Uhm, forgetting the whole "sacrificing souls on the bloodstone for the Mursaat" thing, eh? Humans have sacrificed their own kind's souls too. They've also subjected other races to slavery, so I'm not really sure where you're going with that. How is the cataclysm not on par with the searing? In both cases the person/people responsible utilized Abaddon's magic (I'm assuming this is your "functional equivilant of Lucifer", which is inaccurate btw but that's another argument) to destroy an entire region of land. The difference is that there were survivors from Ascalon and the region STILL EXISTED afterwards, albeit very much ruined. After the Cataclysm the entire nation was literally gone and there were no survivors on either side of that conflict. In what way is that "better" than the Searing?