If we got one, it would just leave open questions about Putress and the Scarlet Crusade, and then they’d need novels too.
It will turn into this unending stream of novels, all to make sense of things that were untought out.
See, I really don’t think this is the cast at all.
Blizzard will occasionally mention that a character of a certain faction was in a fight, but it’s the playerbase who takes that tiny nugget and extrapolates it in such a way that totally discards the other faction’s experience.
There’s a certain amount of abstraction going on in every fight. It’s not actually the case that a heavily armored guy spends 10 entire minutes getting continuously cut up while healers continuously stitch him back together - that’s just gameplay mechanics. It’s not an honest portrayal of what fights look like.
In my view, faction-exclusivity is part of that abstraction as well. It’s not actually the case that for every major battle in the game’s history, one faction sat on their thumbs and did nothing while the other actually invaded the enemy’s lair. The mechanics of the game demand that, but an more honest portrayal would incorporate both factions to various degrees.
The Horde and Alliance both fought at ICC. Both experiences are valid.
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That’s hard to square for the raid at least, where one of the encounters is making sure the other faction doesn’t do the raid.
And a lot of Varian, Jaina, and Saurfang’s development requires that the Gunship battle end in a Horde defeat.
Gilneas was technically not Alliance Garrosh just wanted it so that aspect is offensive but not the start of the war technicly. However Sylvanas knew what the Alliance were planning and that they were on the offensive so using the blight to destroy them is defensive.
Given that a fleet of this size takes a lot longer to gather than ground troops means the Alliance was moving long before the Horde was moving in Ashenvale.
The Horde was really caught by surprise if you look at it. The Alliance make deep incursions into Horde territory in many areas even Durotar and Mulgore are under attack.
No idea we don’t have a perfect timeline for everything.
Given it was the landing point for the invasion Sylvanas may have destroyed it before we just don’t know for sure. However the Alliance forces in WPL suggest that part of the fleet landed as planned and moved into position before Southshore was destroyed.
I do not remember any of this and I’ve looked at Alliance WPL stuff under a microscope. I don’t remember them mentioning Soutshore at all and I remember being weirded out by this.
I have no idea where you’re even getting this Alliance fleet stuff from. The original plan for Southshore in Cataclysm was to have it destroyed by a tidal wave.
Its in Edge of Night (https://worldofwarcraft.com/en-us/story/short-story/leader-story/sylvanas-windrunner) and the Forsaken side of Gilneas.
The TLDR is the valks give Sylvanas visions of the fate of the Forsaken which show the invasion of Lordaeron by the Alliance. In the Forsaken side of Gilneas we uncover battle plans detailing the change of plans from attacking Lordaeron to defending Gilneas which prove those visions were not a lie at least.
I don’t remember this bit. Can you link that?
That’s a vision from the Val’kyr which is kind of eh to rely on objectively, but even then I don’t think Southshore was mentioned, just Andorhal.
The visions are sus but they did come true. Garrosh was in the process of throwing the Forsaken away when Sylvanas returns and the Alliance did send the 7th Legion to take Gilneas and Lordaeron. This is likely another reason why Sylvanas started to believe the Jailer. The best way to sell a lie is to slip it in with truth. Its also why she just said screw it blight everything. She knew the end of the story and was desperate to change it.
Southshore is not mention but it really is the only way to get an army to WPL for the Alliance at the time. The Forsaken are guarding the way in from Arathi so by process of elimination it leaves SS as the only place which means they landed and left before the forsaken blighted it.
Eh. Not exactly. There’s a tunnel from Arathi to the Hinterlands and no Forsaken guarding it. A land route from Ironforge to WPL via Arathi and Hinterlands is pretty easy to see.
Additionally, those forces in WPL could have arrived any time before Southshore got Blighted, because we don’t have a chain of events.
WPL is really weird on the timeline because apparently the Alliance also didn’t know that the Forsaken had Val’kyr and were surprised when they were deployed even though the zone is a higher level than Silverpine.
Thats a long way to march with no attacks on them. Also they had half a town built so they had to have got there rather early in the war.
I guess you could chalk that up to lack of advanced communication. This is a semi middle age setting. Then again the silly mailbox toy quest in Dal exists.
The Alliance was providing logistical support to the Argent Dawn since Vanilla so the Argents were probably reciprocating in some way.
The only place they’d really have to worry about that is in Arathi, and they’d be well away from the Horde outposts there the entire time. Wetlands are Alliance controlled. Hinterlands, they’re nearly at Aerie Peak when they leave the tunnel. From there, it’s the same March as a SS one.
Coming in from Southshore, they have to pass Tarren Mill.
If anything, the Arathi route is safer.
That’s why I’d suspect it was done well before Southshore and Sylvanas’s Hillsbrad takeover.
Well all of EPL is dangerous and they have a lot of equipment in tow to build a town. Horse and wagons are not exactly fast and feeding them could be an issue through EPL.
But that would put Varian plotting the attack even earlier if he is sending an army over land to WPL in time to build the town.
Tarrren Mill is busy with the Stormpike and the Frostwolves refuse to help they sat out the war. The Dwarfs could provide good cover though if you wanted to get an army through the pass.
They wouldn’t need to go through EPL though? Why would they go through EPL?
I sincerely doubt they’d be too busy to care about an army marching right by them.
If you take the path from Hinterlands to WPL you cant go west you have to go east around Darromere lake into EPL. The river is way too deep to cross with wagons there.
I guess if you go south enough you could try crossing near Chillwind Point though.
You couldn’t take the main road but you could go directly north to Darrow Hill next to the cave and only have to worry about a few yeti. From there its a mountain road in Alterac to WPL and you would have Dwarf help.
This is how I’d imagine they get there. Just double-checked it on my druid, and it’s not onbly a pretty safe and easy trip, you totally avoid any possible contact with the Horde.
Except then you either have to keep pushing through Alterac and deal with the Syndicate, yeties and ogres, or go west past the Frostwolves where you’d come out still close enough to Tarren Mill for a whole army to be kinda visible (but the distance is enough that if the forsaken there are being kinda dumb, they won’t notice you). Having a brief time amongst those dwarves isn’t that helpful, given the threats to the journey come after you’ve left them and they don’t exactly have fortifications to support your troops. Aerie Peak does.
You could go east and just circle around Alterac altogether. You do still go through Syndicate terrain and the path is narrow at points (for an army, that is) and skirt the edge of Strahnbrad, but the majority of it is much safer and clearer, but you’re doing an awful lot of uphill climbing without roads or paths. Very small Horde outpost there, but nothing really of note Horde-wise.
The biggest problem is logistics. The path I outlined gives resupply and rest points throughout the Wetlands, in Refuge Point (for whatever that’s worth), Aerie Peak and finally Chillwind, with most of the journey on established roads.
Yours only offers Chillwind and dwarf encampments. Next to no roads, lots of nearby enemy outposts, lots of field travel, lots of uphill climbs (also without roads), and includes forces hostile to both you and the Horde. Using the best case scenario, you avoid the enemy outposts (save a very small one) but exchange it for a narrow crossing that would slow you down.
It also relies on Southshore not being watched for massive troop movements by the very close by forces in Tarren Mill, which we haven’t bothered to address. And it leaves open the question of why these forces wouldn’t instead be sent to sack Tarren Mill to build a reliable supply line from SS to Chillwind to Andorhal, which is such a basic strategic move in this scenario.
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WPL was all kinds of ridiculous.
Not just the Alliance forgetting about the Valkyr but also the Argent Crusade seemingly not caring whatsoever that the Forsaken are replaguing the very land they cleansed & raising people into undeath in their backyard.
There’s also the awkward thing where the Alliance forgot they had Paladins of their own during CATA and never uses them against the Forsaken.
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If ever they remake EK/Kalimdor again, I wish they would add the battlegrounds to the actual world map! I really hated the fact they were instanced off somewhere.
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The novel keeps it vague enough that it’s still SORT OF her fault, but also not. She is well aware of the blight production and definitely encourages/oversees it’s completion. Putress kind of just leaps on something that she says that is open to interpretation. I don’t want to go back and find the exact passage, but she eludes to something along the lines of not caring about casualties of the blight as long as Arthas is killed in the process of deploying it.
At the end of the day, it was a coup though. She didn’t care about Wrathgate as a whole in terms of casualties, but it’s clear that it wasn’t her plan to just blight everyone for funsies.