Opinion ofc:
Current Kaldorei: scarred and lost by Sylvannas’s actions
Post War of the Ancients: society extremely focused on druidism and Elune workshipping, perhaps a little too focused.
Pre/during War of the Ancients: Kaldorei society was at its peak, Queen Azshara was their ruler, and their focus was mostly arcane magic.
Kaldorei’s beginnigs : establishing aroung the Well of Eternity, learning about its arcane magics. Also learning druidism through Cenarius and workshipping Elune. (a perfect mix of arcane and nature imo.) That balance made the Kaldorei culture perfect.
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While I agree that the Kal’dorei Empire was all-around more interesting than contemporary Night Elf society, I think that they only began to learn about Druidism just as the War of the Ancients was about to kick off. I haven’t kept up with all the retcons Blizzard has done lately, but I recall that Malfurion was supposed to be first druid, and that he then went on to teach druidism to other Night Elves following the War of the Ancients.
That’s not a bad thing if you think about it.
Druidsm focuses on Nature itself and nature is anything but rainbows and butterflies. Nature is savage. Killed or be killed. In a natural world a flower is just as beautiful as a tiger eating a deer. It’s just the way it is but Blizzard turned druids and to an extent all Night Elves into hippies.
Sisterhood of Elune is the core pillar of current Kaldorei society and those priestesses are warriors. Trained to be the Elite forces in the defense of their people. They are the ones who lead battles. Experts in hand to hand combat and the use of several weapons. Smitting their foes with divine powers but once again Blizzard turn those Elune worshippers into regular human priests only focused on healing and nothing more.
The problem is not Kaldorei and their new way of life but Blizzard not understanding what it trully means to be Kaldorei.
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Depends what you find cool. Some nelf fans are really digging into power fantasy so world domination (hence why asking for the return of the Highborne and building them back up and return to these ways) if may I say so. And to me it’s a massive eyeroll because I prefer balance.
I always enjoyed the rustic/isolated nature of them. It made them mysterious.
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I think this is what the night elves are going to have to reckon with, finding a balance between the Arcane and Druidic sides of themselves. This will be especially true if the curse is broken on the ghost elves in Azsuna and they fully join their Kaldorei compatriots in the Alliance.
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world domination and control is their shtick
Name three people and provide sources for this please.
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Something I liked in WC3 was the implication that the night elves lacked a central government and were more a series of semi-autonomous groups living in harmony with nature, each defending it in their own way. It certainly didn’t seem like the Druids and Wardens answered to Tyrande, rather only the Sentinels, and vice versa for the other leaders.
I think it gelled more with the idea that they were ‘of nature’, rather than the owners of it. All these groups fulfilling their ancient purposes, living in harmony with forest spirits, Ancients, living gods, etc.
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Ancient Night Elves are cool, but they’re their own thing. The entire point of them as a race and story is that they aren’t that anymore, and shouldn’t be (it didn’t end well). Plus, they didn’t have Wardens, objectively the coolest thing Night Elves have ever had. You can’t be cooler than something that has Maiev in it.
https://i.imgur.com/dQo1Ue4.png
You say they had balance but the entire point was that they didn’t, and had lost the balance they had when they first found the Well. They relied too heavily on it and it warped their culture.
I don’t get the sense that Night Elves are really lost right now. Early BFA, sure, but now? They have a purpose. Rebuilding, and also busting a cap in Sylvanas’ a$$
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Back in Legion, I thought the Night Elves had it pretty good story-wise with all that NE history going on.
But even as somebody that played WC3 a lot, I never realized that Delas Moonfang was a POTM character name- and in retrospect, if I had been a Night Elf fan seeing a POTM on her knees begging a male human paladin to let her join the Order of the Silver Hand, I would have quit the game on the spot.
The coolest thing they thought they could do with Tyrande is have her dual-wield warglaives and have her swirl around like Illidan- who kinda is a night elf, but kinda isn’t too.
I think i’m starting to understand why all there are so many pissed of NE avatars on the forums.
The NE story is about how cool their race used to be.
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I’m somewhere in the middle of the two takes you describe. To me, the biggest crime has occurred since Vanilla in how they were neutralized - there is an in-between to domination/power fantasy and the boring Tolkien hippies* we got in classic.
To me, the Zandalari as first presented in BFA are the rightful inheritors of what an ancient, once-dominant, majestic, nature-oriented race ought to be. Unfortunately, they seem to be getting the vanilla NE treatment in regards to defanging as well. Blizzard can’t seem to write realistic factions and societies to save their lives. They ought to take a leaf out of those that wrote for Age of Conan. Not everything has to be dichotomized into lawful good and pure evil to be palatable to the audience.
*detractors and fans alike will point out how this doesn’t apply since blizzard has given night elves big wins here and there such as the Battle for Darkshore. This point is irrelevant to me as it still doesn’t address the fundamental shift in tone between Warcraft and WoW for Kaldorei.
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I would add as well, especially for the playable race, there’s a constant drumbeat of losing, and a feeling that things will never turn around, brought about by a series of transparently arbitrary writing decisions, that just amplifies and builds on everything that came before it. The straw that broke the camel’s back was set a long time ago. The howling you’re hearing is coming from them piling on additional straw.
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Yes and to add/reiterate, whenever there is NE content, it has very little to do with the playable faction, if anything at all. People will bleat how Legion was a NEcentric faction due to Val’Sharah and Suramar while totally ignoring how these zones do absolutely nothing to the Darnassian elves.
None of the elves even acknowledge nor address the fact that they have closely-related cousins alive across the sea. Saying that Legion is NE centric is like saying a chapter of British history contributes to the current events happening in the USA.
It’s one of the things I really loved about Lorekeeper Vaeldrin’s story in MOP. A side story, probably not remembered by any but it directly had to do with Darnassian interests in Pandaria.
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I mean, personally, I’ve always been baffled at the people who like X, but only a very specific subset of X, and not other subsets of X even if they’re aesthetically and culturally identical (as Val’sharah effectively is).
The stuff I like about a race doesn’t stop existing just because their NPC tag is yellow colored. Highborne stuff is one thing, there’s a bigger gap there, but Val’sharah may as well just be Super Ashenvale.
I get it’s a different thread of the story but they’re still Night Elves, and seeing some people just write them off entirely as “not from Darnassus so they don’t matter” is just odd.
It strikes me as an arbitrary line to draw in the sand.
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I mean, we’ve talked about this before. Personally, I felt that Val’sharah was Night Elf content, but the genesis of this came from Catalcysm’s Hyjal, and the sense that they were giving off that the Cenarion Circle wasn’t just a group of druids, but something that a) functioned as its own country (which of course it didn’t), and b) didn’t care at all about the playable race, to the extent that it was ignoring its problems and buddying up with its enemies (again, to the extent that they couldn’t bring themselves to code Malfurion into Tyrande’s raid boss fight).
More recently, I’m sure that in legion plenty of people were calling Suramar Night Elf lore. Obviously we know now that it’s not. Affiliation matters.
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Would I describe Suramar as a primarily or even notably Night Elf zone? No, course not. Would I say it’s a stretch to say that it doesn’t have chunks of Night Elf content in its worldspace, narrative, history and themes? Definitely. I know cause I don’t really like it and it reaffirms my preference for modern Night Elves (by it I mean the Moon Guard stuff mostly, I like Suramar in general). But thing is, whether or not you or I like something doesn’t really change what it is.
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Sure, I could follow you there. It informs the common history between Night Elves and Blood Elves and certainly tells us more about the progenitor society to them both as well as something of a continuation to it. I wouldn’t say though that it’s something that is of continuing relevance to the playable Night Elves, however.
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Blizzard takes a curry-infused stink infested rotting dump on priests in general when it comes to lore sadly.
I mean even in the Legion campaign, the priest campaign quests was ultimately to become pathetic fodder & need ‘rescuing’ from the ‘almighty paladins’ – Heck one of the priests in your hall, a Night elf - shuns priesthood and becomes a paladin, that’s like not only an insult to priests but Night Elf Priestess lore too.
Before I get any objections to the Night Elf ‘ThAts HoW PaLaDiNs ArE mAde!’ - The lore of paladins being made from priests was ultimately human-paladin lore / the first we encounter them, but ideally the other races had their own lore for paladins & how they were created / made or founded, but they made it the crux of paladin order.
They made it very single-minded of what the class meant in the Order-hall scenarios and basically shunned all the cultural aspects of what each class means to their respective races. You could wager it was for unity of the class & make things simple, but from my personal perspective it just seemed lazy.
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The only part of Suramar I’d say is directly relevant to the playable Night Elf story thread is the Tyrande stuff, and many of them seem to not like it cause it paints Tyrande as a jerk or they’re mad about Nightborne being Horde.
Me, I say her open disdain for the Nightborne and her just straight up telling the PC to recruit as many as they can so that less Night Elves have to die saving them is the most interesting thing she’s ever said in all of WoW.
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I mean, you’re not wrong. I’m sure we’d probably argue about framing, but you’re not wrong there.
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