The difference is in the real world, priests and holy men don’t bring the dead back to life. They don’t throw protective bubbles around people in danger. They don’t smite their foes with their mighty claymores, imbued with the power of their faith (not in polite company, at least).
In Azeroth, there was once a tangible connection between your absolute devotion to your race’s view of faith and your special holy magic powers. Stronger belief means stronger power. That is the class fantasy we’re sold on from Vanilla up to now. Taking that away and making it “basically wizard stuff” is no different from:
Taking away the nature aspect of druidic magic and saying “it’s basically wizard stuff”.
Taking away the demons and fel magic themes from warlocks and saying “it’s just wizard stuff”.
Taking away the chi and also nature aspects from monks and saying “it’s just wizard stuff through your fists”.
Taking away the elemtnal ties from shaman and saying “it’s just wizard stuff, and sometimes axes”.
Once you take away the major themes of a class, the fantasy and enjoyment of those classes is diminished. Does WoW really benefit from further diminishing fun and enjoyment?
Sure, but in the real world, praying to a pot for 100 years does not make it come to life and turn it in into a yokai. That’s some of the kinds of faith magic present in other religions rather than just monotheistic faiths.
Priest in wow is very broad-- a panda preist and a troll priest have very different cultural context and workings. Even a priestesses of elune functions differently from a priest of the light in terms of how the faith magic works.
I think this adds to the fun and enjoyment rather than takes from it. And it allows for more unexplainable divinity rather than, well… “it was 3-d printed and it all comes from this one robot.”
But in the real world, soldiers don’t leap a hundred yards, landing with such force as to cause enemies in their immediate vicinity to feel pain.
In the real world, assassins don’t vanish into thin air with hundreds of onlookers present, while invisibly making their way through crowds and right in front of police, all without any ability to see them.
Real world Satanists don’t throw bolts of infernal fire with their cute incubi boyfriend standing at their side.
Nerds in the real world only wish they could throw arcane missiles (at the darkness!!).
Real world druidic practices do not transform you into an owlbear that throws out lasers of moonfire.
So on and so forth.
No other WoW classes are intended to represent real world beliefs or abilities.
Why should priests and paladins be more grounded in realism than any other class?
It does. There’s even talk about how mommy will probably be back with troll ears.
And like there could be an interesting story about Sylvanas and the Sin’Dorei realizing how completely wrong they were. But it doesn’t look to be headed in that direction.
No, I was just responding to your initial real world comparison.
My point was more that “they already sort of are fantasy versions of real life counterparts” and that “not all priests are based on monotheistic divinity structures.” Panda priests don’t worship the light.
Well at least that’s consistent with how they’re supposed to be presented. It’s hopefully written to be shocking rather than sympathetic.
Like of all the people who did nothing wrong, Zul’Jin did the nothing wrongiest. Yeah I completely get where he’s coming from.
Not only did these people steal your land and murder your people- they’re being insufferable country club members about it.
I uh. Don’t get that sense. Even remotely. We are to be sad for Loreth and how his performance in front of the Prince will be more stressful for the lack of family present.
And uh. Man. It does do a good job of explaining why Sylvanas was conditioned from birth to view the Trolls as nothing but forest monsters to be killed. But I’m not getting the sense we’re going to come full circle about how insane that was.
Yeah, this makes me want to read it more. I think we really really need more blood elf and forsaken interactions developed and explored because there seems to be a lot there that hasn’t been touched and really needs to be unpacked.
Point of order: No, you initially brought real world religion into it.
This is true, but making them no longer based on any form of actual belief system and more about “but I believe in the Wetlands Marsh Lasher so strongly, I can throw healing spells out, because I just gotta believe in anything hard enough” only serves to ruin that as well.
Now not only are all priests beholden to nothing at all, but the core themes of the class as being a member of some religious organization is itself destroyed.
And for what? Nothing at all is gained. Nothing is made better. If anything, it’s just doubling down on the pre-existing trend of “playable races are just plain capable of everything, all the things”. That narrative trend has a direct corrolation to the decline of the story. To the demystifying of the world. Of the world deconstruction instead of world building.
Except you also make priests and paladins less interesting to boot.
Well I think there’s a great deal of difference between “I alone believe in the wetlands marsh lasher” vs. “my people have believed in the wet lands lasher for centuries and there is divine power attached to it now because it has cultural significance.”
We’re still not in the realm of the real world here, but it’s a different way for magic to have power based on a lot of real world beliefs.
Isn’t this close to what loas in the game are, anyway?
No. Because the Loas are real beings, with actual power. They are not a belief system; they’re wild gods who the trolls worship (along with a few other things).
You’re suggesting priests and paladins are made better if their belief systems are hollow, empty lies. That they are improved if their system and rituals are just bullcrap. They are made better if they and they alone are just full of it and don’t know it.
I just don’t see anything about this that improves literally anything in the game.
Mmm, I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that the belief of a people could and should have just as much potential for supernatural power in a fantasy world than a 3-d printed superman who gifts powers. And from what I’ve seen in the lore of wow, that’s already a thing in some cases.
As for wild gods-- I don’t know how they work because I’ve never researched them. But I was under the impression that something that isn’t divine could ascend to the position of Loa, rather than them only being wild gods. I also thought that wild gods can be created rather than all wild gods getting created at once a long time ago and that there can never be a new one.
Isn’t voljin now the loa of kings? I don’t think he is a wild god.
Edit: So, I did some research. Loas, Wild Gods, and August Celestials are all the same thing. The Zandalari believe that individuals in their society can become loas upon death. We know that this is true with Voljin.
So, things in the wow universe that are not divine can indeed become divine in this sense due to enlightenment or ancestral rituals.
Currently, every religion in WoW is tied to either a cosmic force (Light-worshippers, Cult of Forgotten Shadow), a divine being (Elune worshippers, loa worshippers), a near-divine being (old gods and the Twilight’s Hammer though they tend to be more shamanistic), or an unknown potentially divine entity (An’she). No religious groups in-game gain power just because they believe in a thing strong enough; they all tie back to something that exists.
Vol’jin got bound to what remained of Rezan, the former loa of kings.
That would be the (along with a few other things) I mentioned. We know Bwonsamdi was a troll at one point who ascended to loa status, presumably through Muez’ala’s power given their interactions and the fact Bwon was once a worshipper of Muez’hala.
Thus far, we have no examples of someone or something ascending to near-divine status through their own power alone, except potentially Medivh (but that’s some very old lore and never confirmed or denied, or even addressed ever again), and nobody gains power through worship of Medihv.
Nothing present in WoW, unless I forgot some fringe case, has spontaneously ascended, and every religious institution with actual priests and/or paladins associated to them can be traced directly to a divine-ish being.
Again, I don’t see why removing all of that improves the game in any way beyond “mortals are so great”.
But! I thought of some even worse repercussions of this (were it a thing) that would further just damage the story for the sake of it.
Because we know the Light is actually real. No doubt at all. Other cosmic forces reference it, other cosmic forces have dealings with it, Naaru come from it in some fashion. It is canonically a real quantity in the Warcraft universe.
So for priests and paladins to get power just from their belief alone? This means the Naaru must be straight up lying to them for no reason.
Because the draenie know their holy people get their power from the Light. The Naaru tell them such and back up this belief. The Naaru would need to be intentionally misleading the draenie, just for the sake of it.
And if the Light isn’t answering the calls of priests and paladins who worship and follow it, then why do humans on Azeroth, without known Naaru contact until relatively recently, have very similar beliefs to the draenie? Currently this makes sense; the Light itself communicates the belief system to its followers. Remove the Light from the equasion, and now we have a plothole.
The Light also becomes the cosmic force which interacts directly with player classes the least; Death powers DKs, Fel powers warlocks and demon hunters, Life powers druids, Order (via Arcane) powers mages, Void powers shadow priests (except that too would have to be removed), and the Light?
Eh. It’s just not interested in joining the party or something.
Removing the ties between priests and paladins, and what they worship makes the Naaru objectively worse, creates a plothole (easily the lesser issue here), and makes the Light an unexplained anomaly.
But okay. That’s just too problematic, so we’ll say the Light is real (which is kinda has to be) and the others are fake beliefs created by mortals, and either their beliefs alone grant them their power, or the Light does it for them too.
Well. Now the draenie and the humans are the only people in all the universe who are canonically correct in their belief systems. Tauren? Wrong! Trolls? Wrong! Night elves? Wrong! Everyone else? Wrong!! Just follow the religion of the too-prominent humans, foolish trolls and elves. We’re gonna homogenize everything into humanity even moreso than we have already!!
That’s assuming everyone gets their power from the Light though.
The other side of it is that the Light itself would be canonically weak. You can emulate the same level of power the Light gives you by just believing in the blessings of your six generations past dead ancestor. You too can rival the Light, if you just believe hard enough.
…
All of this is avoided, and a more multicultural world is created, by just saying different religions are real and exist and have divine backers. Any way you word this concept leads to homogenization or narrative dissonance.
Right. Which is why I established that in this model, a culture has divine power but an individual does not.
I don’t think this was the case. I think both ancestor worship based priests and light worship based priests are lore friendly and do not have to be the same thing.
So, most pandaren priests worship celestials, not the light. I believe their restorative magic comes from wild gods canonically.
Yes, we are on the same page here. I just think “divinity created by a culture” can be just as real in a fantasy world than “divinity is based on a monotheistic model of one divine entity being a source always.”
And I think there’s examples in lore that show that not all priests are inherently based on monotheism. Especially troll and panda priests.
That is what makes the story of the Sindorei all the more tragic. They had a lot of great stuff and a beautiful land basically climate controlled by the Sunwell and leylines or something. Then they lost it, and had to put any false pride aside, and go groveling to old allies and old enemies to cobble together a future.
I can understand why the Forsaken fans aren’t crying much. Lordaeron arguably upgraded thematically from a generic Human fantasy land to a freaky zombie society. The only people from Lordaeron who seem to be crying are the ones in the Alliance who want it.
In Warcraft? Not so much. Because then the collective belief in a concept without cosmic backing is exactly on par with a colective belief in a concept backed by a cosmic power. Effectively, the cosmic power becomes utterly irrelevant and discardable.
This isn’t a traditional D&D setting. Here, cosmic forces are powers we weild. If collective belief alone can equal collective belief plus cosmic force, we would know canonically that the cosmic force is a valueless addition.
Again, this is very damaging to the setting as a whole. Why would mages even call upon Arcane energies when they could just join a cult and have the same level of power, but without the need for Arcane?
Nobody has made any claims at all about monotheism. The only religion that could even be called monotheistic in a roundabout way would be Elune worship among the night elves, and even they aren’t monotheistic given they fully acknowledge wild gods.
Why are you bringing monotheism into this suddenly?
I just think the fact that people in WoW can become loas through the power of the things their cultures worship just directly contradicts this.
The meaningful distinction here is “can a loa spring from the belief of people” or "does a loa have to be created by something divine. " And I suppose we do not know the answer to this yet. I prefer option 1 to option 2 because I think there being a finite number of loa is a lot less interesting.
Edit: did some research. Some loas just coalesce from spirit! So new ones can indeed just be made over time through the wills of people!
Because that’s the light model I’m thinking of. Nelves worship both elune and wild gods, which makes them different from light priests already.
So far, all the available evidence is Option 2. Nothing at all implies Option 1 is anything more than what Zandalari think is possible. And technically they are not wrong; they can ascend to become loa. They just need a divine patron.
And even if they can become so powerful as to ascend to the level of loa?
They still worshipped and drew power from the loa along the way. Nothing about their ascension suggests they did it through the power of belief alone. Only that they may ascend.
No, the Light is… It’s more like the Jedi from Star Wars. They don’t believe that the Light is God. They know the Light is a Force and believe it’s a force for good.
But I think we’ve exhausted this derail. We have our different opinions, and I’m content to leave it at that.
