So I asked Trade Chat what the origins of Dwarven Mages are and received two answers. One side told me the Humans taught Dwarves magic after learning it from the Elves. Then the other side struck that down and said Dark Irons taught the other two clans Magic after the Three Hammers war in Cata.
They then started arguing about canon for an hour. Anyway im trying to get some clean answers on origins of dwarven mages so I can write one up without going full on snowflake
We got Dwarf mages in the same expansion where Dark Irons returned to Ironforge. Between that and some of Moira’s voice lines, it’s heavily implied that Dark Irons taught new Dwarf mages, like how the newly reintegrated Highborne taught new Night Elf mages.
The difference between those examples is that Bronzebeards didn’t have that strong anti-arcane policy the Night Elves did, plus they were close, longtime friends with mage-friendly humans. So an individual Dwarf could’ve learned that way. It just presumably wasn’t common enough to be represented in the game.
Khadgar owed me a favor after Icecrown, baha!
Got me some Dark Iron cousins, I do.
The council hath been summoned. The Lore Dwarves are coming.
I’m 99.9% sure Dwarf Mages were listed as an option in the Vanilla manual that came with the book.
You can play a dwarf mage however you want. Dwarves generally live in the lore hole, so it isn’t really described, but I’ll share my understanding of this.
The humans and elves had been sharing arcane knowledge for roughly 300 years by the time the earthen awoke as dwarves and left Uldaman. The humans and dwarves, as well as gnomes, crossed paths at some point in the last 2000 years and have been buddies since, so it’s reasonable that Dalaran may have been a source of arcane knowledge.
That being said, it’s possible that the dwarves discovered arcane (and other magics) from other sources - the gnomes are powerful spellcasters as well but they have a presence in Dalaran, dating back to Alodi iirc. The presence of golems in the Bronzebeard heritage questing implies that Dwarves retained some inclination for magical machinery, so some forms of enchantment or runesmithing might originate with the dwarves.
The Dark Irons are definitely the most magic inclined of the clans, but until about 250 years ago in lore (War of Theee Hammers) they weren’t a particularly distinct identity. The clans weren’t split back then, so it’s likely that the Dark Iron sorcerers and similar spellcasters were also spread throughout the Wildhammer and Bronzebeard clans. When the Dark Irons split and accidentally summoned an elemental lord… the other two clans probably grew a dislike for that sort of magic.
Bronzebeards probably stopped training or encouraging many wannabe mages after that, but there’s nothing to say that they actually did or that they stopped the training of every mage. They likely had mages that predated the War of Three Hammers - and Dalaran still exists as the primo mage city of the world. Bronzebeards still had some casters, even if mages were rare, in that they still had priests.
Wildhammers probably stopped training mages as well, replacing them with shaman for the most part. I’m not certain mages would’ve been popular among the Wildhammer even before the war, but magic involving lots of math and practice doesn’t fit the general themes of the Wildhammer.
And of course, when the Dark Irons returned to Ironforge they are implied to have taught more dwarves the ways of magic. So if you want a new mage, that’s an easy in.
TLDR: Dwarf mages are likely pre-War of Three Hammers veterans (250+ years old), a somewhat uncommon mage trained in Ironforge since then, a Dalaran schooled mage, or a recent convert to the Dark Iron ways of spellcasting.
I went and checked and I didn’t see him, but I’m 90% certain there was a dwarf mage NPC along the road talking to another NPC in Northrend Dalaran, or there was at one point. Maybe I was wrong and it was Legion Dalaran, but I’m sure you could always have been a member of the Kirin Tor.
Sargeras taught the Dwarves after he gave them the Rings of Power. The ones corrupted by the rings became Dark Iron Dwarves.
I never ran with this, but I always thought it’d be neat if a Dwarven archaeologist ended up getting into the arcane as part of their Titanic studies.
They were. This is because the manual was written when dwarves could be mages in the original World of Warcraft alpha, but then Blizzard silently removed them before the game went live, possibly because it would’ve meant that Alliance would have had one more race/class combination than Horde.
However, even after they removed dwarf mages, there were still references to dwarven mages before Cataclysm. As previously discussed, the Dark Irons had lots of them, and had them before they split off from the other clans, but there were references to non-Dark Iron dwarf mages as well—https://wow.gamepedia.com/Tymor was a Vanilla questgiver standing next to the mage trainers in Ironforge who was a self-described “student of the arcane” that sent you to Azshara to collect arcane runes from the night elven ruins there, and https://wow.gamepedia.com/Dorfus_Alphamage, who was a dwarven Kirin Tor mage from WotLK (and an inside joke about dwarves having mages in the alpha).
You’re right. Dorfus is in the sewers, which is likely why you missed him.
I knew he was around here somewhere with a name like that.