Was there ever really a "bad Horde"?

HAahahahahahahahahaaaaahahahahahahahaaaaahhhhhhaaa a!

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http://bloodinkworlds.tumblr.com/

Just "Badass" "Totally Rockin'" "Misunderstood" "Savage" "Good Intentioned" "Underdogs" apparently. Evil things you do without drinking demon blood that are identical to having drank demon blood are different because you didn't drink demon blood and thus not evil.

It's pretty hilarious, they could have just taken Draenor back from the Ogres, even the Draenei and have been the conquerors "fighting for their freedom" and not gone on this whole dumb dark portal thing that really makes little sense to begin with. Especially since Grom's been shown along with the Elements what fucking happens when you dick around with this portal business and has been filled in on how shitty going over there goes. But Grom is to s̶t̶u̶p̶i̶d̶ smart and misunderstood for that apparently.

I wish they would think for one god damned second what they are trying to sell us on. Are we supposed to be pumped on how "Good and Cool" the iron Horde is to kill them, because that's honestly been their attempted selling point for this whole thing, less "Lets kill these guys because they are evil and a threat" and more "lets kill these guys because they are fuckin' sweet yo." The Lords of War, the cinematic, the words that have surrounded the concept of this expansion all tell a very very awkward story from Blizzard's standpoint marketing wise. It's pretty embarrassing.

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“Listen to the Chair Leg of Truth! It does not lie!”

So since they've pretty much given everyone a free week of play, I decided to test the waters to gauge how I'd like Warlords first-hand.

My impressions so far:
- I main a Frost DK (though only because they killed Blood DPS), so there really wasn't anything meaningful to take note of on the class changes front.
- I blew through the Blasted Lands quests in a few minutes, and was not particularly drawn in by them, but I'm not going to count that against the expansion since it's pretty much aimed more towards getting the boosts up to speed.
- I can see what they were trying to do with Timeless Isle, making it a bit more like a sandbox than a theme park ride, but the implementation seriously underwhelmed me, since as far as I can tell over 90% of it is grinding mobs. Or, to be more specific, judging from the blanket of corpses and the rather hilarious group finder requests, grinding frogs. Since the news I've seen regarding Warlords is that, outside of instances and Ashran, Draenor is basically a continent-sized Timeless Isle, my experience there did not get me super-excited for the expansion.
- I haven't tried the new UBRS yet. I've never really raided much to begin with, and I quit very early into 5.3, so my item level isn't high enough. Haven't felt much drive to venture into Siege, either, so there really isn't much way to upgrade my gear outside of Timeless Isle (and my gear is just high enough that I don't get anything useful unless I grind out 50k coins per armor slot, which I'm not going to waste time doing since I just have a week of playtime and the armor's going to be obsolete in less than a month).

What I've mostly been doing is soloing old stuff that I hadn't gotten around to doing yet. Specifically ICC and Ulduar, but I also did ToC for the Hell of it and Tempest Keep (though I had already done it before) to try for the pets that were added to it. I was particularly interested in getting ICC out of the way, since Dreamwalker was now skippable and the Gunship cannons now scaled with gear, which took care of the two main roadblocks that were in my way. I actually did ICC 10 instead of attempting 25, since I'll be able to do it again come Tuesday and wanted to unlock Heroic ICC 10 so I could try for the boots and belt that match the 10-man Scourgelord set. In the end, I got a good laugh as I hopped in the Skybreaker cannon, mashed 1 so I could start the battle with a high heat level, and then proceeded to nuke the Orgrim's Hammer out of the sky with a single shot. At first I thought I had somehow bugged the fight. On the Ulduar front, I learned that I am not yet good enough to solo Orbituary, and I lack the ranged damage to easily pull off Firefighter, but other than that it was a breeze (I did not bother trying for Alone in the Dark, since I figured it'd probably wind up like my Orbituary attempt rather than my Knock Knock Knock on Wood attempt).

I don't think he's trying to sell them as good guys, but he's selling them as a different type of bad guys than the original Horde.

The original Horde had bloodlust on 1000% of the time, fueled by demon magic, and almost out of control in their actions. They didn't bother to conquer Draenor even, they burned it down and corrupted it into oblivion until finally shattering the world itself and tossing it into the Nether.

Meanwhile, the Iron Horde is a group that is attempting to be strong on a world out to kill them or worse - stuck between an empire of ogre bastards, massive and deadly wildlife, plant life that will kill you and twist you into their pawn, and massive giants that wage war upon each other with not a care for the little mortals scurrying underneath. Except, they have the tools now to rise up against their long-time oppressors and either force them to kneel or obliterate them if they will not. They're bond by fear of Azeroth and fears of a half-given prophecy. Like Bashiok said, they have been beaten down, oppressed, tortured, and marginalized. And now they have the power to stop that. And if that's all they did, stop it and secure land and peace for themselves, they'd certainly be heroic. But you can't give a race like orcs, who have suffered since time immemorial as lessers to basically everyone else around, on a world like Draenor that sort of power and expect them to just play nice. They turn all those eons of hate and marginalization and oppression back onto their enemies.

They certainly take it way too far, that much is obvious. But what do you expect? The orcs have turned their own oppression into oppression over others, probably as revenge for being a rather easily pushed around group on Draenor. It's no wonder that the second they're made overpowered, they just simply lash out in fear and rage, looking to beat down everyone who isn't an orc. Hell, even some orcs are pushed out, if they're deemed too weak.

It's essentially the same situation as the Burning Legion's interactions with the orcs in the MU even - someone comes and manipulates them and gives them power way outside their league or knowledge or ability to properly handle.

And even then, the Iron Horde isn't actually as bad as the original Horde still. The vast majority of the Iron Horde under Hellscream has ignored the draenei until Ner'zhul decided he wanted to make the Dark Star. Shattrath seems to have only been taken as a show of force. Most of the other races wiped out by the first Horde are still alive in the AU. Even the long hated ogres aren't faced with genocide, they're simply made to serve the Iron Horde.

tl;dr - They're assholes, but they're not genocidal bloodlust half-demon assholes, and probably have slightly more depth that will never be explored by Blizz. They're assholes because it's a planet of assholes and now they finally have their turn at being the biggest assholes around because orcs are really easy to trick.

The Ghost Horde on another chunk of Outland would have been better than the Iron Horde in a past Draenor.

And the other chunk of Outland could have resolved so many loose ends.

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The world has made them into assholes. So what? Doesn't make them any less a group of assholes. I don't care about what potential the orcs supposed have as a force for good. I don't care to understand them. All I care about is the fact that so long as they've been "the Horde" in all it's shapes and forms has been nothing but a force for destruction and evil and I'm seriously fucking tired of hearing about how it isn't.

If there were a button that could be pressed to kill every member of the Horde at any time, at any place, the only real choice there is to make is how quickly it should be pressed.

Oh you!

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TLDR: Warlords of Draenor is "Battered Woman Syndrome: The MMO"



I don't buy it. Every individual in the Iron Horde is a thinking being capable of both logical and ethical reasoning. Every individual marching to the Hellscreams' drums chose to kill, to rape, to burn, to pillage, and to do all of this to a people on another planet who have never even interacted with the orcs. Garrosh brought little to no evidence with him back to AU Draenor: with all of his promises of what the Horde is destined to be and what happens in the future, he actually sounds like a wackadoo cult leader not dissimilar from the Peoples' Temple or Heaven's Gate.

Bashiok is basically presenting two scenarios: the first, a crackhead is told by his dealer that if he kills one of his dealer's enemies, he'll get more crack. The other is told by a cult leader to kill his cult leader's enemy, because it will bring him glory. These are both deplorable, acts, and while I personally am a moral nihilist I would call them "evil" by almost every standard of ethics used by any system that affords for a concept of evil. They are equal in scope, magnitude and consequence, and furthermore, both speak to a weakness of the murderer: for getting addicted to a drug in the first place, or for believing the toxic lies and speeches from his cult leader.

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Something must be wrong with my eyes because the only thing I see in Bashiok's post is that the Iron Horde is neutral evil instead of chaotic evil this time around.

Also, someone can offer context to something without becoming an apologist, Omacron. A sympathetic villain is still a villain, no one is saying the Iron Horde is just misunderstood bunch of angry victims. There's just some depth to them, a logic behind their chosen paths.

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Head Canon: The Deathwing Gambit

They're not any more sympathetic than the first time around though

If anything, they're less sympathetic.

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Brought to you by Sanguine Enterprises.

My Worldbuilding:
http://bloodinkworlds.tumblr.com/

Blizz must focus more on the ''Show, don't tell''. Which to their credit they did with LoW and the comics. Devs telling us stuff like above doesn't really work.

Are they fucking serious? From start to end, the Iron Horde is nothing BUT Bad Guys. they aren't good guys walking a dark path, they fucking CHOSE to walk that path with the intention of being bloody conquerors killing everyone in their way. Only a retard would see that as good guys walking a dark path.

This. Is this really that hard to understand? The game may not depict them as anything more than generic conquerers (because it's apparently that hard to tell a story within a game), but the Hellscream short story, the Lords of War episodes or the Blackhand comics show us that there is more to them, that they have a reason for being the way they are and acting the way they do.

Hardly. It just sounds so like 99% of your worthless posts.

Now if you're talking fetishes? You have a serious one for shitting on this thread.

Jesus we haven't even played it yet or "lived" the story, and you guys already can't wait to take a steaming dump on anything they state about the lore.

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El. Psy. Congroo.

Screw the lore, I'm dropping a Cleveland steamer on the 5 man garrison limit that may not exist :@

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If you could play any race in WoW lore, what would it be? Why?

Stop enabling him. Don't mention him. Don't answer his posts. Just ignore him.

Sort of like how the Poke is supposed to be handled.

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In one case we have "The Devil made me do it." Which is framed as bad and evil to someone who commits the same actions fully consciously.

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“Listen to the Chair Leg of Truth! It does not lie!”

New artcraft, on level design.

edit: Nothing that revealing in it, from a quick glance.

How the hell is that meant to make them less evil? "A glorious future where they take back their honor and rule as conquerors of an entire planet." Is evil by most definitions FFS. It's not even portrayed as "Azeroth's claimed to be a threat", just "Iron Horde need to kill people to feel good about themselves! It's not their fault they have no self esteem!"

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"Terrorism, a job for lazy people and wankers"

If I die, blame it on BfA

http://wow.joystiq.com/2014/10/27/wa...e-with-terran/

interview with Terran Gregory, lead cinematic director

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Random musing about that supposed xp/loot grinding nerf thing.

How, if at all, does it impact what we do in WoD at 100? I mean, you're expected to do a lot of grinding for reputation.

Unless I'm misunderstanding the nerf thing.

I was gone for three days, and its all gone to shit.

so glad to be back.

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I don't think it affects reputation from what I've seen.

I haven't encountered it while leveling either, but I just do quests so I'm never grinding one mob. Which is usually the best way to level anyways.