How old are our characters supposed to be?

Vanilla intro questing kind of implies you’re pretty young tbh. No numbers ofc but I doubt the intent is for every playable elf to be 10k.

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My characters are old enough to tell people to get off of Orgrimmar’s lawn.

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I mean, it’s a world of magic, sure some races have young natural age limits compared to others, but even when I play as those races, I just make something up to give them the same non aging as the others.
For example, a grog that turned my pirate lady immortal
A powerful mage that uses magic to keep themself young
one blessed by a much more powerful entity, etc.
Really as long as you can make it somewhat logical in the warcraft verse, anything goes.

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I figure Dwarves are similar in lifespan to Tolkien Dwarves.

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depends on race.
some can be anywhere from 100 - 1000 years old.
time is fake.

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mine is -1.

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It’s impossible to tell, for a Lightforged. Normal draenei are ridiculous long-lived. Functionality immortal. Not just Velen, there are normal NPCs tootling around selling mushrooms who were alive during the Argus exodus. Lightforging extends that.

The army of The Light was fighting in The Nether where time flows different. Turalyon claims his 20 or so years away from Azeroth was 1000 years in the Nether.

The Army of The Light had been fighting The Legion since the Genedar and Xenedar fled Argus 25,000 “normal” year ago. So someone would have to math that out.

This one was 17 at the start of BC. She’s 31 now.

Depends on the lifespan of the race in question, but you are typically refered to as “young” when doing the intro quests. Your character was probably in their late teens or early 20s/equivalent of 20s for the races during the Vanilla to WotlK era, so in their 40s now. If you started in Cataclysm or after, then around 30s/ 30s equivalent.

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My beautiful night elf princess may look young, but she’s really a 3,000 year old demon lord

i know many rpers decided to ignore the skip and keep their age.
i mean otherwise we’ll have a huge time skip and p much everyone is dead
even if u started at 18 in vanilla, ur like 35 now lol.
at some point you need to wiggle around lore to have fun

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Well, I see you’re on Moon Guard. While this is something most players really don’t give a second thought to, I’m guessing you’re looking for the RP answer. The short, simple answer: It has been 16 years in game from when Classic started up to the start of The War Within. On the dating system used, Classic would be 25 years after the opening of the Dark Portal (25 ADP), and TWW would be 41 ADP.

To get a bit more complex: Classic more or less originally progressed in real time. Burning Crusade and Wrath were about a year each within lore. Wrath>Cataclysm originally had a three year timeskip, then everything up to Legion was roughly back to about one and a half to two years.

In other words, time in the game and time IRL was moving side by side again.

This is best seen in Mists of Pandaria as some early 5.0 questing mentions that Alliance/Horde forces will be arriving en masse in about two months. The first campaign quest of 5.1 even makes an offhanded remark about how it had been a couple of months since your arrival. For those keeping score at home, this originally put Legion as starting around roughly 37-38 ADP if we factor in the seven years (including timeskip) for Classic>Cata, followed by the six years of real time for Cata>Legion.

Then they had to screw everything up with a retcon.

For whatever reason, they were completely adamant about Legion being set in 32 ADP with Anduin becoming king just before turning 17 years old. This retcon is still very much a contentious topic as it not only drastically shifted many events in the WoW timeline to earlier dates, but suddenly compressed the entire series of events from Classic all the way to start of Legion into only a seven year timeframe (for reference, this was about 12 years IRL). Official timeline policy then became that there was NO timeskip from Wrath>Cata (yet they’ve NEVER fixed Cata era quests in game that reference “three years ago” and casually ignore issues this creates such as Vanessa VanCleef’s apparent age), and that every expansion was at minimum one year and at most a year and a half. The only major timeskip that has now canonically happened has been between the end of Shadowlands and the start of Dragonflight. This means the events of Classic as well as EVERY expansion up to Shadowlands have happened in ten years. Azeroth itself has literally been in a non-stop state of war against at least one major threat be it the Old Gods, the Legion, the Scourge, a faction war, etc. for an entire decade.

Honestly? It’s ridiculous. I could at least see capping off the events of an expansion to 12-18 months if we at least factor in the remaining time between the final patch of one expansion and the start of the next as a peaceful period, but with the way it currently is the world has had zero breathing room in between every major event at it just flows from one disaster to another.

In any case, for the RP players needing a reference, here’s when each part of WoW officially took place regardless of if you agree with this stupid timeline or not. In cases where something spans multiple years, actual patches will be listed to note where the calendar change lines up for that specific year/expansion. Important notes are also listed where relevant.

Classic: 25 ADP
BC: 26 ADP
WotLK: 27 ADP
Cata: 28 ADP (4.0, start of expansion) to 29 ADP (4.3: Hour of Twilight)
MoP: 30 ADP
WoD: 31 ADP in the Prime Timeline, -2 BDP in Alternate Draenor

  • Special Notes: Events in Alternate Draenor occur two years before the opening of the Dark Portal in the Prime Timeline. While for gameplay purposes we can freely travel back to Azeroth, canonically we spend the whole expansion in Draenor and upon returning home at the end, this timeline is sealed off from us with no way back.

Legion: 32 ADP
BfA: 33 ADP (8.0, start of expansion) to 34 ADP (8.1: Tides of Vengeance)

  • Special Note: If you are a Mag’har player, your character’s earliest possible origin is 34 ADP in Alternate Draenor.

SL: 35 ADP to 36 ADP

  • Special Note: No firm point is given regarding what patch transitioned us to a new year, but like with WoD there is gameplay and story segregation. With rare exceptions (such as the quest in Redridge for Kyrian champions and the retaking of Lordaeron), we spend the whole year canonically in the Shadowlands. Once the rift at Icecrown is sealed, we cannot return.

DF: 40 ADP
TWW: 41 ADP

Depending on how strict one is regarding their character and when they created them, I’d say look for the expansion you made that character in if you need a starting point to determine age. Keep in mind that in many cases, our characters likely started off as novice adventurers/soldiers, so unless your character concept was an older character for whatever reason, your character likely started at about 16-18 years old if they were a human with the age being adjusted accordingly depending on the race (for example, gnomes in their early 20s are still technically teens by human standards)

Ultimately, whatever the case may be regarding your character and however old you intended them to be at creation, at most your character has aged about 16 years if they were created in Classic.

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Funny that you bring that up. It’s been almost a year since the trailer for The War Within was first seen. There was an entire topic that revolved around a bunch of edgelords that likely never experienced real hardship, nor looked into how messed up Azeroth actually is essentially mocking Anduin and his post Shadowlands PTSD.

In fact I’ll raise you: not just normal Gohan, but Future Gohan.
Him and Anduin both could share more than a few stories that end with the line “…and then he/she died too.”

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The drakthyr already participated in the War of the Ancients, which happened over 10000 years ago. They were put into stasis later by Neltharion and then forgotten when he went mad and became Deathwing.

The playable drakthyr in WoW fall into two categories: There are the original ones which are over 10000 years old, but they have been kept young by the stasis. The others could be drakthyr kids so they are still very young (yes drakthyr kids exist, at least the models exist, if a drakthyr uses the Anima toy and chooses to be a kid).

As drakthyr have both dragonkind and human heritage, their max age will be somewhere in the middle. So drakthyr will become several 1000 years old even without stasis (the max age for humans is around 120 years, but dragon can become several 10000 years old).

Links

warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/Dracthyr#History

warcraft.wiki.gg/wiki/War_of_the_Ancients

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  1. They are all 30 and they don’t age.

And if you are 30 IRL I’m very jealous, enjoy being young don’t ever wish to get old!

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can you say 30 is young every day :pleading_face:

huh. that’s slightly ironic. this game is rated T for teen now, yet our characters can’t be teenagers. :thinking:

All my characters are older I typically pick old lady faces lol I like being an adventure granny.

When you are in your 40’s and up 30 is young and you yearn to be 30 again lol

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Do you ever yearn for being 40 again? Maybe at 50? (does it scale)?