What Price Zuldazar?

While 8.1 is on the PTR, and thus is subject to change, I suspect that most of the story as it has been discovered will make it live and thus be canon. So I'm going to talk about that and the course of the current Alliance/Horde war.

I'm primarily concerned with narrative flow rather than intricacies. One could argue that with her mastery over necromancy, Sylvanas has an undeniable advantage in the prosecution of war. I don't really want to get into the nitty-gritty of whether Kul Tiran Tidesages or Zandalari spirit magic makes for a better navy - I'm mainly interested in the flow of the story.

Battle for Azeroth began with the Horde striking a devastating blow against the Alliance. Despite some skirmishing in Silithus surrounding the sword of Sargeras and the azerite that was bubbling out of the wound, neither the Horde nor the Alliance knew that they were about to be in so dire a conflict - only Sylvanas, Saurfang, and Nathanos knew that the Horde forces assembled in theory to defend Azerite mining operations in Silithus were in fact meant for the Night Elf lands. These three Horde leaders pulled a cunning ploy to ensure the Alliance's main forces in Kalimdor were caught out of position while they made this advance.

The result was the destruction of Teldrassil, and whether that was the true plan all along or not (something only Sylvanas would know,) it left one of the Alliance's most powerful member races devastated and scattered.

The response was swift and decisive, but also entirely predicted. Anduin rallied the Alliance forces to attack the Undercity, easily cutting a massive swath through Tirisfal, annihilating the town of Brill (we never saw what happened to its people, which I think is a missed opportunity) and laying siege to the old Capital City of Lordaeron under which the Undercity stood.

But while this might have felt like a great victory for the Alliance and a proportional response to Teldrassil, the truth is that Sylvanas had not only expected it, but even counted on it, trying to use herself and her city in an attempt to decapitate Alliance leadership. This effort failed due to Jaina's surprise arrival, but the fact is that, unlike Teldrassil, which was serving as a refuge for noncombatants when it burned, Undercity had been fully evacuated, meaning that the actual loss of Forsaken life was probably minimal.

Not that Anduin, at least, was aiming to slay as many civilians as possible - quite the opposite, in fact. But it does mean that the loss of Undercity cannot be seen as the sort of atrocity that Teldrassil was.

All of this meaning that the Alliance needs a win.

But in terms of narrative, what cost will that win incur?

SPOILERS AHOY


The upcoming raid, and the first "major" raid of the expansion, will be Siege of Zuldazar. (Name not final.) In it, the Alliance launches an attack on Dazar'alor to drive the Horde out and compel the Zandalari to abandon any allegiance they have to the Horde.

The raid will be unconventional, with a different boss order depending on your faction, and three bosses on each side that the other side will only see as flashbacks (presumably with the appearance of members of other faction.)

A number of its bosses will be major lore figures. So far, the confirmed ones we have are King Rastakhan, High Tinker Mekkatorque, and Jaina Proudmoore (the latter as part of a larger "Tidesage" encounter.)

Through broadcast text, we seem to have a sense of the fates of each of these characters.

Rastakhan refuses to submit to the Alliance invaders and fights us, using the blessings he was given by Bwonsamdi. Ultimately, though, the Alliance slays him, leaving Talanji to grieve and inherit the throne while Nathanos harries the retreating Alliance forces (along with the Horde players.)

Mekkatorque appears to get frozen somehow - possibly as a safety feature of his mech suit, but one that no one on the Alliance side seems capable of reversing, meaning that Mekkatorque is out of commission indefinitely. Granted, Magni was turned to stone in Cataclysm, and he seems mostly ok now, so perhaps there's hope for Gelbin in the long run.

Jaina makes it out of the fight all right - she is wounded, but ultimately guarantees the safe return of the Alliance forces.

We also know that the attack is only possible due to the Alliance's success in destroying the Zandalari fleet - about half of its ships are destroyed, while the Kul Tiran navy appears mostly untouched.

So what does this mean?

First off, the Zandalaris' primary asset that made them attractive to the Horde, namely their ships, is now more or less gone. That being said, the Horde is now showing its more admirable side, as they seem to embrace the Zandalari as another outcast people who would have trouble getting allies otherwise. Talanji has a huge reason to detest the Alliance, though I would assume that Bwonsamdi's claim on the royal line does pass on to her - even though his magic failed to bring Rastakhan victory.

Though they did not conquer Dazar'alor, one can hardly count this as anything other than a victory for the Alliance. There had been a few objectives, but the biggest one - destroying the Zandalari fleet - appears to have been a total success.

We hear that in the aftermath of this, the Alliance has rallied worldwide. Indeed, we see that Tyrande returns to Darkshore to fight the Horde, and what had seemed like a total victory for the Horde forces (if a morally troubling one) now threatens to be a quagmire.

After this raid, the Alliance is winning the war.

Which is great for the Alliance. If it weren't the first major raid of the expansion.

For any good story like this, especially one we experience from both sides, we need to see things swing back and forth. This is one swing, but to stretch the pendulum metaphor a bit, it doesn't need to keep swinging back and forth in one direction.

We're clearly fighting Azshara at some point in the expansion - in fact, we were initially told that the Azshara raid would fall where Siege of Zuldazar does in the progression of raids.

Now consider this: Kul Tiras, especially after the devastation of the Zandalari Fleet, has the greatest navy in the world. Or rather, it has the greatest navy amongst those who are not inherently aquatic.

In truth, there's no more powerful water-based military force than the Naga. We saw in Vashj'ir that there are a LOT of Naga out there, and that they are all united in service of their Queen. They have all manner of sea creatures and naval technology at their disposal, not to mention a great deal of arcane magic.

What's more: there are strong, strong hints that the very magic that the Kul Tirans use to make their ships so powerful is actually derived from Azshara. They speak often of the Tidemother, and at one poin we have to destroy some magical objects called the Tidemother's Pride, Wrath, and Radiance as we fight our way into the Shrine of the Storm.

Remember the boss of Eye of Azshara? Azshara's Wrath. There's a similar weird elemental construct we fight in quests in Stormsong Valley called Azshara's Pride. How much do you want to bet that we're going to see Azshara's Radiance at some point?

See, the Kul Tiran navy might have always been more powerful than the Zandalari one, but I also suspect that its great advantages could be easily negated by Azshara.

I'm beginning to suspect a certain direction for the expansion:

The Alliance is dominant on the waves, closing in on the Horde. But it's then that Azshara strikes, and suddenly the Alliance is fighting two wars at once.

The Horde might be eager to just let the Alliance and Naga fight it out, but Azshara is not ignoring them either, and after the Alliance's attacks, they're vulnerable.

Realizing that Azshara has sought to divide and conquer (and perhaps revealing that she has surreptitiously fanned the flames of the war) the Alliance and Horde realize that they've got to both focus on fighting her.

Now, granted this is largely the standard "team up against a common foe" trope we've seen many times in WoW. But I could imagine some twists:

One is that the two factions are in a total prisoner's dilemma situation, trying to commit just enough resources to defeat Azshara without leaving themselves open to the other side.

Two, which I like better, is that we find out that this entire war has been orchestrated by Azshara in the first place, and the factions need to look past the terrible wounds of war to find common ground.

We still don't know how BFA ends its Alliance/Horde conflict. I generally think that it plays best when it's a Cold War, like it did in Vanilla, BC, and sort of in Warlords and Legion. I know a lot of players (myself included) would like to see some grand shift that allows individual player characters to reach out across the divide and truly make the choice to set aside their differences and, say, run dungeons and raids together.

But it does seem that, much as the stories of Kul Tiras and Zandalar have gone, the Horde is in a downward trajectory while the Alliance is on its way up.

But stories are about change, and I see something bad happening after this victory for team blue.