Originally Posted by
Hitei
His plan hinged on absolutely none of this.. Why do you people think planning for things works like this, have you never attempted to get anything done? When you look up directions on google maps to drive somewhere, do you also plan for every car that's going to be on the road and pedestrian you have to stop for? Do you note exactly how far back from the crossings you're going to stop because of how many cars are going to be in front of you, and the timing for each individual stoplight?
The Jailer's plan hinged on building up enough strength to push back against the other Eternal Ones and get free of the maw, and figuring out a way to forcibly take their sigils so that he could use them to access Zereth Mortis. That is all. The way it ultimately ended up working out was not the only possibility or sole progression of the plan.
Figuring out some way to destroy or disable the Arbiter construct so that souls would flood the Maw en masse, significantly increasing the rate at which he was building strength was a side option. The Arbiter being disabled was not even something required for the plan, all it did was make things go much faster by actively weakening the covenants at a high rate, and empowering the Jailer's forces at a high rate. So now instead of having to continue to build up strength over several thousand years and slowly infiltrate and corrupt the other realms, he could take a much more aggressive stance.
In case you didn't notice the Jailer wasn't even particularly reliant on the Oribos stream of anima, because Denathrius was already stockpiling his entire realm's worth of anima to dump directly into the Maw.
You also seem to be under the incredibly wrong impression that the only way the Legion could ever get to Azeroth was if Gul'dan specifically magically came back from the dead and helped them get there, when in reality it was just an inevitability that they'd figure out some way to. Gul'dan was just a nice little surprise that let them move up their invasion. It should be pretty obvious that the Jailer's plans didn't hinge on Gul'dan, when Gul'dan wasn't even the Legion's first attempt to open a portal this century.
The reality is just that while biding his time powering up, having already effectively conquered one of the four covenants/realms by bringing Denathrius to his side, and having already worked with both Mueh'zala to start undermining Ardenweald and Helya to undermine the Kyrian, the Jailer was in a great spot. On the side, he had the Dreadlords actively working on a way to sabotage the Arbiter and Oribos by slamming a large corrupted soul into her, and they had decided Argus was a great candidate, and corrupted him even more behind Sargeras' back to prime him as that weapon. Fortune worked out for them and we killed Argus while defeating the Legion, but the plan did not hinge on that, because there are other, much stronger forces than us who do not like the Legion, like the Void and Light, and it's quite possible they didn't need anyone to kill Argus at all, because he was naturally unstable and could have eventually just tore himself apart and still worked out as a weapon--and if Argus had failed entirely, they would have gone looking for something else to use, or just waited until Zovaal was strong enough to do it himself.
Likewise, on the side, he was running a minor scheme to figure out a way to get to the sigils without the backup plan of all-out-war. Which he did by having the Dreadlords slip his control into the Lich King's armaments, giving him increased control over people in the mortal world. As above, his plan here was not control the lich king, to kill Slyvanas Windrunner, to raise her, to run the forsaken and attack the scourge, to kill herself and become a conduit and then warchief and then destroy the helm and kidnap Anduin Wrynn. It was just to put another, strong agent (the Lich King) in the mortal realm to spread his influence and be a useful tool. Like Sylvanas, who once in position and sufficiently empowered, was an even stronger, more loyal agent, so he no longer needed the Lich King and decided to use the helm to shatter the barrier between worlds and look for living souls to weaponize against the covenant leaders.
The reason why Zovaal's strategy is great and worked well isn't because he planned for every last chance and individual piece over tens of thousands of years, it's because he's very good at seeing the whole, recruited a whole lot of useful people to his side, and had dozens of small, self-contained schemes to individually help him along his primary plan of "get stronger -> beat other covenants and take sigils -> go to Zereth Mortis and fuck up universe". None of it hinged on anything or required 9 million IQ 5d chess plays. It was just good managerial skills and an eye for finding/creating, and then using, opportunities.