Your biggest threat, lay with valid points of another forum.
Here are just some of the points they’ve made (Not all) -
|START QUOTE|
1: “High Elves are different enough from Blood Elves!”
This is the point I see posted the most. No, sorry. They aren’t. The High Elves went through no mutation, no physical change, no evolution or otherwise genetic alteration after Quel’thalas was sacked by Arthas and the scourge. Kael’thas renamed the High Elven people Blood Elves in memory and honor of their fallen, and for no other reason. Renaming his people did not physically alter the race. It’s been only 20 or less years since Kael’thas renamed his people Blood Elves. They are racially, genetically, identical.
While people love to think of High Elves as “pure” (patently false, with some in-game High Elves succumbing to dark magic) or Blood Elves as “tainted”, (also false, given the recent golden eyes of the Blood Elves, it doesn’t appear that tapping demons’ magic to sate the elves’ magical addiction did anything cosmetically permanent), the fact is they are not that different. Blood/High Elves that succumbed to their hunger became Wretched. Blood Elves that overindulged in fel became Felblood Elves.
High Elves have different eye color, and they have different friends. Otherwise, they are completely identical.
2: “Blizzard did Pandaren for both sides, they can do Blood/High Elves on both sides! How could it dilute faction identity more than Pandaren?”
First and foremost, Pandaren were designed from sqaure one to be a Neutral race. Their start area is dedicated to eventually aligning with the mentality of one side or another.
I’m also going to go ahead and say most people asking for High Elves don’t play Pandaren. Why? Because they represent the lowest number of players within their own faction out of ALL races. Last number estimates show about 2.5%, per faction. Combined across all of WoW, roughly 1 in 20 plays a Pandaren, whereas Blood Elf numbers are the most populous among Horde races, having been roughly equal to Human numbers in Alliance for most of WoW since TBC.
Comparing the impact of High/Blood Elves on the factions to Pandaren who can’t even break 5% overall representation is silly.
Also, Blizzard regrets doing Pandaren as a Neutral race (evidenced by a remark Ghostcrawler made while at Blizzard), to the point that I can say we’ll likely never see another Neutral race (hence why we have not had another in three expansions). Since MoP, it’s basically impossible to write Pandaren lore now, because their forces are split faction, and we haven’t seen them do anything notable in WoW since MoP. Their identity is basically nothing.
3: “High Elves’ lore and history is rich enough to stand alone!”
Except any High Elf history is also Blood Elf history. High Elven buildings, tabards, crests, architecture, vehicles, weapon style, etc. is Blood Elven except painted blue. They still speak the same language. Blood Elven Quel’thalas still maintains the heavy presence of the Magisters (Mages), and the Farstriders (Hunters/Rangers), and with TBC introduced the Blood Knights (Paladins) as the third branch of the Blood Elven military.
Also, the only notable High Elven characters left are Alleria and Vereesa, but Alleria now leads and represents the Void Elves going forward, leaving only Vereesa. The two have been separate for only 20 or so years. Not nearly enough to diverge or have enough unique history.
4: “Nightborne are just Night Elves, so we should get High Elves even if they’re just like Blood Elves!”
Nightborne spent 10,000 years in arcane isolation from Night Elf society (which is the same amount of time the Night Elven Highborne under Dath’ramar Sunstrider took to transform into High Elves). They physically changed from the powers of the Nightwell, and their culture changed immensely from worship of Elune. They bear little cultural similarity to current day Night Elves. They have different architecture, draw on different powers, speak different languages, wear different clothes, and value different things.
They are far more similar to the Blood Elves in that isolation around a magical font of power changed them drastically over time. Blood Elves originated as Highborne Night Elves that were cast out for continuing to practice in the arcane. This doubles as a lore reason as to why they find allies in the Horde through the Blood Elves, as they can empathize with their plight.
5: “High Elves chose not to feed on demonic magic! They sated their magical addiction through other means! Their culture is so different!”
If I make myself a ham sandwich and offer you one, but you tell me you don’t like ham and would prefer a turkey sandwich, I wouldn’t turn around and call you culturally different from me.
Regardless, as of the end of The Burning Crusade expansion, where Blood Elves were introduced to the Horde, the Sunwell was restored as a font of Arcane and Holy magic, removing the inherent need for Blood Elves (or High Elves) to sate any magical withdrawal. Lor’themar has also continued to allow High Elves to make pilgrimages to the Sunwell. You can see High Elves in a post-TBC-era Sunwell during the Quel’delar questline, and more recently, the Nightborne recruitment questline, where he even granted Alleria an audience and visit to the Sunwell. The tapping or feeding off living creatures or demons is a storyline that ended fully within TBC, and Azerothian Blood Elves, the players, never fed or tapped demons or fel magic, hence why they had “Mana Tap” and “Arcane Torrent”.
6: “We can make High Elves different enough from Blood Elves! Look at all these tattoos and tribal motifs we made! Void Elves are not what we want!”
Re-imagining the High Elves to all look like extrapolations of the Warcraft 2-Era ranger unit isn’t solving the main problem. The problem is that Blood elves are High Elves. The problem is that the fantasy of a traditional LOTR “High Elf” in this game is a Blood Elf, for players.
Blizzard hasn’t been deaf for all these years when Alliance ask for High Elves. It is NOT a secret, but they likely took a look at High Elves and agreed that they are just Blood Elves in fantasy, skin tone, hair color, origin, and feel, with the only difference to speak of visually being eye color.
So they made an attempt to see how they could spin and mix up a Thalassian elf enough to merit inclusion on the Alliance. They made a compromise. They gave the Void Elves the most prominent High Elf in the Alliance, Alleria, as their leader, and they provided them with a unique, flavorful aesthetic to set it apart from other races, most importantly their Blood Elf counterparts.
In these areas, I think Void Elves were a success. They also currently number greater than any other Allied Race of either faction (beating out even some non-Allied Races), so it sounds like most Alliance are enjoying them.
7: “You say there’s not enough High Elves left, but there’s even less Void Elves, yet they are an Allied Race!”
Let’s start with basic stuff. Actual NPC numbers, towns, factions in WoW, etc, do not represent canon numbers. WoW is a representation of a multi-game IP. Example: The canon number of people in Goldshire is somewhere in the thousands, where as in game, I don’t think you can find more than 30 NPCs.
The point being, we don’t know how many High Elves are left, but we do know it’s far less than Blood Elves. 90% of High Elves died, 9% of the surviving 10% renamed themselves Blood Elves, and the remaining 1% were left as High Elves in one splinter group or another.
We also don’t know how many Void Elves were created. People’s perception that there’s less Void Elves than High Elves is based on in-game representation, and Void Elves were literally just added. This has definitely changed going forward as you can already see them in BfA events, such as the Battle for Lordaeron, recently added 8.1 Assaults (where we see Void Elves in both SI:7 and the 7th Legion forces), and they even have their own Island Expedition team (who also happen to be my favorite group in the game right now). High Elves, barring a single NPC here and there (to date, there are 5 in BfA, most generic), will only see less and less limelight as Void Elf stories move forward.
Per Steve Danuser in a Polygon interview this year, Void Elves “Start as a small group
…but eventually will group with other like-minded elves who want to see if they can also undergo a similar process.” They are basically forehadowing more Blood Elves and High Elvea to bolster Void Elven populations, and we see the seeds of this in Telgorus Rift already, with Locus Walker seen with Blood Elven Scholars and High Elven Wayfarers.
8: “High Elves were there in the Nighthold cut-scene! They represented 1/3rd of the forces there!”
The two main factions involved in that quest were the Blood Elven forces under Liadrin and the Night Elven forces under Tyrande. Vereesa made an appearance so Elisande could insult her and her people for diluting their bloodline with humans (ouch!). Because she showed up to help Tyrande with a glaive thrower and a few of her Silver Covenant does not somehow equate to being one third of the forces there.
To add to this, zero (0) High Elves enter the Nighthold or take part in the raid. Tyrande, Liadrin, Khadgar, Thalyssra, etc, are all present both outside and inside the Nighthold during this insurrection, with even minor Nightborne like Aruelle and Victoire present at the end. Veressa and her High Elves are not. They are never mentioned or seen again until we we Veressa and Alleria meet up on Argus.
9: “Blizzard reverted their stance on Classic Servers! If we make enough noise and cry enough, they’ll cave on High Elves!”
No, definitely not, and if this is the reason you keep arguing about it, please stop. The two are not at all the same. The lack of Blizzard Classic servers was causing unauthorized private servers to pop up and recreate this experience, and Blizzard has to protect their IP, so they shut them down. However, they realized there was more of a crowd/market for this than previously thought, so they announced official Classic servers to cater to this demographic.
If you honestly think there’s as many people clamoring for High Elves as there were for Classic servers, you severely overestimate your vocal minority.
10: “Ion doesn’t know his lore. Ion isn’t listening to us! Ion should be fired!”
While this isn’t exactly an argument and more of an opinion, I’m including it here because it’s flooding the forums while High Elf Hopefuls go through their stages of grief. Ion isn’t Lead Game Director because he doesn’t know his lore. Blizzard has an actual department called the Lorewalkers who literally have a room full of books and materials, and when the team has lore issues or questions, this department is consulted. He’s also not the only person that weighs in on these decisions, though it’s easy for everyone to bash him because he is the messenger.
Ion in my opinion does what any good developer does: experiment, keep what works, cut or fix what does not. Through the Q&A’s, we’ve seen the progressing stance on unpopular things in Legion like Legendaries, RNG, AP grind, etc. and in BFA, all of these are getting addressed, while popular things like Mythic+ are seeing dungeons specifically designed around it.
11: “If Blood Elf is the High Elf Fantasy, then NIghtborne is Dark Elf Fantasy, and Horde are getting those! They look just like Night Elves!”
I would say no here. Nightborne were isolated for 10,000 years from Night elf society. That’s as long as it took for Night Elves to transform into High Elves after their exile, leading to the creation of the Sunwell, and those two are obviously different races.
If you hadn’t caught the obvious, the Nightborne was basically a Legion-era retelling of the Blood Elf storyline:
“An elven people (Blood Elf/Nightborne), physically and culturally warped by thousands of years by exposure to a mystical font of power (Sunwell/Nightwell), find their leader had consorted with the Legion (Kael with Kil’jaeden, Elisande with Gul’dan). A splinter faction within these people (Scryers/Nightfallen) rise up to overthrow their leader and purge them from Legion taint and control.”
The only difference is that Velen reignites the Sunwell, whereas Thalyssra decides to destroy the Nightwell. Either way, they culturally and visually clash with Nigh Elves, who have shunned practice in the arcane since Azshara and The Sundering, having only recently allowed Night Elf mages to tenuously practice since Cataclysm.
Back to the question, Nightborne were given unique idle animations, had the Night Elf signature flip jump removed, and given only one eye shade between them. Nightborne get Warlock as a class option. Nightborne also have severely limited customization options, less than that of any Allied race despite being the most fleshed out in Legion. Whether that serves to severely limit their palette, or indicates they were merely worked on first, I don’t know.
I find Nightborne plenty different from Night Elf, considering the entire first story arc in Legion is dedicated to explaining and detailing this, and given the changes mentioned above.
12: “High Elves being barely different from Blood Elves is just like Lightforged Draenei being barely different from Draenei, or Highmountain being barely different from regular Tauren!”
Yes, of course. But unlike High Elves, Draenei and Tauren are not crossing faction lines. They are just more Alliance Draenei. More Horde Tauren. More Alliance Dwarves. More Horde Orcs. The only two Allied Races thus far that “mixed it up” would be the Void Elf, a compromise to the Alliance to get the Thalassian model, and the Nightborne, a compromise to the Horde to get the Night Elf model.
Using any other comparisons between Allied Races to merit High Elves is a pointless endeavor, because Blizzard specifically catered these two to be opposing and opposite compromises for each faction. For an Allied Race that “crosses faction lines” a more drastic set of rules and distinction would be required.
|END QUOTE|
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/why-high-elves-dont-work/182681
Is the given forum.
