Actually horns DO grow back…since the extremities are basically just modified hair/keratin.
"Horns—are a two-part structure. An interior portion of bone (an extension of the skull) is covered by an exterior sheath grown by specialized hair follicles (similar to human fingernails). Horns are usually found on both males and (in a diminutive form) females.
Antlers are shed and regrown yearly while horns are never shed and continue to grow throughout an animal’s life. "
So essentially it’s like giving someone your fingernail clippings or a lock of hair. Which, is sort of creepy, but hey, not like lopping off a finger to give to a friend as a token of affection >_>
The cynical side of me thinks this could be a way of trying to “balance out” the night elves possibly growing a new -Drassil in that conveniently empty water spot off of the Ohn’ahran Plains with the magic seed. But yeah, I agree that it feels awkward for either side to settle on the isles.
I’m happy about them getting some kind of Ohn’ahra connection, though. Initially it felt like what little one they had through that survival hunter weapon was “taken” from them when the DF centaur were created to revolve around it, and the tauren don’t have a single wild god to call their own since Goldrinn / Lo’gosh is now a worgen thing. So at least they finally have SOMETHING to connect themselves to the world in some way.
Still feel it’s too little, too late with Baine, though.
Baine should have died ages ago. Nobody in the Horde wants him. He only exists to stop Horde players from killing guilty alliance soldiers. That is his entire role. P-aying an alliance apologist. Azeroth would be a much better place without him and having Magatha taking over as the Tauren leader.
If I remember right, the quest can be done by both sides. Although there is some funny unique dialogue for tauren players where you’re insulted if you ask why they hate centaur so much.
I don’t know. Wowhead didn’t say it was Horde only, so I just assumed everyone could do it. Like how everyone took part in the Return to Lordaeron quest chain.
You don’t speak for me. While I don’t see Baine as one of my favorite characters, I do like the guy.
They don’t have to want to exterminate the Alliance for Horde players to like them. We just want to feel like they like the Horde more than the Alliance. But the strongest ties for both of them are to the Alliance themes and Alliance characters, so they feel like transplants.
And the point is more centrally the fact he is Native Coded
Natives were murdered via bounty by State and Federal governments, with scalps and hands and fingers and heads being needed for payment.
There’s a long and varied history regarding that and the critique had was that doing so gestures at that history and there was no need.
Could’ve given him a feather of Baine’s hypothetical pet eagle he uses for ceremonies, or any other meaningful spiritual gift. Maybe a beaded pendant of Anshe to invoke the IRL basis.
Calia advocating to give Worgen back Gilneas is that the few remaining Horde holdouts in Lordaeron get surrounded from 3 sides. Gilneas from the West, Stromgarde from the east and Wildhammer from the north. It is quite possibly the worst strategic move you can make and also ensures Forsakena re being reduced to Tirisfal by ceding Silverpine and Hillsbrad.
So even if it is weird, that’s a good thing. Get over it maybe.
Yes lol You’re literally in the camp of people who wants Baine to start a war on Alliance. You won’t like him until he does. Your entire personality is “ew I don’t like Alliance”.
They literally do though.
That means ‘acting like a war criminal’ to Horde players. See the issue never was the Horde acting like villains. The issue was the Horde acting like villains and the story treating the Horde like villains.
Because what is an ‘Alliance’ theme? Not going to war every five minutes? Not being unduly aggressive to your neighbors? People have a lot of perceptions that they’ve never actually explained at all. Like Cairne being ‘awesome’ despite the fact he did literally nothing in the game he showed up in, and did nothing throughout the entirety of WoW up until his death in Cataclysm. His death was the only notable thing he ever did. And he died over a duel to the death with Garrosh, whom he challenged because it was believed that Garrosh sent some agents to go kill some druids. How very un-Horde of Cairne to challenge his warchief!
And Calia has an Alliance ‘theme’? 99% of all Forsaken are former Alliance characters. She hadn’t done anything in her tenure yet and Forsaken players are like "mehhh I don’t like her, not enough skulls on her armor and also she’s ‘bending over backwards’ to not antagonize the Worgen anymore’.
It literally is about these characters not acting like complete antagonists the entire time. Apparently not being a jerk is an Alliance theme.
I’ve written sad nerd theses about it before but Baine’s really just a symptom of the faction war writing, although it doesn’t mitigate the effect it has on how he’s viewed. His character is one that seems like, in-universe, he’d be happier on the alliance, which feels rotten when he’s supposed to be a horde racial leader. He only seems known for his friendships with Anduin and Jaina. In contrast, I don’t really know how he feels about any actual horde characters, and just have to assume he’s okay with them because of being on the same faction.
Calia just feels nasty to me in several ways, though I can’t care less about her wanting the forsaken out of Gilneas because I always loathed their conflict with the worgen anyway and the sooner that gets forgotten about, the better. For me, I straight up hate the idea of a Menethil being part of the forsaken leadership at all. I hate how the character, even if she wasn’t Calia, had basically no interaction with the race before being slid into a possible position in the first place. I also hate the light-raised necromancy aspect. It’s all just YICK and she seems accidentally custom-tailored to be the worst possible fit for the race.
I kinda think that I (an actual Horde player) know more about what Horde players want than you do.
Sooo much bad faith here, but I’ll try going one more round.
I don’t actually consider that to be an Alliance theme at all. Back in the day, the Night Elves fought their neighbors the trolls, and the human kingdoms fought each other.
Let’s say I agree that he did nothing. Doesn’t that go against your idea that Horde leaders have to be rabidly anti-Alliance warcrime edgelords to be popular with Horde players?
Yes, she does. Calia is infused and literally glowing with the Holy Light, which is basically an Alliance thing. Apart from limited involvement by the Blood Elves, it’s Alliance characters who are devoted to the Light, pal around with Naaru, etc. She was raised into undeath by two Alliance characters (Anduin and Faol) with the help of a Naaru. She hangs out with an undead Proudmoore and two undead Night Elves in her spare time, all of whom are recently raised and some of whom used to fight against the Horde. Plus, in every one of those four cases, the fact that they’re undead and/or the circumstances of their raising are a source of shame for the Horde.
That’s mostly just Benedikt. But it is true that she doesn’t fit in with the Forsaken aesthetic.
It literally is not. If you brush aside everything I’ve said above, then I’ll know you’re not interested in a real discussion and just want to badmouth Horde players.
Really? Because I play Horde too and I know what they want as well. And I’ve spent enough time around Horde players to know that they really do just want to be villains, but just not persecuted for being so. The problem has never been with doing villainous things, just the story treating the Horde as villains when they do villainous things.
You mean a Horde theme. you’d think it was, considering that when a Horde character acts as if maybe they shouldn’t start multiple wars, that is an ‘Alliance character’.
Nobody said Cairne was awesome until Baine showed up. People like Cairne in the context that he is supposedly not like his ‘soft, wimpy, Alliance son’. They have no real reason to believe this considering he didn’t do anything, though. Just a vibe that people have, that Cairne would automatically not be like his son when there’s no indication of that because there’s not an indication Cairne would do anything.
The Light is a cosmic thing. It hasn’t been an Alliance thing in since, I dunno, forever considering Horde have had priests since forever and it has never been the case that priests don’t use Light to heal, or that Horde priests were somehow different than Alliance ones when they used Light magic.
the weird thing is that you don’t see this sort of reluctance from Alliance players who get ‘Horde themes’. Draenei, Wildhammer, and Kul’Tiran shamans who commune with nature, the elements, and spirits are never derided by Alliance players by being too ‘Horde themed’. I wonder why that is?
Good to know that Forsaken are an Alliance race.
It literally is. Because no one has ever even articulated what an ‘Alliance’ theme is other than, I guess, Light. But that’s not even correct and it never was. So try again. What is an ‘Alliance theme’? Diplomacy? Compromise? Honoring ones own principles? I’m really struggling with what an ‘Alliance’ theme here is, and what makes Baine more Alliance than Horde other than him attempting diplomacy with the Alliance and refusing to support a war started by a despotic banshee who clearly never had the best intentions for anyone.
Priests are weird in that what their specs depicted have shifted a bit as the game aged. From the start, shadow was more of a generic spooky thing and better aligned with trolls and forsaken, the latter of were described as having to call on light through the shadow to explain the gameplay conceit of them having holy specs at all. Even being healed by the light is supposed to be agonizing for them, as their bodies are very temporarily revived, with all of the sensations that come with suddenly being aware of the multitudes of gaping wounds, exposed bone, and rotten muscle tissue. And while the blood elves came with paladins, it was themed around abusing the light to do so.
They contrast humans and dwarves being very traditional not-Christian fantasy priests. Nelves technically aren’t supposed to be calling on the light either, but Elune, but they’re relatively closer to that concept than a troll witch doctor would be.
While that would later get spread out somewhat with tauren (believing they are?) calling on An’she as fire-based “sun druids”, I’d still think the Light as a force is still much more strongly-associated with the alliance than it would the horde.
Shadow got screwed up and went from being “generic enough to cram in multiple non-light-related races” to crazy old god cultists, which don’t fit any of the current races at all. So it kinda half-orphaned trolls and forsaken, IMO.
To some degree, but it was always nebulous. Because the lore in vanilla wow was always kind of nebulous. But even outside of undead priests, Troll priests also existed. And prelates existed back then as well in some form in the lore, so Troll-kind had some sort of relationship and use with the Light even if it is not trapped in the same not-Christian trappings of the Dwarf/Human aesthetic.
I agree that Blizzard has messed Shadow lore up too bad, and rolling it into Void lore was dumb to begin with. Shadow is now just Void-lite. That being said though, WoW has done Light just as poorly because it comes only in two aesthetics: Draenei crystals or Human cathedrals when it isn’t either of those things in the current lore. Because it is a cosmic power, there is room enough for other takes on the Light.
But I don’t agree that Light is an Alliance theme. And if it ever was, that was for a very brief period of about 2-3 years. After the Sunwell was restored, that never was the case again. Which meant that Alliance has not had a unique claim to the Light for longer than they did have it as a thematic.
So we have this problem of Horde players hating some characters for being Alliance themed but not really articulating what an Alliance theme is. So the only possible conclusion one could come to is that diplomacy is an Alliance theme, since when characters act diplomatically, those are ‘Alliance characters’.
Because as stupid as Baine calling Taurajo a legitimate military target from his own perspective is, as Zerde said above, he did not take a passive stance in that war until it became obvious that Garrosh had to be stopped. He led Horde forces in the Barrens.
I think trolls fall into the same section night elves do in that their spells originally weren’t meant to be seen as them actually using the light, despite the spell graphics obviously being such. Druids kinda have the same hiccup, where their arcane-element spells weren’t supposed to be REAL arcane but “moon magic” instead, and Blizzard didn’t want to create a new element for one half of one spec of one class. But over time, the substitutions became lore themselves.
That’s why I personally feel the light is predominantly an alliance theme. It was used as a trope played straight for humans and dwarves, accentuated but still as advertised with the draenei, and other racial faiths started to warp around that baseline such that their priests, which weren’t supposed to be utilizing the light at all, got grafted onto the otherwise “draenei crystal / human cathedral” aesthetic you point out.
With the exception of blood elves, which is fair to bring up because their light abuse was fixed at the end of TBC. But as belves themselves were meant to be a theme inversion race, I think there’s a level of disconnect between them (plus now nightborne) and the greater horde.
Baine stayed in Mulgore until Garrosh dragged him out. He didn’t care about the Horde at all. Ignoring the Horde saving him from the alliance trying to invade Thunderbuffet. He is a traitor who deserves execution.
