the boat, Anduin and a huge majority of the Alliance army are dead and the Alliance war machine is broken. Remember, the Alliance failed their objective too; they wanted to capture and reclaim Undercity. We were able to force a draw because the Alliance was incredibly stupid and forgot about the plague weapon they’ve seen at least three times already and didn’t think to bring mitigation or protection.
There’s no way to spin Undercity as anything but an Alliance screw-up of crazy proportions because nothing should have been a surprise.
Player counts started to drop in Cata when Blizzard forced Horde players to be the heel.
As they increasingly made Horde players be the heel, they kept going down.
When they stopped creating Horde content at all, the drop increased.
People like playing Horde.
Horde is what always separated WoW from all the other Generic Fantasy MMO’s.
Blizzard craps on the Horde playerbase at their peril.
Sylvanas was not central to BFA. As a Horde player you spend about 100 times more gameplay doing stuff for Magni than you even see of Sylvanas.
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Maybe for WQs, but the storyline was dominated by Sylv and Rastakhan Horde-side.
Specifically, because God-Empress Jaina showed up.
Whom we “killed” in the previous expansion when she was a raid boss, but Alliance so she never goes away because of all that plot armor.
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And yet the ‘God-Empress’ could only make it a draw, not a win. So yes, a battle that was the Alliance’s to lose they lost. Hard. Nothing at Undercity should have been a surprise, yet Anduin and the Alliance seemed to have literally zero intel on the situation to the point where they were surprised at Blight weapons being deployed.
When Yrel gets back we’ll solve this faction problem once and for all. #purgetime #oohlightsobright #isthatahammerorareyoujusthappytoseeme
She was centric in the sense that she was a plot driving force in many of the in game cinematics and being talked about throughout both War campaigns, the intent of the comment was to point out that she clearly didn’t “Dominate” the spotlight in BFA and Shadowlands as a member of the Horde, as Gigabear has stated.
Agreed about spending far more time working with Magni as a Horde. At this point if you’ve played the game it’s glaringly obvious that the Horde are shoe horned into questing with Alliance leaders far more often than the contrary. Jaina, Tyrande, Anduin, Magni. The level of what equates to forced in game interaction, is hardly precedented on a player by player basis.
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Doing stuff for Alliance characters goes all the way back to vanilla and questing for Tirion Fordring in Plaguelands.
Don’t forget Brann Bronzebeard in Wrath! And he’s coming back in TWW as our Delve companion.
They couldn’t even be bothered to make a Horde NPC for Horde players to Delve with.
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Ah yes. How dare neutral Paladins be comprised of races that could be Paladins in Vanilla… Which were entirely Alliance at the time.
Seems like a stretch if you ask me. I don’t think this is the case at all.
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I wouldn’t mind a return to the faction war if they were able to make it believable. But I doubt they are capable of that.
I’ve been pugging a lot of low keys on my alts. Nobody cares about what faction they bring into their groups. This is strictly a Brewa fixation.
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