The Battle of Lordaeron is now live, and with it, Alliance players who have been feeling frustrated (again) after a big loss right before an expansion (again) have a chance to lay siege to the Undercity and attempt to secure some kind of justice.
Spoilers to follow, but it's live, so go do it if you're worried:
The Alliance has mobilized and the very advantage that Sylvanas attacked Teldrassil to take advantage of, namely the sorry state of everyone's navy and the inability to move troops around effectively, has now made it easy for the Alliance to very quickly assemble and besiege the Undercity.
The battle is a gradual push by the Alliance into the city, fighting their way around the above-ground ruins of Lordaeron city in their pursuit of the banshee queen.
Sylvanas' only effective tactic in this seems to be the use of her blight, and to Saurfang's shock, she even uses it while her own troops are on the field, killing them and then raising them as skeletal soldiers.
Oh hey, you notice that Sylvanas has a bunch of shadowy, necromantic powers? This could of course just be iterating on her kit of superpowers, but if we want to read more into it, I wonder if this is a hint that she's getting juiced by some external force. Something to consider.
When the blight pushes the Alliance forces back to the ruins of Brill, Jaina comes in on her father's flagship, flying the damned thing over Tirisfal and freezing the blight with her magic. This clears a path for the Alliance to push forward and enter the city proper.
As the Alliance hits the Horde's reserve forces, Alleria shows up with a battalion of Void Elves and Gnomes, who easily lay waste to Nathanos' troops. From there, it's just a push into the central courtyard and the Alliance finds Varok Saurfang, standing alone.
Now, as we know from Old Soldier and "A Good War," Saurfang is practically suicidal at this point, and is eager to die in battle with some semblance of honor after the guilt over his rather large role in Teldrassil's fate. But when he is beaten down and defeated, Anduin won't give him death. Shrewdly, I think, Anduin sees Saurfang as a potential ally in coming to some sort of peace with the Horde, and so he has him taken to the Stockades.
So finally Anduin, Alleria, Genn, and Jaina (and the player, but they're not in the pre-rendered cutscene, of course) enter Lordaeron's throne room. It's actually pretty cool here as the shots are largely reminiscent of Arthas' return from Northrend back in Warcraft III, with Anduin walking the same path. And when they arrive at the throne room, they find Sylvanas sitting in Terenas Menethil's chair. She taunts the Alliance heroes even as it is clear that she has lost this battle.
But just when it looks like she might surrender (well, not really, but she's playing at it,) she goes into her banshee form and flies away as blight pours out of every nook in the entire ruined city. As the deadly gas closes in, Jaina forms a protective shield and then teleports everyone to her flying flagship.
The Undercity is lost, but Sylvanas has not left it to become an Alliance stronghold. One imagines that it will be a very long time indeed before anything can be salvaged from the Undercity.
So let's do some analysis.
The Alliance's attack on Lordaeron is exactly the sort of "good war" that Saurfang wanted for Teldrassil. There's no genocidal cruelty to them, and Anduin is there to capture, not summarily execute, Horde leadership.
The Horde really can't use this as some kind of rallying cry. "Remember the Undercity" is going to only be met with skeptical responses of "yeah, I remember how we totally deserved it after Teldrassil and it was Sylvanas who destroyed the place."
Sylvanas likely knew that the battle was hopeless - the Alliance just had more to throw at it and wanted the win more. But she used that to her advantage to take a fight that might have been quick and decisive and turn it into a meat-grinder. I'm sure her hope was to trap the Alliance leadership with the blight and kill them, though it seems the main purpose of blighting the city was to deny it to the Alliance.
What we are not getting, and what I think a lot of us were hoping for, is a sort of give-and-take of each side scoring victories and retaliating for losses. Yes, technically this is a loss for the Horde, but it's all part of Sylvanas' master plan. If Sylvanas were the leader of some NPC faction, that might work a little better, but by snatching away some sense of victory from the Alliance, you also make it harder for the Horde to really feel that pumped about fighting them. Right now, I think most players (yes, some like to play Horde as the "evil" faction and some who don't are so incredibly myopic that they still see the Alliance as bad guys in comparison with the Horde) feel Sylvanas is shaping up to be the villain of the expansion, which makes playing the Horde kind of tough. Surely, this is not what, say, the Highmountain Tauren signed up for. It's hard to be motivated to fight the Alliance when it's pretty clear that there will be a shift at some point in which we turn on Sylvanas.
Doing so would also be treading territory we already did in Mists of Pandaria, which was pretty recent.
Blizzard has pushed Sylvanas so far into pure villain territory that it's hard to imagine any other outcome. And that's a shame, because I think WoW works best when there's nuance. The Horde and Alliance should be a conflict between two good factions, not one good and one that flips back and forth between good and evil every couple years. They need to make the Horde's grievances against the Alliance more believable and dial back the Horde's crimes against the Alliance.
Imagine if these battles had been reversed - even if they went the same way. If the Alliance struck first, maybe goaded by Genn to re-take Lordaeron so that Gilneas can be recovered. Then Sylvanas would seem ruthlessly practical, but still sort of justified in blighting Undercity. Sylvanas, then, launches an attack on Teldrassil in response, and the Horde feels totally justified because hey, the Alliance just proved they'll never let them live in peace. So they get ready to conquer Teldrassil only for Sylvanas to say "no, we're not conquering. We're destroying them." And then the Horde is in a much more complicated situation. There's more room for an argument there, and more of a chance to say "well, we were provoked, and it got out of hand, but we were still in the right to be attacking." As it currently stands, the motivations are weaker than they could be.
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