Give bolvar a break

he needed to step down so he could be our guide in the shadowlands bolvar let her win :wink:

when his flames are red his taped into his human potential TM powers when his blue his just the lich king clearly his human potential form would destroy sylvanas

And as was mentioned the helm was Nerzul, and Nerzul commanded and mind controlled the Scourge from Afar when Arthas was razing Lordaeron and raising Sylvannas.

So Sylvannas and every Forsaken have every right to hate the helmet >> Nerzul, because he resides in the helmet and merged with Bolvar as an entity.

So your argument of is different Lich King is invalid

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bolvar: “the world of the living can no longer comfort me”. Being Jailor: “this last act of service is mine to fulfill”. All the while he knew he had a daughter considering the timespan and her curent age.

So, she robbed him of this one duty he willingly took upon himself, for what? To open some portal? How does destroying a helm create a portal? The souls of the Lich King’s victims were suposedly contained within Frostmourne, not the helm as far as we know.

So yeah, this guy deserves a break, and I don’t even know how. I’m very curious

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Sorry to burst your bubble but Malfurion beat Saurfang in seconds during the War of Thorns

phttps://wow.gamepedia.com/War_of_the_Thorns#/media/File:A_Good_War_-_Saurfang_vs_Malfurion.jpg

So did Tyrande, sorry Varok is a mediocre warrior at best, so Sylvanas beating him is also not insane or unacceptable. However Bolvar losing has been explained and it is canon, nothing wrong about objectively speaking.

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To put out some stuff that people dance around and create convoluted reasonings to avoid saying it directly, the main reasons people are bothered about Sylvanas “defeating” Bolvar could be summarised into one big fact: More often than not, they either dislike Sylvanas character or simply like the “Lich King” concept more.

The Lich King doesn’t inherently make you a huge powerhouse by yourself. It gives you dominion over the Scourge.

Arthas’s ability largely didn’t derive from solely the mantle of Lich King. He also had Frostmourne.

Sylvanas, meanwhile, has been steadily gaining power since her demise - or so it seems to be implied.
In essence, she is about as pumped as Tirion was when he defeated Arthas (even if by a different energy). And where he had the Ashbringer to fend of Frostmourne, she now relies on more mundane ways to defend herself from “more mundane” weapons such as that new hammer Bolvar has.

Adding to the above people should note that Sylvanas didn’t really beat him in actual combat.
She spends most that fight dodging Bolvar’s hammer and running around avoiding his other attacks (she does get smashed by the chunk of ice out of the blizzard, and needs to dissipate before getting smashed into the ground, while Bolvar took a much larger chunk of ice head on and it only winded him a bit).

The only way she had to beat him, was by using a power borrowed from an ancient death god, and still only managed to use to to subdue and restrain.


Now, i’m not saying that the complaints aren’t in any way valid, or that the fight could or should’ve been shown in a better way.
What i do think, is that the matter is being blown way out of proportion, and that the circumstances around said duel facilitated a somewhat plausible scenario, even if it relied on a set of rather weird or “bad” narrative elements.

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good constructed arguments and I can see where you’re comming from. It’s true that I don’t like Sylvanas, but I credit that towards good writing.

My main point with this topic is the missery Bolvar has gone through and in the cinematic, I get the vibe that Blizzard simply had to side him for a bigger picture revolving around Sylvanas. So my hope is that we’ll get a more in depth storyline where Bolvar actually gets a break cause honestly, I don’t see any hope for him now that his single purpose is destroyed.

The fight itself could’ve been much less onesided. keep in mind the cinematic prior to this one showed Sylvanas easily owning saurfang without ANY effort at all, and he was a very loved character aswell.

If you get shown 2 cinematics in a row where Sylvanas seemingly effortlessly beats 2 very popular character, ppl take this as offense to those characters. There have been great battles between major characters that were not this unevenly displayed, like arthas vs Illidan, Thrall vs Garrosh or Cairne vs Garrosh just to name a few.

Yes mate play the ‘you hate women in general for having a different opinion’ card that always works

The issue is the explanation feels like it was made up on the spot, we didn’t even know of this power so it could have just been a retcon to retcon Sylvanas sudden power
Its not a statisfactory explanation because there was 0 buildup to it

I’m personally reserving judgment, hopefully they’ll dive into it a lot deeper in 8.3, they really should give away some more info on it or show more about it in general in 8.3

The you hate women because you dont like the story is a weak play tho, shame

That’s because it more or less was.

The explanation goes back to Edge of Night and that novel doesn’t mention it, not even in passing.
If it had, Sylvanas couldn’t have gone two steps before someone would wonder if this had been part of the unresolved pact plot from that novel and we’d all seen the powerup coming from miles and miles away.
This is, plain and simple, a retcon.

And the entire arc relies on that retcon. A retcon that contradicts her own thoughts and motivations from as early as the start of BfA.
And worse, it even retcons events in BfA, such as the angry wisps when the Horde tries to resurrect NEs in the Darkshore intro. Wisps are NE souls and those should have been stuck in the maw.

To make matters worse, they also retconned the origin of the Lich King armor and Frostmourne in the process to facilitate the “link” to the Shadowlands, which suddenly punches a plot hole into Frostmourne not devouring the Nathrezims souls.

That said, I do agree with Zarao that for many people, it likely simply boils down to a general like/dislike of the characters.

I do think however that it cannot be overstatet just how bad the writing of the whole thing was.

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What explanation was there for Tirion to suddenly be able to break free and smash Frostmourne to pieces? I mean, the setting present prior, literally went with ‘The Light is almost non-existent here’.

I’m sorry, but almost every fight has been contingent to some script.
And personally, i think this one holds at least some merit in the fact that Blizzard cared to signal a progressive ramp up for Sylvanas, that went from battling Malfurion, to Saurfang, and finally Bolvar, with the whole ‘leeching souls from the Shadowlands’ thing.
Whereas Tirions victory came with some rather apparent Deus Ex Machina.

To add to the above, i’ll repeat that i fail to see the big fuss of all this, given how the fight was portrayed as Sylvanas repeatedly avoiding direct combat, and only being capable of using that “Super-power” to snare and trap someone that could possibly squash her flat if he landed any blow.

I didn’t think the fight was onesided.

I saw Sylvanas running around, peppering Bolvar with arrows while at it and forced to dodge devastating blows that Bolvar could take head on.
I didn’t see the fight as Sylvanas “owning” him.
To use a simile, i saw it as most Dark Souls fights, where players need to dodge, run, and deflect blows that would probably insta-kill them if they got hit.

I’ll repeat, that for all her “power” she didn’t actually manage to kill him. She could just pin him down, and remove the remaining source of power he had.

And while i’d probably have issues too, if Bolvar was a character of my liking, or if i hated Sylvanas, even if i would definitely tweak some stuff, in essence i didn’t have any problem with the combat being as is.

To be fair, i was more bothered with the Saurfang one where at one point the animators had Sylvanas blocking a two-handed blow from Saurfang. With one arm. And a single dagger.
Those details are indeed irksome.

But the way the cinematic played out for Shadowlands? Not really that bothered. Both characters played their strong points, and the setting wasn’t one that broke immersion either way.
Personal preferences regarding characters aside.

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Sylvanas gave Bolvar a break…a break in his helmet.

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The light has done some miraculous things before, which is kind of the whole thing with the Light.

Unlike with what we have now, in the case of Tirion, there definately was existing grounds for it.

Light is one of the most powerfull forces in the game, the fact that there is no holy resistance or light resistance is imho not a coincidence but something that was thought out for example

The issue here is that the power that Sylvanas wielded was not even defined until that moment, the light has been defined as a force to be reckoned with since the warcraft strategy games

I’m not saying it was good writing, it felt kind of lame when we downed the lich king that Tirion got all the glory while all he did was afk in an icecube until he decided to bubble and crusader strike Frostmourne but I don’t think you can easily compare the two scenario’s purely based on the fact that the light was already present ingame and already had a reputation of being able to do the impossible through faith

For me I like Sylvanas as a character, but I also feel like she’s being put on a pedestal by the developers themselves that she simply couldn’t have lived up too without retconning, that’s my main issue with it.

I also still feel like 8.3 could hold some more of that, for all intents and purposes I’m trying to not forget that there’s still a whole gap of story content missing between what we know now and that cinematic (8.3 and 8.3.5) that will hopefully make it better

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I liked Illidan character before legion. He was idiot, bad and evil char, he was enemy, but wtf they done to him in legion is unforgivable.

Maybe theres more of an explanation in 8.3? i.e. we still have 8.3 patch and a pre-expansion patch to go through.

8..3 Spoilers! What if, with us 'killing N'zoth' in the 8.3 raid Sylvanas manages to absorb the soul of him with the powers the jailer has given her?

With this cinematic happening after 8.3 is it feasable to suspect Sylvanas is wielding the power of an old god and hence why shes suddenly got such a power up?

no mortal can wield such power.

But she is no mortal? Shes a banshee and is being helped by an entity potentially older than Azeroth itself (i havent done any reading into who/what the jailer is)

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Current Sylvie and Steve Danuser’s self-insert mary sue are the worst things in WoW. It’s worse than peak Thrall.

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Undeads are still mortal race.

True. But wasn’t the whole issue with Arthas, that the Light was weak/nonexistent around ICC?

And Death has always been present too. We saw what it could do through the likes of Arthas himself.
We had powerful “Dark” or “Undead” casters, even if we had never seen them battling each other prior.

In all, and given the portrayal of said fight, I’m not that bothered about it. Or at least, I don’t see it in any different way as I’ve seen other villains go down in previous fights.
Regardless if they went down before Thrall, Malfurion, Velen, or Tirion.

Because yes, regardless if people like it or not, and personal preferences aside, the end goal Blizzard seems to have regarding Sylvanas, is one that has them pumping her with “Death power”, much like the previous examples use Elements, Nature, Light, or Void. (I personally don’t like it at all, specially because of what entails for both her character and the ones she has represented until now).

Once someone accepts the above, the scenario itself isn’t that irksome for me. Specially given how it’s portrayed.

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Shes a banshee which is purely a spirit being (in the lore from what i can see banshees are incorporeal undead = ghosts and spirits of the dead). She just takes the form of her old self.

Cant see anything that states banshees are mortal/age with the passing of time. For the forsaken its only their bodies that rot and age, their spirit just moves from body to body via use of magic which looses part of their personality/memories each time they inhabit a new shell.

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She is limited, she was rised from elf.