Since the start of Legion we have taken out Kil-Jaeden and Sargeras who up until that point had arguably been the biggest threat to the universe. In my mind, we never should have been able to take them out. They, along with Elune and some others were the distant, constant threat. The thing that kept the story in balance.
There were stories of forbidden powers such as the Night Warrior, as soon as they came into reach (even if it is of an NPC) the entire balance shifted and a bigger threat was needed. So now, in order for there to be another threat on the horizon, we get hints of other cosmic forces and of course ‘it was the dread lords manipulating stuff all along’.
There is a reason that most decent fantasy stories essentially end with the final confrontation of the big bad. Yes, some have an epilogue tying up loose ends.
Those Night elves that fought under the darkened moon of Darkshore were imbued and blessed with the power of Elune.
It was explained in the dev video that clarified how the black eye customisation (and the Army of the Black Moon), came to be.
And it was again referenced by Tyrande herself in the Darkshore finale.
Its the main factor that explains the Night elf arch involving Darkshore. And the main reasons it featured an ending with NEs being victorious in said warfront.
As for:
She is referenced as essential for the Ardenweald campaign, to the point that we as players end up going after her.
As to how she became instrumental, its thanks to her that Ardenweald is defended from the Maw armies, and then is thanks to her bond with Elune, that the Winter Queen is capable of using her as a vessel to comunicate with her sister and create another tear of Elune as substitute for Ardenweald’s sigil that was stolen by Anduin/Zovaal.
The power boost that actually just exists in your assumptions. Neither did the army of the dark moon anything that required supernatural might, nor did Blizz explicitly ascribe any superpowers to them. And the only time we got to see Tyrande in action was against Nathanos. Someone we had no reason to think she needed Night Warrior powers to defeat, considering her and Malfurion were the one element that Sylvanas thought might be a problem in the war of thornes, quite a while before her empowerment.
So we have a power-up, that didn’t make anyone do anything especially impressive, and that wasn’t established as necessary for any of the tasks the empowered characters did. So… yeah, that’s kinda nothing.
Beating Sylvanas would have been something… but since Elune didn’t allow that use of her power to come to fruition that was kinda nothing as well.
It’s nothing anyone cares about. People care about their revenge, but if the whole of Shadowlands popped out of existence and was never mentioned again, I doubt many people would regret it. So it might as well be nothing.
I suspect that in the end the powers will also be used to grow another home for the nelves… And that home will certainly be something. Doesn’t make the Night Warror arc useful, though. If the Night Warrior had the power to do that all along, the whole arc is just a useless detour. It’s not even helpful for Tyrande as a character, since her anger was essentially just magicked away. We could have had that from the start. Sparing Sylvanas would have been a character moment. Letting go of her rage would have been a character moment. But being stopped and being drained certainly weren’t things she had any input on or lessons that she learned.
So yeah, I’m not especially sympathetic to nelven whining… but cut the Night Warrior ascension out of the Night Elf arc, and nothing really changes. It was useless.
(By the way… I certainly get that they were wary of Malfurion saving his strong independent wife from emotion-powered self-destruction, but they kinda forgot to replace that with…well, anything.)
Some players would sacrifice the entire planet and all living creatures that delve in it, for the chance of spitting on Sylvanas corpse.
That doesn’t negate the fact that saving the universe is a big deal narratively speaking.
People can grasp at anything they want but it’s just being disingenuous at this point.
Blizzard spelled it out quite clearly, that the ritual went BEYOND Tyrande herself.
Darkshore was overflowing with visual cues about a more aggressive and powerful NE army.
And this, without factoring the literal explanations targeted to clarify such.
Be it in a “meta” mean such as the interview, or the finale that has their leader proclaiming how affected they all were by said magics.
Again:
The change [Black Eyes] occurs over time to any night elf fighting on behalf of Elune while under the darkened moon in Darkshore
And then:
Tyrande: Victory is ours this night! Tyrande: Elune has given us the power to save ourselves!
It kinda does. In a narrative, it’s always feelings first. Saying it’s important is totally irrelevant, if no one feels it.
It doesn’t matter. If the job is to carry 1kg, giving the one with the task the power to carry 10kg is irrelevant. The army DID nothing that they needed those powers for. So they mighht just as well not be there in the narrative. It’s USELESS.
First up, if something has to be clarified and explained in a dev video, then the story telling has failed.
Without the Night Warrior buff, both Tyrande and Malfurion are canonically powerful people. It was night, the time when the NIGHT elves are at their most powerful naturally. Again, I don’t believe the Night Warrior added anything to the situation, if it did, it was minimal.
With regards to Tyrande being essential for the Ardenweald campaign. We are talking about the realms of prophecy because again, she’d done little but become a conduit for Elune to speak.
She took down one mob before setting her sights on Sylvanas. I’ll be charitable and say it turned the tide somewhat but I think that is overselling it.
Tyrande is a priestess of Elune and prior to the Night Warrior was recognised as one of her favourites. I don’t think she needed the Night Warrior power to allow Elune to speak through her.
The Winter Queen references having asked Elune for help, clearly prior to Tyrande showing up there was some means of communication between them. The Tear of Elune making a new Sigil, OK that’s fine. But She managed to produce a tear not so long ago without Tyrande’s aid.
The Night Warrior has so far only undermined previous lore, it was supposed to be a destructive power. Making it a creative restorative power, changes its nature entirely.
Having Elune step onto the stage and look weak in the first encounter changes the perception of the Goddess, it destroys the mystery. Every time they bring in a new more powerful entity into the fray, they raise the stakes. We’re at already the stage where Blizzard are completely ineffective when it comes to telling the story in game and adding more layers and complications will make it even more difficult.
A more satisfying story would have been,
Tyrande stomping around looking for vengence, maybe even screaming at Elune for not intervening.
A character moment where Tyrande lets go of her anger -whether it be because she failed to kill Sylvanas or because someone gets through to her doesn’t matter.
*Some confirmation -a vision or such that Elune comforted the dying Night Elves (the only reference to which I can find in game is talking to Astaari in Ardenweald),
*A confirmation that Elune does not intervene in such things as the burning of Teldrassil, and that once they had passed she tried to syphon the Night Elf souls into Ardenweald.
That keeps the big power ups in the background, we don’t have one race with a massive advantage and some measure of closure for Teldrassil.
Satisfaction doesn’t nulify the narrative importance of any element.
I can assure you, that some people would’ve found far more gratifying if Thrall had used his World Shaman status to level down Stormwind and annihilate the Alliance armies.
But that doesn’t mean they can now proclaim his arch about using such powers while killing Deathwing was “for nothing”.
That’s sort of debatable.
After all, the take home message from Darkshore was that they managed to kick the whole Horde army out.
Again, I’m sure that some diehard NE fans will argue that having a single race beat on the armies of several, single-handedly, is an easy task if the one involved is the NE one.
But yeah…that’s debatable at best.
Having them do so through a magic boost ties a few hanging threads that otherwise would be make the whole deal rather questionable.
The narrative was a pointless, unimportant detour.
Both can be true. If Tyrande’s powers were needed to huggle the uggleduckl, and we are never explained what either of these things are, her powers are important to the pointless, unimportant narrative. Since no one cares about that story, though, it’s really unimportant and should be cut out. It’s not a good thing that the plot people cared about introduced powers that were only used to huggle the uggleduckl.
The Night Elves managed to get one zone, while the Horde forces were spread all over the world. There were no statements that it was impossible. The game depiction made the Horde and Alliance forces totally equal, in numbers, as well as powers. So nom, there is nothing debatable about it. Blizzard gave us no reason to think that it wouldn’t have worked without the ritual. They didn’t make the warfront a “few buffed elves vs many weak hordies” thing. And they failed to tell any stories about it outside of the game. And you pulling reasons out of your head that were never stated or shown anywhere, doesn’t matter at all.
If we were to take the Night Warrior out of the equation, the scenario should’ve been simplified in order to scale things down.
As in:
-Night elves didn’t battle the whole Horde army in Darkshore, but just the Forsaken.
-Tyrande wouldn’t have been shown as carelessly waltzing through the Maw, and instead was taken prisoner like Jaina and Thrall were. Leaving the rest to develop similarly as to how it went Live.
-Her defence of Ardenweald and the Elune interaction would’ve required a different plot device to play as Elunes mouthpiece. And we’d probably have to remove the NE relevance out of Ardenweald’s destiny.
etc.
Would the above feel far more gratifying? I’d bet a ton of gold that it would.
But the story told was a different one.
Just as the Zandalari have to now play with the cards given, as in “Well now, we are to bench our raging hatred for the Proudmoores i guess…”, then the NE’s had a different narrative path.
And honestly? If you think that a plot targeted at “feel good moments” such as turning a leader into a heroic figure, and having an explicit questline meant to give resolution to a faction war, is something to be taken negatively, i can say with all certainty that the scenario left for the rest of races involved is much worse.
Honestly, i’d kill to have a similar story play for the Forsaken. Or for the Zandalari.
Both of whom have been “wronged” by the story in a similar way, only they are to now walk it out without any sort of resolution in the foreseeable future.
It’s fairly easy to adjust the troop numbers in an area, especially in the context that there was a battle at UC
Thrall and Co. were kidnapped before we all jumped in the Maw. No reason she should have been kidnapped in the first place. Fairly easy to explain she was running around Kalimdor looking for Sylvanas
Her sole contribution to defending Ardenweald was killing off one mob before going after Sylvanas. She could have done that without the Night Warrior power up.
The story told did not need Tyrande to have additional power, especially when that power failed to accomplish anything she couldn’t have done without it.
There was very little gratifying about the story told, the moral of which seems to be (and I’m taking this from the cinematic) that victims should just accept their lot and move on with rebuilding instead of seeking justice/revenge or anything on the scale between.
-That is not a particularly good narrative given Blizzards current predicament, is it?
Where are the feel good moments? The Night Elves got one zone back -I don’t mind them being on the back foot and losing ground. It wasn’t the decisive victory you seem to think it is. Tyrande killed Nathanos, it was a nice cinematic but not really a ‘feel good moment’
Tyrande is not a heroic figure. She went crazy with grief and anger (which is understandable) and went chasing after Sylvanas. Is that heroic?
I assume the questline that is meant to give resolution to the faction is the main campaign quest line, which appears to be leading towards a redemption arc for Sylvanas (which is a whole different discussion). That whole plot line relies on blaming another force for a characters actions.
I am not suggesting that because of what happened at Teldrassil, the Night Elves should be allowed Carte’ blanche to go stomping over the horde, nor should they have the power to do so (even if said power is not wielded in a destructive way). I’m OK with them being left to sulk because Anduin refused to aid them in taking back their homeland.
Elune didn’t need to be brought into the mix. It would have been quite easy to explain that she does not intervene in events such as Teldrassil because of the potential impact it would have. As I said before, putting a big player like her on the stage sets up far bigger stakes in a far bigger arena and quite frankly, Blizzard are failing to communicate the story they are already telling in game. If Tyrande continues to wield the Night Warrior power even if it is not in a destructive way, we have another force in the mix which is essentially a nuclear bomb, while the other side have little more than canons in comparison.
Players should not have to delve into books or lore compendia to understand what is going on. Right now, key moments in the lore happen out of game and the story-telling suffers for it. Blizzard will tell their story the way they want, that doesn’t mean that players who are invested in it shouldn’t criticise what they are doing.
