Even with the new lore about the Void Elves and their exile, who says that playable Blood Elf Shadow Priests aren’t canon? Even if Quel’Thalas doesn’t approve of the Void, that may not matter to an adventurer who practiced their craft in secret.
Like, yeah, Umbric said it was a danger to the Sunwell, but simply being in Quel’Thalas and using the Void wouldn’t necessarily affect the Sunwell, which is on the Isle of Quel’Danas, not the main continent.
Belf priests were trained to use light magic and they might be able to offset the power of the void with that knowledge, because the void is eternally attempting to take over the user. I feel like it’s sort of like a balance version of priest.
However, bringing the weapon into Silvermoon that single-handedly drove the Highborn into madness and the entire race out of settling in Tirisfal is a big, fat middle finger to the lore. Having Xal’atath anywhere within 10 miles of the Sunwell is probably a really, really bad idea.
Can’t argue with this. The eldritch power which has, without fail, corrupted Dragons, Gods, and Titans alike, was mastered by a bunch of elves over the weekend.
That’s basically a Disc Priest.
And as far as I know, the Void doesn’t take over your mind. It just bombards it with its thousands of truths and it drives you insane from basically information overload. The void will tell you of every possible future and conspiracy but give no context on how they happen. The Light tells you one future and its context but little else (if you’re attuned enough for it like Velen).
This entire situation is so stupid. How are they even a threat to the sunwell?
Is the light so weak that such a potent force of light mixed with arcane can be extinguished by a few elves casting shadow spells?
Why does this only extend to the void? Couldn’t literally any cosmic force and the elements want the Sunwell?
The only way this makes sense is if Umbric was a moron and his goals were to target the sunwell with a massive source of void.
Apparently, their presence acts as a beacon to draw Void entities to the Sunwell, or something. I don’t know. I mean, Alleria ate the heart of a darkened Naaru and had to be within spitting distance of the Sunwell before anything happened. Just keep the Void Elves off of Quel’Danas and they’re probably fine.
The Void Elves’ narrative has a lot of issues, but some of the more damning ones has to be what it did to the Blood Elf narrative. From losing that edge of, ‘we’ll master any magic for the advancement and prosperity of Quel’Thalas no matter how taboo,’ to Shadow Priests, a lot was taken from the Blood Elves to make the Void Elves a thing.
I think it’s not necessarily that it’s a coveted power source, but that the elves are extremely protective of it because of the societal effect of the corruption of the well by Arthas.
Years of magical withdrawal is still fresh in their minds and seeing agents of another dark force trying to corrupt it again is going to set off some major alarm bells. Even though it was an unintentional reaction, they want to make absolutely sure history isn’t repeated.
Xal’atath I think might be a special case because wasn’t she a 5th old god? She might have been dead for eons but I imagine even an old god spirit could have some pretty profound effects if you put her in front of a massive font of power, holy or otherwise
The fact that you can create them is enough to make them canon.
That initial batch of Allied Races are still pretty hilarious in retrospect. The level of lore gymnastics to avoid giving the factions logical and actually canon Allied Races because they were just trying to cobble together an expansion hook from already made assets yoinked from the customization overhaul.
Completely missing the point and you know it. Dont be reductive.
If we wanted dark magic to be restricted to shadowy dive bars, we’d play Alliance.
The Blood Elves were supposed to be proud of their unrestricted magical research. None of this should be illegal. They used to prominently display fel crystals across the kingdom, now they’re cowering to some shadow priests. Dark wizards should be lounging in luxurious chambers with clear signs outside their doors saying, “You come get the fel/shadow, man”.
This was what we were advertised when we were kids booting up TBC. This is what Chris Metzan advertised in interviews about the Blood Elves. This is what we were clearly leading up to in WC3.
I’m fine with Blood Elves returning to their High Elven roots and worshipping the Light, but the love for dark magics should never have gone away. It just leaves us as complete generic elves.
Void Elves and Lightforged Draenei are weird concepts that I still struggle with even though I love and play both races.
I think Blizzard sometimes needs to give up the ghost on trying to find the most unique way of introducing something. I know that High Elves in the Alliance would’ve been a predictable narrative but sometimes the most basic of narratives are the best ones. This would’ve kept with the original groundwork that was laid for High Elves in the Alliance since day one and not damaged Blood Elf lore in the process.
I wish they had gone with Alleria being unwelcome in Quel’thalas (What with absorbing a fallen Naaru and being a threat to the Sunwell and all that) and the rest exiled for researching Dar’khan’s legacy and NOT specifically due to their Void research. That seems like a much more reasonable thing to exile a group from Quel’thalas for in my mind.
As it is, Blood Elf Shadow Priests feel like Lightforged Shadow Priests in that they kinda don’t make sense in the setting unless you do a lot of story backflips in your head. It’s just a shame that Blood Elf Shadow Priests were around LONG before Void Elves were…
Because Lother’mar and Rommath are kinda idiotic and decided to over react? Well, their loss is the Alliance’s gain.
I think the danger was more that corrupting oneself with the void puts one on the fast track to insanity and enslavement. Umbric’s supposedly noble motivations wouldn’t have counted for much with a compromised void cult running rampant in QT, agents of void aberrations with designs on the Sunwell.
The Horde blood elves Metzen spitballed at BlizzCon 2005 were (by his own admission) a very much WIP, borderline villain race, and it was (quite ironically) backlash from Horde players that saw the concept softened in time for TBC. Compare the blood elves’ actual companion lore in TBC to some of Metzen’s early ideas. It’s enlightening.
Is that a greater danger then warlock possibly becoming addicted to fel/more likely to bend the knee to demonic agents?
A lot of demons actually try freelance to rise above the Legion and claim their own power & glory. There’s been references where the Legion imprisons or punishes them.
They don’t get more likely to bending the knee to demonic agents – They just happen to be rewarding more power as a reward, and that’s what they want.
While I am aware that Shadow magic is derived from the void.
I have never seen Shadow priest to be the same as Void Elves, it would be like comparing them to Void Lords that are beings of absolute void energy.
I have indeed always viewed a priest’s shadow magic to be a very diluted form of void magic, they may hear the whispers of the void when using it, but they are not being of void that the void elves would be, and thus possess no danger to the Sunwell itself.
I am not sure how the whole Sunwell and Alleria thing worked anyway. The Nightborne entry questline made it seem like that Void Elves can easily be used as a gateway for other powerful void beings.
This is irresponsible misinformation that ignores the greater context for the Blood Elves’ narrative design. You also ignored every other example I gave, and honed in on the one you could poke holes into, but only if you look at it in complete isolation.
WC3 happened. That wasn’t Metzan spitballing. You can not tell me the narrative purpose of the Blood Elves was for them to revert back to generic High Elves a couple years later. You’re speaking nonsense.
The concept art, the interviews, the cinematic, the jingoistic blood elf voice-overs. Even the RPG (which is no longer considered canon but was intended to be an extension of the official canon before they retconned it out of existence) talks about the exact same Blood Elves Metzan described and sold us on. Vanilla WoW even touches on this with the Blood Elf in Stonetalon.
The change in direction you speak of DID happen, and it happened sometime during the development of TBC. But to act like the entire concept of the blood elves was just spitballing from Metzan is total gaslighting and I won’t engage with it.
There was a middle ground between full-on villains and light bound goody two shoes. Blizzard failed miserably.
I couldn’t tell you what their narrative purpose was; they ended TFT in flux. Stranded on another world, divorced from their Tolkienesque allies, in bed with fellow outcasts, shanghaied into service by Illidan’s sinister benefactor. Kael was far from an irredeemable character in TFT, though. I think redemption was as likely as damnation even then.
Although, a point to consider is that BEs probably weren’t meant to be playable in the MMO in the first place. They were billed as a “villain race” after TFT and mostly lived up to that in vanilla. I believe they were explicitly labelled as such in that RPG you mentioned. Forest trolls, naga, blood elves; “villain races.”
You come off as awfully passive aggressive, you know that? :^)
You’re making my case for me. These hardcore, tatted up, fel-crazy monster elves lost a lot of their edge in the transition from concept to canon. The draenei lost their killer tails in this blender, too. Unlucky. I just think it’s silly to act as though this race should still comport itself to ancient storyboarding that didn’t survive to see TBC’s launch, let alone its climax.
You constantly lament these newer story developments as though they don’t make sense for the race as presented to us in the canon. But they do. You just wish they didn’t.
The first iteration of “Horde blood elves” I mentioned was, by Metzen’s own admission, very much a WIP when he revealed it in 2005 BC (Before Cosby?), and nearly every single bullet point was downplayed or outright reversed in the race’s official lore blurb come 2006. Power-deranged fel elves the Alliance hunted as monsters made for a cool concept, but not a very realistic player race in a Horde that still (generally) held itself to be shamanistic and heroic. Horde players hated the idea. As did Alliance ones, for other, more obvious reasons, but I digress.
Is it any wonder that stuff got softened up a little, put in the background, pushed on “extremists” we’d begin killing around level 58? You don’t think it’s a bit weird how the words “fel” and “demonic” aren’t mentioned once in the entire blood elf questing experience, despite all the big green crystals and everyone having fel eyes?
Personally, I think it was a bad idea in the first place. If a visual indicator of corruption was necessary, they should’ve gotten evil eyes from Kel’Thuzad’s necro-Sunwell. This flip-flopping and mid-development whitewashing concerning their usage of fel was incredibly vague and unsatisfying, and now almost totally irrelevant.
On that we agree. Mostly. I still consider the blood elves fallible enough to qualify as “grey” rather than “white,” but swings and roundabouts.
Again, you’re just downplaying everything we’re talking about. None of us are mad the Blood Elves got softened up a little. We’ve said that. You know that. The fact that you keep taking our words and pushing them to such extremes shows me you are not engaging seriously in this conversation.
Softening the Blood Elves was expected from the get-go the moment they decided to add them to the Horde. Of course Metzan ended up walking back some of his initial concepts. Because it was meant to show their growth as a people. So of course, they were gonna soften them up a little, just like they softened up the Forsaken a little. No one in this conversation is against this.
The issue is they softened them completely while going in the opposite direction for the Forsaken. The result did nothing to make the Horde less villainous, as we can clearly see from what Blizz did with the story. So if their intent was to soften up the Blood Elves to keep the Horde from seeming too evil, how did that go for them? What you’re suggesting does not make sense.
I don’t know why it’s so hard to impress this upon people whenever we have these Blood Elf conversations. We wanted a middle ground. Blizzard took the whole mile. They created an entirely new idea for High Elves, and went back on it immediately. It’s creative cowardice.
Peak blood elf can be found in game in Magisters’ Terrace.