Right now, Sylvanas is shaping up to be Battle for Azeroth's villain. The Burning of Teldrassil and, to a lesser extent (as it's a more reasonable scorched-earth tactic until you consider the Horde troops slain by the Blight and raised as skeletons) the Battle of Lordaeron, show her to be cruel, vindictive, and murderous.
The speculation machine is running on overdrive right now about how, exactly, the story will proceed. Is Sylvanas going to be deposed like Garrosh? Is the Horde simply going to submit to this kind of behavior in the shadow of a survival crisis it has caused? Can Sylvanas somehow be redeemed at this point?
Before we get into what people have read into the expansion, let's look at the story as Blizzard has presented it and promised:
Battle for Azeroth is about the Alliance/Horde conflict. It's a story that Blizzard said, in its announcement, needed a resolution, and that BFA is meant to provide that. A resolution to the faction conflict has the potential to be really huge, but it could also mean a return to a kind of stalemate with a promise that, somehow, things will be different this time.
There has been only vague mention of an external threat that needs to be addressed, but there are a ton of hints that the community has more or less settled on as the clear direction that the expansion, or potentially the one that follows, will take.
I'm going to be talking spoilers here, so I'll do a cut. I'll note that I haven't done a lot at the level cap in the beta (I didn't get a Horde character there, for example.) But I've gleaned a few things and I've at least done all the major zone quest lines in Kul Tiras.
The plot on Zandalar is all centered around G'huun, the boss of the first raid in the expansion. G'huun is the product of a failed Titan experiment to neutralize or ameliorate the power of the Old Gods, but the main sense you get in questing is that Zandalar is afflicted with a cult to G'huun that is a mix of bloodthirsty villages and secret cultists within leadership positions. Chief among these traitors in your midst is Zul, the Prophet who pushed the Zandalari to attempt to reunite the Troll Empires back in Cataclysm. Zul is in charge of the Zanchuli Council, which is kind of the parliament of the Zandalari Empire. Through questing in Zandalar's three zones, you discover a grand plot to overthrow King Rastakhan and take over the empire in the name of G'huun. G'huun thus serves as the continent's big bad with Zul as his primary representative.
On Kul Tiras, there are, I would say, two very clear threats, but it's unclear if they have any connection to one another. If Kul Tiras has a primary antagonist, it's Queen Azshara, though she primarily operates through two of the nation's four noble houses. Lady Ashvane, long a friend and confidant of Grand Admiral Katherine Proudmoore (mother of Jaina,) became close with Katherine after they both lost their husbands. But Ashvane has been secretly working with Azshara for the promised reward of ruling Kul Tiras. She has been siphoning Azerite to the pirates of Freehold in order to launch an invasion of Boralus, the Kul Tiran capital. Meanwhile, Lord Stormsong, whose house leads the order of Kul Tiras' Sea Priests (who bless their ships to allow them to sail safely under any weather conditions) seems to have been more explicitly driven mad by the Old Gods, thanks to Queen Azshara's influence. He has hidden the Kul Tiran fleet and is converting people into ilithid-like K'thir (Ilithid, or Mind-Flayers, are one of the classic D&D monsters who look like human-sized, wingless Cthulhus and suck out peoples' brains to feed on.)
Kul Tiras also has another threat that doesn't seem to fall under Azshara's umbrella, though, which are the Drust. When Kul Tiras was settled by sailors from Gilneas, there was a population there already (it's not clear to me if they were other humans, vrykul, or a totally unique race) that the early Kul Tirans clashed with. The Drust used death-magic and animated stone elementals to fight the Kul Tirans, but were eventually wiped out, it seems. However, as a vast coven of witches begins to take over Drustvar, it appears that they are being empowered by the ancient Drust leader who either didn't die or is somehow back from the dead.
If we look at G'huun and Azshara, both known to be major raid bosses, the Old God theme for BFA seems inescapable. One of the most popular theories of where the expansion will eventually take us is that we'll be seeing the faction conflict either resolved or fading into the background and the plight of the World Soul and the threat of N'zoth emerging as the bigger problem.
I could see a couple other ways it might go, though.
One is the full-on Mists 2.0 route. In Mists of Pandaria, our early fights were against new threats we had discovered on Pandaria - the Sha, the Mantid, the Mogu. But the expansion eventually turned back on the internal problems of the Horde, and while Garrosh was using powers he had discovered in Pandaria, it still portrayed him as the big threat. Indeed, as the first "Age of Mortals" expansion, it really showed that when the Alliance and Horde can beat anything, they become the biggest threats. BFA could be using a similar tack - if we can defeat the Burning Legion, the biggest thing we need to worry about is one another.
Such a plotline would probably have Sylvanas become the final boss of the expansion. As far off the deep end as they've taken her, my primary objection to this is that we've done it before, and pretty recently. (Though 2014, when Mists ended and Warlords came out, feels like a lifetime ago for a variety of reasons.)
But if we return our focus to the external, cosmic threats, there's an odd outlier. All three Zandalar zones are pretty focused on G'huun (despite the zones feeling much more visually distinct than the ones in Kul Tiras, they're more united in story.) Two of the Kul Tiras zones are essentially about Azshara, but Drustvar is an exception.
Where do the Drust fall into this?
WoW's exploration of Death Magic and the Shadowlands is pretty thin at the moment. While we did get some reference to the realm of shadows in Wrath, all we knew was that it was a place where the Lich King had a lot of influence. And Death Magic as something unique from Fel or Void magic is also a relatively new idea. The Lich King was created by Kil'jaeden, which suggests that everything the flowed from it - from the Forsaken to the Knights of the Ebon Blade to the Razorfen Quillboar - sort of have a Fel lineage.
But the Drust appear to have something pure. The only other entities we've seen that seem to be purely connected to the Shadowlands were actually one of the threats in Legion - Helya and her Kvaldir.
We never got any direct confirmation that Helheim was a part of the Shadowlands, but it seems very possible.
But it's interesting to be pushing that part of the Warcraft cosmos at this time. Despite their fel lineage, the Scourge and its... subsidiaries? Spin-offs? are clearly focused primarily on necromancy. Just as the Legion was not above summoning in Void Walkers (who are somehow demons despite being entities of void,) it wouldn't be that crazy to think that in crafting the Lich King, Kil'jaeden had decided to try a different school of magic.
So with the introduction of the Drust, we stand to start exploring the Shadowlands and Death magic in far greater detail.
And that might be important when the woman currently working very hard to be the major villain of BFA is the undead queen of the Forsaken.
One idea I've heard thrown around is that maybe the biggest punishment you could give to Sylvanas would be to restore her to life. Cut her off from her people, but also force her to reckon with a fully functional emotional apparatus with all the things she has done. Right now, her empathy and good will are all muted by her undead state. Imagine coming down off of the emotion-blocking drug that is undeath and remembering all the screaming Night Elf children you, personally, had murdered.
Sylvanas long ago gave up on any hope of actually curing her undeath, despite the fact that that was the entire basis of the Forsaken entrance into the Horde. At this point, she's committed to perpetuating that undead state. Consider the Desolate Council, or rather the dissenting members within it. They were not suicidal for rejecting Sylvanas' offer of immortality. They weren't lining up to shoot themselves. Instead, just as mortal beings expect to eventually die after a hopefully long and happy life, many Forsaken expect themselves to eventually just die off. Indeed, the Forsaken themselves, as an organization, could be more of a support group and alliance for defense to ease the burden of this period of undeath before they can go onto what waits beyond.
Sylvanas saw what was beyond for her, and it was horrific, which is why she feels the need for unending undeath.
But she's also convinced that all of her people will share that fate. Is it possible that, in fact, they won't?
The more we learn about necromancy and the Shadowlands, the more we might be able to start tearing Sylvanas' worldview - the one that she has used to justify her atrocities - apart.
I don't really want to just Garrosh 2.0 Sylvanas, but at the same time I think that if we look at her actions, you'd have to be insane to consider her an "I did what I had to do" anti-hero. Any potential redemption or rehabilitation of her character is going to require something colossal.
So if you want to throw a curveball here, I think we need to find a way to make Sylvanas live again, and then force her to face everything she's done without the mask of undead emotionlessness.
But in order to do that, we're going to need to delve into the Realm of Death. And what horrific monsters might we encounter there?
EDIT:
One thing that I've seen people pointing out is the recurring presence of Arthas and the Scourge in many of BFA's cinematics and cutscenes. We see Sylvanas' memory of being slain by Arthas, and we see Saurfang remembering taking his son's necklace in the frozen wastes of Northrend. But perhaps more subtle (though not terribly subtle,) Anduin's march into the Lordaeron throne room is nearly a shot-for-shot echo of the cinematic at the end of the Human campaign in Warcraft III (right when Arthas has just become a Death Knight and returns home to murder his father.)
The parallels between Arthas and Anduin are there, and something I wouldn't be shocked to see them playing on. Both have been young, popular princes who were also drawn to the Holy Light. Arthas was a Paladin training under Uther the Lightbringer (the first paladin of the Silver Hand) while Anduin has been training as a Priest under Velen (a Priest who, in D&D terms, has clearly taken a few Paladin levels, given his heavy armor proficiency and use of divine smite.)
Arthas was tested against an undead menace and lost his humanity as he found himself with impossible moral choice (Stratholme being the biggest one.) Anduin is now seeing the two most memorable foes the Alliance has ever seen - the Scourge and the Horde - merged into one with Sylvanas as Warchief.
I think it would be really interesting to see Anduin's story parallel that of Arthas. As someone who, since he kind of got a personality in Cataclysm, has always seemed to be of exceptional moral fiber, even visiting Garrosh in prison in an attempt to figure the Orc out and perhaps develop some understanding of him.
His attempt to arrest, rather than outright kill Sylvanas, demonstrated both a sense of honor as well as a kind of naivete. It was the right move for Saurfang, because Saurfang was not the kind of person to surrender falsely.
Ultimately, thanks to Jaina's magic, the Alliance can chalk Lordaeron up as a victory, but they came very close to suffering a devastating and decapitating loss. What needs to happen now is for the Alliance to actually go through a moral reckoning, and not one in which we're all pretty much guaranteed that they'll come out relatively unscathed morally.
How might the Alliance be tested that isn't simply the clear and present threat of the Horde? What lies within them that might threaten to change them into something they would hate?
Is there someone, say a fallen prince who walked a similar path to Anduin's, whose soul, essence, or echo is trapped in a land of shadow, but might be used to defeat the Banshee Queen?
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