Dethroning Moment / Warcraft

Level 1 or Level 120. Casual Grinder or Hardcore Raider. RTS or MMO. Alliance or Horde. It doesn't matter. You are not prepared for these moments!

Keep in mind:

• Sign your entries
• One moment per game to a troper, if multiple entries are signed to the same troper the more recent one will be cut.
• Moments only, no "just everything he said," or "The entire game" entries.
• No contesting entries. This is subjective, the entry is their opinion.
• No natter. As above, anything contesting an entry will be cut, and anything that's just contributing more can be made its own entry.
• Explain why it's a Dethroning Moment of Suck.
• Please make sure the moment is fictional and is neither an event that occurred in real life nor something gameplay-related. We have a perfectly good Scrappy Mechanic page for the latter.
• No ALLCAPS, no bold, and no italics unless it's the title of a work. We are not yelling the DMoSs out loud.

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Warcraft

• Retloclive: I'll never understand why Malfurion fell for Tyrande, because the way I see it, the woman is just the worst person ever. She refuses to side with the humans and orcs when the Burning Legion is on her very doorsteps trying to destroy the world, but I found that somewhat forgivable since Cenarius' death was a pretty good reason to at least not trust the orcs, and the humans happened to be working alongside said orcs at this point in the story. However, it was Mission 5 of the Night Elf campaign when she and Malfurion go into the Barrow Deeps to awaken the Druids of the Claw where I realized how much I hated this character. She's supposed to be the hero we root for, and yet here she is going about slaughtering Night Elf prison wardens, her own kin, who are just doing their job keeping a condemned criminal (Illidan) beyond bars. Even if it was for a justified cause knowing that Illidan could be useful fighting back against the Burning Legion, she never gets any kind of punishment for slaughtering the wardens apart from Maiev calling her out for it in the expansion game. If it wasn't for Malfurion being the voice of reason, I honestly believe that Tyrande on her own would have ended up getting everyone killed to the Burning Legion.
• cricri3007: The intro where Medivh's "warns" Terenas. Medivh knows the demons' plan, knows what this strange plague is, know what they want to do. Does he tell any of this to Terenas? No, just (paraphrased): "Your kingdom is already doomed! Your only hope is to abandon it and sail for a continent that may or may not exist." To make things worse, when Terenas (rightfully) calls him mad and asks him to either clarify what he's saying or GTFO, Madivh jut say "So you refused to listen, I'll find other who will." and leaves. No, you asshole, they didn't "refuse to listen" your warning, they refused to listen a crazy old man who barged into the royal meeting saying "Doom is coming, hope is lost, flee for your lives!". Considering he wasn't clearer with any of them (not even Arthas, who he knows is going to be the demons' pawn), it's a wonder Jaina and Thrall listened at all to his ramblings. To make things worse, he later tell them that his "warning" is his atonement for bringing the orcs to Azeroth. And you couldn't be clearer because...?

World Of Warcraft

Burning Crusade

• MiltiadesBooga: What in the sassy Francis was with the derailing of Kael'thas and Illidan!? Wrath of the Lich King seduced me back to the fold (fist shaking goes here) but that little bit of WTF had me trying to throttle my keyboard. Blizzard, please don't let people who have never played WCIII write scenarios involving characters from WCIII.

Cataclysm

• Monsund: World of Warcraft: Cataclysm probably has the ultimate Dethroning Moment Of Suck for Thrall. He's just teamed up with the player and a wily goblin called Sassy to defeat their former traitorous Trade Prince Gallywix. What does Thrall do after defeating him, make him racial leader again! This is after Gallywix betrayed the player twice, enslaved his own goblins in an abusive mine, teamed up with pirates, and right after he personally tried to kill Thrall and the player. Worse is that the player and Thrall killed tons of mooks to get to Gallywix and other goblins such as Sassy showed themselves to far more capable and caring then Gallywix. This moment totally derailed Thrall into a caricature that no no longer resembles his old self.
• CombatLibrarian: I found the entirety of the Goblin starter area to be a dethroning moment of suck. Let's see...for the first time ever in WoW, your character is given a canonical sexual orientation (straight). I tried to engage in some proactive suspension of disbelief ("Um...okay, my character is culturally being forced towards having a relationship with a guy but she doesn't like! Yeah, that's it...") Only to find that after the game-appointed S.O. leaves my character, my character is so overcome with jealous rage that she killed him, ripped the still-beating heart from his chest (I'm quoting), and then killed the goblin woman he left me for. It's worth noting that unlike all previous races, the Goblin and Worgen starter zones are completely unskippable and MUST be completed to progress to the rest of the game. Combined with the bizarre Fanon Discontinuity of making every single goblin player character the previous "next up and coming trade princess/prince", the entire goblin starter area was a WallBanger that I decided was a hallucination brought on by Kaja-Cola overdose.
• VVK: One more vote for the goblin starter quests, specifically the first zone. The goblins themselves are repulsive — the annoying craziness of gnomes combined with being greedy bastards, giving them two different joke obsessions that are milked to nausea and beyond, seemingly headed for inevitable extinction when they invent exploding money. (I was astonished in Warlords when there was a goblin whose business and family had been caught in deadly peril and she cared about getting her family out.) The first starter questline and zone are exactly what you'd expect from them, up to eleven, full of stupid jokes. You're not even trying to do something meaningful or heroic, just quests like "drive around in your lamemobile to show off to people." (Yes, you're trying to accomplish something by doing this, but if anything that makes it worse — you're being fake rather than doing what you want for its own sake.)
• Valkir: Another one from Cataclysm. Not the overall appointment of Garrosh Hellscream, but rather the precise moment they show it in the pre-event. He's suddenly a humble guy that wants what's best for the Horde and is being respectful to everyone. He says things and acts in ways that are radically inconsistent with his previous characterization in Wrath purely for the sake of revisionist history so Blizzard can force him down the player's throat. This moment specifically sets the tone for all future encounters with Garrosh, because it's nothing but shilling the Creator's Pet from there on out, with him suddenly being a competent badass due to events in Northrend that we as a player never got to see. Garrosh Hellscream, you made me, a fan of Warcraft for over 10 years and a hardcore raider, quit the god damn game.
• cricri3007: I honestly was fine with Garrosh being a humble guy. It was bad Character Development, but it was Character Development nonetheless, with him learning to be an honorable chief and whatnot. But what I couldn't stand was Sylvanas. For me, she was someone with a severe case of self-loathing whose only purpose in non-life was to have revenge on the Lich King and then die. But, since the Lich King is dead and we wouldn't want to be rid of her (while getting rid of Cairne was a-OK) she stays. I admit I was quite surprised to see the Forsaken invading Gilneas. And then she used the new Plague, despite express order from Garrosh not to, and almost insulted him. But this is only a prelude to the real DMoS. The battle for Andorhal where she use Val'kyr to ressurect dead Alliance fighters to fight for her (thus proving that mind-control is in action since there's no way those people would fight for their former enemy minutes only after being dead). It also turns the whole Alliance questline of this zone into a "Shaggy Dog" Story, which I have a very low tolerance to. Not to mention that Tirion Fordring (the leader of the Argent Crusade, you know, the faction that was fighting the Lich King in the last expansion,) being litteraly in the same region and not lifting a single finger when it becomes clear the Banshee Queen is starting to become the lich Queen. Imagine my surprise when the villain of the next expansion was revealed to be Garrosh who had, until then, been undergoing (poorly-handled) Character Development and not the Lich King knockoff.
• Regu: A minor one from Cataclysm, but one that still made me mad. In the expansion, the Deadmines were completely re-done and even had a storyline in Westfall to explain. After discovering that the daughter of the former end boss has been reviving the Defias Brotherhood, you are sent in to defeat them. After running through an entire dungeon with completely new bosses, you fight the end boss. Oh but's not who you think it is, it's Cookie, you know that murloc who wasn't even required to down for completion. You can only fight Vanessa in the Heroic version. It's a complete and utter waste of time, and a crappy "twist" to boot.
• PyroWildcat: The "Elemental Bonds" questline, full stop. This thing takes one of the longer-running plotlines in Warcraft lore, the festering hatred Fandral Staghelm had for both Malfurion Stormrage and the Dragon Aspects, one that had been ongoing for several years in real time, and a few millenia in-game, and completely shunts it aside to give Thrall center stage. And then both Alliance and Horde are "treated" to a long, obnoxious, overblown, irritating, and downright nauseating love letter from the developers to how "awesome" Thrall is. And, since Chris Metzen is so butthurt over the Fan-Preferred Pairing for his little Thrall, we also get to hear over and over again about how awesome the utterly one-note character Aggra is, and how she and Thrall luurve each other so much. Oh, and the player is brought into this travesty under the pretext that they were going to witness the Cenarion Circle, the Earthen Ring, and the Dragon Aspects working together to restore the World Tree. What comes of this? Nothing! Apparently, the developers thought that Thrall's wedding was more important. To get an idea of how bad this was, this quest line was enough that even many of Thrall's own fans were sick of him afterwards.
• Kylenne: Cataclysm was a festival of suckage in general for all of the above reasons (and many, many more), but for me the absolute nadir was the Uldum zone. After years of fan speculation on what lay beyond the wall in Tanaris, and tantalizing hanging plot threads from vanilla involving the Titans, we finally got to see it. But when we get there, we get teased with an amazingly cool new race and lore, that promptly get shoved onto the backburner so that we can play sidekick to a minor recurring NPC for fully 3/4ths of the story in a ridiculous Whole-Plot Reference to Raiders of the Lost Ark that doesn't even try to make sense within the context of the Deathwing storyline. Uldum to me is a microcosm of everything wrong with Cataclysm as a whole, being not just an incredible waste of potential and cool setup, but offensive (those damn sand pygmies), disjointed and nonsensical, and little more than a showcase for an NPC where the player is relegated to spectator status for cutscenes. The Harrison Jones nonsense is also a prime example of how Blizzard's tendency to make pop culture references got incredibly lazy and unfunny in Cataclysm, turning from fun little puns and Easter Eggs to making entire zones into Parody Episodes with no pretense of caring about in-universe story cohesion, only the Shout-Out itself. About the only thing Uldum had going for it besides the badly underutilized Tol'vir was Thrall's merciful absence, though Harrison's not much better than him there, and similarly suffered a lot of player backlash.
• Hallowspite: Cataclysm was the beginning of the end for me when the servers became more and more integrated. Sure, it started in Wrath (or, actually, way back in Vanilla if you count cross-realm battlegrounds), but right at the tail end. I come from Moon Guard, which before LFD was a wonderful server (with a very undeserved reputation) with a community that felt like home. LFD's introduction at the end of Wrath meant that the effects of the tool weren't immediately obvious. When LFR was released I felt excited, as a casual, to finally be able to raid, but by then I was starting to feel isolated and my enjoyment of the game had started to go downhill. By the end of Cata, the community I knew was all but gone — diluted by the neverending, revolving-door influx of new faces in LFD and LFR which meant a major contributer in friendships and guilds forming was now gone. I held on for two more expacs, but despite joining guilds, I never made so much as a single new friend after Cata launched, and the old ones I had had long begun drifting away from the game. The family feel in the server that had made the game most fun for me was gone, and after my sub accidentally ran out in Wo D, I never bothered to renew it. It used to be that even though Moon Guard was one of the largest servers, you'd still see the same faces enough that everyone knew each other even if you'd never spoken, but now they're long, long gone. More than anything I regret not holding onto screenshots of very beloved memories from back then. It made the last few expacs not just a DMoS, but a Tear Jerker as well. Where are they now?

Mists of Pandaria

• Scaramouche: For me, the Pandaren starting area and quests were OK, if a bit on the cutesy side. But the thing that really irritated me about it was the amount of quests whose only purpose is to gather things for Jojo Ironbrow to shatter with his forehead. The first one was alright, just a neat little diversion, but it really should have ended there. We get it! He has a strong head! OK, they're not compulsory to move to the next level, but is it really necessary?
• ChrisX: One of the things that made me think that World of Warcraft has transformed from a fair fantasy story that made a groundbreaking deviation of writing that the Orc race could be honorable, being more than an Always Chaotic Evil race is the fact that the storytelling now heavily favors The Alliance as the more bonafide good guy where every 'bad' Alliance people will have justified reason for fans to pity over and The Horde are getting more and more bonafide bad guys that always stirred up trouble that every strikes against the Horde will be hailed as a Awesome Moments by the fans... at this point, might as well make the Alliance a Creator's Pet where Horde is constantly shamed and being the Designated Monkey. Pinpointing WHERE this problem is at the highest is hard, but to me, everything began in Mists of Pandaria, where Blizzard decided to make Garrosh into a full blown villain just like how his decriers wanted and tried to pass it down as "That is how we planned all along", and refusing to bring Thrall back to the Horde throne, seeing that he was what made the Orcs and the Horde a truly admirable force (whom, by the way, Blizzard yanked away from his Warchief throne later down the line and then make him an extra so the players can feel good about themselves). Alongside this is also the turn of Jaina Proudmoore from a level-headed pacifist that believed in the peace and unity between two forces, just like in the Battle of Mt. Hyjal, into a full-on Alliance worshipper that threw a hissy fit if the situation really required the Alliance and Horde working together. Those were the moments of Jumping the Shark... but and it only got worse and worse. From there, it snowballed into making the Orc race being warmongers by default (Warlords of Draenor), Vol'jin getting killed so Sylvanas, now a full blown evil character and handwaved as Being Tortured Makes You Evil negative Character Development, becomes a Warchief (Legion) and Greymane, a revenge obsessed person who'd prolong the war as long as he gets his revenge on Sylvanas, turned into a 'good, developing guy' because he aimed his revenge at the person Blizzard wanted to designate as Evil... and once again, Sylvanas is made to do something atrocious and worthy of enmity (the burning of World Tree), because Blizzard couldn't find any other pariah to appease these Alliance fans other than Sylvanas (Battle for Azeroth), and Horde players gets shamed by the narrative for playing the Horde at all. After a long descent which started in Mists, that was the point that Warcraft has completely showed itself to have morphed into an Alliance-bootlicking fest that wanted to make sure that the Alliance will be the winner of the Faction War and rub it to the Horde's face that they will never be more than an Always Chaotic Evil faction... no longer the same Warcraft I grew to love... and completely unworthy of my praise and love. This new Alliance is nothing more than a disgusting Creator's Pet to me, and I cannot buy the idea that Blizzard wanted this to look like "Internal strife when the Horde is led by an evil leader". It feels more like pandering to whiny Alliance fans that wanted the Alliance to look like a squeaky clean group that can do no wrong, will never have an evil leader, and will come out victorious by stomping the evil Horde for their own satisfaction and obsession of roleplaying the hand of karma for what they see as evil. What happened to the great legacy of 'Horde developing into Noble Savage' that Blizzard and Chris Metzen built in Warcraft 3? Crushed to dust.

Warlords of Draenor

• Huffbuh: You thought Cataclysm was bad? You thought Mists was bad? Bah, said Blizzard, you ain't seen nothing yet! Warlords of Draenor started out so well, with some of the best leveling content the game has ever had. But after that? Just... nothing. Outside of raids, which not much of the playerbase actually does, all you have to entertain yourself are "Apexis Daily Zones", places in which you kill an arbitrary number of enemies until you are given Apexis Crystals, which can be traded in for rewards. Sure, Mists had too many dailies (or rather, required you to do too many at once by locking near-essential rewards behind countless different factions) but to have them taken out entirely and replaced with nothing but a mob grind has lead to one of the least replayable expansions yet. Not to mention the absence of any new Battlegrounds or Arenas, meaning PvP players have had no new content (outside of the highly broken Ashran) for over two years.
• Opalure: That's not even the worst of it. World content was almost completely disemboweled. Reputations were added as an afterthought by the devs' own admission in a no-holds barred Q&A, leading to the reputation vendors offering nothing of value but to the most obsessive of collectors. The reputations didn't even have their own mounts; the same handful of new mount models were strewn about willy-nilly between achievements, reputations, rares, and the Garrison. What did casual players have to entertain them after hitting level cap? A cynically-nerfed LFR that removed tier sets and raid weapons/trinkets, and instead recycled Honor gear models so painfully basic and low-res that they would have looked perfectly in place next to Sunwell drops from 2007, treasures and rares that only reward anything of value once, the lion's share of which were hidden behind awful jumping puzzles and other platforming that WoW's aging engine was never designed to handle, mindless mob grinds, and, just in case you were having too much fun, the majority of your endgame was spent clicking through menus in a minigame so "complex" browser-based games were doing it better fifteen years ago. Crafting was even nerfed into the ground, with buildings in your Garrison capable of crafting anything you needed and your character being arbitrarily locked into three slots of crafted items. Coming off of 5.2 and 5.4, where the pacing of dailies, rares, and treasures were spot-on, and crafting saw the return of the very popular TBC weaponsmithing recipes updated for level 90, Warlords of Draenor was a resounding disappointment for many casual players.
• Kraas: My main problem with Warlords of Draenor is that it seemed to not move the storyline forward for the Horde. At the end of Mists of Pandaria, this was the scene: the warmongering Garrosh Hellscream and his cronies have been deposed, and the Horde is poised to move into a new era of teamwork and prosperity under the leadership of Vol'jin, who has been shown to be just, competent, and not given to xenophobia like Garrosh. However, Garrosh is not executed, which would have been a fitting punishment, with Varian Wrynn nonsensically declaring "His punishment is not for you alone to decide!" What punishment would you have chosen, Your Highness? Seems to me that the Alliance has wanted Garrosh dead for a while. So he's extradited to Pandaria to face trial. Fine, no problem, but of course he escapes. So instead of seeing what our new leadership is capable of, we get pulled off into the Draenor sideshow which has Thrall and the Frostwolves getting the lion's share of character development, with little or none for the rest of the Horde. At least Vol'jin puts in an appearance at your garrison later in the expansion, but there's no word on what Lor'themar, Sylvanas, Baine or Gallywix are doing. What? Ji Firepaw? Who's that?
  • Storm Kensho: And then, to top off how pointless making Vol'jin being made Warchief was, He's killed during the first act of Legion and names Sylvanas, of all people, as his successor.

Battle For Azeroth

• cricri3007: The end of The Battle For Undercity. One week after The Burning Of Teldrassil, the Alliance counter by attacking the Forsaken's capital city. Finally a chance for the Alliance to get some payback? "lol nope" says Blizzard, by having the four alliance members stand there like idiots as Sylvanas talk, taunts Anduin, then flee, before she tries to gas them all, and plagues her own city so the Alliance can't capture it, and the Alliance somehow didn't plan a countermeasure against the plague, despite it used by forsaken for years by now. To recapitulate, the Horde taking Teldrassil was a flawless victory for the Horde, crushing the night elves, marching through their regions without any real problems, and ended in the tree burning instead of occupied because of Sylvanas's decision. The Battle For Undercity was a long, grueling battle, saw the Alliance lose many soldiers, and ended in a Pyrrhic Victory because of Sylvanas's decision. Although the Jaina bit was awesome, it makes me lose even more hope of the Alliance ever getting proper vengeance on the Horde.
• Soul Cross: N'zoth's defeat is just awful. After having been built up since 'Cataclysm' as one of the most effective villains in Warcraft, having manipulated Deathwing, created the Emerald Nightmare and the Naga among other things, he is finally taken down by an incredibly cheesy cliché. Your character has been brought under N'zoth's almost complete control, but a brief pep talk from Magni causes you to break free from N'zoth's control. Then you use the Heart of Azeroth to direct the Forge of Origination's power into N'zoth, killing him. For such a major figure in Warcraft's history, just behind Sargeras in how far-reaching his influence is, to see him beaten like an 80s/90s cartoon villain is incredibly disappointing.
• Opalure: This entire frickin' expansion, but if I had to nail down specifics, it would be the Mag'har allied race unlock scenario. A perfect microcosm of the writing team's abject ineptitude under the careful guidance of Golden and Danuser. Logically, the Mag'har would be in a rough spot because the draenei, no longer constrained by an alliance of necessity to wipe out the remaining Legion presence, took the opportunity to punish the Mag'har for attempting genocide and doing F-all to repay their sins afterward, as the Mag'har had figured cooperating for survival's sake meant the draenei cleaned the slate. Instead, Blizzard bent over backwards and drove the draenei mad by having them become religious zealots under an Yrel radicalized by the Naaru, like the Scarlet Crusade with the serial numbers filed off, for seemingly no other reason than to not only allow the Mag'har to get off scott-free for attempting genocide on multiple species on their homeworld AND Azeroth alike, but to present them as put-upon victims being unfairly persecuted by religious extremists. And once the dust settles, the Mag'har are shown to have learned precisely nothing from the experience except "draenei bad," as they haven't even unpacked their backpacks in Orgrimmar before deciding to wipe out the (completely innocent) draenei on Azeroth, too.