Now, with the understanding I’m not saying you’re doing this. A problem with the way you describe it is that it plays into a weird off shoot of this argument. This idea that some of these elves are good and some are bad. And it tends to be kind of stark in how they present it. I’m disappointed in Blizz so far on how they pull it off, but I much more prefer a grey story where almost everyone is a mix of good and bad.
In some ways the High elves are quite arrogant, either through being non-magic users used to surviving in the wilds as some of the lodges were, or through the luxury of provided or stolen magic items to feed off of instead of creatures they were able to avoid the lengths that the blood elves went to to try and keep as many of their number alive. Not just peak specimens, but any survivors left, injured elves, children, and so on. And they look down on the blood elves for what they did to keep their people alive. The next bit ties into this as well.
Depends on how it is implemented. If they recognize that it will be liable to be very popular they may provide them with a larger population of elves who never mana tapped. (as that seems to be the big divider) I’m not bring up population as “not enough so no race” but as a story function so keep reading.
Right now we have a situation where the majority of the surviving blood elves had to do the somewhat bad thing (although, how worse is it compared to killing for meat?) to survive, and a small number survived either because they were elite rangers who could withstand their lesser pangs, or were fed or stole magic item to drain of their magic to handle the withdrawal. That means that for a society trying to provide for all its survivors, not just the most fit, these means don’t work either due to not enough artifacts to feed everyone or that many could not survive going cold turkey. So in this case blood elves did something untasteful but necessary to survive, other high elves escaped that and might possibly be the jerks for not helping out their kin in need.
If this gets changed to a larger population that were able to survive through other means it starts to raise questions about how necessary the mana tapping was, and can change a desperate method to ensure survival until the sunwell got fixed into a dark decadence that paints the blood elves not as desperate but debauched and wicked. And that’s just one way it can effect the other side.
What about the model? How will it compare to the blood elf model? Will it be identical? Will it be new, made with 2020 techniques instead? What about customization, will they be getting things denied blood elves the way the Void elves got the facial hair that blood elf players have been asking for since their introduction?
Basically, will high elves end up being superior models to blood elves, thus hurting players who might have preferred that the already playable high elves got the graphical appearance given to yet another alliance version of a horde race.
