Warcraft Retrospective 35: Code Charm: Sylvanas of the Rebellion
The Frozen Throne redesigned all faction themes to be more upbeat and more suggestive of action, but whereas it’s very obviously the case with the human, night elf, and orc faction themes1, it’s less so with the undead one. There are more war drums compared to the original one, but overall it’s still sticking with the feel of the previous undead theme: slow, spooky, and eerie.
As for the campaign, we’re going to take a one-mission break from Sylvanas’s plotline and once again focus on Arthas. The fourth mission covers…
The Return to Northrend
Arthas lands in Northrend… and is immediately attacked by elves, whom he identifies as high elves at first. Thankfully, like many other times in Warcraft 3, his enemies have the courtesy to introduce themselves.
Arthas’s forces engage with the dragonhawk riders… and suddenly, crypt fiends appear from the ground, led by a giant nerubian.
This is Anub’arak, the last king of Azjol-Nerub, who was reanimated by the Lich King after his demise and is now fiercely loyal to him — though, considering the nerubians were conquered by the Scourge, probably not by his own choice. As we’ve seen with Sylvanas, sapient undead don’t seem to have their free will intact and are instead mind-controlled by the Lich King, thus explaining their loyalty.
It’s actually good that this has been established. Imagine if some other undead group raised their enemies as undead, and the newly risen, despite supposedly retaining their sound minds, immediately joined the banners of those who raised them, forgetting their previous allegiances. Without mind control, it would make no sense, right? It would be even worse if, hypothetically, the writers couldn’t decide if the undead raised by this other group actually were mind-controlled or not, changing their minds from scene to scene.
And logically speaking, if the Lich King was vanquished, the undead formerly bound to his will would now be free. Mindless undead, like ghouls and zombies, would roam wild, attacking everything in sight, and those who have minds of their own would get their free will back — as it happened to Sylvanas and her banshees.
Gameplay-wise, Anub’arak is a crypt lord, the fourth undead hero added in the expansion. The crypt lord’s gameplay role can be described in one word: tank. He’s very durable, can increase the armor of allied units, and can raise beetles from enemy units he kills, which provides his allies with a steady stream of disposable frontliners. The crypt lord is a nice addition to the undead, whose early-to-mid-game units tend to be relatively squishy. In this campaign, Anub’arak will be taking the hits a lot of the time as Arthas gets progressively weaker by losing levels.
The elves are repelled, but there’s a problem: Arthas’s landing site has no resources.
We have transport ships, but the only gold mine in the vicinity is occupied by a blood elf base, and its coast is protected by patrolling ships and four towers. Charging blindly in would be suicidal, so we take ships of our own to destroy them; the frigates mop up enemy units while the battleship destroys the towers, itself staying outside of their range.
Notice that Arthas has to use ships here to cross a narrow strait. This is because, as was clearly established in the vanilla undead campaign, Arthas has no way to cross bodies of water on his own. He has absolutely no magical powers that would let him, say, just make an ice bridge over the strait and charge in.
Once the towers are destroyed, the rest of the base falls easily. He calls the elves pathetic, tempting fate as their leader teleports in.
Warcraft 3 heroes seem fond of treating talking as a free action. Once in a while in cutscenes, a hero will teleport in, stand there like nothing threatens them, talk to their enemies, then teleport out. I suppose that narratively we do need the heroes to speak their minds to each other within the constraints of the RTS format, and this is a lesser evil compared to Arthas somehow being able to hear Mal’Ganis across the entire city of Stratholme.
For some unfathomable reason, Kael boasts to Arthas about the vast forces under Illidan’s command, marching on Icecrown Citadel even now, and taunts him that he’ll never make it in time to his precious Lich King. Um, Kael, maybe it would be better not to reveal your plans to the enemy, so they won’t hurry to foil said plans?
“Consider this payment for Quel’Thalas… and other insults,” says Kael, then teleports away. Arthas has another fit of pain.
Once he comes back to his senses, he worries that they’ll never reach the glacier in time, and Anub’arak suggests a plan.
Once we regain control, we have a rudimentary base already built on the former site of the blood elf base. I immediately start developing it, constructing towers and production buildings and upgrading the necropolis. We can’t build flyers in this mission, and we’ll be facing powerful enemy flyers, so I invest heavily into crypt fiends. The barrels around the base are also worth knocking down for sweet loot, including gold coins and bundles of lumber.
Anub’arak gives us a side quest: there is a dragon who lives nearby, and if we slay him, we can find items in his hoard that will protect us on our march. Soon enough, the base gets attacked by Illidan’s naga.
The dragon in question is Sapphiron, a mighty level 15 blue wyrm who’s guarded by two level 10 blue dragons. As Arthas approaches him, they have a really funny banther:
Sapphiron: You dare enter my lair? I am Sapphiron, ancient servant of Malygos the Spell-Weaver! Explain yourselves!
King Arthas: Sorry we don’t have time to chat, great wyrm. We’ve come to murder you and steal whatever artifacts you’ve been hoarding over the centuries.
Sapphiron: Honesty, how refreshing. None may challenge Sapphiron and live!
I wish more quest bosses treated us this way.
Sapphiron and his guards fall to the army of crypt fiends, and Arthas raises him as an enormous frost wyrm with 2750 HP! He has the power to freeze enemy buildings that needs to be researched for regular frost wyrms, so he’s particularly helpful against enemy towers. He can also guard our transport ships practically by himself, which comes handy considering this is a map with lots of water.
And it really is. The naga have a home field advantage, since they can just swim across deep water, but we have to take transport ships. Still, their base falls, followed by the small blood elf base to its northwest.
Our actual goal here is to defeat the guardians of the passage to Azjol-Nerub, but before I do that, I go off exploring into the southwestern corner of the map.
We find some ice chunks, which are immediately destroyed by an earthquake, revealing a passage filled with trees. These trees are actually placed sparsely enough to be passable, and once we go through it, we’re faced with a closed door… and a cutscene.
The Penguin King dances around in a cutscene and doesn’t attack, instead offering a Ring of Protection +4.
There is another mission secret involving a village of walrus people called tuskarr, who have a pen with penguins, one of which is… Little Timmy. He’s been a human boy, a ghoul, and now a penguin, and if you click him enough times, he explodes. However, getting to the tuskarr requires destroying a powerful blood elf base that’s otherwise optional, so I didn’t bother.
The passage to Azjol-Nerub is protected by a variety of creatures, including nerubians and blue dragonspawn — centauroid draconic beings — led by a level 15 Blue Dragonspawn Lord. However, our massive army, augmented by Sapphiron, makes quick work of them.
However, this is where we have to part with our frost wyrm friend. Azjol-Nerub awaits, and he won’t fit into subterranean caverns. Probably.
Leaving Arthas as he prepares to delve underground, we return to Sylvanas.
Dreadlord’s Fall
In Starcraft’s expansion, Brood War, there was a mission where Kerrigan betrayed her allies, launching an attack when they were resting and thus gaining a few valuable minutes of crushing their bases with impunity while their forces were asleep and disorganized.
That mission concept was so nice, Blizzard did it twice. We’ll be doing the same thing here.
Sylvanas is surprised to see humans at Detheroc’s stronghold, and asks Varimathras who they are.
Said “Garabon or Gilithos or something” is, of course, none other than Grand Marshal Garithos. Not only did our General Failure needlessly alienate some of his best troops with his racism, but now he has been outright ensorcelled by a dreadlord and is fighting on the undead’s side.
For some reason, our army of overpowered minions from the previous mission has evaporated, and Varimathras now calls Sylvanas’s forces “paltry”. Instead of attacking either base head on, Sylvanas hatches a plan. Her banshees ambush two footmen returning from a patrol, and possess them.
The returning footmen raise the gates and are in turn attacked by their alerted comrades. Now we have eight minutes to cause as much mayhem as possible before the enemy forces awaken.
There are four enemy bases on the map: two of Garithos’s and two of Detheroc’s. I chose to take out Garithos first: he’s a tougher hero than Detheroc, human bases are more annoying to siege at full strength, and there are two mortar teams just outside his bases that we can possess to quickly damage buildings.
There’s not enough time to level the bases entirely, but I don’t need to. It’s enough to destroy the town halls and kill all peasants, so they have no resource income and can’t rebuild. After that, they can upgrade the towers for all I care and sit ducks for the remainder of the mission.
I’m kind of conflicted about the premise of this mission, though.
The premise of the previous Sylvanas mission was enough of a stretch. It’s nice to have the enemy use the same tactic as us for a change — mind control the leader of a large force and have their underlings fall in line — but it already stretched belief that the ogres and the bandits would follow an undead abomination, and now we have an entire human army serve a dreadlord — and acknowledge it in dialogue — just because said dreadlord mind-controlled Garithos, whom nobody liked anyway? This sounds like perfect pretext to mutiny against Garithos and appoint a new leader.
Sylvanas is now level 6, and she unlocks her ultimate ability: Charm. It mind controls any enemy organic unit, ground or flying — whereas banshees can only possess ground units — and has only a 40-second cooldown, so Sylvanas can use it over and over again. Between Charm and banshees, we can now outright turn whole enemy armies against their masters. This mission is fuuun.
Once Garithos’s two bases are crippled — and the man himself goes down after putting up one hell of a fight — I retreat very very quickly to my base before the timer expires.
When enemy forces awaken, Detheroc counterattacks — and throws everything he has against me. Seriously, he must have collected every single unit across his two bases. Once Sylvanas and her banshees return, they’re in for a tough fight — or so it seems at first, but then we turn the heaviest hitters of Detheroc’s army against him and mop up the rest.
The best time to counter-counterattack is right after an enemy’s failed counterattack, so that’s what I do. Detheroc’s first base falls easily, having almost no units to defend it. The second one puts up more of a challenge, but eventually caves in too.
After that, there’s the awkward mop-up phase where we have to destroy the remains of Garithos’s bases, which pose no challenge: they did upgrade their towers, but all they could produce was a few measly footmen. With both Detheroc and Garithos’s bases destroyed, the mission is over.
An animation shows some kind of spell effect fading from Garithos and his men. So it seems Detheroc actually had ensorcelled the entire human army and not just their leader?
Sylvanas proposes an alliance to the Alliance.
Of course, as she immediately confides to Varimathras once Garithos leaves, she has no intention of giving the humans their lands back. She’s merely using them. Varimathras remarks that she sounds more like a dreadlord with each passing day — to her displeasure.
A New Power in Lordaeron
Sylvanas and her motley crew are ready to attack Capital City. As could be expected, Varimathras and Garithos don’t exactly get along, and only Sylvanas’s intervention is keeping them from exploding at each other.
Sylvanas’s plan is to attack on two fronts, so that her forces and Garithos’s will assault Balnazzar from two opposite directions. That is, indeed, how we start on the map: in two opposite corners. Balnazzar’s humongous base is in the center of the map, between our two bases.
Sylvanas has the entire undead tech tree at her disposal, but Garithos — fittingly — can only build human units at start because he had a teeny tiny bit of a quarrel with elves under his command.
Garithos’s in-game class is called “dark knight”. Mechanically, he’s an odd hybrid, having the paladin’s Holy Light and Devotion Aura, the tauren chieftain’s Shockwave, and the mountain king’s Avatar. It seems weird that such a selfish and offputting person wields a paladin’s healing power, but I assume it was given to him for balance reasons.
Though Garithos starts with human troops only (that is, just footmen and knights), a footman soon reports that their scouts have found the missing band of dwarves. Garithos’s reaction is predictable:
Honestly, in a story filled by relatively complex (by Warcraft standards) anti-heroes and anti-villains, he’s a disappointingly boring, one-note character. This makes his fandom all the stranger. Over the years, Garithos has accumulated a vocal fanbase putting his xenophobia on a pedestal and trying to recast Warcraft as a battle between humanity and inhuman monsters. Obviously, this was not the author intent, and whenever he opens his mouth, the narrative makes it clear that he’s wrong about pretty much everything.2
The dwarves are in the northeastern corner of the map, and to get to them, we fight through kobolds guarding a gold mine. Once Garithos reaches them, he acts like, well, his usual self.
We get it, he’s an prickish racist doofus. Can we move on?
(One of the riflemen remarks that they aren’t paying them enough to put up with that asshole3, implying they’re mercenaries. This would at least explain why they put up with him at all.)
The mission itself is remarkably plain. In a campaign laden to the brim with gimmicks, it’s just a straightforward base siege mission, with the only twist being that you’re coordinating two independent forces for a joint strike.4 Balnazzar’s base is protected by a lot of undead and demons, and he himself is a powerful level 10 dreadlord, but we wield the combined might of two players — and while the game expects us to attack from two fronts, it’s actually more beneficial to teleport one base’s force to the other before beginning the attack. Eventually, Balnazzar falls.
Sylvanas orders Varimathras to kill his brother.
He refuses at first, but eventually caves in. There are two possibilities: either he’s become genuinely obedient to Sylvanas, or he’s just complying to save his own skin and is just waiting for a chance to betray her. Take your pick.
Garithos is next.
“Kill him, too,” says Sylvanas. And Varimathras gladly does so — and leaves his body for the ghouls to feast on.
And so, a new order rises in Lordaeron. Through lies, damn lies, treachery, and lots and lots of mind control, Sylvanas has come victorious. Her followers are no longer part of the Scourge, and she announces that from now on, they will be known as the Forsaken.
We will not see the full consequences of this development until World of Warcraft.
This new Sylvanas is… scary. Her will is now indisputably her own, but it’s clear that something changed in her compared to the Sylvanas we saw in Quel’Thalas, even if we know basically nothing about her past life. Was she always an amoral manipulator? Is it the consequence of the mental trauma suffered when Arthas raised her as a banshee? Is undeath itself just inherently corruptive, twisting even noble souls into mockeries of themselves?
I really hope that when the time comes, the story will pick one answer and stick with it.
Next Up
Here’s something else that bugs me. Where is Kel’Thuzad? What has he been doing throughout all this?
We won’t get the answer, which is very puzzling, because Kel’Thuzad’s plotline ended abruptly in the second mission, which makes me wonder why they bothered to put him in this campaign to begin with, only to forget about him. As far as Warcraft 3 is concerned, we’re done with power squabbles in Lordaeron, and we’ll be returning to Arthas in the next and final third of this campaign.
Next up: dwarves and nerubians and faceless, oh my! Followed by a climactic confrontation between Arthas and Illidan.
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Patience. We’ll get to the orcs. ↩
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Also, his existence and the authority he wields will only get odder and odder as retcons surrounding Lordaeron, Quel’Thalas, and Dalaran pile up. I’ll revisit Garithos later when we get to these retcons, but for now, I’ll note that the plot holes the retcons introduced are the problem with the works that introduced them, not with Warcraft 3. Garithos’s story holds together for now. ↩
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Wow! A swear word! In a Warcraft game! ↩
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As opposed to the final night elf mission, where Malfurion and Illidan’s forces each acted in its own part of the map, and you didn’t have to manage them both at once. ↩
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