How old are DH’s?

Lore World's End Tavern: Role-play and Fan Fiction
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Hey everyone don’t usually make forum posts so hopefully this is in the right place.

Anyways I’m working on setting up a profile for my DH and got pretty stumped as to how old DH’s are, like are they 10,000+ years old or are the Illidari and Illidan’s training of DH’s a more recent phenomena.

Also as sidenote what would you consider to be relatively young for an elf like our equivalent of being 20-30?

Thank you for your time and I appreciate any information you can provide.

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It depends. Blood Elves are generally not going to have as many calendar years on them as their Night Elf counterparts who have long forgotten what calendars are.

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10,000 years Before the Dark Portal was the War of the Ancients, a period that more or less ended with The Sundering. This is when Illidan joined the Legion and got his eyes burnt out by Sargeras and imbued with power. IIRC his next major “upgrade” came when he absorbed the power from The Skull of Gul’dan, which was about midway through the Third War, year 22 After the Dark Portal. This is when he became the half Demon Illidan we know and love today.

At some point Illidan retreats to Outland with Kael’thas and Lady Vashj where he then goes about reclaiming Outland from the Legion and the Dark Temple became his throne. Or so we were lead to believe. Really this was just Illidan’s staging area to continue his attacks on the Legion, but I digress…

We don’t see Illidan again until about four years later, the year 26 After the Dark Portal, which is when The Burning Crusade expansion took place. Slaying Illidan was the culmination of that Expansion, at which point Illidan and all his Demon Hunters (assuming you and I) were taken captive by the Wardens, and held for ten years until our release during the Legion expansion events.

Illidan’s Demon Hunter recruitment drive and training camp officially became a thing some four years before The Burning Crusade events, but Night Elves (and others) had been seeking Illidan’s secrets to his power (his secrets to becoming a Demon Hunter) from almost the moment he was imbued with power by Sargeras. Few found it, others found a version of it. Others didn’t even know to look until Illidan started putting out the call to join him in Outland. The Demon Hunters themselves pretty much existed from 10k BDP forward, but the Illidari and Demon Hunters weren’t organized nor as prolific as they are now until Illidan went to Outland.

So conceivably I suppose you could have a character that was just old enough to pick up a weapon heed Illidan’s call and somehow survived the journey to the Dark Temple. Their four years of training and fighting combined with the ten years in prison gives you a fourteen year period of growth right there.
(/Tangent: Assuming some natural maturation could have been allowed, though that does bring into question if a fel infused body can keep naturally maturing or if it stops all growth. On the other hand Orcs were said to have been prematurely aged by Gul’dan in the First War, so perhaps a young Demon Hunter in training could undergo such a ritual to bring them up to speed, so to speak. /endTangent)

You could also have a Night Elf Demon Hunter that more or less remembers the War of the Ancients and the Sundering, who survived and lived through those times.

Kind of an open field. :+1:t3:

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Thanks so much for your insightful reply and help in narrowing down the timeframe for the DH training.

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For Night Elf Demon Hunters, they can be old or new. Some Demon Hunters became DH’s during the War of the Ancients, but most of them were trained and became Illidari during or before the Burning Crusade events. Also, Demon Hunters were trained during Legion events. There is a trainer quest in the DH order hall.

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However he really didn’t become the Demon Hunter that he is now until he consumed the artifact known as the Skull of Gul’dan. That’s when the Horn and Wings kit came into play.

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Now lets see, where did I put that…

Ah! There it is.

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I portray mine as a rogue who turned demon hunter following the (presumed) death of his wife at the hands of the Legion during the early part of the Burning Crusade. He only finds out she survived when he comes across her in Dalaran during the events of Legion., because you know, imprisonment.

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So, the person who becomes a demon hunter can be anywhere from over ten thousand years old to probably around twenty. But the Illidari and the majority of demon hunters have only been demon hunters for about a decade ago (starting somewhere about 23-25 years after the opening of the Dark Portal). The current year being 33 years after the opening of the Dark Portal. This point being when Illidan began training Night Elves and Blood Elves at Black Temple.

That said, we know there were demon hunter copycats not taught by Illidan. Illysanna Ravencrest was one such person, imprisoned in the Vault of the Wardens for it.

This has been debated a bit, I believe. From what I understand, a Night Elf will reach mental and physical maturity at the same point as a human, so about twenty. But that there might be some social norms that a Night Elf is viewed as more of an adult after a couple hundred years (though I don’t remember an actual sources on that note).