If Blizzard wants to split High Elves between the factions, Void Elves need more work

Community General Discussion
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I personally like what Blizzard is doing with the High Elves, generally speaking. Both sides get High Elves, and it’s not a big deal. One side likes the Light, one side likes the Void, great, that’s all well and good, that’s fine.

But we need to look at what’s going on with Void Elves mechanically, because right now, I don’t feel off the mark in saying that they’re one of the most restrictive, and least powerful races in the game right now.

Racial abilities matter, and having decent synergy with your race will give you 1 or 2% DPS and a huge amount of utility. Picking a bad race won’t keep you out of a lot of content, but a lot of players will make HUGE use of their racial abilities and it does give that player an edge. For the majority of classes, Void Elves really don’t offer anything.

Lets look at the major racial abilities for Velf.

Spatial Rift: Tear a rift in space. Reactivate this ability to teleport through the rift. 30 yd range. 3 min cooldown.

This effect is great for casters, but literally as slow as walking for melee. For a turret class that needs to hardcast many spells in a row, this is a fantastic spell. For the rest of us, well this really doesn’t do much at all. The orb travel speed is about 30% faster than base walking speed, and slower than any other movement abilitiy in the game, to the point where even DKs and Paladins can outrun it. You can do some gimicky stuff with it and go for fakeouts in PvP, but that’s niche use, unreliable, and it’s incredibly telegraphed.

The only practical use of this spell is for casters, as it allows them movement without costing them casting time.

Entropic Embrace: Your abilities have a chance to empower you with the essence of the Void. Entropic Embrace increases damage and healing by 5% for 12 sec. It has a 33% proc chance with 60 seconds internal cooldown.

This is outright one of the lowest simming DPS racials in the game. It is very undertuned, even on the classes that should be able to use it very effectively. It is an unreliable effect that may or may not line up into your damage windows. Even when it is working, it still sims abysmally poorly, and even on Death Knight, a class who’s DPS specs offer massive bonuses to shadow and frost damage, Void Elf is one of the lowest simming races in the game for them. Even with 50% bonus damage, the effect still isn’t meaningful.

Prenatural Calm: Your spell casts are not delayed by taking damage.

Outright useless on more than half of classes.

As it stands right now, Void Elves are one of the most useless races in the game, unless you are playing an immobile turret caster that’s inconvenienced by pushback. I’m fine with Void Elves being the Alliance’s High Elf option, that’s okay. What’s not okay is making a race that’s so mechanically defined that there’s no reason to pick it if you’re not a Warlock or Priest. Void Elves need some kind of changes. Spacial Rift seems too hard to balance, it’s just inherently not as good for melee as it is for casters, and the value proposition isn’t there for classes that can move during their core rotation.

Entropic Embrace will always either be undertuned or overtuned and has very poor quality of life. Damage is so swingy between Cooldown windows and standard rotations that the value of this racial has about a 400% value swing depending on when you proc it, making it outright the least reliable damage racial ability in the game. Right now, it’s undertuned, but if Blizzard tunes it up, lining it up with cooldown effects will randomly make it the best racial in the game, on random pulls. Or it could be the worst. This is the Outlaw Rogue of racial abilities, and I think at this point everyone understands just how swingy they are.

High Elves have proven to be one of the most popular player race options in the game, with both Void Elves and Blood Elves having incredibly high play rates. It’s a fantasy that draws in a lot of players. Some of those players are getting turned away due to lack of mechanical support. Something like a Rogue or Hunter gets basically 0 value from picking a Void Elf, because they’re already mobile as is, don’t care about pushback, and would rather have a reliable racial for damage.

Void Elves are one of the few races that genuinely offers nothing to classes that it doesn’t mesh with.

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Racials had bewn nerf to the ground in the last years, to just be flavor. Not only void elves are useless, almost all racial has no use, except human one, and maybe the orc one ?

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Look at the PvP ladders for Alliance and Horde, and look at Demon Hunters specifically. Tell me more about how Racials don’t matter.

Every racial ability matters, and at a certain point racial balance absolutely matters.

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Can I get my interrupt back on Arcane Torrent?

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Please, i hate how it works now, it is useless

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You already get to trivialize a handful of M+ pulls with it as it is, which puts it leagues better than other racials. it doesn’t need to go back to the absolutely broken state it used to be in.

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And?
Void Elves could cheese Uunat beams with spatial rift as well…

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Just to point this out - Spatial Rift is a true teleport, meaning it does allow you to bypass floor effect mechanics.

I’m not going to try to claim it isn’t a niche ability or that it doesn’t take some getting used to in order to use effectively, but it’s far from useless.

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Which is why exactly 0 guilds race changed Alliance for it, and exactly why every MDI team in Legion was all Belf stacking, right?

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And exactly why nearly every MDI team in BFA was all Nelf stacking, right?

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They’re not splitting High Elves. They’re giving cosmetic customizations, some of which can be used to resemble High Elves.

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Neither side are getting High Elves. They will still be Void and Blood Elves with de facto High Elf customization. It’s a cop-out answer they’re implementing over more reasonable solutions to a problem that they’ve only just made worse.

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Semantics. Blizzard is taking a split down the middle approach. High Elves as a faction will never be playable after these changes, and we’ll never see them as their own race.

I agree that it’s not ideal, but the moment that blizzard introduced Void Elves, that window closed. Now all we can do is suggest changes to make the best of the situation. I’m not commenting on the process, I’m commenting on what’s here, and what blizzard can and should do to make the best of the situation.

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Please point out the semantics in my comment?

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There’s a big difference between race stacking to cheese, and race stacking because of pure value. Night Elves are cheese, Legion’s Blood Elves were just genuinely better at every position in M+ than any other race, because it turns out having a 2m AoE silence+resource builder is just good on every class, and 1% crit as a damage racial is generally one of the better damage options.

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So too is a on-demand vanish valuable to every class…

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Both Void Elves and Blood Elves are biologically the same creature, and High Elves have ceased to be a hugely relevant faction on their own in recent lore, and as a result, the remaining High Elves are filtering into the faction aligned Elven subfactions. Yes there are more High Elves than Void Elves, no it doesn’t make sense for Void Elves to be the inclusion over High Elves, but that’s how it’s playing out.

Right now it makes 0 sense for blizzard to give Void Elves High Elf customization and then follow it up by making them their own race.

I dont care about that process. It is purely irelevant now, Blizz has passed the point of no return, and we won’t likely get High Elves as their own race.

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Not to be That Girl, but the “High Elves or not High Elves” argument really has nothing to do with the racial balancing discussion, which as far as I can tell is supposed to be the actual point of the thread.

I’m firmly in the middle there, to be clear. I do think their racials are extremely niche and maybe could use a bit of touching up, but at the same time if they never got touched I wouldn’t lose much sleep over it.

So I dunno. They’re “fine”, imo, in the sense that I would gladly take buffs but not getting them isn’t chasing me away from the race anytime soon.

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It’s not universally valuable in all scenarios though, it’s only useful with very specific setups.

Look, I’m not arguing about the power of Torrent. It’s a proven ability that has warped metagames. If you don’t want to believe that, then we don’t really have a conversation to be had about it.

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The lizards with watery domes before the 2nd boss in TD is the hardest pull in the dungeon for the Alliance. For the Horde it’s but a minor nuisance.

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