That was not an occupation since the goal was immediate and clear extermination, same goes for that village in Gilneas since there was no pretense of keeping the civilians alive just using them until they died.

Are you just trying to prove that you can't read?

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Didn't some other datamined dialogue imply that it is unravelling? There is a reason Eitrigg implied that even if they wanted to, these mag'har would never be able to return.

In any case, even if it isn't falling apart due to its timeline, Draenor still seems to be dying. So it being more than mindless religious seal still applies.

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Before The Storm's story manages to piss me off despite hormone-induced rage-mouth-gag. This is exactly the kind of story i want to happen but i don't even need a disturbingly elfishly named human to tell how it ends; i already KNOW how it ends because Blizzard has their collective cocks stuck in the Faction War Meatgrinder and interesting plotlines are simply not allowed.

Nah, it's just the other heinous shit they do that makes them Evil and Textbook Villains.

I feel you : / I've been wanting some diversity in the Forsaken storytelling for ages, there is so much potential there that it is a crying shame that 95% of what we see are loyal Sylvanas flunkies who do horrible shit for kicks.

Some thoughts I had on this on another place:

And:

I have to say, I'm actually a little disappointed that night elves flock to Stormwind of all places (and not just because it's yet another example of SW hogging the spotlight). Wouldn't the next logical place to go to be Hyjal? Or Winterspring? Or even Ferales?

I hope Anduin knows what he's getting into by opening the doors to homeless nelves. The homeless population would skyrocket, the economy would be shaken by the increase in population, and what about food for all these hungry mouths? I can't imagine the people of Stormwind would take kindly to this change.

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It would be interesting to show tensions between the humans in nightelves, with the humans saying "We don't want these free-loading elves here!" "The King sucks for bringing them all here!" and clashes happening between them. But blizzard will never show anything in the alliance going against Anduin.

To be fair, it's not clear just how accessible those places would be for large numbers of refugees. With Azshara, Darkshore and Zoram (i.e. western Ashenvale) in Horde hands, the unoccupied coasts of northern Kalimdor are basically all impassible mountains and cliffs.

One might point to somewhere like Feathermoon Stronghold in Feralas (assuming it's not being overrun as well), but even with them being night elves, frankly dumping a wounded, dispossessed urban population in what amounts to a military base in the wilderness seems like a recipe for a lot more dead refugees.

In the same vein, Azuremyst and Bloodmyst don't seem particularly suited to supporting the sudden influx of that many people. Plus there's the whole thing where Blizzard will erase entire cities and demolish entire zones in the old world, but really doesn't want to ever change or fix anything about the TBC-era zones.

Yeah, the Exodar wouldn't be able to support all those people, and Bloodmyst is still a wreck.

I dunno, Blizz seems to love the tragically misunderstood character, if Sylvanas is anything to go by.

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The mission tables suggest that the Night Elves remaining hold on the continent is stronger than this, as well as that some refugees are being evacuated to Azuremyst. As for cliffs making other areas difficult, that's still easier than an entire contested ocean. Finally, I don't think it makes sense to call this an "urban population" as we would think of that in a modern sense. These are elves who are multiple thousands of years old who have lived on Teldrassil for no more than twenty years. There should be no issue with going back to how they lived for a span of time longer than we in the real world have recorded history, especially not if the older themes that people actually like made a comeback.

This isn't about any of that, just as Teldrassil wasn't about anything meaningful in the first place. Night Elf refugees are in Stormwind purely to gin up sympathy and get Alliance players "motivated" to fight the Horde, just as the Teldrassil incident was writ large. That's all. It doesn't have to make sense and they certainly don't care about the damage it's doing because that objective supercedes everything else.

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I say we see the refugees in Stormwind because it's the most visible place to put them in-game, but it's more probable that there's groups of them all over Feralas, Myst Isles, Wetlands, Elwynn, Gilneas and so on.

Scattering the population diminishes the resources they'd drain from a single place.

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So, before the storm. You got any thoughts on that?

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Yes, but at the time of the evacuation, it likely wasn't clear how much land the army had managed to hold on to, so it was safer to evacuate to relatively safe places places like Stormwind and Azuremyst.

Even for night elves, most of Kalimdor's terrain isn't easy to traverse through, and that's without the threat of marauding Horde fighters or having to defend a large (and long) refugee caravan. You don't want to risk a night elven Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.

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Azuremyst makes sense to me. Stormwind does not. The last I checked, they have a serious problem accommodating their own people if Westfall is any indication. Azuremyst doesn't have this problem, has a sizeable forest, and is surrounded by fishable waters. The Draenei also don't appear to be terribly densely packed on it. Nor do I see them experiencing Stormwind's documented resource problems, or anything close to them.

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It's fortunate that both night elf and undead refuges won't take as much resources as other races would.

Undead, for the obvious reasons: they don't have bodily needs.

Night elves, because their nature allies and druids will probably be able to help grow food and wood for their needs. May not be enough to sustain the population, but it means less stress for the Stormwind economy.

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It will be a time of prosperity! cheap labor that will work in the field producing more food than ever thanks to thier druid skills

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Pumpkin pie for everybody!

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WoWHead elaborated on Ian's article for BlizzPlanet.

http://www.wowhead.com/news=284410/t...eroth-spoilers

In essence, they made maps that show the areas controlled by each faction in the war:

http://wow.zamimg.com/uploads/screen...mal/736086.jpg
http://wow.zamimg.com/uploads/screen...mal/736085.jpg

Edit: Sorry, the images were too big. I've changed to links instead.

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Some. Aside from my overall distaste for the faction conflict overall, I'm mostly reserving judgment, but a few things:

1.) The Calia resurrection thing could work. I'm irritated that they're utilizing the Menethil/Throne of Lordaeron angle because I've always felt it was a dumb idea, but I'll find it extremely bizarre if she's revived as an actual Forsaken-style rotting corpse, complete with half-decayed body parts and whatnot and just different eye color to set her apart. I can see the Light raising people as something somewhat other than what they were in life, perhaps along the lines of the Valarjar (the non-Stormforged ones, that is), but there's something "off" to me about the Light's reanimation just mechanically spitting out a rotten meat puppet full of ichor and exposed bones the same way Decay/Void-based necromancy does. The quirks of how Scourge-style undeath "works" has always seemed pretty specific to the nature of the magics involved and the whole focus on Shadow, disease, etc.

2.) I'm not particularly averse to the idea of attempted reconciliation between some Forsaken and their living families; it arguably makes more sense now, in the wake of Legion's cooperation between previously faction-interested characters, than the faction war itself as it seeks to cram those same characters back into mindless "patriot mode."

3.) Anduin even needing to wonder what happened at the Broken Shore is silly. Legion is utterly packed to the gills with powerful neutral or less hardline factional agencies and characters who would know from their Horde associates what really went wrong and have every reason in the world to make sure the Alliance found out about it and get back on board the cooperation wagon, so the idea that it still remains this big point of miscommunication and contention by the time of BtS is pretty idiotic. Khadgar or any other member of the Six could solve this point of friction with two five minute conversations, but instead he's just sidelined and silenced so everyone can be deliberately kept ignorant. It's dumb on the level of Alexstrasza keeping her mouth shut about Bolvar's fate at the Wrathgate and thereby helping to perpetuate faction hostilities during a war with the Scourge for no reasons that ever materialized.

4.) It's also kinda pitiful that Anduin only just now will figure out that some individuals just plain aren't ever going to change their ways, after the sheer scope of the bullshit Garrosh continued to pull with his unrepentant declarations at his trial and after his escape in War Crimes after Anduin's attempts to change his mind. I get Anduin still struggling with judging the whole Horde, but it should already be completely clear to him that some individual people just plain will not be swayed from doing the wrong things.

5.) With her actions, priorities and machinations, along with even Nathanos seeming rather aghast at parts of it, it would seem they're making no bones about Sylvanas instigating this thing, and while I have no problem with that by itself, it reinforces my distaste for the whole war because as with Garrosh, it necessitates that the story insist upon treating the Horde players like morons who willfully spend an entire expansion doing things they know they shouldn't be doing, then spontaneously heel-turning when it's time to pretend they had nothing to do with it. From a narrative standpoint the faction wars in particular have established a standard in WoW of not respecting the intelligence of the players, and from the look of things both in BtS and in BfA Beta, they seem intent upon continuing that precedent. They think appealing to mindless team partisanship is a perfectly serviceable way to make people ignore that they've just been made into villains and/or willing facilitators of villains again, when frankly its just condescending and more than a little disrespectful. They seem to think they can separate Sylvanas' villainy from our own actions as they thought with Garrosh, but when we obligingly do as we're told by the bad guys while knowing what we know, that makes us culpable in the minds of any player who's not a completely irrational apologist. Following that up with no implication of regret or lasting cost to the player further cheapens the whole affair. I'm certain any number of Horde players would have been glad to truly make things right for what Garrosh had them do and emerge as the heroes who fixed their Horde, but instead they were handed a "nah, that wasn't really you" handwave, and it feels an awful lot like we're being set up for that same treatment again.

I'm still debating whether I want to order it or not, but frankly that uncertainty is more steeped in doubts that have predated the preview than any new information therein (doubts that have similarly stayed my hand on ordering BfA up to this point as well.) I just have a hard time caring about this expansion's premise. Even notwithstanding my basic opposition to a faction war on principle, having one right after Legion in particular seems like the worst timing to ram it down our throats, and the more I've heard out of Alpha and Beta, the more I've felt like this expansion just plain isn't meant to appeal to people who aren't hardcore faction partisans. Just the bald-faced ramping up of the "trust us, you don't actually know what you want" attitude intruding upon the story when it was previously kept in the realm of gameplay makes it feel like the devs are tired of hearing player dissent and don't want me or people like me in their game any more.

Moreover the excuse that "your character doesn't know this stuff" just doesn't work. I know they'd like it to, but it doesn't. Not with the type of game WoW is and the way players so often identify as their characters. When the players can read BtS and know what they're doing is wrong, it doesn't matter if you insist that their in-game self is ignorant of that; a lot of them will still feel like they're being strung along, treating like fools and made to act in ways they wouldn't act. Treating players like that just strikes me as disingenuous and wrong.

Then we can apply the same argument for them needing to move at all.

Either way, we will never settle this. We're not going to get numbers or concrete information about production and consumption sufficient enough to settle the issue. We're also not likely to get information on what's safe and what's possible, and even if we did, those matters are still reduced to what the writers want to portray.

When I look at the images, I see them wanting to portray displaced and defeated people, and for the record, I don't like that they've done this with the Forsaken either. It's not as bad because they don't have a long history of being portrayed as helpless victims, but I don't think it fits them either. I think these portrayals undermine their respective playable races - although again, due to the histories, one far more damagingly than the other.

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Via the Mission Table...

I have no problem with the mission table system as a time sink/leveling up mechanic like some do, but as seen with Legion, story-wise all it does is let them pretend there's a huge war going on without it ever remotely feeling the least bit like there's a huge war going on.

99% of the stuff on the Legion Mission Tables felt irrelevant because it should have been quests in-game. If they didn't think there was time to make the ultimate war to defend all of Azeroth from the Burning Legion actually take place all over Azeroth, then they shouldn't have fucked around turning massive concepts like the entirety of Argus, multiple other planets and destroying the Burning Legion into one pathetic patch and actually showed us the story they said Legion was supposed to be.

Kind of odd that the Night Elves fled to Stormwind rather than Azuremyst.

Why flee to a tiny island?

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When the weather is clear they can see the horde on the horizon, bathing on the ashes of Teldrassil