Don’t exist in WoW but you could try ESO.
We should have just stuck with night elves.
farts away like a hovercraft
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I respect this
I’m sure 0 people will be surprised by me saying this, but I truly think Blood Elves should have just stayed Alliance. It would have been interesting to have a single Alliance race that resents the alliance a bit, and maybe misbehaves because of it.
The Horde has a race like this already in the Forsaken. They went off and did their own plague stuff in direct opposition to their warchief’s orders. You never knew what they were up to or if you could fully trust them, and that’s fun.
Excluding Tyrande occasionally going rogue following the burning of Teldrassil, the Alliance has always been made up of perfectly obedient races who are all in complete agreement about everything they do.
But what’s done is done. Nothing we can do about it anymore.
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Shame it didn’t really feel like it had much at all to do with the history of the Tauren, just go kill voidy things with an ancestor’s spirit.
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Blood and void elves are altered versions of high elves. Imagine a nation with a deep history and culture going through a shift. A real-world example would be China that after the civil war ends with Mao’s communists taking over and completely restructure the culture. Meanwhile there traditional Chinese carrying on in exile all over the world and in Taiwan. High elves are those living in exile.
For all I know this may be the real reason why Blizzard has been unwilling to allow for playable high elves, it could look bad in China a place where there at least used to be a sizable player base.
My personal reason for wanting playable high elves is more akin to allow for a situation similar to the US civil war, a conflict that sometimes pitted friends and family against each other.
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high elves tf
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I… I don’t even know how to respond to this.
This isn’t even mental gymnastics, this is a mental Triathalon halfway across the planet.
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Probably better then the Horde. I mean with no indoor plumbing where exactly do you think they toss their waste? It was probably the reason why Vol’jin stank so badly during MoP.
I mean, it’s not like we’ve seen anything about warcraft waste management beyond outhouses on both sides. It’s not something I figure they bothered worrying about too much.
Just, with knowledge of the fact that you had events like the capitalized Great Stink in London in 1858, or stories of how business was handled in Versailles, it’s not like we can say Western European coded humans are necessarily on solid ground there.
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I think this is really insightful. That is very possibly the reason that they have so stubbornly opposed high elves despite all reasoning.
Not to get political, but the PRC is very sensitive about symbolism, and this is a pretty direct parallel to the original Chinese Republic. I would not be surprised if they were privately in contact with Blizzard about the issue.
It’s interesting how many of the criticisms about high elves could sound like anti-Taiwan talking points.
Didn’t WoW just leave China recently? Are Blizzard’s other games still being sold there? If Blizzard were to wash its hands of China altogether, I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw High Elves shortly after.
Either way, very interesting!
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Sorry for the necro, but…
Technically, none of the Windrunners were ever Blood Elves.
A “Blood Elf” is a political faction, not a race. It’s a group of High Elven survivors of the Scourge who remained in the NE part of the Eastern Kingdoms after the fall of Quel’thalas who broke from the Alliance (with whom they were still legacy members from the Second War and had again taken up a briefer compact for mutual aid) following Garithos’s attempted purge of the Elves.
- This was largely triggered by Kael’thas’s seeming to have worked with ‘demons’ (Naga), who Garithos considered backers of the Scourge (he would otherwise have been mostly correct), giving the bigotted human-supremacist reason enough to cease all efforts to rescue and house Quel’thalathi survivors or campaign to retake the northeast and instead fortify the surviving human kingdoms. Of course, had Garithos never put the rest of his troops’ lives ahead of the elves’, they’d never have needed to ally with the Naga for survival.
While the term was beginning already to see use for those who’d stay in the north to mourn their homeland and to fight for it to the end, it didn’t really solidify outside of Kael’s own movement that would soon have them split away and depart for Outland. It was a term he pressed onto his people, yes, but the only ones who would have gotten that unofficial edict were those in the area of its pronouncement, who were by then his own forces (as in a ‘fleeing from service was a hangable offense’ sort of command). Though many others matter mourned the loss of Quel’thalas and vowed to see it eventually restored, those outside his ranks do not appear to have taken up the term Blood Elf, remaining only Elven or High Elven.
Alleria was away, likely already in Outland, at the time of the attempted purge. Vereesa was in the Eastern Kingdoms but not part of Garithos’s legion nor notified of what happened. Sylvanas died during the fall of Quel’thalas and was busy being a banshee that still had yet to even fully re-manifest her body; she wasn’t about to be accepted into any faction of surviving elves, separatists or otherwise. None among them became Blood Elves.
The High Elves themselves, btw, were likewise separatists / exiles. They refused to hold to the compacts following the War of the Ancients and rather than give up arcane magics (seen as a root cause of the summoning of the Burning Legion that would latter lead to the Sundering) and certain other prerogatives of their former noble status (arcane magics, btw, were pretty well exclusive to the higher classes, with druidism being rare and a thing of outlanders and merely spiritual/less magically immersed Elunite worship being a thing of the lowborn and/or naive) and instead chose exile, sailing east to new lands.
- Trolls influenced/mutated by the Well of Eternity → Night Elves
- Highborn who went into exile to the east → High Elves
- High Elves who (re)split away from the Alliance after Garithos attempted to purge them as traitors → Blood Elves
- High Elves and Blood Elves who followed the de facto leader and primary teacher in permanent Void integration, the Alliance-aligned Alleria Windrunner, and who thereby were pushed towards an Alliance-aligned sub-faction after their initiating ritual → Void Elves
All Void Elves and all Blood Elves are also High Elves. Both are terms for political factions with fairly autocratic leadership (under Alleria and her lieutenants, or under Kael and then his lieutenants).
If not for the political leanings of the Void Elf leader and it being such a tight group, one could be a Void Blood High Elf (a High Elf of the Sin’dorei faction who has imbued themselves permanently as a conduit of Void magic).
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Void elf should never existed, now that they’re here nothing can be done, but they should never have appeared in the first place.
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here was one of the high/half elf concepts an artist came up with just after void elves were released. the alliance players who wanted playable high elves as an allied race were not happy with void elves. even worse, once a void elf was fully geared they looked identical to blood elves. though high elf fans wanted the blood elf look, they didnt want to be a copy/paste. so an artist came up with this concept, composed of features from night elves, blood elves and humans (and a hairstyle from nightborne)
click to view larger version
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I remember seeing this one. And also all of the discourse whether High Elves should be more muscular than Blood Elves. Some people really just wanted the Belf model on the Alliance, while other people wanted something more unique. Personally i belong to the second group.
In hindsight, i do wonder why one of the two Elf based allied races were given so much more development. I know people love to scream Horde bias!! But there got to more than that, right?
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i was a fan of the model but felt it needed to have different animations for helfs such as the idling pose, which was a big belf identifier and exuded their bitterness from the attempted genocide of their people. head tilted to one side, frowning, hip jutting out, ready to smack ya upside the head with a broadsword. iconic belf. helfs wouldnt be at this exact mindset, thus their stances should be different
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As they… should. They’re the same race.
If a human had an option to die their skin green from taking on Fel magic, it still wouldn’t turn them into, say, an orc.
Would be nice to simply see a second thickness/musculature option available to all races, honestly, but it’s not as if all Blood Elves went on a Fel diet and got crack-skinny.
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To be honest, the High elves should be identical to the Blood elves physically, they are the same race but with political and cultural differences today as a result of the time that the HE have been living in communities that are not 100% HE, like Dalaran.
What they could do is introduce 2 body types per sex, 1 100% HE identical to BE and 1 that is for half-elves, and convert the HE into a culture that is receptive to others and accepts mestizos (Half-elf) as part of their society.
Regarding the racials, even in TTRPG one can have different racial traits depending on their culture, for example weapons training, with that in mind the HEs could have magic resistance as a racial instead of abilities based on draining magic.
I think it would have been very interesting to explore how the BE and the HE being the same race are different culturally and transfer that to the HE playable in the alliance. But as we all know, Blizzard clearly cares little about story, storytelling and lore compared to gameplay, so they preferred to go for an option that seemed “awesome” to them and was easy/weak in story.
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Man that reminds me of when Blizzard updated the Belf models in WoD. The first iteration of F-belves had this almost aggressive resting B**** face. I think it got changed in the second ptr build.
Yeah definitely. Their idle stance should be more “relaxed”, for the lack of a better word.
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