#wotlk priest

[warcraft-guru]

Priest alt showing off in WotLK Classic.

[vividvermeer]

My shadow priest main all dressed up for Northrend!

[aggravatetheaxe]

dethklok plays WoW

Nathan - main tank. Horde of course. Probably orc. His only toon. Absolutely a blood death knight both for aesthetic and because you know he's pulling top dps in addition to holding agg on everything in the room. Guild leader, does not take his title seriously but will still kick your ass if you bail on raid night. likes pvp but prefers pve

Pickles - plays mostly trolls, has 2 or 3 toons, probably also has an ugly forsaken and an ugly goblin (although goblin is a later race so depends on the year). Cat druid, often forced to spec into healing because mythic dungeons are only 5 man. But prefers to be cat or combat rogue. Incredible dps when he's allowed to do dps. not nurturing at all as a healer, WILL let you die if you piss him off (unless you're Nathan, but Nathan never dies). loves both pvp and pve but gets super steamed during pvp

Skwisgaar - paladin paladin paladin. Belf, of course. has secret female alts as well as secret ally alts. constantly adding his girlfriends to the guild and taking shit from the bank without asking. But he doesn't get in trouble because his dps is second to none - topping the charts even over Nathan. Ret pally, could technically heal with holy but his dps is just so insane that they can't afford to have him healing. pvp is beneath him

Toki - altaholic. Lots of female toons, lots of ally toons, gets bullied for both. Really wants to main a hunter so he can have a bunch of cute animal companions (and because it would be easier dps) but the others say that's gay so his main is a frost DK. the others make him spec into unholy because his crowd control brings clusters together so that Skwis and Nathan can wipe them out. So, so fucking angry that he never gets to do any actual dps because his plagues never get the chance to stack - and despite knowing it's a DOT issue the others clown on him for being the absolute bottom of the dps chart. pvp is too hard for him, no one protects him and everyone picks on him

Murderface - orc arms warrior and tauren fury warrior, dps but mostly off tank. makes cringe jokes (abt both native americans and milking) if tauren. One secret ally toon (human no less), also a warrior, that he uses to /walk around stormwind and RP badly. constantly brags about his dps but he's actually garbage, only above toki. makes a big deal out of his rank in the guild but he actually has no bank privileges. loves self harm through pvp

Charles - undead disc priest. a few alts, equal numbers male and female but almost all undead. probably a GM. heals when pickles is on dps and there's room or in a raid setting. guild treasurer, full bank permissions, has to constantly police the boys and spends thankless hours filling the bank back up with pots, food, etc. Also in charge of recruiting, so he should just be guild lead at this point but he dutifully never complains :) plays an affliction warlock and a couple rogues (combat and assassination) on a different server, when the boys give him one free fucking moment to do his own thing

Magnus - used to be a super powerful destro warlock that matched skwisgaar in dps. was super involved in the guild, help build it into what it was, contributed lots of materials, consumables, and money to the bank. Recruited some of their best players. after a horrific falling out (he was the asshole in the situation; controlling, etc) he was kicked from the guild and replaced. has since (due to wotlk) abandoned his warlock for a death knight. now he has a forever grudge and badmouths dethklok any chance he gets, but the majority of the server knows he's the drama so he has trouble finding others to play with. because of this he's been forced to switch over to alliance side. hence he falls in with...

MMA & the revengencers: MMA is yet another DK, probably blood, guild lead of the revengencers - rival guild to dethklok, constantly butting heads with them in pvp, ganking their low level members/alts, just generally being a nuisance. MMA wants revenge for Nathan (with the help of GM charles) getting his OG account banned

Edgar - human arcane mage main ("actually, the rotation is quite simple"). has lots of female alts. treasurer of the revengencers, takes everything way way way too seriously. Definitely works for blizzard or is a GM. very tense, sometimes outright hostile, relationship with Charles despite being essentially coworkers. "umm you sir have won the internet" "updoot" guy in chat. full collection of mounts, even the rare and/or limited edition ones

[swampgallows]

I just started playing wow. Perhaps it is because i am an old person without much knowledge of these things, but you know, your posts really give me the wrong idea about Garrosh. It was surprising to know that he nuked a whole city. World of warcrime even.

To be fair i followed you for orc thirst and some memes. I was never really a "gamer", maybe i should have read the fics and the text posts. Oh well, nice grindy game though. I am playing as a holy priest vulpera!

yeah he is umm definitely a criminal guy. i mean you saw his book right? it's literally called war crimes LOL

i used to talk about the garrosh meta more when he was still a living character, and back when i had more to say that i hadn't already said about it over the years. but yeah the tldr on my attachment to garrosh is that he started out as a way, way different character than the character he was eventually railroaded into becoming, and so it sucked to watch suicidal orphan become genocidal dictator then vaporized in super hell. i have a lot of feelings about it because im also mentally ill™ n all that, cautionary tale, blah blah.

burning crusade garrosh my beloved.... i love him in wotlk too (that's what cemented my attachment anyway)

i'm glad youre enjoying the game! I've been playing wotlk classic lately and enjoying the trip down memory lane, as well as the old game mechanics, but there are quite a few quality of life improvements in retail that i do miss. if you're ever on wyrmrest accord server, feel free to hit up Arete! That's my main :)

[warcraft-positivity]

Day #177 of things I love about WoW:

The tier 3 armor sets. I never got them when they were current, but I was obsessed with the priest/druid sets. Though WotLK gave us recolors, the originals were always my favorite. To this day, I've got three pieces of the Faith set I snagged from the BMAH.

[sleeper354]

Traps and Min/Max

World of Warcraft dominated a lot of my early online gaming.  One portion that always stood out to me was the talent system and the builds that would come out of it.  I used to play a warlock and when I looked at what the warlock class description was it emphasized the demons and curses.  I was like, pets class dots class?  Sign me up, I played a ton of D2 necromancer it was right up my alley.

What I found out, was that it turns out that a lot of things were stacked against curse/demon warlocks.  During vanilla, there was a harsh debuff limit which really hurt both warlocks and shadow priests.  You had so many debuff slots spoken for so that tanks could do their thing.  And curses were mutually exclusive so even in smaller content you were either doing curse of elements to buff the mages who did the actual cast damage or weakness to help out the tanks and healers.  No shadow, no agony because one, you could only have one up and a raid wide boost to the 6 mages or what have you was better than the boost to the 2 or 3 warlocks, or just your own personal damage.

Then on the pets end, so many bosses had cleaves or mechanics that would target pets and become a huge fucking problem that a demon was more often than not a liability.  When you did have a demon out, it was the imp, for the HP buff, and the fact that it phase shifted out and was un-hittable.

So where did that leave warlocks?  A shitty version of a mage with a shitty version of a priest buff and a damage buff for the non-shitty mages.  So you would run enough into affliction to get some support for your shadow bolts and then into destruction.  On top of that, the demonology tree had a bunch of useless talents that buffed useless things, like improved firestone or improved spell stone (that one sat at the bottom of the tree with the other 31 point talent!).

So you have these talents that everyone says “Oh these are traps to show new players what isn’t a good talent”.  And that’s such bullshit, new players should never say “Ugh, I can choose garbage”.  But then, even a good set of talents would then be overshadowed by “This doesn’t do optimal damage in the constraints of the game” so now you have the min//maxxers going “21/0/30 so that you have the best DPS a warlock can get” and how boring is that.  Why have any variety if the only way a community lets you play is by ignoring 90% of it?

So I played differently, I used the firestone, I had the DPS pets out, I would swing a sword that was enchanted to do fire damage, on my dumb little caster class.  Did I top a DPS chart? No.  Was I gonna anyway without raid gear?  Also no.  So I finally found something fun to do, and I’d get yelled at in groups and raids.  “Where’s my imp buff, why are you swinging a sword, the fuck is a succubus?”

On the one hand, I get it, some people want a system they can game.  I would be lying if I said that I hadn’t worked out the ratios for a good chunk of items in factorio so I could have a 0 wait and 0 overflow production line.  But at the same time, so many games trend towards the min/max that variety and fun become very specific.  Cards in MTG that have fun effects that you will never see because even when you account for jank deck tournaments, they still stick to these formulas which do in fact work, but just playing bread decks all day just doesn’t appeal.

Where am I going with this rant?  These ideas of newbie traps and min/max bleed out.  They seep into other things and people start putting up gates.  It starts in the games themselves, in WotLK the halls of reflections had the alcove strat.  Because the waves spawned spread out, it meant they would all bunch up.  But by now I’ve switched to warrior.  I have 3 different ways to charge and a ranged silence, I want to use these buttons the game has given me.  “No, stand in this corner”, and I’d argue with groups, just come out and have fun.  But now you see it bleed out into things like real life toys.  I saw a commercial for a hand held music playing device which you could control by waving it around certain ways.  The commercial had one of it’s selling points as “Make content creation easier”.  What the fuck?  Why is it content.  Why can’t it just be, “make some music” why do we have to min/max our own enjoyment of life.  And why does that min/max have to be economical?  Why can’t I have a fun dj toy be a toy that I make music with.  Or put on a concert for my cat, why, when even just describing this toy, is it still pushing towards “Better max your marketability!”

Just fucking enjoy things, stem the tide of people saying, “But this is the best way to do it” do suboptimal shit.

[vap0relf]

It is a tragedy when a hypothesis is utterly incorrect, and I worry my folly has put some of my patients in horrid danger. I had assumed that with the mutations, that brief lapse in thirst for magic had ceased; the void sustaining our kind in full, but I had not heeded common sense. An ever hungering force, the void giving us freedom for nothing could never have been, and I was blind for even assuming so. For it is through us that the void can - and will force us - to feed, and it is through that feeding we gain not only our sanity, but power. More power than even the fel provided, and the exact power the Magister claims could be a sort of salvation for us. But what salvation is one that begets mental slavery? Luckily, it seems that we need not feed on the life force of things, although, as it was then it is so now — they are among the most plentiful sources of energy.  And such energy when consumed into one’s form? It no longer retains its original properties after some time. Our bodies convert the energy into shadow, something I have not seen in my many years of practice, and something that seems to break the laws of magic itself. I have more questions than answers. If the void is capable of corrupting other forms of energy into itself, does that mean that every school may be plausible to do this? Or is this precisely why the void is feared across history? That someday, in the far future, everything could become corrupted? Is this how the Void Lords intend to end our reality? The whispers will not answer me, nor will they. Gods do not answer the inquiries of their pawns. My research will continue, especially with such a potential dire outcome. I will suggest to my kin suffering from vampiric desire that they return to consuming mana crystals, or hunt creatures of magic that have a plentiful population. We cannot let the Sin’dorei know that we have regressed in this regard, or I fear their opinion will - somehow - sour further towards our research. ~Vyktyr Astralgazer --- {{General headcanon that Void Elves are not nearly as mentally stable as they claim to be, regressing back to the vampiric state that Blood Elves were in back in The Burning Crusade. Having been cut off from the Sunwell, and having no similar font of energy in Telogrus or on Azeroth, they feed on magical energy of all kinds - particularly, light - and wind up converting it to void, fulfilling the all-consuming void motifs that have been present for a very long time. The Shadow Priest tree contains several elements of vampirism, Vampiric Touch and Embrace being the most notable and long standing, but with Dragonflight, they flat out have a talent called San’layn now - which has been the Darkfallen group associated with vampire aesthetics since WoTLK. I don’t think every Void Elf, especially the students and “second generation” would wind up suffering from an ailment like this, but it’s one of those things that just falls into place easily, and really plays off the aesthetics they have. A twist on vampires with an eldritch touch that plays off former racial themes that were abandoned on Blood Elves.}}

[one-winged-dreams]

Me: Okay, Varian died, I cried, I'm done being emotional over Legion again.

Val'Shara: -happens-

Me: -loud weeping-

[transarchivist]

sasha

sasha: which episode you were most afraid of on your first time listening?

binary 100000%!!!!! im fine w it now after relistening but it Got Me the first time around!

[is1of1]

First time fully t-mogging my paladin; I let him be super ugly for a long time. Headless Horseman's helmet, and a wormscale sheild from of the bug raids. Plus, one must always use the excavator's torch in the main hand or else wtf are you even doing.

Flying with the Headless Horseman mount too!

Also redid the 'locks tmog recently but I am unsure about it.

Plus my good old priest bc its a tmog post. Note the excavators torch, bc if you can you must it.

[visenyaism]

I came back to finally properly play wow (I used to play wotlk in high school but switched to ff14) since my friend resubbed, but it's gonna be a while before we can play together. I honestly had no idea what to do on my own so I was pulled into Kul Tiras questline and in my first dungeon I was kicked from Freehold at lvl 20 for letting the tank die once. Yall really live like this?? Any tips how to start wow? I don't have Shadowlands yet.

i did freehold my first time as a disc priest and i genuinely thought i was gonna die it was so stressful. you just gotta practice and know that you will never see the randos in your dungeon group again so if they suck it is what it is

[wackywarcraft]

Why I won’t be leaving World of Warcraft

Hey all, I ask that you give me a moment of your time and patience, and attention. I am a long-time player of this game like so many, I started in September 2009, and I've played without breaks since then. I've endured the ups and downs, the highs and lows. I've been a dedicated elite raider and now spend my time in retirement. I got to experience the second opening of the portal and I'm enjoying Classic and Classic TBC.

World of Warcraft is a second home to me, and now that it is being tainted I want to say WHY I won't be quitting this game anytime soon.

Now before you get upset please hear me out.

When I started playing in 2009 I was SICK like DEATHBED sick. I had suffocated due to a terrible lung infection caused by an offset of the bird flu I got via a dead bird in my old apartment. But I was ignored by doctors and when I FINALLY was believed and sent to the hospital I had an O2 average below 40% so I suffered for SIX months.

When I got out of the hospital I had barely any real function, brain process, etc, and one fateful day while my partner and I were in Best Buy I picked up a copy of WoTlK. My partner refused to play it because of the things they heard about it being   'addicting' but the moment I logged on and made my wee little human priest who was a mock-up of my old DnD Cleric character I felt like I'd woken up.

Six months before my motor skills returned, the ability to deduce and strategize helped rebuild my brain. The RPG brought back my creativity (I'm a writer by trade) and my reluctant partner joined and then my mother creating a whole new unit! My partner and I reconnected because we could spend time together since I was now stuck to an O2 concentrator. And my mom started playing too and we now have a family of gnomes we play together.

World of Warcraft saved my life in 2009 in more ways than I can even share.

Fast forward to 2020. Lockdown and I am going through the worst mental health crisis of my life, I've been bedbound, I'm agoraphobic and I've got the severest anxiety and depression I've ever had in my life! But the ONE THING. the ONE THING that has been getting me through it, getting me through lockdown and all this terrible stuff going on...World of warcraft.

I am also a survivor of SA and an intersectional feminist. (This is important) I believe the survivors of what has happened and I know what they have endured. But I also know that working in the most toxic of work environments has a way to wear you down in all the ways possible. BUT I know how hard those survivors worked on this game, I know how hard it was for them to endure that and I feel within my heart that to stop playing Blizzard/Activision games would be a slap in their faces.

Watching what they created during their worst times go to waste because some a-hole created that toxicity would be a mockery of their suffering. To watch their hard work not be appreciated or used or bought so they don't receive their money would be a slap in the faces of the survivors.

As a survivor who loved what they did, I hated watching something I did go down the drain because of what I'd stood up for, and I know they'd feel the same. To Boycott, unsub, or stop playing in their names gives their attacker the power instead of them. But this game and all others like it to continue to be appreciated worked on loved, and used, and not let their attacker win is a victory.

It cannot change or undo that environment that the work was created in but it can make it great and shine like the beautiful diamond those people worked so hard on for us.

This is only my opinion and mere statement as a player of this game. I'm not going anywhere and I will stand up for those SA survivors. If you don't feel the same I understand but this is how I feel and I hope anyone who worked on this game reads this and knows we as the game base stands with you. And we won't let this game falter because of someone's evil. We are the light that stands in the darkness.

Have a wonderful week friends. Holychaos.

[boilingheart]

HI I’M BACK WITH MORE JAVI SOLGUARD!!

Lore dump about him and these pieces under the cut because it got long!!

Javi’s a holy priest, very devout man. He’s the sole survivor of his family after the Scourge attacked Quel’thalas, and since then, he gained a dangerous fascination for all things involving life and death, a morbid form of coping at the time. He researched extensively the traits, powers and systems of the Scourge and undeath, came close to becoming a necromancer himself before pulling himself off that path to darkness before it was too late, using instead his knowledge and his Light to aid others who suffered from the same he did. Active during WotLK, disappeared in Cata seemingly to finally grieve, then would be active in every expansion after that.

When death knights joined the ranks of the living, Javi was one of the first to welcome them with open arms, respectfully but extensively studying them as well. He was briefly friends with my DK Seaandra Sunblade as well since she was a curious case, plus, they knew each other before death.

Aside from studying the unholy, Javi turns his attention to most every power source out there, ranging from the Sha, to Azerite, to arcane and more — while on Argus, Javi studied the Lightforged and “borrowed” their tech and skills, and devised his own bootleg lightforging ritual to give himself similar augmentations as the draenei to boost his own Light. He’d also spent time in Suramar and managed to get some of the Nightborne there to help him devise specific runic tattoos like they have so he can hone his affinity for arcane. He grabs hold of any interesting relics and power sources from different places so he can improve himself and gain more power, which directly fuels his insatiable curiosity.

Come Shadowlands, Javi will FINALLY be able to complete his research on death, and will LEAP on the opportunity to use anima. When using anima, his lightforged augmentations disagree with the power source, and the anima latches onto those golden fixtures, unintentionally burning him. When he casts it or is empowered by it, it will often steam out of those augmentations. He’ll often wear bracers/gloves (from the Vestments of the Eternal Traveler set) that help contain and control anima. When I get more info on how all the new stuff works I’ll have a better system but man

I can’t get him out of my head

[conscience-killer]

25 and 32!

25. Proudest accomplishment in gaming?

Honestly most of my proudest moments are from 2005/2006 vanilla WoW. Beating Vaelastrasz the Corrupt comes to mind: basically when I first started playing WoW I was in a pretty awful guild; quantity over quality, essentially. We took like a year to down Ragnaros (and I shit you not we had guildmates throwing fire spells at a literal fire elemental, that's how bad they were), and somehow, by some miracle, we managed to enter BWL and down Razorgore. Anyways Vael the Guild Breaker ended up doing just that, and a bunch of us Not Bads decided to break away and form our own guild, and after a few initial struggles and a shitload of recruitment and *cough* player poaching, we finally downed the bastard. I still have the kill video! Good times. :’) (Fun fact: some members of that original guild still bear a grudge lol. It's been 15 years, Lee, get over it. 😂)

Another cool moment was when I, a level 56 (or 57, I forget) shadow priest managed to beat a notorious BWL-geared ganker (complete with Ashkandi, no less) in pvp. I have the screenshots to prove it lol. Vanilla shadow priests were overpowered as fuck. :D

Also, during original TBC my guild got the server third Black Temple clear, and we were on a pretty tryhard server, so that was kinda neat.

And one time I won a 3v1 in world pvp, but this was WotLK and I was an arcane mage sooooooo, yeah lol.

And something not WoW related: The first time I played SH3 I was completely out of ammo for the final boss, and somehow scraped my way through it with the steel pipe. Or it might have been the katana, either way it made me feel like a badass.

32. Do you cosplay?

I do not, I'm afraid. I wish I had the skills!

[mogsnobs]

Wield the powers of the arcane with Blue Dragonflight transmog sets.

♦ Azure Spellweaver - Cloth ♦ Crystalsong Acolyte - Cloth ♦ Nexus Defender - Plate ♦ Sapphire Centurion - Plate

[alteredphoenix]

In Defense of Calia: On the Topic of Misogyny and the Criticism of the Forsaken Double Standard

So I like to browse Twitter a lot, mainly for the art but mostly just to kill time. But I also follow people and websites, and one of those happens to be Wowhead. A couple days ago there was an article documenting Calia’s appearance within the Horde Council in the Shadowlands pre-patch, to which she would voice her opinion on the state of the Horde as well as the uncertain future that Azeroth now faces with the breaking of the Helm of Domination and return of the Scourge.

The WoW community can be...very passionate, or inflammatory, depending on your point of view. The same can be said for any big fandom, in all honesty. But I’m not in a lot of fandoms, and, at least where WoW is concerned, there’s a kind of laser-guided hyperfixation in regards to the introduction and development of its characters. Old or new, the fandom watches them like a hawk, but perhaps none more vigilantly than ones that have been mentioned in-game but have not made an actual appearance itself beyond the tie-in novels.

Three of these characters are Turalyon, Alleria, and Calia. However, Turalyon and Alleria are not given this much scrutiny outside of snide quips that “Turalyon is flat and boring/he’s a zealot/he’s the embodiment of the white savior among the draenei” and “Alleria is a fucking psycho for using the Void and wanting the blood elves to return to the Alliance, she’s just like her sisters, it must run in the blood/she’s arm candy to another, rugged Alliance man” whenever the plot calls for their convenience. I would daresay these parts of the fandom would go as far to say that with their developments given within the story, it would be in Blizzard’s best interests to have never brought them so as to “preserve their memory from before the Activision merger”. On the other hand, I would like to note that this sentiment is echoed ad nauseam for practically every character in WoW...but we’ll touch on that a little bit. This piece isn’t about Turalyon and Alleria or the others.

Rather, this is about Calia, and I wanted to give voice to my opinions on the backlash - or perhaps reception would be a better word - she has been receiving. She was a character I came across reading Arthas: Rise of the Lich King and didn’t think much of afterwards; for all I knew, she had died when Lordaeron and that was the end of the Menethil bloodline. However, with her debut in Legion and unique circumstances that followed culminating from the ending of Before the Storm, as well as being tangentially tied with the Light/Void conflict that’ll come to the forefront in the future, I wanted to keep an eye on her character arc.

Needless to say, when I read the Wowhead post, the comments could basically be described like this:

The WoW Community: Gawd, Blizzard is pushing Calia so hard into the narrative.  She’s just another pathetic dev’s self-insert like Nathanos is, even though we only base this off some harmless, tongue-in-cheek posts on Twitter and we need to vent our anger toward another character who clearly has too much development! She’s everywhere!

Be me, off to the side, remembering she was only present in the Priest Class Hall campaign in Legion; takes part in Before the Storm before getting axed in the Arathi Gathering and being subsequently raised into Lightly undeath by a king, her Archbishop, and a naaru that may have influenced her into going to the Gathering; only shows up very late in BfA right after Sylvanas Blasts Off Again at the end of the War Campaign to reconnect with the Proudmoores and help the kaldorei undead as well as the Forsaken Sylvanas ditches; shadows Lilian and the Horde Council in Shadows Rising, and shows up in Icecrown when the sky cracks open and Bolvar is no longer the Lich King that took up the role her brother was in.

I don’t know what popular fanfiction you folks are reading (or whatever tea you’re drinking; I’ve been looking around since the last Calia post I made and I can’t find it!), but that is not what I would call everywhere.

Look, you’re more than welcome to despise Calia as much as Nathanos over baseless claims and double standards, but let’s not pretend there are other Forsaken that’d fill the hole Sylvanas left behind. Because they can’t. They won’t be able to, because for years Sylvanas made up the core of Forsaken identity. Prior to WotLK they were a race that was reviled and ostracized by the world and looked upon with distrust by everyone including the Horde, even as Hamuul vouched for them and convinced Thrall to give them a chance despite knowing full well how cruel and selfish they could be. Their sole purpose was to exact revenge on the man who took everything away from them, destroyed their lives, and raised them into his service against their will.

And even when Arthas was defeated, they had no other purpose but to conquer Lordaeron, find a way to reproduce their numbers, and reaffirm their loyalty to the Horde - because where the hell else are they going to go? Because even if some Forsaken disagree with Sylvanas’s strict institutions regarding the acceptance of their undeath and the complete rejection of their former, mortal lives, not everyone in the Alliance is going to welcome them with open arms; not everyone is an Anduin or a Jaina. You see this with Genn, who despite accepting that not every Forsaken is bad still holds them in contempt, and with Alleria, who, after spending a thousand years in the Twisting Nether fighting the Burning Legion and thus being removed from the changes that occurred on Azeroth, is justifiably concerned that they are no longer the same person in undeath as they were in life. You see this in the way that some families spurn their loved ones when the Gathering takes place.

So while it’s true that you can say Calia doesn’t have what it takes to be the person the Forsaken need in a post-Sylvanas Azeroth, you must also remember that of all the named Forsaken we know of only Lilian has been given due development. You can’t say the same for Belmont (a loyalist who disregarded Cromush’s warnings about using the plague in Silverpine, as well as fought a losing battle against Tyrande in Darkshore in BfA), Helcular (a presumably former Cult of the Damned affiliate who notably defended Tarren Mill during the Legion’s third incursion), Faranell (another loyalist who created the New Plague and believes Putress is behind Wrathgate, but perhaps unaware of Sylvanas’s possible involvement), and Velonara (who did not want to be want to raised but followed Sylvanas anyway until the Fourth War, eventually siding with the Horde Council). They are merely foot soldiers; outside of maybe Velonara they don’t have the luxury of experiencing the emotional turmoil a newly risen undead goes through the way Lilian Voss does when Thomas Zelling, dying from illness, makes a deal to be raised into undeath and help the Horde in their war if it meant protecting his family. They don’t have the luxury of watching him get executed by the Warchief’s right hand man in front of their eyes the way Lilian and every other Horde leader present did. You would not get the same weight by switching her out with any of them. You could say Lilian would make a decent successor to Sylvanas, and I would not disagree with you. However, Lilian does not have the familial connection that Calia does to Lordaeron, and while Gey’arah poses the question of leadership to her at the Horde War Campaign’s epilogue, it should be noted that Lilian believes there is “another more suited to the task”, preferring to be the hand that would comfort the Forsaken of the trauma of being raised into undeath and, as of Shadows Rising, act as their interim leader.

Then again, neither does Calia. We don’t know where she and Faol were after Lordaeron’s fall (which is one key detail I have seen people not take into account upon their criticisms of her character), but we do know that upon being asked she had refused to reassert her claim to Lordaeron. However, she has common sense enough to know that Faol was not like the other Scourge in the beginning, and later when she met with Elsie, Parqual Fintallas, and the Felstone family.

Whatever happened during that time period prior to Legion, she identifies with the Forsaken. They are, in a way, still her people, regardless of that. This is why I think she would suit the Forsaken best as their leader, not as Queen of Lordaeron that the fandom - or rather, most of the Sylvanas stans - has been so prone to parroting since her intentions to help guide the kaldorei undead and the Lordaeronian Forsaken were first revealed.

And look, I’m a Sylvanas stan, too. But it is very much apparent that Sylvanas only started the Fourth War for her own purposes, has clearly been in an alliance with the Jailer since Cataclysm (yet is hinted to not be entirely subservient to him), and even if she was doing everything up until Shadowlands as an extreme mixture of For the Greater Good and The End Justifies The Means she was still a toxic influence to the more honorable members of the Horde and to the Desolate Council. Even if her behavior were an act to conceal her true intentions, it would still not absolve her completely for all the atrocities she committed and the suffering she caused. Not even Nathanos, whom people have an obsessive, misandrist fixation of being based on someone who’s not despite being in the game for fifteen years prior to that dev joining Blizzard, would not be the best replacement for Sylvanas. Nathanos - the same man who loves Sylvanas so much he would do anything for her even as he pushes aside the brief moments where he hesitates following her orders and expresses shock at her actions - would not have either the Horde’s or the Forsaken’s best interests at heart, for his belongs only to her. After all, you can’t “redeem” a character if the character himself does not regret what they have done and does not want to change for the better.

Which is another thing I have noticed, in the years I have been in the WoW fandom: the concept of “redemption” in the wake of “character assassination” in the wake of events that caused by said characters that are often deemed questionable, which is what I believe makes people conclude the causation to be a source of “bad writing”. This also ties to what I also believe to be the misogynistic undertones the fandom expresses, simply because the events caused by questionable if dubious methods are done by a woman and not a man, which therefore leads to the notion that Blizzard “hates women”. This gives me the impression that these voices would prefer to have Blizzard write their women as someone who are pure and strong and multi-faceted but the minute she performs an action that not everyone is on board with then she is either considered “ruined” or a “dreadlord”, which is merely a cop-out excuse that you only see applied to the female characters (e.g. Jaina) but not the male characters; those men are simply called “evil” or “genocidal”, whether or not they are rightfully so. Then again, men are also considered “ruined” if they are so much as given the spotlight (e.g. Lor’themar in Nazjatar, Baine throughout BfA), but they are nowhere near under as much scrutiny than the women are (unless it’s Garrosh, then you’re going to have to put up with the “Garrosh Did Nothing Wrong” memes). Which leads us back to the hypocrisy the fandom shows towards Calia, a character to whom people call a “Mary Sue” but at the same time an “abomination” who is going to be “Queen of the Forsaken” that is being pushed by Blizzard to make the playerbase hate Sylvanas even more.

And from what we know about Calia, she is neither seeking to become “Queen of the Forsaken” for the foreseeable future nor a “Mary Sue” (if she were, she would’ve succeeded in making all the Forsaken defect to the Alliance and, you know, not die). Perhaps she is made to question if she is capable of providing for the Forsaken (for some, that is, for it was confirmed by Blizzard that not all Forsaken are willing to be lead by another Menethil, and one who had been missing and presumed dead for years at that). Perhaps she is an anomaly, but she is by no means perfection incarnate the fanbase paints her to be.

TLDR Calia Menethil is a character that deserves a chance at getting her character arc and development, and should be judged accordingly instead of jumping the gun.