That works really well actually.And it would give the Tauren some much needed lore on their religious practices/beliefs and such.
Earthmother druid? What would they use an spells? Arcane?
True enough.
Sigh … I think alot of these types of threads always boil down to one truth. No matter how flawed Cata was, it was ambitious. I would not be opposed to seeing that kind of ambition placed into a full-expansion “Anti-Cata” experience. Just, over the course of the expac, redo series of zones with exclusively local and racial narratives … to rebuild. If recent dungeons have shown anything, its that you do not need “Big Bad” narratives to make fun dungeon/raid experiences. Just a goofy concept taken to its extreme. Take that principle and just rebuild the world as a true pallet cleanser. 
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If the rumored time skip is true, the next expansion would be the perfect time to do that. Or at least the one after that 
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I mean, nearly all other Tauren classes have connections to the Earthmother. Tauren Paladins, Tauren Wariors, Tauren Hunters, Tauren Priests, Tauren Shaman, etc… Its actually sort of abnormal that the Earthmother is not the inspiration for their Druids.
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I certainly think that’s the direction we should be heading in - and again, for more on that, I’d point you to this thread for how we might do that.
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/writing-a-pvp-narrative-post-shadowlands/801368
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The Earthmother, even if she was Azeroth, would not be associated with just arcane just because she is a Titan. The Earth itself is made of several elements, and life is a big component of it as well.
I’m wondering where you got arcane from, because even Titans do not always use arcane, with only Norgannon being the exception.
I think one of the biggest issues you can draw from this as NE fan isn’t just the fact that Teldrassil was torched for cheap shock but this was also the second time we had to watch the Horde march into Ashenvale and wholesale slaughter the NEs inside WoW’s history (three if you wanna count the wolfheart novel)
It’s what leads to the “blizz F’in hates NE’s dont they?” mentality and does more damage… why not have the undead march on IF instead?
Just been to much kicking the crap outta one race constantly, “yeah we ran roughshod over you three times in a row and damned all your people to the maw but uh… those war campaign tables say you did some stuff!”
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I only comment to send greetings to all my fellow night elves, better times are coming for us! We must remain united! Warriors of the night ASSEMBLE!!! 
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They used their arcane powers to subdue elemental magic, just as fire mages or ice mages do.
But it was arcane magic.
I would prefer an An’She Connection as a Taurendruid to mirror the Druid of the Moon.
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Kyalin a few things, first welcome back.
Second, I’m a bit late to this discussion so I don’t think I can add much. I do agree that adding additional flavor lore to the playable races would be a great thing for both RP and PVE experiences. Something I want to see added for Night Elves (to stick the primary spirit of the thread) would be lore on how the Night Elves who evacuated to Stormwind are returning to Kalimdor to resettle either in Ashenvale or Hyjal.
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I unfortunately think this comes from the defanging of the night elves and the trope that elves are a dying race. Terrible trope to use for wow.
Out of all the cities IF is a fortress that I’m unsure even the undead could crack.
I think the devs not only failed to give the alliance the closure it needed(hopefully coming in SL) but they made horde who felt they were good guys do villainous acts again and unable to stop it. Give the horde a reasonable reason to attack Teldrassil. Why would a Tauren druid sit on the side of the shore and watch it burn?
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I feel like this a whole different can of worms we could open up.
Blizz just does not seem to care enough to want to bother giving the Horde justifications or motives for its aggression towards the Alliance; let alone validation for them. It reminds me of an Ion interview around 8.2.5 or so that had him spewing something to the effect of “The Alliance hates the Horde for Genocide, the Horde has reasons to hate the Alliance”. It was illuminating to say the least. The lead dev of the very team that keeps requiring that the Horde to be antagonistic to the Alliance, could not think of a single reason why the Horde should be antagonistic to the Alliance. Hence the whole Silithus Goblins fiasco LOL!
Not to derail OP’s thread too much, but if there was ever a sign that the Horde was little more than a plot-device and vehicle to help Sylvanas settup SLs in BfA … it would be that.
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Even a short quest chain, where the kaldorei navy picks them up and drops them off at Darkshore, would be some canon in game evidence of a return of those people who were evacuated.
Or a quest chain where you gather the refugees and march them through a portal to Mt Hyjal.
Maybe for the heritage quest. The diaspora returning to Mt Hyjal could be reflective of their heritage, as they gathered there after previous calamities.
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I’m going to have to respond here with one of those nuanced answers that will get me in trouble, but, here goes.
A lot of our detractors like to frame the issue of us being “upset about the tree”, which misses that a lot of Night Elf fans, certainly including myself, have been feeling this way about the perceived competence of the playable race since about Cataclysm. Some will go all the way to Vanilla, but I think Cataclysm is the major demarcation line for where this issue cropped up.
Cataclysm did include a necessary rebalancing of zones, but the way that the conflicts with the Alliance were framed imparted the general impression of the Horde being the stronger faction. In places like Ashenvale, this presentation disagreed with the canonical result of the zone - and in MOP, despite numerous calls for one, we could not get a phased questline, a scenario, or anything that visually depicted the reconquest of Ashenvale. We knew it happened at the time because otherwise Night Elves could not run caravans to the Dry Hills. Elegy later definitively confirmed it - but despite that the Alliance was already one scenario down and was dealing with the dreadful robot cat questline in the patch where that would have made the most sense, Blizzard could not bring themselves to do anything about it. That faction war came and went with the impression that it was fine to make it look like the Horde was brutalizing the Night Elves onscreen, but that we could not expect to be allowed to hit back onscreen. Patch 5.1 was also a mess, where the Alliance’s failures - every single one of them - could be laid at the feet of Night Elves, either failing to stop the Horde from landing in Krasarang, having a “crack team” that was easily swept aside, having the leader of that crack team give away military secrets, having the city of Darnassus being unable to protect the divine bell from infiltrators (I’ve heard that they actually wanted to detonate it in in the city to bring on that tragedy sooner - but cooler heads prevailed), and having Tyrande make a complete fool of herself for Varian’s benefit. Night Elves by this point were in such a state that one of the game’s superstar devs, Ghostcrawler, was calling another one out about their defanging about it multiple times on Twitter. This eventually led to the embarrassing and vacant “Night Elves are the New Orc!” campaign that led Legion for about fifteen minutes before it fell again into the morass of Tyrande making a fool of herself, and the Night Elf military being held back from fighting the Horde.
This is why, post-Cataclysm, WoD was my favorite expansion. It left us alone. But for everything preceding that (except probably the the Warden and Demon Hunter content from Legion - which was great but technically neutral), people already were demoralized and convinced that Blizzard just had it out for this race.
So, that’s our prologue. This is how the Night Elves were looking before Teldrassil. This is what leads to Elesana-style doomerism - and while we’re on that point, apart from wrongly using the language of certainty, failing to hedge her predictions as predictions - it’s hard to assert that she’s wrong. Being a fan of the Night Elves for as long as I have has taught me that it’s a cycle of feeling like you’re being mistreated, being shocked that your fellow players don’t seem to care, trying to push what you see as a reasonable solution for fixing the problem, and then watching Blizzard do everything in its power to make the problem worse. I think Horde fans are understanding this mindset more and more come BFA, but I’ve known that feeling since 2010.
Anyway - take all of that, and I only skimmed the issue - but take all of that, take that feeling that Blizzard is never going to make up for past abuses and that they generally don’t like you. Get yourself into that mindset and pretend that it’s 2018.
NOW add the War of the Thorns and Teldrassil.
Take an extra second to put yourself in that mindset.
.
That is why Teldrassil was probably the worst choice for a target in the faction war - more than anyone else in the Alliance, Night Elves had had more of their fill of feeling like the “free kill” in the faction war - and then we introduced the free-kill super bowl, where the moments of Night Elven formidability - notably everything they did in Ashenvale in Elegy and A Good War were largely hidden in novellas that about 5% of the population read, while the tragic elements were hyped for maximum effect in Blizzard-sponsored art dumps, in the questing, in the framing, and in multiple cinematics, including one of the super Hi-Res ones in order to highlight how Saurfang feels bad about it.
THAT ALL BEING SAID
There is a tendency I’ve noticed among Night Elf posters to claim - I think errantly, that things would have been better if we just razed Ironforge or Stormwind, or somewhere else instead. I disagree. That we have bracketed our expectations to the level where we expect one faction to just defeat the armies of an entire nation within any faction is I suppose understandable given that our minds are focused on such an event. In auditing this is called “anchoring”, and it’s a bias that we have to consciously watch out for - but apart from that normally being logistically absurd, it’s an incompatible action for a faction-centered, rivalry based MMO, that is that way to stand up a competitive multiplayer scene. Establishing any race as the “free kill” in the faction war interferes with that, it demoralizes people, and it removes the expectation that people can get their feelings of victory from putting in the work to be the very best they can in PVP, and instead invests that into hoping for fiat wins as Blizzard deigns to distribute them. I can’t sign on to making ANY playable race go through that - and no, not even as revenge for Teldrassil.
This is where I’m going to also stop to address Turasko’s general sentiment, about wanting a reasonable reason to attack Teldrassil - same with calls that things would have been better if the Undercity and Teldrassil merely switched places. They wouldn’t have - these objections only (partially) solve problems from a Horde point of view. They don’t deal with the central problem that Teldrassil presents - and that is its humiliating and demoralizing effect. It feels bad to be a Night Elf fan these days because of it - particularly if you’re trying to hold up the standard image of your character being autonomous, capable, and relatable (in the way that we choose of course) - as people in video games generally do. We can’t even trash talk our opponent in the faction war, and what’s the point of jumping in a battleground if nothing I do matters and it’s always going to look like I’m losing anyway? These are the questions that I wish Horde players would consider a bit more closely when they say these things.
Anyway - I hope that’s given you all a bit more to chew on.
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I know the feeling. You really don’t know what you have until it’s gone.
When I first came back in Legion I was a little bothered by how almost every Forsaken based social RP took place in either Brill or the Undercity. New Brill in particular disappointed me somewhat. I was annoyed how Gallow’s End had been replaced by a barely memorable cookie cuter Forsaken building #006.
But post BFA I realized why that was.
It was because those are the only Forsaken towns on the EK outside Tarren Mill and the Sepulcher that aren’t phased to ish. And neither of those towns feel like towns, they’re more forward operating bases in the middle of a war zone. Ditto for the Forsaken colonies in Northrend. Nothing else really has the spooky but cozy feeling of Tirisfal.
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Then you agree that the Alliance won at Undercity?
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Yeah, and if I may break this into something of a tangent, this is an issue that Blizzard seems to have with RP spots generally.
Take the Park in Stormwind. For those who don’t remember, the Park was an empty district in Stormwind that was somewhat done up in Night Elf themes. It had a Moonwell, it had Night Elf lamps, but it also had a number of empty buildings and an empty tavern. RP servers made excellent use out of this place - setting up in that tavern or in those buildings, and this was great for those scenes. Empty or mostly empty buildings are fantastic in general for that. But I can see where some developer thought “well, we really need to hype up Deathwing as a villain, and we’re not really doing anything with this, so let’s have Deathwing destroy it.”
Only, people were doing something with it.
To back up - MMOs I think are difficult for narrative-craving writers because the player is the protagonist, and I don’t mean that in the sense that they should go out and write an epic destiny for the player - Danuser was right to say that writers should get over themselves about that - but rather, the core narrative experience takes place as the player engages with the world. The player makes choices, big and small, about what they want to be, and it’s important that those choices are respected. What quests that you take matter, what order that you do them in matters. Your interactions with groups matter, your challenges matter - and this all happens not because a writer sat down and precisely laid out what would happen if you chose this thing or that - they happen through emergent gameplay.
That story that you tell to your friend about this amazing thing you did in a battleground or how you cleverly approached that one quest? Think in that frame of mind.
In my mind, an MMO should provide a conducive platform for said experiences. In that sense, the world, a world rich with different cultures with their own conflicts - not just to choose from to play but to interact with - becomes a main character in its own right. Small stories like the Legend of Stalvan in Vanilla really shined with this concept - even if players found it somewhat annoying to be ping-ponged across the continent to follow it. Difficulty and a lack of convenience made the world feel big and full of mysteries to explore. Player choice was also, largely respected. Blizzard didn’t come in from on high and say “your pick sucked” or “you’re a bad person”. You could do you - you were encouraged to do you.
Cataclysm changed that - there was this idea that everything needed to be streamlined, everything needed to link in to the grand narrative, everyone needed to be involved, and if the conflict just wasn’t compelling, or interesting enough for you, then they would raise the stakes to make you care. Certain playable races would have their roles picked for them, and yes, if an area was deemed to be “underused”, Blizzard reserved the right to phase it, destroy it, or change it so that it better fit within the model of getting to endgame fast, and progressing through the narrative.
That narrative? That desire to streamline the game experience? I think those elements ripped out the heart from this MMO.
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Can’t POSSIBLY imagine what that feels like as horde …
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