One of the biggest hot-button issues surrounding the coming of Cataclysm is the situation between our current warchief, Thrall, son of Durotan, and his presumed replacement, Garrosh Hellscream. Recently, while defending Orgrimmar from the Alliance dogs, Thrall needed to take a small nap and that left his warchief seat up for grabs. Seeing my chance, I seized power and stood around, doing nothing in particular since there's no actual in-game mechanic for, "Hey, I'm warchief until Thrall respawns."

This got me wondering, though: what exactly would I do as warchief? Frankly, while I think Garrosh Hellscream's daddy issues are pushing the Horde in a bad direction, I'm also not a terribly large fan of Thrall's laissez-faire approach to Horde leadership. Under Thrall, we talk a good game about coexistence and so on, but the Horde doesn't really seem particularly interested in such talk (and to be fair, it's not like Varian Wrynn is often over for hugs and cookies either). Maybe it is time for a more bellicose Horde leader. However, one can be martial without being ... well, whatever Garrosh is. Is "super-frothing-fruitbat-insane" a word?

So what would I do as warchief, the flow of the post forces you to ask? I'm glad you were so forced!

1. Normalize our military. This one's pretty big. Right now the Horde doesn't have a military to speak of, as far as I can tell. We basically just have each sub-faction within the Horde having its own soliders, and occasionally we'll put together something like the Warsong Offensive or what have you, which has a certain amount of cross-group enlistment. But at present, the Horde still has groups like the Korkron, the Hand of Vengeance, Sunfury, etc., etc., just sort of hanging out and doing their own thing. This needs to stop. As Horde, we need to get some cohesiveness up in this thing -- and fast. Get a command staff together, get some unity going. Orc, troll, tauren, blood elf, undead and those new, smaller green things need to all wok together.
2. Get the other faction leaders in line. I'm kind of looking at Sylvanas here, but don't take that to mean I wouldn't give Vol'Jin or Cairne or Lor'themar the business if it was needed. The Horde is woefully poorly organized. People just kind of do whatever they want, really. Now, I'm not entirely sure it's the fault of the faction leaders that their youth go off on weird adventures and eventually acquire artifacts of ridiculous power, growing strong enough to challenge gods, dragon aspects and even lich kings. But we need to stop stuff like, "Whoopsie, that plague I was developing got used on our people, tee hee," and so on. That doesn't fly no matter how shapely your undead backside happens to be (and as a tauren, I find it kind of repulsively small anyway).
3. Promote more tauren. Seriously, guys, this place needs like a lot more of us. I don't know what the deal is, but let's get to work on this. Tauren are natural sailors and explorers, and of course everyone knows about our shamanic and druidic experts. What with us getting paladins to help add to our already impressive warrior ethos, the time is now for the tauren to start running this stuff. Maybe we can get the orcs to stop chopping down that stupid forest the night elves are so attached to. Seriously, guys, knock it off. You're just doing it to be jerks now.
4. Conquer Ironforge. Why Ironforge? Because those dwarven so-and-so's keep digging up sacred tauren sites. Let's see how you like it when we knock over that ancient forge and turn your ancestors graves into ... I don't know, a nice meadow or something? Okay, we're not as good at defiling ancestors as you are. We'll work on it. Besides, once we had Ironforge, we could basically have a backdoor into Stormwind whenever we wanted.

Aside from asking Kaja out on a date sometime, that would probably be enough to start with for my reign as warchief. What would you do given the opportunity?

Tags: Garrosh, Thrall, Warchief, WWYD

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion