there are 12 order hall leaders 2 champions of Azeroth and way more generic quest clearing champions.
We know that horde and alliance have enough to clear raids on there own.
That illidan killed some in BT.
Some champions are npcs like Dorian.
Some things are never cleared by pc’s even if we do it ingame.
With all of that adding up it’s likely that there are more then 36 champions but some just quest clearing grunts some are horde/alliance only and some come together for things like deathwing/arthas.
No. They are trying to budget how much is happening on screen to make certain it's not TOO busy. Laziness would be if they had a fixed set of NPC heroes on the boat, along with your hero PC, and you had Doomhammer and one of them had Doomhammer, because they couldn't be arsed to ensure there wasn't overlap. The NPC heroes varied depending on your class and spec.
It's just a cut scene for fuck sake, not an opening cinematic.
Would be an interesting plot twist if it turned out that he kept an important secret in his garden in Dalaran and that would be why he wanted to reclaim his citizenship so much.
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It is possible that they didn't want to add too many characters to avoid screen clutter in that cutscene.
Here's the simpler solution.
There is only one true timeline: book and comic canon.
The game is fuzzy canon, where the actors of each major event are largely swappable between different timelines. The same events occur, but a gnome warrior in one might be a tauren druid in another.
The books and comics tell the objective story of the true timeline, where the player's actions are filled in by nameless heroes and placeholders.
It wasn't laziness, it was dividing between 2 factions. It would be more lazy to throw all 12 in one cinematic rather than making 2 separate cinematics for each faction and the ones displayed had to be ones not of your Class which requires more changes. I know it's harder to think than to just mindlessly hate, but come on this was an easy one.
There are zero champions. The NPC's are the true heroes, we're just tag along. Interchangeable no name characters. We can be replaced with any number of interchangeable characters in lore any time Blizzard re-writes their bullshit chronicles from a "different perspective."
The heroes might as well have been Rexxar (hunter), Alleria Sanguinar (rogue), etc.
The entire cinematic was lazy. There was fan made machinima in TBC that was better than that cinematic.
It was a huge moment at the end of the expansion, saving the planet by giving up the power we had been building to fight the Legion. These weapons belonged to CLASS Champions, not FACTION champions. These champions were doing a duty above their faction the entire expansion, they were the leader of class halls filled with members of both factions. The faction conflict was set aside to fight a greater threat, the fact that they split it between factions in such a defining moment was a poor choice because the theme of the expansion was the factions coming together to face the bigger threat, and because they split it they cut a lot of what could have been a rather epic moment. It was lazy because it was poorly thought out end executed, just because there were two awful cinematics instead of one doesn't make it not lazy. I'd venture to guess it probably took one guy a few hours or less to throw these together, it's the generic ship with premade NPCs standing there and doing an animation that already existed with some shitty laser beams added in. It would have taken less time to do one cinematic, but being lazy isn't just about the time it took.
Mograine was in both cinematics. Apparently his weapon got drained twice? They also didn't always exclude NPC champions of your class. Mograine would be gone if you were a DK, but here's a frost mage, with the NPC mage class champion in the background with Alu'neth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6BanF2T_ZY. There are a total of 12 NPC champions between the two cinematics, I'd say it would have been easy to put them all together and just exclude the champion of your class, but as I've already shown they messed up even something as simple as that.
The cinematic was poorly done and inconsistent. I give blizzard credit where it's due but this isn't a place where it is. I know it's harder to think and have an objective opinion than to just ride Blizzards dick but come on, this was pretty obviously an awful cinematic with very little thought put into it.
There's not a set amount of champion and that is done intentionally, it's just as easy as that.
That was actually something that really annoyed me. Balance, unholy, and I think afflction basically had the same quest for their weapons. Not sure why that didn't have the foresight to basically just add a NPC of the other classes.
Least for arms, shadow, and holy paladin, they seemed to have in different order. Arms takes the sword and then kills the herald, shadow defeats the cultists then uses the dagger to consume the corpse of the herald, and holy paladin unleashes a void being while getting the hammer and the tomb collapses behind you.