So something that has tickled my brain for a while is how we’d get Non-Evoker Dracthyr, because most of the Weyrs were either trapped in stasis or buried beneath miles of rubble, and only a few of the Dracthyr we meet on the Isles are not Evokers, including a few members of the Healing Wings who mention they were not trained as Evokers, but ambassadors and messengers.
What if, and hear me out, we have three options that Blizzard might give us.
We know that Dragonflight is now the ‘Default’ Leveling Expansion for WoW, but one of the big issues we had with Dragonflight is that Evokers, or rather Dracthyr questlines, were specifically focused on their purpose/function/abilities as Evokers. How are Non-Evoker Dracthyr going to interact with these, will it be mentioned that they’re not Evokers, or will it be closed off to them?
We see amongst the followers of Sarkareth, the Sundered Flame, that there’s far less Evokers amongst his ranks and more Mages and Warriors, meaning that Dracthyr who could not learn to harness their abilities, or did not have the abilities at all, were still out and about during Dragonflight, they’d just turned to follow Sarkareth instead.
So …
- They were there all along:
It is going to be like Goblin and Worgen Death Knights were were retroactively added to the original Death Knight starting experience with a bit of awkward lore-bending for our beloved Wuggins, and we’ll just blink and go “…Aight.”
- Failures are better than nothing, but only just barely:
While the Weyrns are proud to boast Evokers almost exclusively, Sarkareth’s forces prove there were far more than just Evokers amongst Deathwing’s elite soldiers, and we see on the Dracthyr’s home island, the Forbidden Reach, that any Dracthyr who was disloyal, or wasn’t deemed ‘sufficient’, was killed during rigged trials to determine their rank within the army.
We’ve also seen amongst the Healing Wings that Dracthyr would could not become Evokers occupied lower-ranked roles within the army, and were not simply purged from the Dracthyr creation program, highlighting the warm and generous nature of the Earth Warden Neltharion before his slow and maddenning corruption into Deathwing the Destroyer. With much of the Weyrns in ruin, or still buried in stasis, the Weyrns cannot be picky and take in any Dracthyr, Evoker or not, to find their place in the new world they find themselves in, and the old ways of Evokers being on top of the pile in the army is now giving way to a more meritocratic method of advancement up the ranks.
- Evoker no more, or they were left in the freezer too long:
We’ve seen that Magical Stasis can have side-effects, from being groggy and gaps in one’s memories to actual permanent disfigurement and even death. We know that the Dracthyr stasis was empowered by draining the Black Dragon essence out of them and using it to keep the Black Dragon Adamanthia in a form of agonizing stasis for tens of thousands of years.
What happens to the Dracthyr who ran out of Black Dragon essence first? Combined with the side-effects of magical stasis, their unique creation method and the volatility of combining the powers of all Five Dragonflights together, when we have conflicting accounts of the Flights being forbidden from intermingling their bloodlines, and Dragons of different Flights falling in love with one another, there’s a good chance that non-Evokers are going to be unearthed from the Forbidden Reach in the aftermath of the events of the Dragonflight expansion and, due to the Aspects now gaining their abilities from the World Tree Amir’drassil, they might not be able to be Evokers anymore.
The combination of excruciatingly long stasis, being drained to the last drop of their Black Dragon essence to keep Adamanthia in stasis, and now the Aspects being overwritten with completely new, non-Titanic powers might mean that only existing Evokers can draw upon the ‘old’ essence of the Dragons, and that might fade through the generations. Or, more troubling, the addition of chaotic power from the World Soul and the inclusion of a primal Proto-Drake like Vyranoth into the mix might make it too volatile for Dracthyr to be trained to become Evokers until the situation is studied more.
In short, they ran out of Go-Juice, and the new replacement is not something they can use because they’re still wired to run on good old fashioned Titan-Brand Go-Juice. With no other options, they have to rely upon other skills they learned while training to be soldiers.
Being natural casters, Dracthyr would naturally gravitate towards Mages and Priests, although Warlocks would be given the side-eye for dabbling in such destructive and chaotic magics so far removed from the Dragon-Flights, but their knowledge of such dark magic could be invaluable to the Weyrns.
Warriors are a natural go to given the militant upbringing and culture of the Dracthyr, and Rogues-as-scouts and explorers would also tie in well to this, given their ability to fly, their agile forms and their Visages would make a Dracthyr spy or scout damn hard to pin down, especially when combined with the tool-kit for a Rogue.
Hunters? That’s terrifying. Spells from range is one thing, but imagine a Dracthyr squad trained specifically with armor-piercing crossbows or firearms, hooked polearms and flying pets whose sole objective was to harass and torment flying enemies, be they Dragons, Air-Ships or otherwise, plucking crews off the deck and dropping them to their deaths, lobbing explosive into exposed mechanisms or gouging holes in air balloons or wings, small enough only a skilled marksman or lucky blow might tear them out of the air, and with trained combat beasts to back them up and harass the enemy? Yeah, I’ll take my chances with gravity, please and thank you, it will be quicker.
So, what are your thoughts?