The irony being that the other races more often than not invalidate their own strengths, like when Forsaken rogues outstealthed them in their own forests and took out all of Ashenvale. Remember the book when Malfurion had the very grass warn him about attackers? Yeah, that’s long forgotten.
Even Teldrassil is an example of this- a living tree should’ve been an impenetrable defense and would have to be attacked by air, but no apparently regular shaman and magi can just burn world size living matter at will now.
The Horde’s fantasy of “nobility” has been scrapped twice. They are bloodthirsty weak-willed monsters. And they (Saurfaeg) understood it. Shall we make a deal?
About glass ceilings. How do you like this option - we will take revenge on all our offenders, and then go into isolation, rot and wither, for the next ten thousand years? No events, no stories. Ten thousand years nothing. Well, maybe we will take part in a war with a universal evil or a monster that threatens Azeroth.
And you have not touched us for these ten thousand years.
There is indeed miscommunication, but often much of it is intentional. There are occasional complaints such as a Night Elf being caught by surprise by a shredder, or other situations that elicit knee jerk reactions. But realistically not every Night Elf will be a perfect soldier, and even the most experienced ones can trip and fall. That one Night Elf does not make the best showing in one moment in time is not reflective of the entire race.
While the are plenty of doomsaying Night Elf fans running around falsely screaming about how Blizzard hates Night Elves and wants to make the race go extinct, very few ever actually complain that the Night Elves aren’t powerful enough.
These fans might complain that they wish the Night Elves had driven the Horde off and prevented Teldrassil from being burned, yes. But usually these sentiments align more with ideas such as the Night Elf army and/or Tyrande actually having been allowed to be present for the War of the Thorns. The requests are not often that the civilians should have been able to not only slow the entire Horde by themselves but also easily crush the Horde through their mighty innkeeping and tailoring skills.
No, it is often anti-Night Elf fans that make these kinds of statements on behalf of Night Elf fans to create an argument actually intended to indirectly try to declare the Night Elves as weaker. Much in the feigned attempts made in this thread to portray Elune as weaker when there’s no need for it.
We can argue all day about how stupidly written the WoT was, but it was still like half a dozen races against a skeletal civilian police force AND Malf that canonically fought of 8 to 1 odds; and ground the Horde War Machine to halt twice before succumbing. Thats nuts!
And as shocking as this may seem, the NEs weren’t the only ones nerfed in that stupid awful story. The entire Horde was operating off tech and tactics that dated back to BC; with the exception of like a handful of Cata era Goblin shredders. We ran head first into the one thing we knew a decade ago not to do when facing the NEs (not denying them their homefield advantage as much as possible). Hell, we didn’t even bring one Boat/Airship to get into or onto the Skyscraper Sized Tree in the middle of a Sea we were supposed to be invading lol?!
And this again is not me saying that the NEs are weak by ANY metric. My GOD no. They are still, as always, very formidable. They just have never been portrayed as strong as some NE players clearly expect or demand from them. And rather it seems like they took a single WC3 Grom quote completely out of its proper context and extrapolated out to an absolute extreme to craft their expectations. There is nothing in their Lore. Not in WC3. Not in the WotA. Not in the WotSS. Not in the WotSatyr. That supports this “Auto-Win Button” power fantasy.
To be fair, this is really just the norm for Azeroth. Virtually everyone is still largely using bows and arrows and hitting things with pointy implements. Until the dwarves, gnomes and goblins started sharing their tech, other than the mogu dabbling in gunpowder pretty much every mortal nation throughout Azeroth’s history seems to have historically leveled out and then sat at the same technological level where the Zandalari have held steady since the height of their power, and magic has usually been the only way anyone was managing to selectively clear certain hurdles of being stuck in the middle ages until, as stated above, a small handful of specifically tech-savvy races more recently started handing out boomsticks and combustion engines.
Consequently trolls, elves, vrykul, pandaren, humans, etc. basically all share similar levels of maximum development without delving into shortcuts that amount to magitech.
That said, I’m not one to insist that the night elves be this unstoppable juggernaut, but it is annoying how between supposedly already losing lots of people from aging (despite them still being long-lived and basically having been frozen in their physical primes up until WC3) and over-reliance on everyone else, WoW’s night elf themes have leaned more heavily into generic tropes of elves being in decline and on their way out to make room for the younger, more dynamic races like humans to run the world.
People think the night elves have stagnated during the Long Vigil, but by the standards of Azeroth that’s not really the case. Mortal races in WarCraft just plain don’t seem to outgrow a certain level of development unless they either resort to magic or one of the few mechanically brilliant races provides them with a leg up.
But we have become numb. We are not developing. And our time is long gone. It’s time to die under the onslaught of young, adaptive, innovative monsters.
How can you be formidable if you are an old man with a sword, and the enemy is a newfangled infected with a machine gun in his hands?
So are we going to make a deal for the dying orcs?
Or they could do what LIFE does when faced with a new environment? Adapt? There is an alternative to “die”?
And its not like they need to adapt that much, and they have in several areas, but in terms of military tech and tactics. They are a bit outdated. Like, truly, what would have happened if the ENTIRE Horde’s navy and airforce wasn’t just gone at the end of Legion (yet the Alliance can still spare a dozen ships to hunt down the Zandalari princess lol)? And just decided to forgo Ashenvale and Darkshore entirely to attack the island capital that was the objective to capture and hold? Could the NEs really do much? Their naval power just sort of seems to exist in the form of glorified troop transports, that are expected to be formidable because … they’re expected to be. Even the NEs airforce, outside of Chimera riders … again kind of boils down to glorified troop transports. And their Glaive Throwers are anti-cavalry/anti-infantry focused … not really anti-artillery or anti-air.
This here is what I was talking about earlier. Droité will pivot to any tone that would fit at any moment to try to put the Night Elves in a bad light, regardless of what that light is. If it’s convenient for Droité to chime in to make random claims that the Night Elves are not that strong then that’s what Droité will do. Or if it’s convenient to take the entirely opposite contradictory angle and complain that the Night Elves are portrayed as too powerful that is also what Droité will do.
Honestly the void = shadow thing really annoys me to this day. They just threw out the CotFS tenets in one go. And made it impossible for shadow to be a valid religion without old God nonsense.
Elune didn’t “perfect” them, she chose them when they were still Dark Trolls. Trolls spending all their time hanging out by the Well of Eternity caused them to change as a side effect. Similar to many other ancient peoples, the Night Elves came up with some story of how they came to be because they didn’t understand how magical evolution worked.
Does any of this invalidate what I said about why the lore doesn’t support the power fantasy some NE posters clearly expect? Because it doesn’t. And tbh, I don’t hate the NE PC Race. I actually enjoy their lore, their culture, their characters, and their stories. What I’m not fond of is their EXPECTED racial fantasy by a segment of their fanbase. Not all, probably just a vocal minority on these subs. But seriously, what they seem to expect is the most flawless, eternal beings ever to exist. So, outside of BfA (which was truly an inexcusable nightmare created by Blizz) … its no wonder they’ve felt for years Blizz hates and was “beating up the NEs”. Its amazing how much I’ve seen Cata Firelands and Legions Emerald Nightmare used as examples of this apparent Blizz NE hate. Are they just not supposed to struggle against anything ever?
In the Priest Order Hall questline. “Few remaining followers” of the Cult of Forgotten Shadows, and we need to restore it. Quest giver is Forsaken yes, but it is by no means shown to be the Forsaken Religion anymore.
Well, I don’t really enjoy their power fantasy. I prefer underdog stories. Which the NEs absolutely are not.
But you’re right, I should have been more specific. That discussion reminded me why I do not like the expected NE Racial fantasy of some NE players. That expects them to be such a overwhelming and special group of people inherently and intrinsically, they do just kind of invalidate everyone else. They make the rest of them superfluous. And in a world where that expected (and rather baseless) Power Fantasy came to exist, lets just say that “Human Potential” would pale in comparison to “NE Potential”.