The new customization options will make it easier to make blood elf and void elf models resemble high elves, with blue eyes. This is probably going to result in more roleplayers writing their characters as quel’dorei who did not have to partake in the fel that turned the sin’dorei’s eyes green.
So lets talk about how you would write your character dealing with the magic addiction in ways that wouldn’t change your eye glow, if you plan on playing a high elf (or even if you don’t plan to play one just for hypothetical fun!)
Did you find another source of arcane magic to sustain you, like Vereesa and the silver covenant seemed to?
(Commentary): There seems to be two methods of coping withdrawal that High Elves used which are still confirmed as canon. One would be draining magic from magical items. The other is simply going cold turkey and dealing with the withdrawal pains. The High Elves in Dalaran and Outland seemed to make use of magical items, whereas those at Quel’Danil in the Hinterlands went cold turkey (one of the comics states they ceased the practice of magic altogether).
(Speculative): The most lore-friendly explanations I could think of would be that a blue eyed Blood Elf is either a High Elf sympathizer (perhaps from Dalaran after the Purge), or was always a Blood Elf, and their use of arcane magic from the Sunwell altered their eye color. As for an Alliance High Elf through Void Elves, probably sticking to the two known canon explanations would be easiest, but at this point there’s nothing stating they couldn’t be a Blood Elf whose eyes turned Blue thanks to the Sunwell who abandoned Quel’Thalas to rejoin the Alliance. Considering the events of BFA, I can imagine quite a few Blood Elves who might’ve wanted to jump ship, and Umbric certainly paved the way for that.
(Commentary): The above having been said, players are free to make up their own reasons and what not. I imagine a popular one will be reliance upon a family relic or heirloom, perhaps dating as far back as the ancient Highborne Empire. Something powerful enough that it could be siphoned over the years, and now is no longer an OP relic of a powerful empire, but roughly as powerful as most stuff we wave around these days.
Ael’akor was considered a high elf until he returned to Quel’thalas - he had whitish blue eyes, more white than blue.
As a child, he actually fell wretched - and only survived due to exposure to nether magics. The true reasoning for his cure was destroyed when Ultris exploded, but frankly, he’s still not quite all there in the head from the experience, and people were exceptionally wary our outright malicious to him because of it. (Nor is the only cured one being played by a player; there’s a couple of us running around with different reasons!)
After his cure though, he was given mana crystals from the Scyers on the regular while he remained in Outland. The Sunwell was restored by the time he returned to Quel’thalas, so he benefited from that until the ren’dorei transformation.
Now he just feeds on elves and hangs out near leylines again.
The void alone isn’t enough to sustain him like some of the others because he /is/ void, much to the concern of his peers.
I couldn’t drop the whole “mana vampire” feel. It was just too good.
My upcoming ranger probably attempted to go cold turkey, and failed, and may have been a bit hypocritical and stole magic from animals when nobody was looking out of pure desperation.
Sorry to make a post somewhat unrelated to the topic, but this thread gave me an idea of a long-running High Elf criminal circuit in Alliance towns that would kidnap civilians and drain their mana to sustain themselves without the use of Fel or public admission they were having withdrawls. Kinda like Shirt said with Mana Vampires. They didn’t kill anyone, but traveling mages would wake up seriously drained and probably bruised.
That could be a really cool angle, if people want to be morally-conflicted High Elves.
Teilaya (Myst) had already learned to take in fel to safe her thirst. From her partner of multi hundreds of years, the Warlock Vor’rinar Solarshade. Because of him she was well accustomed to the contaminating effects of it and her eyes had begun having a green tint to them. In her travels when the thirst hit her like a brick wall from the sunwell’s destruction she naturally took those lessons to heart and would look for hidden and unknown warlock covens.
She would sneak in during the night and leave them drained of energy. Which is how I explain her green eyes despite being apart from Silvermoon for many many years.
It would certainly mean they followed the blood elf beliefs more closely than they followed the beliefs of the high elven defectors.
But if their victims weren’t warlocks then their eyes would stay blue so they could plausibly keep this hidden and pretend to be regular ol’ non-mana-vampire elves!
(Commentary): My query is more based around the fact that the High Elves never learned the techniques to drain mana from living beings though.
(Speculative): That’s not to say someone couldn’t RP their High Elf learning one way or another, just that in general, the technique was taught to the elves in Quel’Thalas, who became Blood Elves, and those who would leave and be High Elves objected to it, so why would they learn it?
That would make sense! Just seems remarkably similar to the blood elven penchant for draining light naaru.
I guess maybe thats something ethereals, as beings of pure energy or whatever, would have figured out separately from the blood elves, and then taught alleria?
Oh, but what about this softer but still morally gray way of playing Araghar’s
Idea: instead of kidnapping magical individuals to drain, they might steal magical items to sustain them?
Depending on how sympathetic you wanna make this group they might restrict themselves to stealing from really wealthy mages who only keep those items around for vanity, or perhaps evil mages who would use those magical items for nefarious purposes?
(Commentary): Not really? The Blood Elves just siphoned Light rather than Magic from M’uru. What Alleria did was eat the heart of a dark naaru, which didn’t seem to be draining at all.
(Speculative): Again, to me at least, it doesn’t seem to be the same thing. We haven’t seen Alleria, ‘draining the void,’ or even magic out of anything since that one case.
Can we talk about how the high elves were like, close to nature (even if it wasn’t as close as, say, night elves) and knew about the power of nature, druidism, etc., and yet never even tried to just connect to the world around them for their magic fix? The blood elves went straight to demonic jamba juice despite living in an eternal summer paradise.
edit: you even see that Botanist guy in the Botancia who is clearly a druid. Was he the ONLY one??
Actually that reminds me that it’s even dumber the high elves got “starved.” There are literally leylines crisscrossing the whole planet - that’s exactly what the nightborne were living off of.