Before the fel glow, and then the holy glow, I don’t think high elves had any eye glow, just normal eye colors.
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so why dont alliance high elves have normal eyes then? wheres kael’thas pupils?
for gameplay reasons. eye color is as mutable as hair color. ion even points this out when he says ‘if you want to be a blue eyed elf sorry, the horde is there for you’
what reasons?
to show the divide of the high people mostly. when they create a high elf npc it is from a premade set of skins. they never bothered to make a skin for each eye color for a few unplayable npcs and we are talking about a character creator system over 15 years old
so if high elves had blue eyes, not glowy, just normal blue eyes, where’s kael’thas eyes? he’s got no pupils.
There’s a lot of inconsistency in art. The current eye colors were defined in TBC.
And high elf eyes do not glow and can be of different natural colors, like green, blue, gray as per old descriptions. Alleria had green natural eyes in the novels, Vereesa had blue and Sylvanas had gray.
The Warbringer Sylvanas’ flashback seem to confirm this, with Sylvanas having grey eyes, and the high elf commoner she tries to save having natural blue ones.
But this lore is sketchy at best and could be retconned at any moment.
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high elf eye color is mutable. it is not just blue
They do though. Theyre all blue, but they are normal…ish. They dont glow like the Blood Elves which is a dead give away. Id say its because of the localization to sources of magic. Since Blood Elves are closer to sources of magic, even when they had the fel crystals powering their stuff, they got the glow showing this. High Elves havent been that close to magic sources in a long time.
They do.
https://imgur.com/V8NukgM
cool. so why doesnt kael’thas have that since he’s an arcane high elf?
Might have to do with making a deal with Kil’Jaeden and using the Fel.
Well they could have a variety of normal eye colors, so it wouldn’t necessarily have been based on the magic they use at that point in time.
see what i mean. the lore gives me a headache. its all over the place and people accuse you of being a racist and tell you, you’re damned, based on lore that has so many holes in it and gets retconned so often, i dunno why anybody even puts any credence in it anymore.
Maybe it was something the royal bloodline had?
nah its a scene prior to kiljaeden, prior to fel. kael’s still on the alliance and he has basically normal white eyes with no pupil, no glow. just white eyes.
As far as I can tell, at least 66.66% of the people asking for playable High Elves are entirely alright with seeing them changed in extremely profound ways – and, really, there are only two things that these players feel are required for any hypothetical implementation to be successful:
- The individuals and/or groups in question need to actually be the requested High Elves (i.e. instead of a group of Blood Elves suddenly deciding to make friendly with the Alliance, any playable group of High Elves needs to actually be derived from existing Alliance-aligned organizations like the Silver Covenant or “the Highvale”).
- If the playable High Elves are thematically inspired by some existing organization, the relationship(s) of that organization to the broader context of the game needs to be maintained (regardless of whatever cosmologically-based, physiological adaptions Blizzard subjects them to in their efforts to make them visually unique).
They could introduce playable High Elves in the midst of some calamitous alteration (i.e. even to the point of being a near-exact copy/paste of the Void Elves introduction), complete with some unseemly physical transformation(s) or a decidedly sordid color palette, and as long as Blizzard approaches their storytelling with those above points in mind you’re almost certain to have a well-received implementation on your hands.
As long as the fundamental elements of their modern caricature aren’t abandoned in the process, I wouldn’t really be bothered by playable High Elves being made to look like human-sized versions of Dobby the House-Elf. 
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dobby has hyperthyroidism. poor lil dude.
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I think there’s a difference between lower case “high elven” - which I would consider non-GMO Thalassian elves - and upper case “High Elf” which is the schism between Blood and High elves which is political/cultural/allegiance based.
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He’s the son of Anasterian, I think we would know if the King of the High Elves had taken a human wife. 