So there's a few issues here, broadly relating to meditation being unclear or unwanted in the result, and the wider concern of not wanting to waste actions.
Firstly, I'll note that this quest thrives in ambiguity. Neither you nor Grok have perfect information. Sometimes you can test things and see how things work, other times I will intentionally lead you down particular paths, though generally I'll provide signs for you to read rather than tricking you.
For this specific issue with the meditation action, I regard 'dealing' with the shamanism problems Grok is having as a longer action. For example, you might say that you want to build a castle. I could say that Grok estimates that action to take 10 actions, or 10 weeks. This would involve an action to get resources, one to start building, one to get more resources, one to do something else, and so on. The actions would progress up to 10 in that manner and at the end the castle would be build.
With shamanism here, Grok, who I remind you is not and has never been a proper shaman, is puzzling his way through the complex manner of cultural divergence in spiritual tradition. He's been told about various traditions of different peoples, some of which practice sacrifices, some of which practice subjugation, many of which regard the Elements differently. My chain of logic there was that Grok was indeed distracted, but this didn't stop him thinking about it entirely, instead he consider the nature of the allocation of resources in societies. In terms of dark shamanism the shaman takes the resources, enslaving or subjugating the elemental to their own ends. Other shaman disagree with this and instead work with elementals, even when they're wrecking the place.
This turn's meditation therefore represented the initial stages of the project of working out what's going on with dark shamanism. In the manner of a castle this might have represented the surveying of a site or the building of foundations. The analogy somewhat breaks down I'll admit but you get the idea.
When I'm writing stuff about shamanism I'm trying to do a lot of things. I'm trying to provide a compelling narrative about the orcs and their practices, to show off some of Grok's internal thoughts and show him as a character not just a robot puppeted around by the 20 or so people who vote currently, and I'm also trying indeed to fulfil the choices you make in your actions, in this case presumably fulfilling the aim to get your shamanism back after you lost it.
In this specific action, what is Grok trying to accomplish? How does he go about confronting his issues? Can he just sit around and think about it? No. How does he confront the guilt and horror he feels at having to wade through blood and dying centaurs and 'fail' at the whole Forneus thing? 'With difficulty and over a long period of time' might be the answer. Incidentally, I'll entirely admit that I also did less to actually get Grok's struggles onto the page rather than in my head and considerations, so I've edited in a couple of minor bits to better portray this.
Therefore I don't really think it reasonable to say 'we didn't do the action', you did meditate, you did meditate on issues around the one you're considering, you didn't wander off and bake a pie or something. The action and result represented both the nuance of the action and the nebulous nature of it. As I mentioned I'll admit that I could have perhaps been less specific about what you'd be doing, but as mentioned above I considered this with the chain of logic which stems from the broader questions of what dark shamanism is and what it represents.
On the second point about the 'optimal' way to play a quest and do things, I also don't really accept these. I agree that in something like a visual novel you can choose an 'optimal' path. If you choose X, Y will occur and because a computer program is dictating what happens there's a branching path of X number of issues with only Y number of possible results.
If you are perceiving this quest in the same manner as you would such a program that's frankly a massive mistake. There are things you know, there are things you know you don't know, there are things you think you know which are wrong and there are further things that you don't know about and you don't know you don't know. In a quest about agency, ambiguity will be a given.
In some cases I find this quite frustrating. In both this quest and in my other one the questers have chosen not to be a wizard and then expect to do wizard things competently. In my other quest the PC ended up a heavily mutated wreck because of Dhar overuse, whereas here you've blundered into things like dark shamanism because Grok didn't know enough about shamanism generally to differentiate between different traditions. This shouldn't be a surprise to you. If you want to be a shaman then pick a shaman.
There's a naturally competitive urge to play 'optimally'. I can certainly understand this. I enjoy strategy games and I enjoy setting up something like the 'perfect' battleplan in HOI or making the perfect first turns worth of moves in Total War. It's a matter of using the resources you have to serve the aims you choose.
You can waste actions, there are indeed things that would be of little consequence to do. For example some interest has been expressed in alchemy. I wouldn't necessarily regard this as wasted but you'd have to take a lot of actions to learn it and I don't think you'd use it much so that might be classified as 'wasted'. Comparably though if you take an action and later something happens to reduce the effectiveness of that action that still doesn't mean it's been 'wasted'. You took an action to get better at survival but haven't ever used it really because you've not been out in the middle of nowhere for long, and you've never been to Echo Isles so knowing about plants there is 'wasted'. Except it's not because at that point you were considering going to Echo Isles which you decided not to in the end.
On the old warband particularly, I don't think it's unreasonable to have to go about doing stuff to get them sorted. Soldiers need training if they're going to obey. If you just turn up and say 'hey im in charge now' people are going to laugh at you. This relates to a wider point which I've emphasised over time, other people have agency too. Scorn is a character and makes his own choices for example. He thought about deserting at the Crossroads but the roll said he stayed representing him deciding to hang about.
Around your points on the consequentiality of the choices, whether if you'd chosen differently different things would happen. I suppose that's a complicated one. The first arc was the tutorial arc of my first quest, so I'll simply ask for your indulgence there. Thrall at least was impressed by your shamanistic abilities, so yea your work toward that was consequential, and Feldad also approved of it. Around whether anything would have helped out against Forneus, not really, you chose the Hunted option, you got hunted and your hunter was a relatively sensible person and able to influence other people to help him. I likened this to a lich jumping out from behind a bush and ganking you, so one question you might ask would be whether you could have done anything against such an opponent. You did however have consequential engagement with the events afterward, particularly in Orgrimmar. The choice regarding considering the nature of strength and the ability to think about how others were motivated allowed you, among other things like your engagement between Thrall and Feldad's influences, to defeat Thrall's strategy, so yes that was consequential.
I have a question about your two quests. I see you explore a lot of topics, in doing so do you enjoy it?
I write interesting things. Or at least, I think I do and people seem to indicate that this is correct, especially given 2 of my fics have been plagiarised previously. I'm aware I'm at least a competent author so I write things that stretch me instead like this, which remains my first quest. I write things I've not seen before because I think there's a gap in the literature. For example, alt-Stargate fics are pretty common but IMO they never properly explore the social aspects of having the Stargate in a different country. There were 2 soviet stargate fics which I didn't think were very good, so I wrote my own, which I've now concluded. No such story in either quality or length had existed before and someone even translated it into spanish which I found highly amusing.
I generally have a specific objective I want to explore with a story, in this case agency, which it seemed appropriate to do so through a quest. In my soviet story I had the question of how Soviets would do stargate stuff, not just americans in uniforms with red stars on them, so I put stuff in like central planning, colonisation and expansion or political theory. Here we're looking at other particular themes and issues which are relevant to the study of agency.
I'll admit that sometimes the scope of the project rather gets away from me, in which case it's less enjoyable. For example in the soviet fic stuff like characterisation was largely unimportant, and a lot of the chapters devolved to conference room discussions and excuses for me to exploit information which later made me reflect that I should really have just done that fic as a timeline. But in general yes I enjoy them.
@FractiousDay it is brought up how Thrall learned a lot from humans. How much do you think he demonstrates that besides keeping the name given to him? He doesn't well act like a humanphile in the sense he acts like one and dresses like one.
the way he worked up the crowd
I would say primarily with the centralisation of the Horde along human lines. Thrall has his own set of largely ineffective reforms where he tries to pull good stuff over from the human organisations but it doesn't really work, for example the creation of a clanless or clan-neutral Horde bureaucracy. There's also points about how Thrall acts as a leader which I think are reasonable too, but are perhaps less obvious.
Daelin Proudmore was right.
Instead there was the internment camps.
To note a couple of points on this, it really depends on your attitude toward a variety of factors. For one, is it permissible, either socially or otherwise, to destroy a people? Proudmoore wants to kill them because they killed his son, while the Horde did massive damage to Stromgarde which explains why Trollbane wants to kill them. I think you could certainly say that without the orcs a lot less destruction would have been caused and the peoples of Azeroth (and indeed the Draenei) would have been safer and more prosperous. I think you can also say that Orcish culture and the apparent inability of their leaders to control the destructive impulses of the people in the general 'pass me another elf, this one's split' way means the other races are permitted to destroy them if they think it necessary, it's not like the Orcs haven't had plenty of chances, they just keep provoking. There's various Alliance vs Horde debates but at the heart of all of them is that the Orcs are an alien force of conquerors who completely fail to change over time. Incidentally I've had a question open on the question forum to mods to ask about how much genocide I'm allowed to have in my fics but it's not been answered yet so I'm assuming everything I say on the topic is fine.
! I have been blessed with a vision by the Light, to confer onto you this HOLY and totally not evil blessing
I am indeed planning something along these lines at some point
