Durotan openly opposes the Horde's corruption

Full History

Durotan led the Frostwolf clan in an age when the orcs' identity was undergoing a dangerous transformation. The old shamanic traditions had bound clans to ancestral memory and elemental respect, even when rivalries separated them. Under Gul'dan's influence, the emerging Horde became increasingly aggressive and dependent upon demonic power. Durotan recognized that the direction of this change threatened the people the war machine claimed to strengthen.

His resistance was not simply reluctance to fight. It concerned the purposes for which the orcs were being gathered and the source of the power offered to them. The blood of Mannoroth promised strength but brought a curse that bound warriors to the Burning Legion's designs. Durotan refused to participate in that bargain. The choice placed his clan outside the consensus forced upon much of the Horde's leadership.

The Frostwolves were expelled and compelled to survive in exile. Durotan and Draka continued their lives with the danger of the Horde's hostility hanging over them, and their son was born into that precarious situation. When the parents were murdered, the infant survived only to be taken by Aedelas Blackmoore and raised as a captive. The opposition Durotan had voiced seemed, for a time, to have ended in the destruction of his immediate family.

That was not the final result. Thrall eventually escaped human captivity, rediscovered his heritage, and sought out the Frostwolves. The older values preserved by his father's clan helped shape his conception of a New Horde freed from demonic control. Durotan's resistance therefore stands at the point where the fall of old orcish customs became the source of a later renewal. He did not prevent the first Horde's wars, but his refusal helped preserve an alternative to the corruption that drove them.