I won’t necessarily say you’re wrong, a lot of ARs really should have been customization options rather than full-throated racial options, but here we are. The decent thing to do at this point is to recognize the PC is an anomaly of the world, a unique and special individual capable of breaking the norms and rules set to the NPCs of their race and culture.
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I’m very tempted to RC to Draenei.
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More if they race change.
Every time they add new race/class combos some folks will race change. Others will level an alt which will increase time played metric.
Your own lore is what you make it. A Draenei Warlock might have an amazing backstory to explain the path they took.
Stop gatekeeping what other people enjoy.
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I have checked the options. Seems like lightforged have better customization, but normal dranei have better color variety (darker tones). You could sort of mimic some eredar skins already with dranei.
Then play a fire mage and pull out a battle pet that looks like a demon or something, and pretend you’re a warlock. You can RP whatever you want without further eroding what’s left of Warcraft that actually had any value.
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This argument doesn’t get enough attention.
“Let people be what they want” is fine, they can still RP as something that doesn’t make sense. However, that should happen on their own rather than genuinely implementing it.
If suddenly a majority of players wanted to have hooves on their humans, that doesn’t mean it should be added because “let people have what they want”. It would be illogical, and those people can instead just RP that on their own, although they shouldn’t expect to be taken seriously.
Things need to make sense, or there might as well be no lore to begin with. The lore sets the rules of the world, and those rules shouldn’t just be tampered with. Some exceptions are fine, but those should be reserved for NPCs rather than the player. The player exists along with other players, which completely would erode them being an exception.
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Why?
Why is it up to the game to gatekeep what people are allowed to do in terms of their personal character concepts and roleplay?
Blizzard doesn’t care if our characters fit in to their story. They don’t care if every “i” is dotted and “t” is crossed in terms of their own story fitting together. The “lore” is a vast mish-mash written by dozens and dozens of people who didn’t always fully get on the same page across several different mediums. Not every possible aspect of the world has even been definitively nailed down. Until recently, we didn’t even have firm answers on a timeline for events that we all literally watched play out.
Why is this a hill that you guys want to lay down and die on, if it doesn’t matter to the vast bulk of the players and doesn’t matter to the people who literally made the game?
If your own personal preferences demand that you stick to your personal view of the lore, informed by all the assumptions, speculation and headcanon that those kinds of things always are, then don’t roll a Draenei Warlock because it doesn’t work for you, in your head. But why does your preference need to limit anyone else’s preference? Blizzard doesn’t care enough to restrict that preference and let people figure out for themselves how it fits for their personal character. The people who roll up these characters have their own personal interpretation of the lore, informed by their own speculation, assumptions and headcanon and they don’t care if some guy at a Q&A made up something off the top of their head fifteen years ago because they didn’t already have a good answer, or a contracted third-party writer put a blurb into a book that sounded good to them but didn’t run it by the development team first, and on reflection the current writers decided to go a different way with it.
Why do you?
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“Gatekeep” feels like a buzzword used by people on these forums who want to do whatever they want whenever they want, with no regard to overarching consequences.
“I wanna play a purple-skinned orc druid but instead of animal forms they turn into monster trucks”
“That’s not lore-friendly”
“Stop gatekeeping”
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When I heard Draenei, I was like “Ok, sure.” But Lightforged makes no sense at all. You’d think those light magic tattoos would interfere with their demonic rituals.
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What kind of “overarching consequences” are there to playing a character that is an outlier for their race instead of conforming in lockstep to the basic archetype? We’re not talking about letting people run around with sharp scissors. We’re not talking about anything that affects anyone but the person playing the character. On non-RP servers, we’re not talking about anything that anyone else would ever mention to anyone, even.
If Blizzard put in an Orc Druid that turned into Monster Truck forms, if they specifically wrote that into the game, some people would still say that it “goes against the lore”.
Blizzard writes the lore. They have dozens of people who are paid real dollars to haphazardly, inconsistently mish-mash the game’s story together with the millions of other mish-mashed bits put in by other people who were paid at the time to write quests, side-stories, books, game guides and blurbs for interviews. It doesn’t become invalid just because you don’t like what they wrote.
But at the end of the day, if you’re going around telling people, “you can’t do that because that doesn’t fit with my view of the story” then yeah…that’s gatekeeping. You’re keeping that gate. Own it.
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And they frequently contradict established lore with no explanation and retcon things like it’s going out of style. Saying one thing one day and another thing the next doesn’t help a world feel grounded. It feels like the writers just don’t care about what their predecessors established.
I and others who share this opinion are going “Blizzard, adhere to your own lore” just as much as anything directed towards other players.
NOW, with that aside, I do think draenei warlocks are possible and lack any “biological hurdles” to leap over like Lightforged draenei, but I’d have sooner it came about when they did the whole “We’re adding all classes to all races” thing so it didn’t just feel like a middle finger to some race lore in particular. Then it would actually feel like, “Oh, you’re the adventurer. You’re can be the outlier from that race’s society as a whole” in a manner that TTRPG characters can be. But the way class/race choices are presented now is that they’re justified as existing in enough of a quantity in that society as to be made playable. It’s why they add NPCs to represent those class/race combos. It’s how they added things like tauren paladin and priest in Cata, with the entire founding of a new order in their society. We aren’t the outliers in how things are offered.
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… Warlocks are coming about as Blizzard is doing the whole ‘all classes to all races’ thing, though. It’s just being rolled out over time because, unfortunately, not all classes are equal when it comes to development requirements. Warlock is among the easiest. Then probably Paladins and Shamans, then DHs, and lastly Druids’ll be the most taxing unless they want to go generic and work in the unique forms later after the implementation. Evoker’ll probably be the last down the pipeline since it’ll require additional assets getting affixed to each race.
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In that case, couldn’t it have waited until the other class/race combos were ready?
Because as it stands there’s no reason a human shaman can’t be playable (aside from assets), yet it’s disallowed but a Lightforged warlock is not.
You outlined why; the assets aren’t ready yet. With Warlocks, it’s essentially a summoner caster class with little difference between practicing races, so there’s not quite as much work to be done as for Paladins and Shamans.
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That’s not an explanation as to why the warlocks couldn’t wait to be rolled out with everything else, other than staggering it to maintain their subscription metrics.
As it’s presented, night elves are more inclined to be a warlock (playable) than a shaman (not playable).
Is there a specific reason to hold Warlocks back if they’re done? If the assets are ready, and there’s no overarching plan otherwise, then it makes sense to release it as it’s done.
Blizzard said that race-class restrictions would be being removed for the rest of the classes. They never said it would happen at the same time.
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Honestly ngl I hope they add a red skin color for draenei. Never been this stoked to play a warlock haha.
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Because:
It paints an incorrect picture of the game world. We all know that lore plays second, third, fourth, or fifth fiddle compared to gameplay, but still. This is supposed to be the World of Warcraft, and I feel like that “world” part has been gradually forgotten and cast aside.
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That’s just the reality of development, roll out what’s ready. Also, uh, Night Elves are a bad example lore-wise, 'cause one of the most prominent ones basically developed and spread Warlock+ as a class, so NE may be rather… Receptive to Warlocks.
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