Having the High Elves remaining as a “perfectly healthy” people is a huge detriment to the story that came. They lost a magical font that had them addicted to magic, and they are just… okay… they are fine, nothing happened. Makes the choices that the Blood Elves made absolutely null and void - which is stupid, especially considering how much the overall story talks about how the withdrawals affected them.
Of course, one can argue whether the “High Elves” are perfectly healthy, they seemed to have turned absolutely insane and overly malevolent. But that is the reason why I call them a b-tier, if not a c-tier villain list in the Blood Elves’ rogue-gallery, they act as villains in the Blood Elves’ story, that is the role of the High Elves - not to be their own race and people - just NPCs in another playable race’s story.
I wouldn’t say that it really made their story lesser than. I actually think the lore concerning the Helves makes them look kind of bad. To my knowledge, many of them only survived because they had connections (e.g. Vareesa only survived because her husband was the leader of the Kirin Tor and let her siphon off some of his energy). It makes them look rather pompous and snooty that they would judge the Belves for taking drastic measures in order to survive when they personally were set up pretty good. I think it’s interesting commentary on how the materially-advantaged often don’t have to get their hands in the mud as much which then often leads to them claiming moral superiority over the less advantaged.
There is a lot other things which makes them look bad, really.
First thing of the bat is them being traitors to their own people, and also disliking their own people because of something the Alliance did - and then they still go on supporting the Alliance actively.
The High Elves - although more fittingly the Silver Covenant - are also highly sadistic towards Blood Elves for the sole reason that the Blood Elves joined the Horde; which the Blood Elves did, as mentioned above, because the Alliance themselves betrayed the Blood Elves in TBC. A point in the story that does not make much sense, and something blizzard seem to have been “sweeping under the rug” but kept in the game regardless.
The High Elves being snooty is the least of their evils.
The Quel’Lithien High Elves atleast were more reasonable with their placed anger. They were the ones actually exiled, despite partaking in the fight to regain Eversong Woods, and were only exiled for not wanting to suck magic from living beings.
No. The Alliance suffers extremely with not having desirable races, nor do the other introduced seem to have any player base (lowest worldwide). They need all the help they can get.
Like people said it before: They were made out of thin air and most transmog doesn’t work on them either. A true spit in your face race. They have only 2 (!) working weapon transmog going for them.
I mean…Horde literally has one more playable lore race (Vulpera) than Alliance does. Personally, I am fine with the High Elf customization for Void Elves (tho would be cool for more hair colors) and would like to see Alliance get something actually unique for once like Gnolls, Centaur, Sethrak, Tuskarr ANYTHING.
People keep saying this, but there’s no proof that the Alliance suffers because it’s races aren’t “good enough.” The more probable and likely reason for it is simply because the Horde’s been seen as the only acceptable faction to play at higher levels for years now. There are mountains of stories of people who actually prefer the Alliance’s aesthetics having to switch factions because their friends’ guild is Horde.
Besides, the best proof that this isn’t a race issue is to just look at the available races either side has and see their number counts. More people are playing Troll and Tauren than Worgen. Now, I’m not saying that Trolls and Tauren are less desirable than Worgen (I personally prefer them), but lets face it–is the average person more likely to play as werewolves or cow people? This seems to indicate to me pretty clearly that all of the Horde race numbers are more healthy because there’s simply a greater incentive to go Horde rather than Alliance.
It used to be really hard to convince my friends to play Horde (I like cows ) until around WoD when Horde was starting to be seen as the defacto endgame scene.
You’d hear “go Horde for CE” a lot in Legion. It makes sense, too. If you care about those things you will bite the bullet on not playing exactly what you want to access the player pool you need to accomplish your goals.
The only known member of the void elves who was classified as a high elf prior to becoming a void elf was Alleria Windrunner. So to clarify not “some” a high elf.
Yeah, but you’d be kidding yourself to say that people hold vulpera in as high esteem as they do the high elves. The reason people are mad about the Horde getting vulpera is more about the principle of them getting the only new “race.” Giving the Alliance High Elves without giving the Horde and equivolent would just be tipping the pendulum in the opposite direction (and even further than it was before).
That’s a very good point.
I theorize Horde is going to get Light risen Undead as the next Allied race slot. I am just hoping Alliance does not get, I dono, Mecha Humans…
Nothing here disproves what I’ve said though; it practically reinforces it. Tauren are #6 and Worgen are #15. Without the existence of the current meta, I find it hard to believe you’d have more Tauren than Worgen.
You have to understand that the reality of giving the Alliance High Elves means giving them a second reskin of the Blood Elf model for an allied race.
Whatever Horde gets will be superior by default, because I can’t imagine there are enough people who care enough about this issue to outweigh the amount of Alliance players who want something actually different.
We are kind of at capacity for elves and elf nonsense at this point.
Now that I think about it, that could be a worthy tradeoff for High Elves. I feel like having Calia/Nathanos style undead could be pretty cool and a lot of people would get a kick out of them.
Edit: It also just makes sense. Humans and Belves are the corresponding “human” and “pretty” races of either faction, so giving each faction a variant of the other is actually perfect.
I said it once before and I’ll say it again; Void Elves are awesome, their lore is crap
Blizzard could have taken the path where all the thousands of High Elves that travelled with Alleria through the Dark Portal could have come back as Void Elves.
Instead we got the stupid story of a small group of Blood Elves playing naughty with the Void…
I don’t know about that. It feels like this argument only works if you assume that most Helf people were satisfied as soon as they got the Velves and only a small number of people will be elated by Helves. This is basically the same logic Blizz used in making Velves–the idea that it was the Belf model pro-Helfers wanted, not the rich lore, history, and aesthetic of the Helves. If it had been the reverse (first the Alliance get Helves and then Velves), I think your argument would stand.
They didn’t even do anything with them for the entirety of BfA outside of a scenario.
It writes itself.
That’s the problem we keep getting into with these threads. GD is an echo chamber for a tiny minority of the player base. How many people wanted High Elves vs any other race? Void Elves are currently the third most played race on the Alliance per your link, which stands out to me as a success.
With that many characters at cap you’d think there would be way more noise if it was a an issue for the majority. I mostly just observe Helf rpers enjoying their Helf dressed Void Elves and living their best life.
Well, obviously there’s no way to tell what the majority of people think on this (because nobody conducts polls). But if I had to guess, with how many human-skinned Velves I’ve seen running around, a significant chunk of Velf players probably would disable the entropic embrace effect and adopt Belf hairstyles if given the option. I think for many Helf enjoyers, the Velves (even back when they were forced to have void skin and hair) have always been the best of a bad situation. If the calls for Helves were truly so small and insignificant, I don’t think the Velves would be the only AR to date to get significant customizations to make them more like their core variants. In fact, it’s because a significant chunk of people would’ve preferred a Helf allied race rather than a Velf one; pro-Helfers are just making do.
Don’t get me wrong. I understand the call for Helf customizations on Velves. I personally am not fond of many of the Alliance’s races but would like to experience their storylines. Being able to finally play those as a character who I actually liked in their totality would be very enjoyable for me. But a lot of pro-Helf players act like giving Velves all of the Belf options would be no big deal even though it most certainly would be. It’s completely unprecedented. The discourse has gotten so toxic that I’m sure even my conciliatory mindset (of perhaps giving the Alliance all of the Belf options so long as the Horde got something of equal value) would seem radical and unacceptable to a lot of people.
I really chalk up the skin options as being a mog-issue. Blue and purple clash with a lot of colors, so naturally the human skin is going to be more popular. It’s also hard to tell who actually cares about being a helf vs a velf, because the rp community is a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the player community.
People want to play a character that looks like their idealized self, which is why humans are nearly always the most played race in any MMO game. The Belf model is considered more attractive than the human one, so put two and two together and known trends spit out the results we can see.
At the end of the day, it’s not going to sound anything less than radical to say Alliance should give up another Allied Race slot to the Blood Elf model.
) until around WoD when Horde was starting to be seen as the defacto endgame scene.
