Warcraft/YMMV

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Here are the subjectives found in Warcraft series.

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Plenty of them among the Lore Fans.
• Arc Fatigue: The length to finish the first two story Acts of Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne's "The Founding of Durotar" bonus campaign can get quite tedious for some people as Act One: To Tame a Land, and Act Two: Old Hatreds, can take between one to two hours each to complete. Especially if the player really gets Sidetracked by the Gold Saucer wanting to find every piece of loot or stat tome available.
• Awesome Music: The 4 related faction's themes.
• Base Breaker:
  • Varian Wrynn and Garrosh Hellscream are the two most prominent cases, in both cases basically for being racist war-promoting bastards of questionable leadership skills taking over from level-headed, peace-seeking, experienced rulers Jaina Proudmoore and Thrall.
  • As of Cataclysm, DEFINITELY. Thrall has taken up a Messianic Archetype role in many events lately, some of which fans are crying out have nothing to do with him, such as restoring the World Tree. Thrall's powers as a Shaman have also increased dramatically, and some have even gone as far as to call him a Canon Sue. Needless to say, he's one of the most controversial characters recently. You can usually tell if someone isn't a fan if they call him "Go'el", as when Thrall took up that name is when the change from Warchief to Messianic Archetype started.
• Big Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • Coming across some secret areas and things throughout Warcraft III can be considered this, such as the Panda Relaxation area in "Digging up the Dead", the Largest Panda Ever in "Brothers in Blood", or the Penguin King in "The Return to Northrend".
  • In the Blood Elf campaign's third mission "The Dungeons of Dalaran", Kael comes across two captured Blood Elves that are, for some reason, polymorphed as spiders before they reach the weapon rack to rearm themselves as two Spell Breakers. Why they're spiders is never explained, and often goes completely unnoticed to the player since the spiders are marked as enemy targets.
• Canon Sue: There's a very simple, one-question test to determine whether a character is a Canon Sue: "was this character created or popularized by Richard Knaak?" You'll only ever be wrong for the few characters that reached Canon Sue status without Knaak's help.
  • Fortunately, their Sueness doesn't really transfer into other media. Several of them were added into World of Warcraft but play fairly minor roles, even though Rhonin is technically a key person as the leader of the Kirin Tor. But even in the Ulduar trailer, his role is fairly passive compared to Jaina and the others.
  • Goes so far that Knaak often gets blamed for characters he didn't create (such as Med'an).
• Cliché Storm:
  • Every line that doesn't contain a proper noun, you've heard in some other fantasy work. This is particularly noticeable in Reign of Chaos.
  • Everything Dranosh Saurfang has ever done. It will either make you jump over how 'awesome' he is, or it shall make you cringe.
• Common Knowledge: Terenas Menethil is commonly assumed to have been voiced by Tony Jay, even Behind the voice actors. Except it was actually Ted Whitnety, who died shortly after (Jay died in 2006).
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Considering the very, very long hiatus before patch 1.29, the metagame of Warcraft III had ample opportunity to become stale. You could pretty much expect everyone ever to open with a Blademaster, Demon Hunter, Archmage or Death Knight depending on their race, and each matchup was mostly railroaded into a single game plan. Night Elves versus Orcs, for instance, would turn into mass Druids of the Talon + Beastmaster and Tinker against Tauren Chieftain and mass Raiders nine times out of ten, and Undead used Destroyers as an answer to basically everything.
• Complete Monster: Gul'dan. Almost every other major villain (except for the demons) have some sort of backstory that explains their actions, though not justify them. Gul'dan dooms his entire race for the sake of personal ambition. Then, there's the experiments he did with Garona...
• Designated Hero: Tyrande Whisperwind could be seen as one since she slaughtered a group of innocent prison Wardens who were just doing their job trying to keep a condemned criminal, Illidan, behind bars. Maiev even calls her out for this in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne.
  • However, the character she freed is a fan-favorite, and possible Designated Villain, Illidan Stormrage. Not to mention that before then Tyrande helped a group of Furbolgs (try to) escape the corruption and eventually turned from her racist ways.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: As noted by a number of the entries on his character page, Vol'jin became this in Cataclysm, to the point that when Blizzard announced that Thrall would be reinstated as Warchief, Vol'jin was one of the most common names dropped as a more preferred option for the position. Just about his only opposition were players who believe that the spot should belong to an orc.
• Gameplay Derailment: It's very easy to abuse the AI of enemy peasants/peons throughout Warcraft II. The reason being that if you damage a structure, but leave it burning in the red, it will cause the AI to immediately send their workers to try to fix the structure. Then, if you constantly kill the workers that the AI attempts to send, it will cause them to keep sending their remaining workers, as well as the newly created ones, directly to the structure that is in the red for needed repair. Eventually, the enemy faction will use up all their gold on making workers, and leaves the AI as sitting ducks to get steamrolled with no means of being able to reinforce themselves.
• Goddamned Bats: Due to its playstyle, Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne's bonus campaign has a few of these:
  • Centaurs, mainly because you end up fighting so damn many of them. Particular standouts include Firecallers, who can deal a fair bit of damage with Flame Strike, and Deathcallers, who can revive other centaurs.
  • Harpy Storm-hags cast Sleep to put your heroes out of action and Curse to make them miss half their attacks. They're not dangerous by any stretch of the imagination, but fighting them gets tedious very quickly.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Remember when Arthas said "What trickery is this!? Mal'Ganis! I don't know how you survived..." and later, after encountering Muradin's dwarves, "Doesn't anyone stay dead anymore?". It's funnier to think about it after some characters are Back From the Dead in World of Warcraft: Muradin and Mal'Ganis themselves, Kael'Thas...
  • That particular example also counts as Hypocritical Humor, since Arthas is the one who got them all killed (or tried to) in the first place.
• It Was His Sled: The RTS games in the franchise are considered to be quite old nowadays, so some of what may have been interesting plot developments back in the day have become well-known within, and outside, the Warcraft fanbase. Especially since many of these story moments were used as the foundation to set up World of Warcraft, and its later expansions.
  • For Warcraft I:
    • Blackhand gets ousted as Warchief.
  • For Warcraft II:
    • Gul'dan betrays the Horde, and dies at the Tomb of Sargeras.
    • The city of Alterac betrays the Alliance, and gets destroyed soon after.
    • Lothar dies.
  • For Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos:
    • Arthas turns evil, and kills his father, King Terenas.
    • Uther dies.
    • Arthas kills Sylvanas, which he then proceeds to resurrect her as an undead.
    • The Human Kingdom of Lordaeron, and the High Elf Kingdom of Quel'thalas, get destroyed by the Scourge.
    • Thrall moves the orcs to Kalimdor, and establishes the current day Horde alongside the Darkspear Trolls and Mulgore Tauren.
    • Grom dies.
    • Illidan is released from prison, and becomes a demon after claiming the Skull of Gul'dan.
    • Archimonde dies after failing to consume the World Tree.
  • For Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne:
    • Prince Kael moves his Blood Elf faction to Outland.
    • Sylvanas and Varimathras take control of Lordaeron to establish their undead Forsaken faction.
    • Arthas becomes the Lich King.
    • Thrall's Horde claims a home for themselves in Kalimdor, naming the territory Durotar.
• Magnificent Bastard: Ner'zhul... just ask Archimonde and Tychondrius.
• Memetic Badass:
  • Darius Crowley cleaves with HIS FISTS.
  • Occurs IN-UNIVERSE that everyone treats Anduin Lothar like he was the Second Coming.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Arthas massacres Stratholme so the city does not fall to the Undead.
    • That can be justified, depending on whether you think the villagers could have been saved from the plague or not (there was never a cure mentioned, meaning that it definitely would have fallen to Mal'ganis). For other players, the true act that made him despicable was hiring mercenaries to help him burn the ships, then telling the men that the "foul beasts" had done it all.
    • Also, it's not the massacre, it's the way he announces it. He refuses to consider anything else than slaughtering the entire city.
  • A questline in World of Warcraft reveals that even some of the mightiest beings in the setting can't cure the plague, not even on one single person, and Arthas didn't even know about those.
    • It's even noted in the Death Knight unit entry for Warcraft III that Death Knights are actually created primarily from Paladins who went mad because, whilst their Light-granted powers shielded them from contracting the plague, those powers were useless to cure the plague. One of the D20 RPG books actually mentions cases of living-but-infected victims spontaneously bursting into flames when a healing spell was cast on them.
  • It's sad, certainly, but what else could be done? Let the Scourge have the city, and thousands of new servants? Realistically, the entire human campaign in Warcraft III is one long, ever worsening Moral Event Horizon. The culmination being when he takes up Frostmourne.
  • Ner'Zhul and Mal'Ganis gave Arthas a no-win situation; that was their whole plan from the start. However, given many options ranging from bad to horrible, Arthas chose the worst one imaginable. He could have tried again to cure the plague; we never see any attempt at all. He could have tried to quarantine the infected from the uninfected; he doesn't consider it. He could have given the infected a chance to die with dignity; instead he kills them himself before they zombify. He could have asked his mentor Uther for guidance or even ceded authority to him; that would be a cowardly approach, in a way, but for all Arthas knew at the time Uther actually could have done something he couldn't. But instead, within five minutes of learning that that part of a city was exposed to The Virus (only the second time he's ever seen the affects of this disease), he orders the entire city massacred. That's called Jumping Off the Slippery Slope.
    • Was it only part of the city? Arthas knows that at least some of the city is infected, but from the evidence, the entire city could be infected. Furthermore, Arthas has no way of knowing who is and is not going to die and turn into a flesh-eating zombie until they actually do.
    • And if you do consider the culling justified, his virtual firing of Uther (and the Knights of Silver Hand) for having reservations against killing the people they swore to protect was clearly not a good sign.
      • This. Even if one makes the leap of logic that Arthas may have seen some of the soldiers he was fighting alongside in the prior mission succumb to the plague, and thusly learned first-hand that Paladin magic can't cure the plague, going berserk over the fact that a bunch of Lawful Good Paladins are refusing to just slaughter people out of hand is pretty clear proof he's losing his mind.
      • And there's the fact that Medivh had warned Arthas earlier that the harder he tried to stop the undead would only deliver his people to them. After telling Jaina that those who were killed in Stratholme will only remain still for just a moment, it turns out that Medivh was right: massacring the people of Stratholme did nothing and was all in vain. If anything, Arthas actually made it easier for his enemies to bring them back as Undead, all while being a dick to his own allies.
  • Ner'Zhul himself crossed it after Warcraft II, when he abandons the Horde to save himself, opening countless portals across Draenor in an attempt to escape to new worlds, which ends up tearing the Orc homeworld apart (and unintentionally sending him straight into Kil'Jaeden and a Fate Worse Than Death).
• More Popular Spinoff:
  • World of Warcraft, to the point where Blizzard once released "WOW: Heroes of Azeroth" as a prequel to World of Warcraft, on April Fool's Day. The game in question was better known as Warcraft III.
  • They also changed the novels accordingly by giving them the World of Warcraft icon even if the stories take place during the RTS games.
• Narm Charm: The writing in Warcraft games and books comes across to many fans as cheesy, but many of them enjoy the series specifically because of that.
• Never Live It Down:
  • Tyrande slaughtering the innocent prison wardens to free Illidan is often pointed out as the primary reason that she's not a good person.
  • Malfurion gets a lot of criticism thrown his way for banishing Illidan for rather vague reasons despite the fact that he just killed a major Burning Legion member in Tichondrius, and could have stuck around to face off against Archimonde.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • For many, Warcraft I was a pretty flawed game.
    • One of the game's biggest problems was that the player couldn't rebuild Town Halls at other locations. As a result, peasants had to travel long distances to mine gold from Gold Mines at far away locations across the map.
    • Hardly anyone liked the road mechanic, which restricted where players could build their structures. As a result, roads were done away with in the later games.
• That One Boss:
  • Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne:
    • The 3 Paladins in the first Undead mission are a pain to deal with when the player is out trying to destroy the human villages. This is primary because the Paladin's Divine Shield makes them invulnerable to kill for up to 45 seconds, and will constantly heal nearby friendly units with Holy Light, which greatly prolongs the fights against them. Amongst the players' 3 factions, Sylvanas' side has a means to counter the Paladins using her Silence spell to stop enemy spell-casting, but Arthas and Kel'thuzad have no such way to counter them. As a result, the player's only option with the Arthas and Kel'thuzard factions is to just hold out prolonging the fights against the Paladins until their Divine Shield finally wears off, and then move in to finish the Paladin off before they're able to pop up Divine Shield again.
    • Baelgun Flamebeard could end up as this at the end of the first Azjol-Nerub level. Baelgun is a powerful Level 10 Mountain King facing off against a Level 5 Death Knight (Arthas), and a Level 6 Crypt Lord (Anub'arak). His Storm Bolt and Thunder Clap abilities are highly effective against Arthas and Anub'arak, and if the AI chooses to do so, Baelgun will use its ultimate to go into Avatar mode for additional health and spell immunity.
• Tier-Induced Scrappy:
  • The Human faction in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne multiplayer is generally considered unfun to play against for several reasons. Their building upgrades and cheap defensive structures mean that they can easily either turtle behind a wall of towers or lay siege to your base with those same towers. They also have access to Siege Engines, heavily-armored base-killers that no one enjoys dealing with, as a pack of these attack-moving into a base is very hard to stop. Furthermore, the Archmage's Brilliance Aura (grants bonus mana regeneration to all nearby allies) is often seen as one of the strongest abilities in the game.
  • Destroyers get hate due to them packing just about everything a unit could want: spell immunity, flying movement, decent damage, a good chunk of health, and the ability to dispel buffs. Depending on who you ask, they're either obscenely overpowered or the only thing keeping Undead relevant at all. When Blizzard finally ended the decade-long drought of balance changes, Destroyers were severely nerfed, to no one's surprise.
• The Woobie:
  • Jaina Proudmoore. Forced to watch the love of her life become a Death Knight for the Scourge, who then goes about destroying their home kingdom of Lordaeron. In addition, after creating Theramore Isle for the Lordaeron refugees that sailed to Kalimdor, she's forced to fight against her father, Daelin Proudmoore, in order to keep the peace with Thrall's Horde in tact.
  • Prince Kael'thas Sunstrider. Was not around to defend the High Elven kingdom of Quel'Thalas from being devoured by Prince Arthas' Scourge, and now leads what's left of his people to try to reestablish their once glorious civilization. All while having to deal with their racist Lordaeron Alliance remnants commander Grand Marshal Garithos. For added insult, Arthas taunts him about stealing Jaina from him.
• Woobie Species:
  • The Human Kingdom of Lordaeron gets hit the worst in the Third War. One moment, it's Kel'Thuzad's plague, the next time, it's an undead slaughter led by their kingdom's traitorous Prince Arthas, another time, the Burning Legion's invasion begins here as it journeys to Kalimdor, and then once the Burning Legion is beaten, Arthas returns to Lordaeron to slaughter some more.
  • The High Elves of Qual'Thalas for almost the exact same reason as their Prince. A race that was devastated by Prince Arthas' Scourge when his undead army marched through the elven kingdom, and slaughtered much of the population. Upon renaming themselves Blood Elves in honor of their fallen comrades, many are forced to relocate to Outland after being threatened with execution by Grand Marshal Garithos.
  • Thrall's Orc Horde. One moment, they're locked up in Lordaeron internment camps. The next moment, they're dealing with Mannoroth's blood corruption.
  • The Kalimdor Tauren started off as this being hunted to extinction by the roaming Centaur. However, they finally begin to build a civilization for themselves after the arrival of Thrall's Horde helps them reach the lands of Mulgore. But even then, they still have to deal with the occasional Centaur raid such as their attempt to take the Tauren Chieftain's son, Baine, captive.
  • The Kalimdor Furbolgs. The bear-men race was hit hard by the arrival of the Burning Legion with many of its people becoming corrupted.
  • The Nerubians of Azjol-Nerub. Lost the War of the Spider against the Lich King, which led to many of its people, and the Crypt Lord King, Anub'arak, to be reanimated as soldiers for the Scourge. Those that survived continue to fight the Scourge in the hopes of one day liberating Azjol-Nerub from the Lich King's undead.