I played through the whole Harandar story and Hagar’s questline about Teldrassil’s burning roots, but I can’t remember it being mentioned at all that we, as the Horde, were maybe just a little bit responsible for that. I did the whole questline with my undead death knight just thinking am I going to have to pull her to one side and say ‘Look, the tree had a serious Night Elf infestation and we might have got a little carried away clearing it up. My bad’.
But seriously, it feels so wrong to have the Haranir as an allied race when they have absolutely no idea that the Horde burned Teldrassil. I really feel that this elephant in the room needs to be addressed and resolved in some way in order for the Haranir to ally with the Horde. I don’t think you can just sweep something like that under the rug.
I don’t know if I missed some dialogue or something (sorry if I did), but it really feels like there’s something missing in this story.
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The lore has been dead for a while.
Don’t bother thinking about it.
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Shhhhhhhhsshh don’t tell them until they teach us druidism !
after we can tell them and buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurn them
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portraying teldrassil burning down as a negative would involve holding sylvanas windrunner truly accountable for her many crimes, something various iterations of the writing team seem unwilling to do…to the detriment of the story and coherent world building across the board
kind of sucks that whenever it is brought up it’s a way to shame horde players despite the fact that it was almost entirely on sylvanas’ rotten shoulders
oh well
i’ll just continue to roll my eyes whenever her brat of a nephew, arator, glazes his war criminal aunt
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Don’t think they really care. A side quest with Hagar definitely shows she does know what happened, but I don’t think the haranir are arrogant enough to judge what the people on the surface are doing (or rather have done) politics wise - at least not previously. The young ones now joining might think differently with time.
It’s a problem with the audience being very split and diverted. On one hand the OG core warcraft fanbase loves this whole Alliance vs Horde theme. On the other hand, Blizzard thought that Factions were bad for gameplay reasons, so they set up the lore in a way where cross-faction content is the norm, while very gameplay-oriented endgame players appreciate the improved QoL.
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True. I started playing in BC and I love Warcraft 3, but I do like that they’ve been able to set aside a lot of their grudges and make peace. But I think that it’s important to show that resolution in order for the various factions to move on. Just sweeping massive things like that under the rug for the sake of easy gameplay just feels like poor storytelling.
Yeah, maybe Blizzard simply hasn’t decided yet to commit to a permanent decision. The faction situation is still reversible, but if they commit to a big story arc getting rid of factions and resolving all the prior conflict, it will become irreversible, and wow would be a game without Horde vs Alliance. I don’t think they want that, as “Warcraft” as an IP is too big to be sacrificed for retail wow gameplay, if that makes sense. Game theory wise, what would be their dominant strategy? Probably to commit to neither direction, as they can only lose from removing faction relevance in wow lore in my opinion, while the wow gameplay has gone too far into cross-faction to pick up these stories again. Blizzard would be best served to save faction conflict now for spin-off games.
I think it would be possible to keep both factions with their own distinct cultures and keep them at peace instead of just homogenising them into one big group, but I guess it’s a fine line to walk.
Or wow just becomes the frontier of the marvel-avengers-type of storytelling inside the Warcraft universe, while Blizzard can release spin-off games or other media to tell the smaller stories of faction conflict, etc. So basically the clear path they have is to make players join these larger-than-life orders/councils that are cross-faction, while the small peons on the ground still do faction conflict, etc. That’s how I would resolve this situation, by splitting the players from the factions rather than making the factions befriend eachother. This way they can adjust wow naturally into the cross faction storytelling without ruining the lore and the franchise for other games or other potential media outlets.
That does sound like it has potential, but I’d hate to have to buy every single tie in just to get the full story like with Marvel.
In any case, we’re getting a little off topic here. My point was we should probably let at least Hagar know what happened to the tree. Could be resolved with a quest or two, or a ‘stay a while and listen’ to at least address it.
I still find it funny that of all Trees Teldrassil that was burned down through use of regular fire is the one irreversibly and absolutely destroyed when… TWO Trees got corrupted by Old Gods and Legion respectively and Nordrassil freaking blew up and their roots were apparently fine.
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That is a really good point and I had not thought of that. That genuinely makes no sense whatsoever. What the hell kind of fire were we using?!
Fire of all Sylvanas’ simps desire to please their Queen.
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Haha! I’m a lifelong undead player and used to find her a really interesting character, but the character assassination of BFA and Shadowlands was just way too much. Betraying her own people to team up with the guy who literally orchestrated everything bad that’s ever happened to her is just about as far from the character as you can get. The war crimes on the other hand, yeah, that’s pretty on brand.
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Hey now, this is basically slander.
We burned the tree. You never see any fire on the roots. The roots are just fine, and if anyone asks… that what we’ll say.
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Ah, of course, and we were just testing our nice new de-icing tools ready for winter and the tree just happened to get in the way. Totally not our fault.
Just like She deserved. But alas she was too popular and she had to face consequences.
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Did you do all side quests? There is literally an entire quest line where you meet the Teldrassil keeper and she tells you about her feelings since the tree burned down. You even put out fires from the Teldrassil roots…