Well, fair enough that you didn’t pull that noise.
Still. I really don’t think it was intended as a slight or anything. Just that at that time, that was how you could play that version of those elves, and there wasn’t a plan to add them then.
Would it be a slight to tell people who say want a new Fighter class that is basically the same thing as a Warrior but with some minor cosmetic changes that if they want say a sword and board tank with options for 2 two-hander melee dps etc that warriors are right there waiting for them?
Kul Tirans used the base human model until they were playable. They’re just humans (the Drust blood idea was axed). They have three models (the base human model, the skinny model, the playable model) as well as special models like Ashvane, Jaina, and Harlan Sweet. Despite being plain ol’ humans, they were given a model different from their parent race. So in theory, Bliz could have made a different model for high elves. We know because they did for a group of monster hunting sailors from a slightly eldritch island.
I was perfectly okay with Alterac humans joining the Horde. As were others based on the replies to that thread. This is why I don’t understand how some would see high elves being playable on Alliance as some “loss” for the Horde. Blood Elves are still there, with their own colors and aesthetics.
Distinction can be acquired through good writing, some fiddling with the model a bit, a different color palette, and a new set of racials. Maybe even give them access to a class the blood elves can’t use.
Although actually, I’d really like the rune… Carver? I dunno, I haven’t seem the RPG books in a dog’s age. Anyway, the magical warrior variation where they enchanted their weapons and armor and body. That seemed really cool.
Just meant that there’s a good number of people that will explain how humans would be different.
But as for the elves, there’s still various different objections
repetitiveness - straight up high elves would realistically have less change between themselves and belves than Tauren and HMT. So if you aren’t worked up about elves on the right faction, it ends up feeling like a wasted race.
Core race got left out - I mean, really, this is pretty messed up where the AR, which is on the opposite faction, has more visual themes than the core race does, so in that way it’s actually better and the people that have been playing them for years got screwed by this in that way.
Story issues - I don’t really feel like going too indepth on that here as it can get wordy, but adding in high elves as a playable race will change their role in the story and can change how past story feels in a way that’s not positive for the blood elf story.
Really, I just lust for more ways to punch things in the face. I have warriors and monks and death knights at home, but there’s whole flavors of tanky violence I’m currently being denied.
If the argument being used against high elves is that they have no visual/gameplay/mechanical distinction, then some distinctions in those fields have to be made (within reason; void elves are not within reason). They’ve seen no real developments since Wrath, so you have an almost blank canvas to work with.
I liked the one guy’s suggestion of giving them the shaman class, but you could totally push them in the direction of magical artifacts and non-death knight runes.
The class you’re thinking of is the Runemaster. You’d probably have to reconceptualize it a bit because they were the RPG’s stand-in for monks. Might work as a two-spec hero class.
I’d argue that this is more due to story neglect. Nothing was done with them aside from being accessories to other stories, so we’ve seen no change. They’re not what I consider an inherently stagnant race, unlike the Night Elves or (to my own pain) the Tauren. If anything, you could argue that they’d be in one of those pivotal moments of their existence. There’s lots you can do with high elves as a people, provided one bothers to actually write about them.
That’s not much of an argument against high elves, and instead it’s more an indictment of the missteps of the art team. Also, pretty visuals do not negate terrible writing.
How so? They already have the role of supporters of the Alliance, and that has been their role since Wrath of the Lich King. The only time they’ve appeared as their own entity was in Suramar, but prior to that they were always at the side of the Alliance.
I really need to hear some examples, because the only thing that comes to mind is if a novel started a reconciliation storyline and it hasn’t been reflected in the game yet.
Well, in the sense that it’s screwing over the story of the actual high elves to concentrate too much attention on a handful of runaways.
Right now the origins of the Blood elves is a story of desperate measures taken out of necessity to try and protect the masses from the withdrawal that was hurting all the elves.
Currently, the high elves who could afford to have been mana vegans are a small outlier. Either peak physical specimens in the lodges who already were less reliant on the sunwell due to not using it as much. Or other high elves like in Dalaran who were able to feed off of the artifacts there, and kinda come off as privileged jerks looking down their noses at those not as lucky as they are for what they needed to do to survive.
Make high elves playable, where they will boom in visible population, and suddenly it looks less like a few outliers able to escape the desperation, and more like the blood elves just did the thing because edgy.
This hasn’t been much of a thing since the end of TBC. Or is the new Sunwell not working out?
Two things here. One being that this is where the writing can pick up the slack. Expand on alternate energy sources and other adjustments they had to make. Use that as a way to explore any changes that brought upon them either in their outlook of the world or how they interact with the other races.
Two is that the outlier thing would hold if the Silver Covenant had never been created. They were given increased world presence, so it’s not just outliers or a handful of elves at this point. If they were, they’d just fade into the crowd, but instead the opposite has happened.
I disagree. I’d say that both went about dealing with the same problem in different ways. If anything, the blood elves come out looking better because they would be the race that faced the problem head on and took massive risks, whereas the high elves were accessories to other stories.
But turning the mana vegans into a playable faction will retroactively at least change the appearance of the numbers that were in play at that point. Basically it’d be a retcon changing old lore.
Eh, energy source doesn’t really matter as much as apparent numbers.
First, the SC’s size doesn’t make the vegans not an outlier
Secondly, the SC should never be playable so that they can get their comeuppance at some point.
And that’s what I feel right now.
However, having a ton of mana vegans show up changes things retroactively in a way that suggests that the mana tapping might not have been as needed as it was. If there’s a ton of other elves who found other ways to cope without the greyness, that makes the blood elves darker in not necessarily a good way.
The Silver Covenant aside, there’s any elves living in hunter lodges, anyone Lor’themar kicked out to prevent political unrest (though this is admittedly a stretch), the survivors in the Allerian Stronghold, and any unaccounted elves that may have struck out on their own (again, a stretch). They’re not as numerous as some of the other races, but I don’t think anyone here would expect them to be.
If they were outliers in every sense of the word, they’d fade into the crowd and have almost no presence due to being rare. The exact opposite has happened because they have world presence and somehow have enough people to take over the Silver Pavilion, run the Argent Tournament, and side with Jaina during Mists. Their numbers are indeed smaller than the Night Elf or Blood Elf armies (one of the things that was correctly represented in Suramar), but that only makes them a less populous race.
Also, they wouldn’t be the only low-population race in WoW. Gnomes are still in the process of recovering. Lastly, labeling them as an allied race would make any concerns over numbers moot because the point behind Allied Races was to allow smaller groups in that didn’t have the numbers to be treated as a full race.
That doesn’t take away anything from the Blood Elves, largely because they have been an active force since their introduction in TBC. At that point it’d be recognized that they were using what they had at hand to survive and came out better because they got their Sunwell back at the end of TBC.
The kind of thing I’m talking about would be represented if, for example, the Silver Covenant had 30 members of other Alliance races for every one high elf. That would make them rare enough to blend into the crowd composed of the other races. The same would apply if the rangers of Dalaran had been composed of mostly dwarf, night elf and human rangers with the occasional rare high elf ranger. That’s what I mean by blending into the crowd.