To touch on that topic, in the Sylvanas novel they point out that Sylvanas had first reached out to Thrall to bring the blood elves into the fold during Vanilla and Thrall was successfully convinced of it:
“Everyone needs someone who believes in them. I believe that once their pride is restored to them, they will repay the Horde’s investment a thousandfold. They will rise to the level you think them capable of. And so, Warchief, I believe it is best for all involved, including the Horde, to think them capable of the greatest feats you can imagine. They will not disappoint.”
She thought of Rommath’s skills, of Lor’themar and Halduron and the Farstriders; of the craftsmanship of the quel’dorei artisans, and their passion in whatever they turned their hand to, and allowed herself a smile. When she spoke again, it was with the complete truth.
“They will not disappoint you at all.”
But Lor’themar rejected them due to bad blood with the Horde. It wasn’t until the desperation caused by time started to catch up that Lor’themar finally agreed to hear them out ca. TBC.
Vol’jin, Cairne and Thrall went to the Ghostlands to meet with Lor’themar and Halduron with Sylvanas as the middle man. Vol’jin and Halduron have a neat exchange about trolls and elves trusting each other and how both are uncomfortable with the idea – Halduron was the one who captured Zul’jin and took his eye after all. But they’re willing to give it an honest try out of a sense of duty to their respective people if Thrall and Lor’themar can find mutual ground. Times change.
Later in Cata Vol’jin and Halduron lead the expedition into Zul’Aman, so that’s a nice little touch.
As mentioned previously, there were some specific terms that Thrall imposed on the blood elves and Lor’themar imposed on the Horde in turn that both leaders agreed to, but Sylvanas tuned out and wasn’t paying attention. What we do know is that once they actually got Thrall and Lor’themar in the same room, they found mutual ground very quickly with Thrall sympathising with their plight and seeing the lethargy of the orcs in them. The biggest obstacle was getting Lor’themar to meet with Thrall in the first place.
Also Lor’themar was the right hand man of Lireesa because Alleria was unreliable and Sylvanas wasn’t even an afterthought for the Ranger-General yet at the time. If there wasn’t an imminent threat that required the Ranger-General’s attention, Lireesa was fine with delegating certain duties for Lor’themar to deal with. He was just friends with everyone.
Less edge, less experimenting on POW’s, less cultish reverence of the currently fashionable god-queen.
So completely soulless, but with potential to be more actualised, diverse people I guess. Unless they fall down the pit of becoming human, but grey skinned.
Aren’t they already? I mean the Forsaken haven’t done anything humanity hasn’t done before them!
The Dalarani magi attempted to cure the orcs of their fel lethargy (experimenting), they keep hanging on to their worship of Light (yes even human magi revere/worship the Light), they’d willingly fight and die for their royalty and if Gilneas and Alterac weren’t edgy I don’t know if the Forsaken are!
It did take Genn meeting with Alonsus Faol before he was willing to admit he misjudged them, but it’s not just the military of the Forsaken that worships Sylvanas. Large swathes of their population did as well - Dark Lady watch over you is amongst the Forsaken a saying as common as King’s honour is in Stormwind.
The Forsaken were as responsible for the burning of Teldrassil as the orcs, trolls, goblins and even tauren were. It was a joint effort by the Entire Horde.
Definitely this, though. That’s why I think they’d be independent of either side if they ever left the Alliance.
Does the book go into any detail whatsoever as to why the forest trolls were not consulted/approached until after the Blood Elves had already joined the Horde as a potential member?
Also why would Vol’jin have issues with trusting high/blood elves? At the time it must have been rare for a Darkspear member to have even seen a high elf.
The Revantusk didn’t join the Horde until Cata, before then they were merely distant allies of the Horde. Also. https://i.imgur.com/IOYUXz0.png
He’s surprisingly apologetic, all things considered, telling the troll ambassador to keep his chin up in the hopes that one day in the future the blood elves will look at the Darkspears as allies without thinking of the Amani.
Tatai, the troll ambassador, is pretty stand-offish in the face of it all. He’s insulted Lor’themar doesn’t have the time to meet with them, he finds the widespread blood elven usage of arcane magic to be something that ought to be shut down immediately.
Part of the dialogue these ambassadors can have is them talking about how something feels off about Silvermoon: the trolls calls the city huge, and wants to know they need so much empty space. Kelemar responds it is empty because of the horrendous loses the elves suffered during the Third War - Tatai responds by calling it a big waste of space.
His fellow ambassadors tell him off more than their elven counterpart.
I was thinking specifically about Zul’aman, since the patch trailer makes it seem as if the Horde is offering the tribe a place within it but Zul’jin is (understandably) outraged that the elves are already members. Twice as odd because some members of the Revantusk tribe seemed to hold Zul’jin in very high regard but there was no development on how they felt about the whole situation.
The trailer shows the Horde arriving at Zul’Aman to presumably sack the city, you even see some of the same Horde characters inside of the raid itself in the following scenes.
They did, yeah. Zul’jin is revered by all of the forest troll tribes, but since the end of the Second War, all of the tribes in the Hinterlands that actually remained loyal to Zul’jin’s memory have actively attacked and raided the Revantusk. We can only assume they were fine enough with the blood elves, since they joined the Horde after the elves did.
Remember that time there was a big magic black hole inside the nexus in coldarra and the best we could do was slow the inevitable? That’s a concern. The hole was still there around Legion when we got our artefacts.
I come bearing magical lore, my friends. This time from Night of the Dragon. Some highlights:
To dispel a spell, one must find the right thread which unravels the pattern of the spell’s matrix to expose its source, then disperse it. One could simply ‘rip it apart’ but the more powerful a spell is, the more they resist this and it takes an equal amount of power to undo it. Methodically unraveling the pattern is the surest way to dispel something that’s too powerful to brute force. The description of the process reminded me of the arcane web thread world quests in Nazjatar. Every mage weaves their spells differently on some level, and this is reflected in the pattern of their spells when perceived through arcane senses. Understanding how someone weaves their spells helps you undo their spells in the future, as you’re already familiar with their pattern. This also helps identify who cast a spell from the latent energies, through the Law of Sympathy.
There are arcane scrying wards that don’t block the scryer from peering in – but they prevent the scryer from leaving, essentially trapping their mind in the location, exposing their body to harm. A mage as powerful as Krasus couldn’t escape the trap once he triggered it, leading to him almost getting owned by a crocolisk that found his body in the Wetlands. In a similar vein, some creatures who devour magic only need to access the spell link to drain their victim, so if your mind is trapped with a ward like this in a room with a devourer and you’re unable to sever the link? Dead mage.
Related to the passage above, the longer the distance and larger the area you’re trying to see at once, the more powerful the scrying spell becomes and therefore more mentally taxing. Exceptionally powerful scrying spells can fry the minds of the weak willed. The more powerful the scrying spell becomes, the easier it is for others to sense your invisible eye. The meta would be to get as close as possible before scrying.
There is a curse which affects the victim’s perception of time, tricking their mind into believing that they’re frozen and minutes turn into an eternity. Your body is still fine, you live and breathe as normal, but your perception of events is slowed down to an excruciating eternity. We see something similar happen in Fallhaven in Drustvar where the villagers are trapped in time – but the world moves on around them as normal. Rats eat their food, pigs go about their business, but the villagers perceive themselves frozen in time. I headcanonned it the name ‘Curse of Eternity’.
For a dragon to disguise themselves as a mortal in a way that passes the detection of a mage’s arcane sense, they must actively suppress their aura and only maintain their disguise. Any active spellcasting will reveal their massive aura and expose them for what they are, lighting them up like an invisible beacon. Masking a dragon’s magical presence is not an easy task.
The black dragons worked on an artificial disease which sterilises mages from magic, deafening them to it – picture the Tranquil from Dragon Age. They planned to release it on Dalaran, but it backfired on Sintharia. Dragons are described as being living embodiments of magic, so sterilising a dragon off of magic basically folded her out of life. The plot is believed to have been foiled and no further attempts have been made since then.
There’s a herb called Morrowgrain which is usually used as an ingredient in primitive curses to slowly erode someone’s body to death. By itself, the herb is quite a potent if insidious killer that’s difficult to detect and identify as the source of the ailment (and therefore making an antidote difficult) – druids can sense it in their bodies (but even then Malfurion almost missed it), and magically concentrate it to a single point which can then be vomited out.
It’s also possible to magically enhance the properties of Morrowgrain to guarantee a “slow but certain death”. It took Elune’s power to keep the curse at bay long enough for Malfurion to come to and purge the poison from his body, though it’s noted that even Elune can’t keep it at bay forever, and eventually the herb would have won through attrition.
Druids can also sense if a toxin they’ve been infected with is lethal or not. When Broll got drugged by poisoned thorns summoned by druids loyal to Fandral, he could sense the poison was only intended to incapacitate him before he lost consciousness.
In the same novel we also get introduced to Steelgrass, a type of leaf that druids weave magically to create cloth, and this cloth is so durable it can’t be cut even by a Sentinel’s glaive. As we saw in Wolfheart, a Sentinel’s glaive possesses some sort of enchantment that allows it to penetrate armour easier. The only way to undo a Steelgrass weave is to sing the song that was used to weave that specific cloth – thankfully Broll and Fandral were both taught by the same teacher, so he could guess Fandral still uses the same technique and thus Broll knew Fandral’s weaving song, implying it’s personal to every druid.
Druids also make armour out of ironwood that like its name suggests has a bark that’s as tough as iron*, but they prioritise using naturally fallen trees for this purpose instead of chopping them down so as to preserve the balance and create no waste.
I have probably said it before, but I like to mention it again.
In Eversong woods, early one in fact, you help a researcher by the name of Apprentice Mirveda in collecting samples from the dead scar.
she mentions the energy in the soil draws the undead to it, and it has disrupted the lay lines, already making it clear the dead scar never was just a case of blighted land, but something far more damaging. Never the less you collect the samples, because she wants to know if the soil can be cleansed.
Sadly this is not the case and she concludes the soil itself has been altered to such an extend that it cannot be reversed.
One could perhaps argue one apprentice to a wizard could be mistaken and the soil can be fixed, but we haven’t heard of anything else since (to my knowledge) so as far as the canon is concerned the dead scar will never be healed.
Anduin is apparently in his early 20s, according to the new Sylvanas book. He was born in year 15, and WoD started in Year 31, so he would have been 16 years old at the time.
So, that indicates that Legion, BFA and Shadowlands lasted a bit longer than a year each, at a minimum.
