The Night Elf campaign is bizarre. First mission, you can construct only archers, and need to overrun a double base: orcs and humans. I only managed that by zerg-rush.
Then the second mission you need to sneak past Doom Guards, which I now understand demons from Warcraft 1. Which is easy, because it turns out night elf invisibility mode kicks in almost immediately, and even stops enemies attacks: if a demon was swinging his sword at an archer that went invisible, the archer won’t get hit.
But then you need to plow throw Undead base, with a limited and not very sizeable army. I’m not sure if on Normal you’re supposed to destroy the entire base, but on Hard I only managed to run through everything.
Best Night Elf unit are the Dryads. They are fast, ranged, magic immune, have automatic dispell and slow poison. Maybe you can’t only mass them, but you almost can. Paired with bears, they can win some battles without even micro.
Funny, I always thought Malfurion is an elk-centaur, just like Cenarius. Turns out he’s a druid riding an elk. Also, I didn’t remember Illidan is his brother. And they were both in love with Tyrande.
Arthas points Illidan to Skull of Guldan. They have this clear homoerotic tension between them, must be because Jaina left Arthas, and Illidan spent 10K years in prison. The skull is what allows Illidan to turn into demon, kill Tichondrius, second dreadlord killed in this game, and get expelled, all in the length of two missions.
Final mission is another last stand, and it is as unfun as the Undead one. That’s the only mission I decided to complete on Normal, as on hard it gets quite ridiculous.
The idea is that you first help defend the Human camp, once it falls you retreat to the Orc camp, and finally you hold final land of defence in your own Night Elf camp. But I managed to stop them at Orcs.
A nice detail, when Medivh tells his story, there’s both recreation of events from Warcraft 1, where you actually hunted him in a dungeon, and from Warcraft 2, where it shows two headed ogres and troll axe throwers.
