Killing baby druids makes one a big damn hero? Odd standards for heroes you Horde have…

http://media.mmo-champion.com/images/news/2012/march/thejadeforest.jpg

Look at the two locations that stand out for you on these PANDAREN MAPS.

New Taurjo, and Hellscream’s Hope.

Yeah, it’s going to be a Meg episode. No one would blame you if you touched the clicker.

Whoops, I mean Garrosh.

Garrosh is good for the horde, Thrall is bad for everything… with any luck he’ll get the poochy treatment and we’ll never hear from him again.

Seriously though, if the horde wants to start tearing itself apart, the scab to pick is Sylvanas not Thrall. (But I hope they don’t do that either, cause’ they’ll fail miserably at that too, I bet.)

Now, as has been suggested azaael, if Garrosh is not in Org, if indeed he’s already been deposed and say, has decamped with a group of loyalists to the top of Dreadmist Peak, then I can see the Alliance and Horde doing essentially the same raid with the only difference in lore being the identity of the assassins who finally take him out.

My Horde main also likes Garrosh, he’ an actual warchief, and the best one around now that Thrall went all mary-sue Jesus Orc. Besides, if thehorde doesn’t collapse under his leadership, it wins. Gilnean and Gnome homelands are lost, so they’re essentially useless in the war. Draenei aren’t in the game anymore…(I think? Haven’t seen any since BC). The Nelves basically lost everything in cataclysm…. So all we have to fight are dwarves and humans.

No, Garrosh being the raid boss is just bad storytelling. My Ally characters want to retake Gnomeregan and Gilneas. Get Danath outta outlands and back in Arathi. Find out where Turalyon and Alleria are. Send a boat to Kul Tiras and find out what’s going on. Establish a War Council and boot out/execute Warchief Wrynn. As for Pandaria? Let the horde have it, the allies have WAY bigger concerns ATM.

Seriously on the war council.

Velen – Ethical compass
Dwarf council – Logistics, homeland relations.
Tyrande – Kalimdor War General
Genn Greymane – Eastern Kingdoms War General
Mekkatorque – R+D, tech guy
Danath (Varian can die somehow) – Supreme Commander
Jaina – Ambassador/horde liason?

Just a quick summary of how they could perform ACTUAL FUNCTIONS as equal members of an Alliance. I mean seriously, they’re called the alliance, I’d like to see that be reflected or changed to “The oppressed city-states of King I-wish-I-was-an-Orc”.

No matter how hated a leader might be he is still YOUR leader and while you might rebell against him you would never join your hated and sworn enemy to do it.

And there has to be some reason the alliance is wanting to fight. Say garrosh kills the SW king or prince. The Horde and alliance are now in full blown red hot war. You may not agree with Garrosh killing the guy but would you turn on your own people? Are Horde traitors?

Except they were protecting bread quests about major pieces of Horde lore. The entire reason for the Forsaken existence got resolved in a minor five man with ‘Oh, he’s too tough for us, let’s run away and let the humans solve it.’ and that’s the end of it. There’s no denoument for the Forsaken. Just running like cowards and having paladin save the day. The Tanuka is hardly the equivalent of the lore, story and proto-cutscene rich story of the return of the missing bronzebeard. Even the redemption of the Sunwell boiled down to a speech about how awesome the Draenei were.

The writing has always been bad because video game writing is generally made as they go along. The only difference is that the focus has shifted to the Horde story in a way that it hasn’t before.

http://childrenofwrath.blogspot.com/2011/10/misteps-in-cataclysm-misfired-story.html

I wrote that 6 months ago, when I spoke out against using factional conflict as a story line. I predicted the escalation of the conflict, and the fact that Blizzard doesn’t really have any other options at this point. I’ll give you the short version:

The Horde has been rolling the Alliance on all fronts. They’re pretty much unstoppable. The Alliance looks weak and disorganized. Back during the faction favoritism backdraft, Blizzard stated that they understand that for the health of the game both factions need to be viable and interesting. If the Horde collapses under internal tensions, then the Alliance is essentially castrated, they’re seen as the inferior faction that only survives because the Horde defeats itself. So therefore, the Alliance has to stand on its own and turn the tide of the war, because we know that the Alliance can’t loose the war. Once this happens, the Alliance will be in possession of a war machine that’s even more unstoppable and powerful than that which the Horde currently possesses. Think of it like Japan and America in WWII, once the Americans turned the tide at Midway, the war was over, we just needed enough people to die to make it official. So now the Alliance has a ridiculous war machine that threatens to crush the Horde, we know that the Alliance can’t loose, but we also know the Horde can’t loose. So, how does the Horde survive the onslaught of the Alliance’s newfound power? There’s two options, either the Alliance stops itself, and the blizzard hopes that interest in the Horde as a faction sustains itself based on the ridiculously skewed story of Cataclysm, or they come up with some ridiculously hackneyed Deus Ex Machina to save the Horde.

Either way, it’s horrible writing, because the writers didn’t take the nature of the medium they were working with into account before they started laying the foundation for the story. They can’t really drag the war out any, because it’s already at comically excessive extremes. The Horde is depopulating cities. They’re committing genocide in the story right now, and apparently they’re going to do even worse things in Mists, and there really isn’t anywhere else to go after that. If the war was still a bunch of brushfire skirmishes like it was in Vanilla and BC, you could drag it out a long time, but there’s a reason why the War in Afghanistan has lasted over a decade and WWII only lasted six years. Total war is unsustainable. You run out of people to kill.

As for the faction leader, they mutilated Staghelm’s story for the greater glory of Thrall in patch 4.2. In 4.3, they had Thrall give morality lessons to Benedictus, who was the Human Faction leader in patch 1.4.1.

Southern Barrens ended for the horde with the players blowing up the oldest Dwarf settlement on Kalimdor and assassinating the General in charge of the area in revenge for Camp Turajo, an assault that most of the Horde casualties were due to the Quilbor whom the Horde had been driving to extinction. The Alliance players in Southern Barrens go from hunting down an orcish warlord who skins Alliance soldiers and wears their heads as hats, to arresting human looters at the wreckage of Turajo, to finding out that the General who intentionally sparred as many Tauren lives as possible has been murdered, to being in Bael Modan as the Horde destroy it, to trying to keep their hands steady as they pour one last drink past the charred lips of the dwarf who had been giving them quests earlier to take the edge off his imminent painful death, to returning to Northwatch Hold as its being overrun by the Horde, and the defenders have been pushed to the point of firing silverware and dishes from their cannons because they’re out of ammunition. If you haven’t done Southern Barrens on both factions, I suggest you experience the Alliance side, it’s nothing but gut checks the whole way.

@Simon

Malfurion is neutral. He’s very poorly portrayed. He’s so neutral that he’ll stand by in Darnassus and watch as the Horde comes to murder his wife. He’ll even greet them if they click on him. He never says anything against the Horde since his implementation in WoW, and it’s extremely out of character from the the way he was portrayed in WCIII.

Also, I’m not sure what game you’ve been playing if you think that the Horde hasn’t been doing anything prior to Cataclysm. In BC, the Horde got a huge quest involving Garrosh and Thrall in Nagrand that there was no counterpart for on the Alliance side. Not to mention that the entire BC storyline was about the redemption of the Blood Elves, to the point where even the Alliance’s new racial leader was used merely as a plot device to advance that goal. Meanwhile, on the Alliance side, the Alliance racial leaders did nothing else, and the human racial leader bounced between Bolvar, Benedictus, and Anduin, who was a level 5 character at the time.

In Wrath, the Horde got a ton of compelling quests, they got closure for the forsaken, the induction of the Taunka, the storming of Azjol’Nerub, the sisters in Grizzly Hills, the relationship between Saurfang and Garrosh, and Sylvanas’ quest for vengeance in the 3.3 five mans. Of all the expansions, Wrath was by far the most balanced in terms of storytelling focus.

The problem with the story in Cataclysm is well, everything. Blizzard completely mangled it. The put the spotlight on a horribly written character, they glossed over way too much. they nuked 6 year old storylines for the sake of a cheap boost for Thrall. They completely imbalanced the factional warfare story which is directly seguing into the problems that people are seeing with the upcoming MoP stories. Blizzard bricked themselves up like they were looking for a cask of amontillado, and now they’re stuck with this route.