And like I mentioned earlier he could have easily completed this goal by just killing everyone with the full might of the Scourge. If he killed everyone than all the best and brightest would have been part of “everyone” and turned into his servants.
Not exactly. He would have killed everybody, but no guarantee that the best and brightest would have bodies left to reanimate. You send the Scourge they will rip apart everyone they can and without direction they would do more harm than good in achieving Arthas’ ultimate goal.
He needed to hold them back to draw the best in. To then kill them and ensure their bodies were kept relatively intact.
The scourge was commanded by generals and are all given the imperative by the Lich King to turn as many people into usable troops, not just… randomly grind their bodies into dust for no reason. It is not hard at all for the Lich King to send troops he directly controls or led by scourge generals or lieutenants or whatever to not obliterate the bodies of important targets. Just like he did with Sylvannas.
This is nothing but poor writing to cover up for plotholes retroactively. Even assuming he had this nonsensical grandiose plan to have some sort of Scourge utopia led by special, affluent death knights towards a brighter future… which is laughable, it implies that the scourge, out of habit go around obliterating whatever bodies they find, when they literally kept as many corpses as possible, stuffed them into meat wagons for safe-keeping and then reanimated them later on. That was standard scourge procedure. And that also further implies that Arthas didn’t have ranks of intelligent officers who directly commanded divisions of the scourge military, which he did. The scourge were not some sort of disorganized, uncontrollable horde, Arthas could control each and every one of them directly, if he wanted to, it would just take more effort.
I think you’re overthinking it. The Scourge generals and high ranking members did exist. Cult of the Damned existed to raise bodies, but quality control was Arthas’ goal. The bigger the army the harder the logistics. If he let them rampage even with coordinated generals logistically it would of been a nightmare to ensure everywhere being attacked was preserving the locals he wished to raise, but just because he had an eye for heroes as champions he couldn’t run the risks of bad logistics killing potentially viable enemies that weren’t processed in time or bad recruits being raised because chain of command issues.
I think you keep assuming that a global invasion even with great generals would be easy for the Lich King. He wanted quality in so far as he judged worthy and didn’t want to defer to the judgment or assessment of his underlings especially because of the scope that invasion would entail. Inevitably a highly focused assault to Light’s Hope or Quel’thelas led personally by him was far more favorable, but he couldn’t be both in Ogrimmar and Stormwind at the same time and would either have to pick one country at a time to invade thus delaying his goals even more and giving time for his enemies to plan against him and worst case scenario flee to areas that would be difficult for his agents to find them.
It’s a matter of logistics and he chose to draw them in for a campaign into his domain that the Alliance and Horde thought would work in their favor. (It did, but not because they did good planning, but Arthas was baiting them) He later would assess their forces around the continent that was effectively under his eyes. Not the entire planet and areas he couldn’t secure the best outcomes through delegation of his priorities to his generals.
Arthas also has a MASSIVE EGO. So, he also simply didn’t trust his generals and agents even if he thought they were good. He always felt he could get better, especially the champions that were in the Horde and Alliance. He also needed to verify these champions were worth it for HIM to accept in his ranks.
You have to also realize the ‘Scourge’ that Arthas was using to test these Champions were a test really and also a way to empower them so that they would be the super invincible Death Knights of ultimate power, its why he basically let’s Shadowmourne get made.
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Says who? Are you just assuming? The scourge was perfectly intelligent and capable enough to take care of “quality control” with little input from Arthas. Arthas would just have a few key targets that he would take care of personally.
This is again, assuming that it’s really hard to keep corpses raisable. The undead are not going around grinding corpses into dust… they’re just killing them and raising them back into the dead. Corpse destruction is not part of the equation.
If it’s a strong possibility that the scourge would lose an all-out war against everyone then that circles back to us not needing the Lich King to hold the scourge back, because Blizzard implies that the LK needs to hold back the scourge or else they would kill everyone everywhere.
This is far too much speculation for my taste… I’m fairly certain it’s just bad writing.
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