Chronicle says they changed on the journey over. Sunwell wouldn’t be made for some time after.
Honestly this.
Love my blood elves, and I did see them as the continuation of the high elven storyline. I also very much love the new Void Elves, so much so that they brought me back from being away from WoW. I also have a fair interest (Or did mostly its waned a fair bit over these fights and discovering the Purge.) in high elves, specifically the Highvale, whom I’ve recently rekindled my enjoyment of.
It drives me nuts that people can’t accept some folk liking both or all three. Thats on both sides mind.
This too.
I play a lot of elves and human and orc characters but I also play every other race very often. I have nearly 100 characters between my accounts and play what I feel like playing that day based on so many things. Even my main is a moving target most expansions.
But not all, and specifically high elves have been shown on the Alliance. I very much get people wanting to play those stories. I don’t so much get wanting “another” elf race when they can literally do that right now but I get wanting to play the stories.
Old Gods this annoys me so much.
High Elves have diverged just as much as Blood Elves at this point.
This! So much this…
Just a little explanation could go such a long way.
Still want to see the Rift expanded and some actual lore sprinkled in… maybe some damned buildings.
At this point I’m not.
I think even after void elves end up with tattoos and all the classes there will still be people making threads for the next thing to get drama going. Thats all it is these days for most of them. Look at the main poster for this thread. They literally jumped between their human and void elf to cause more drama.
I want fourth or more spec options as a way to introduce lore classes, some of being race or gender specific. Example: Female Night Elf Priest get the “Priestess of Elune” option that can wear mail armour, transmog mail and cloth and use a bow, fights like a ranged paladin. Other priests can represent Elune, but this option would be female Night Elf exclusive. Trolls could have “Shadowhunter” added the same way. Most if not all Shamans could have “Geomancer” as an option.
I think one of the main reasons I want more specs is because by leaving specs the way they are for extended periods of time it feels like canonically the classes have stagnated.
There should be continuous innovation going on in-universe amongst the class orders.
MoP did it very well where we saw the inner workings of the Warlock order with the Council of the Black Harvest, discovering that they were researching past foes and learning from them to become more powerful and create new abilities.
Magic is incredibly versatile, so why (for example) have Mages stuck to only using their magic for ranged casting damage? By now they should have learned new techniques or begin to practice applying their current ones in new ways.
We should be seeing mages trying to repurpose their Arcane magic to form armor and become close quarters tanks.
We should be seeing them expand their time magic capabilities to become Chronomancer healers.
Why haven’t Mages honed their fighting style with spellblades and combining them with Frost/Fire to become akin to Red Mages in FFXIV?
Demon Hunters no longer have demons to hunt? Why are we not seeing them look towards the new enemy: The Void? They should be repurposing their techniques and utilizing Shadowflame instead of Fel to continue their fighting fire with fire mindset but against the forces of the Void instead of Fel.
It goes on and on.
My point is: We should be seeing more innovation within the classes in-universe which can be shown through new specs.
My only other point was that the term “Blood Elf” never really had a separate life outside of Kael’thas’s forces. The term began its life already co-opted into a much narrower meaning than its original morale-/conviction-boosting name would implied. It was from the start, above all else, a signifier that one was a follower of Kael’thas (and later followers of his lieutenants who split from him when he’d gone a bridge or few too far).
That came with assumed political tenets, but those were nebulous and disagreed upon, and only even came up after people had questions about Kael’thas’s leadership.
That doesn’t quite seem to make the most sense, though, as then being, well, indigo-toned, so to speak, would be a result of the Well of Eternity, but plenty of NEs have lived far from it without any reduction in that iconic coloring.
The channeling of arcane magics could be a thing, as the Highborne were usually depicted as paler than most others (though, so were the priestesses, and all that could be audience bias from common visual tropes of less labor = less tanned, etc.), but… hmm. I’ll have to think about that more.
The novels, WC3, WC3:FT, Chronicles, and the matter of what has and what has not been retconned and terms usage anywhere else (or, in this case, the lack thereof until the group’s return from Outland — until then, if you went “Blood Elf,” you were going off to join Kael’thas, or later the leadership under his lieutenants)…
…along with common sense when considering that the actual northern half of the Eastern Kingdoms are not some tiny sub-continent that one can traverse in a day, nor were mage relays common for carrying news, let alone that of a small part of a larger army.
Why not? They literally just gave developer time to the worgens getting calm the wolf, if anything customization happens to get a good deal of dev resources.
Do you actually have a citation for this part. Because everything I remember and can find on google, is that this was something he did well before he went traipsing off to Outland. It was even before joining up with Garithos, as in he made the announcement while he was in QT after returning from Dalaran.
I simply noted that there’s nothing that says definitively that the idea for the name was something he alone came up with and that he requested the name be taken up by those under his leadership. And there it stayed — a term used only within and soon as a byword for his followers.
What do you call an elf in outland who is not a Night Elf and wasn’t part of Kael’thas’s followers or its schism groups? An “elf”.
Or a “High Elf” if you wanted to be especially polite. Because at that time, very few people even knew Night Elves existed, so there was no alternative. And if they were among Kael’s followers, then they were Blood Elves.
Your assuming that 90% of all surviving high elves were those under Kael’s leadership who that fled to Outland within the course of a night? Given that we know there were multiple military groups with high portions of elves still operating elsewhere at that time and where non-combatant refugees were funneled, that seems unlikely.
No, that the population of QT who took on the name of blood elf took on the name of blood elf, and then LATER some of them went to Outland with Kael, after they messed around with Garithos and whatnot.
And if we want to talk Chronicles, from Volume 3 page 88 it looks like the High Elves came up with the name on their own before Kael even made it back from Dalaran.
So it IS super funny that you accuse me of stealing from the BE thread when literally the 82th post is from stuff I made for High Elves. Cuz he’s literally using the alliance exclusive Eagletalon recolor.
Though that is why I like the concept Demetryan put forth, especially since it wouldn’t need much of a retcon, that they were minorly affected by the curse or gift of flesh.
Helps explain why none of the other Highborne groups had a similar shrinking and loss of the violet tones.
It’s wow lore, common sense doesn’t always apply.
That said 90% of the high elves took the name change. They own the country… They’re not the separatists in this concept.
Well when the devs say it its kinda hard to ignore.
Fair enough. My copy is lent out at the moment, but if that’s what it was, then so be it.
Doesn’t make whole of sense, but, it do be WoW, and a mere origin myth for a race that was imagined up before even its progenitors isn’t going to be super attentive to detail or warrants.
But the Curse of Flesh occurred around 15,000 years before the opening of the Dark Portal, while the Sundering occurred only ~10,000 years before it.
Ley Lines can occur almost anywhere, yeah. That wasn’t exactly my point, though.
Anyways I didn’t have the Chronicles handy, but Fenelon mentioned that the Chronicles claimed that the change occurred on the way over, so it’d be independent of the Arathorian ley lines (or, as per my previous theory, what ley lines could in turn converge/be coaxed into forming the Sunwell).
My question was why then didn’t other Night Elves who travelled away from the core NE territories likewise change.
Could it have been something about their use of arcane magics, for instance, as that was basically exclusive to the Highborne anyways?
There’d have to be some sort of catalyst, else distance and some time would have generated a similar effect for other Night Elves, too, since they had some very distant garrisons who never experienced those bodily changes over time away.
So if it wasn’t the setting nor distance alone, then it’d have to be something to do with the people or their acts, I would think.