Are You Ready to Kill Some Orcs?

There is less than a day left before we storm through the dark portal and come face to face with a new orc threat.  Like it or not, it seems like one again we will be pounding down the pig faced beasts.  A few posts have popped up asking the question if we really see the orcs as a threat and it got me to thinking about it.

At face value a bunch of orcs are really of no real consequence.  Been there, done that, been pretty much bored of it for ages now.  The orcs have tried, and had limited success, taking over azeroth before and were beaten back by what was mostly an unprepared group of forces that were not even working as a team.  These orcs were infused with fel magic, they were stronger, more brutal, and definitely more determined.  So if we can, as an unorganized, unprepared group of people, beat back a stronger, more brutal orc threat, what exactly makes these orcs think they are anything more than a general annoyance.

The entire orc threat seems to be nothing more than a glorified quest line.  One that should be finished in a small zone where most of the leaders are end of the quest line non elites, just kind of harder than the average orc, and then maybe we sum up the entire zone with a deadmines dungeon sort of thing where all the orcs we heard about while questing are in a 5 man dungeon and we kill them all along the way.

Seriously, this is exactly how I see the expansion.  As something that would have been better served as a 5 man dungeon in the caverns of time or maybe even a three dungeon block at most.  For good measure they could have also given us a small patch of land that involves them where we use a portal to get to and from it, like with the island of thunder.

I do not see the orcs as a threat, never have, never will.  If the much more deadly fel orcs served as no threat, why should the weaker version do so?  Remember, these are a group of people that were capable of being turned into slaves by the orges.  The orges people, just think about how weak of a race you would have to be for that to happen.

Some people like to point out that the orcs have future technology from the blackfuse that garrosh bought back in time with him to use in this endeavor to become a stronger more aggressive force of conquerors. But lets face it, giving technology to orcs is like giving a typewriter to some monkeys. Given enough time they might manage to do something that resembles intelligence but mostly they will just spew out gibberish.  Orcs do not have the intelligence of the goblins or gnomes, they do not have the tactical knowledge of the trolls, and they do not have the power of higher reasoning like the draenei.  They are just, well, orcs.  All they do is smash things with an axe, nothing more.

But then something popped into my mind.  Something that would in fact make the orcs a threat, something I would have to use my imagination to build up because blizzard has done nothing to make us actually fear these orcs of lesser power than our own tame orcs.  So here it is, my completely made up fantasy of why the orcs are something to be considered a threat.  While you might not agree with my reasoning, at least give it a try, because unlike blizzard, I am actually going to try to give us a reason to fear them.

Remember I am taking many liberties here and making some stuff up as I am going along.  I am just trying to create an orc threat that I can really accept as a threat, because lets face it, the threat blizzard presented to us is really nonexistent.  Let me know what you think of my imagination in creating a real, true, orc threat.

There are 5 reasons to fear these orcs:

1) Numbers:
2) Brutality:
3) Desperation:
4) Faith:
5) Fear:

1) Numbers:

These orcs are large in numbers.  While it might be true that we do not know exactly how many orcs there are we can safely assume there are a lot of them.  It is quite possible that their could be more draenor orcs than there are combined forces of both factions that came over from azeroth.  And being the orcs are basically animals and as I said are just the type that smash people with the axes, their numbers could very well be something to fear.

Even if the combined forces of both alliance and horde are in the range of 1000 trained, battle hardened, motivated individuals that are willing to work as a team against this threat, what chance to do they have if an army of 100,000 orcs come charging at them.  Even if they can thin the pack and pick off a few orcs here and there even the vastly more prepared azeroth heroes would be quickly overwhelmed and be annihilated by the superior, even if only in numbers, orc forces.

There is a great strength in numbers, and these orcs have the numbers.  Every orc is raised to be a fighter and all they ever do from birth to death is fight.  While they might not be the smartest of fighters or the most tactical of fighters they do now how to swing an axe better than most.  So with a number advantage as huge as the one they have, even if they all just come blindly swinging axes with no real military planning, the orcs will win based on numbers alone.

2) Brutality:

They might not be as strong as the orcs we know that were infused with the fel energy.  They might never be able to match them in brute force.  But what they can do is be brutal.  They have no code of honor, they have no peaceful shamanistic ties.  They have to part of their mind that can be reasoned with.  They are not the orc we were lead to believe came from this time.  Maybe that is because these orcs are not the ones that came from this time, in our past that is. These orcs are pure animals, no threads of humanity at all, just bloodlust.

These orcs, from what little we know of them, were always brutal.  They were never peaceful.  They did not need to drink blood as an excuse to kill, they killed because they wanted to kill.  There is no right and wrong, just strength and steel.

Think of the story Maraad told us, where the orcs of our timeline murdered women and children and then look at our past and the past of the orcs we are going to visit and you will see the parallel.  Sure our past have the blood drinking orcs, but this world has already shown us that these orcs are more brutal than our orcs were even after drinking the blood.  So if our orcs could do it, these orcs would probably think of killing women and children as a fun family get together game like pin the tail on the donkey.

If these orcs had drank the blood it might be a really bad threat because they are more  brutal, more without honor, more without morals than our orcs ever were.  These orcs would rape and kill your wife in front of you then use dark magics to revive her just so they could do it all over again in front of you.  And then when they were tried of torturing you like that, they would revive her once more and let her demon body rip you apart just for the fun of watching you scream in pain knowing the hell they put you through.  They would laugh more at this then a stoned college student watching cheech and chong movies.

And these orcs that did that would be these orcs on one of their better days when they are trying to be nice.  If there were a word that further stressed pure brutality, it would be used for these orcs and these orcs only.

3) Desperation:

These orcs are at a fork in the road, they have come from being slaves and they know that someone was trying to manipulate them into drinking the blood to turn them into slaves once again.  So they stand at a point where they can either become slaves, fight for themselves, or become conquerors themselves, perhaps in an effort to get slaves of their own to fight the incoming threat they know will be coming.

They are desperate to be top dogs because they are tired of being beat on.  They have always been the strongest, but not exactly the smartest, so they are using their strength and the motivation of their desperation, to try and become leaders instead of slaves once again.  There is an old saying that the most dangerous people are the people that have nothing to lose, and right now the orcs see themselves in this very situation.

They have nothing to lose.  If they choose to stand still, they could be over run, if they go back they could become slaves again, and if they move forward they could lose.  But of all the options the only risk worth taking is the risk of moving forward.  Going back or standing pat are not options, so in desperation they need to move forward and they have nothing to lose.

Always fear the person that is not afraid to die because there is no way you can ever win against them unless you kill them.  They will keep coming at you.  And knowing what is in the past and what could come to pass again if they do not move forward as conquerors, they really are in a no win situation and that makes them dangerous beyond dangerous.

4) Faith:

I am not sure how garrosh managed to do it but be has become a prophet for the orcs of draenor.  He was able to convince grom that drinking the blood would be wrong, he was able to convince the other orcs to follow groms lead.  He was able to get them to drop their individual clans and join as one large clan for the greater good.  He positioned himself as a prophet for what could make the orcs a great race and his people believe him to be so and be capable of delivering on that promise.

In the real world more people have been killed in the name of religion than for any other reason.  Why should the game world be any different?  It shouldn't.  Orcs are now following the lead that garrosh set.  He offered them all this big vision of what could be, how great the orc empire would be, if only they would invade azeroth.

While we know he is doing it as much for revenge as he might be doing it because of some daddy issues they only see him as a gift from the heavens that has shown them the true path to a greater society and they are following the path he laid down for them with blind faith.

As long as you have people that believe in something so very strongly that they will do bad things, horrible things, dreadful things, incomprehensible things, all in an effort to move forward to what the master plan is, you have a force you can never win again.  You can kill a person but you can never kill an idea.  Ideas are eternal and faith, when placed wrongly, in those ideas can be deadly.

The prophet garrosh has come and laid down the path to the golden land and the orcs believe it, with complete faith, and they will do whatever they can to fulfill that prophecy.  As we all know, fanatics that are following their prophet and have been radicalized, will do whatever it takes to get to the promise land.

Garrosh promised them glory, they believe him, and they will not stop, ever, until they push forth and kill every last person on azeroth like their prophet told them to do.  If that is not scary enough for you, I don't know what could be.  You would need to wipe out the entire race to cleanse any remnant of that sort of thinking.  And that is the threat we face.  Even if we kill all the adults now, their children will grow and and continue along the path the prophet garrosh set out for them with even greater zeal than their parents had fought for it because now they are also fighting for the honor of their fallen that died for this belief in the promise land.  It will never end until the entire orcish race is eliminated from the face of draenor.  There are no other options.

5) Fear:

What could these brutal, faith filled, desperate orcs in large numbers fear?  Surely it is not the forces of azeroth because they are marching directly for us.  Perhaps we need to go to the teachings of the prophet garrosh to find out what would make even these animals, these beasts, these killing machines, have their hearts filled with fear.

The prophet garrosh told them about the legion.  How he saw with his own eyes as a world, much like this one, was sundered, torn apart piece by piece.  He told them of the stories of how they enslaved the races high in strength and large in numbers and eliminated the races that could not serve them to the point of extinction, or near extinction.  He mentioned that the visitors on this world, even if they had been living in a somewhat fragile peace with them, were being hunted by the legion and that one day a pit lord would come to enlist the assistance of the orcs to kill them all.

An offer of blood would be given and if they drank it they would gain amazing power, more than enough to kill each and every last draenei on the planet but that they too would become slaves to the legion, minions of their destruction.  And if they did not accept this gift from the legion they too would be put on the list for elimination.

He told them that there was this land, a land he had been to, lush with land and trees, and filled with great power.  A land where the legion attacked and lost, the only land were the legion ever attacked and lost.  After bringing thousands maybe even hundreds of thousands of races to extinction, destroying, sundering, reducing to dust thousands of planets within a blink of an eye and yet this one place remained safe.  He told them of the promise land, one where they would be safe from the legion forever.

After the prophet laid down all they needed to know and the day came where this pit lord he mentioned arrived and offered them a gift that if they accepted they would need to exchange everything in return for that power, they were sure, the words of the prophet garrosh were true.

In their effort to not become slaves again and knowing there was a safe place to go to, they not only turned down the offer but they killed the messenger.  They killed the pit lord that came to offer them power.

The prophet garrosh let them know, just like they would never stop hunting the draenei that got away, the legion would now never stop hunting them down.  So there was only one thing they could do and that was to become conquerors themselves.  They needed to conqueror the world that the prophet described as the promise land, the one land where the legion could not win.

So under the guise of being the strong ones and becoming conquerors when in fact they were running, out of fear, for their very lives from the burning legion that they knew would come down on them hard for rejecting the gift that was being bestowed upon them and killing the lord that offered it.

The orcs are like a cornered dog, scared and with nothing to lose.  And a trapped animal is a dangerous one.  Their fear that the burning legion would come for them coupled with the knowledge from their prophet that they could not beat them unless they were at the promise land gave them more than enough motivation to want to get there.

The orcs we are fighting are fighting for their very lives.  They are fighting like a cornered dog, tooth and nail, just trying to get away from draenor, to save their own very lives and make it to the promise land.  Their fear of the burning legion coming to exact revenge is greater than their desire to conquer, and that makes for a very dangerous combination with their strength and numbers.

Now, as I said, blizzard did not really do anything to make me believe the orcs where a threat, but I have tried my best, in my own mind, to create a world where I could see the orcs as a threat.

The question is, do you think of them as a threat now too?