Eh? That’s not applicable even when talking about WC3:TFT era Sylvanas since Nathanos is basically just a Dark Ranger, except human. By the point of BfA Sylvanas could move at hypersonic speeds, casually dismember people with bare hands, tank falling face first off a skyscraper sized structure, break every bone in someone’s body with her voice alone and that’s before speculating how empowered she got by the point CoD rolled around.
Tyrande having a fighting chance with the powers both were established to have specifically is not even remotely believable.
Except she was powerful even before the Night Warrior ritual. But ok, I admit that when you compare her “power set up” to that of Sylvanas’ you can see a huge difference due to the fact Sylvanas had more screen time.
From what i recall her biggest un-assisted flex was during the Stormrage book countering the Emerald Nightmare. Outside of that she spent most of her tenure as a damsel in distress for Malfurion or the usual hunter-priest multiclass spiel Nelves have going.
Usually, everything prior to her WoW presentation - when elves had more standalone theme. There’s number of feats that Tyrande was accounted for against stopping the Legion or making hard but decisive moves for survival. mobilising her troops swiftly after Legions invasion - waking druids and leading sentinels. She displayed pragmatism, going against the grain and setting best tool they had free, in detriment of having to slaughter her own elite squad, knowing full well the consequences of her actions down the road.
Later on taking her own stand vs undead and holding back the undead stranded ashore.
There was some moments when she fights Naga to save Shandris in Tanaris and the big part contributed in War of the Ancients, including whole Brox story. She always displayed grit and independence of her own mind, weather or not those decisions were best cause of action, is questionable, but traits that put her far from the lately conceived idea of leader with no direction - a.k.a. Damsel in distress, which was birthed in times of that horribly misunderstood and misinterpreted questline in Legion.
The Damsel thing was mostly in regards to Knaak using it repeatedly to move Malfurion along. (The most memorable example would be against Xavius in WotA trilogy) Legion if anything was an overcorrection by flipping that power dynamic on it’s head.
I’m not talking about the strength of her characterisation. (somewhere between inconsistent and incoherent) But about her power scaling, where my assertion is that Tyrande’s base is still the usual Night Elf hunter-priest thing, even if on the high end of it, in contrast to Sylvanas who started out as a highly skilled ranger, got turned into basically the third most powerful undead in Eastern Kingdoms and only ever got more powerful from that point onward.
I see, that clears up more things.
And thats true we have seen her grow. Those two characters were on different stages when introduced, with different flavors why would you root for them.
But still they are the very best for their usual fantasy class design. One is a phew phew Goth girl and other moon striking mommy.
What was the comparison you made originally for the two.
I like how Im getting myself involved into this elven discussion !
I agree with you that they’re the best for the fantasy they’re meant to embody.
In this thread it arose from criticism regarding the Ardenweald confrontation being a bit lackluster shall we say, where i don’t believe Blizzard put enough work into establishing Tyrande as a legitimate threat to that version of Sylvanas opting instead to have her derp around Thorgast aimlessly, while we solved all of Shadowlands’s problems and occasinally hear about random feats of other unrelated Night Warriors.
Yeah, the night warrior thing was brushed over and bit of failure. Overall as I mentioned Tyrande was already set up as being as one of the more powerful beings on Azeroth, plus one gods powers vs another god powers its potato patata.
The biggest disappointment was interrupted choking scene
I never got that impression from Tyrande, in terms of real power. POwerful for a huntress or powerful, for a priest? Yes. However she never really steps out of that mold nor surpasses it. Meanwhile Sylvanas is supposed to be nigh indestructible, have the physical power to tear people in half, able to reach supersonic speeds, be one of the smartest characters and able kill people with her voice alone.
The choking scene was ill conceived and kind of pulled the rug from under Tyrande. Would have been an easy fix too, if they just had Sylvanas fight her way from it say she punches Tyrande so hard she has the big tree collapse on her head and say she survived thanks to the NW’s power, but it delayed her long enough for Sylvanas to make her exit.
I don’t think either faction has to be destroyed… but currently, is that not what we’ve got? What is left of the Horde? They have no Warchief and is now ruled by some council full of elves (Valeera is there too and was she not BFF with Varian?). Calia (another alliance-leaning character) is also there and so far we don’t know if she is to be the new leader of the Forsaken or not. She’s kind of propped up to be but no one seems to accept it so maybe Blizzard is uncertain in their decision, and the whole matter is put on hold until further notice.
So the Horde is done and the faction barriers are gone, and any mention of the Horde will likely be there to placate those with too fragile egos to accept the fact that the Alliance won. Had Blizzard’s writing team played their cards better the Horde could have remained the dominant rival of the Alliance. I mean, what actions made by the Horde can the playerbase stand behind and defend as “good” actions? The Horde has been acting as a major villain in 2½ expansions (MoP and BFA, but you could argue that the Forsaken treachery in WLK counts as well).
God forbid that the Alliance ever tarnish their goody two-shoes reputation. The Alliance with their various monarchies are the champions of equality and diversity, whereas the Horde whose very identity was forged by rag-tag misfits banding together are made out to be the enemy. Now they barely even have an identity anymore. Everyone’s a good guy because having conflicts based on race/culture and territory is extremely sensitive. Sylvanas went cuckoo because she did not control her actions or something – there we go, perfect storytelling!
“For the Horde” has become a mantra that instills a sense of embarrassment. It’s very hard to rally behind that war cry when it is what the utterly dislikable caricature-esque characters were screeching in BFA during the War Mode quests. I can’t help but feel that the Horde isn’t just dead in the game’s narrative, but it’s kind of dead culturally as well?
Welcome to the club. Whoever liked the Alliance from the olden days has felt the same for a long, long time. It’s not that the Horde has become assimilated by the Alliance. It’s that Alliance and Horde have both been assimilated by modern rl values. The Horde was just a bit more downstream from the Alliance.
We have only one faction now, and that’s neither Horde, nor Alliance, it is “adapted for modern audiences”.
I don’t know. I guess because Night Elves used to be isolationist xenophobes who didn’t like people intruding on their lands. They weren’t bad but you didn’t wanna cross them, they were powerful. And night elves now are a meme. Homeless people with hippies for leaders and no direction in life.
I would say that wow´s more brutal things stopped whit WC3 already, yes we had some wars here and there, inlcuding arthas etc…
but in now way was it ever as serious as wc 1 and 2, the game and the chars became more light hearted, and more funny, even if there was some gloomy stuff still.
But in every expansion there has been more funny stuff also.
people started to grow tired or the old days, of war and stuff, and wanted something else, and we got something else, what is not a bad thing eighter, offcourse there can still be faction wars, but it doesnt have to be horde vs alliance, but instead horde and alliance vs some other nasty faction of npcs or so.
…While you bring them up… WC1 and WC2 might have gone all in into the brutal stuff, metal style, but just like with metal culture, that stuff was deliberately overdone, so that it couldn’t really be taken seriously. I never found the tone in those games dark at all. The mission briefing might have been metal lyrics waiting to happen, but the gameplay tone was set more by listening to the funny lines the units made, and exploding sheep. There was brutality, but it usually had no weight to it. No wonder, neithe the world, nor the characters gave players anything to be really invested in, emotionally.
WCIII and onwards tried to take character arcs and world building more seriously, which didn’t lend itself to the same exxagerated violence, but made what happened more cutting and personal. WCI+II could never have pulled off a purging of Stratholm, because it would have been a joke, and no one would have cared about it.
I would say WCIII and WoW were actually darker than the earlier entries in the francise, because they were made to hit harder. They were still pretty brutal, but took the brutality seriously, and gave us context. It was a world where violence was sadly common, and where heroes would still dirty themselves with striking down a peasant revolt in Westfall, or take bloody revenge for the death of someone’s son or a wife.
But we’re far from that era as well, now. At some point it was decided, that the world shouldn’t have some outdated mediveal morality, but judge itself by our modern moral standards. More and more the message behind the violence in the game was simply, that violence is bad, and that we are bad for doing it. We aren’t left to take that from the context, mind you, but instead we are told directly, again, and again by the characters involved.
And with DF we seem to be at a point where the devs find it safer to make the quests as morally simple as possible. We are the guys that help children, animals, and lovers, and bring knowledge and reason into the world. That might be better than doing questionable stuff, just so that the NPCs can whine about how bad it is, but it’s a whole lot softer than what we once had.
Of course the devs are allowed to make the game change and grow, and to choose their own audience. But denying that there were changes of tone within WoW, which might bring in new audiences, but are also pushing away some of the old audience, seems a bit ridiculous to me.
I highly doubt that, and I don’t think they had any numbers to actually point at interest in that stuff waning. But the devs certainly wanted to make something else at that point, and it worked. At that time.
Doing quests in this expansion makes me vomit. Every other character is a mellow Disney princess or a f****** f*****. Take me out of it constantly. When I play Cataclysm zones, I feel like I’m playing different damn game! That’s how bad it is.
You can’t compare cata zones to current DF zones, they are just superior.
Just put the Silverpine forest questline or the Ashenvale questline side by side with the Waking Shores or Ohn’aran Plains.
Althoug there are some good quests, like the ones from Thaldraszus.
