Okay, so I was just remember this random older quest about this gnome questgiver saying that night elves didn’t much like to use guns and stuff.
total respect to the night elves, they have this amazing ancient culture and all…but from SOME people’s POV, they might also be kinda outdated and primitive, still using bows and arrows and glaives. like, look how much damage just GOBLINS were able to do to their forests in so little time! maybe some cultures just are too in tune with nature and not so much with innovation, you know what I mean? all that 10,000 years of experience fighting, and they were still losing quite badly, TBH
if the night elves had tried to modernize more with the latest technology instead of lagging behind, could they have done better maybe in their fights against the Horde, legion and other enemies??
We could apply that logic to all the races and then we would be playing World of Steampunk-craft
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Probably not, as WoW very much operates on Hollywood military logic, whereby unarmed slaves readily overpower well-armed and trained soldiers, armored siege engines can be torn apart by just beating on them with your hands, and things like battle formations exist only to look pretty before the battle starts, whereupon everyone immediately breaks formation to charge the enemy alone.
Give the night elves or any other race literal Abrams tanks and F-22’s, and their enemies would be smashing the former to pieces with swords while swatting the latter out of the air with spears.
Technological advancement means very little in WarCraft, as seen with every new weapon being readily negated or destroyed by the same methods used to beat enemy soldiers to death, or outright firearms being no deadlier than an arrow or thrown weapon. The Lightforged literally have space-age weaponry with shields and particle cannons, and it’s all handily bludgeoned into scrap by infantry the same as any grunt or footman.
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Yes, well they tried asking gnomes for help, and they got cannons but also this;
So these night elves send out a desperate call for help to us, goes something like this:
<Gnombus changes the pitch of his voice to sound like a woman.>
“Please come help us! The big, mean Horde has goblins! Oh, we can’t handle goblins! They pull our hair and make us cry!”
Right, anyway, so here we are.
Gnomes can be dicks at times. Night elves decided to stop asking. It was a matter of pride and stubbornness.
I do not think technology would of saved the Kaldorei, nothing would of saved them as Blizzard already decided their fate, and was willing to ignore what they had to to make it happen. Had the Kaldorei been allowed to use all the tools at their disposal and called upon the wild gods of Hyjal the horde would never of gotten as far as they did.
However, that said… if there was one thing that would of changed the dynamic of the story it would of been if they had embraced arcane magic more. It was not a fancy goblin cannon firing some high tech bomb that set Teldrassil ablaze: it was enchanted trebuchets throwing arcane empowered flame projectiles. Proper arcane shields and protective enchantments could of held off such an attack method.
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The night elves lost because Blizzard wanted them to lose, as has been the case since Cataclysm. On paper the kaldorei are practically a faction unto themselves in terms of military power, which we did see somewhat given that a skeleton crew held off the entire might of the Horde for a good long while.
On paper, and taking into account lore from pre-WoW, the night elves have giant ancients by the dozens, dryads, keepers, chimaera, stone giants, and treants. They have a cavalry made up of giant cats that can move through the forests much more easily than horses, and hippogryphs that can do the same, as well as their own siege weapons like glaive throwers.
They have their own versions of paladins, they have wardens and highborne spellcasters and demon hunters, druids fighting on their home turf, and warriors that at minimum have several decades of experience fighting threats. They also have two of the most powerful characters in lore leading them.
And on top of all that they’re physically imposing, stronger than they look, can literally vanish if they stand still too long at night, can see in the dark, have heightened senses and claws and fangs that probably work as advertised. And when they die their spirits can take the form of wisps and be used as weapons of mass destruction.
Tech wouldn’t have helped, just writing that actually gives them their due.
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Ontop of everything else said, I have three more minor points:
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While they can field forces for conventional warfare, where Night Elves really excel is in using guerilla tactics. You kinda lose your stealth advantage (should Blizzard ever remember that that’s a thing they do) by engaging the enemy with rifles your foes can hear from three zones away. But, the writers also threw all of that out the window, so the Horde could win the War of Thorns.
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Technology is a bit overrated in the Warcraft universe. Did you play through the Siege of Lordaeron? Anduin took out the Horde’s brand new Azerite war machine… with a sword. The Alliance gets a new airship every other day, they have steamships and Gnomish submarines. But what is absolutely critical for the Alliance to win the war? Kul Tiras’ conventional sailing ships.
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Magic is the great equalizer. With conventional technology, the Gnomes have built satellites and orbital nukes. By combining tech with magic, the Draenei (and Legion) have built vessels capable of interplanetary travel. The aforementioned Kul Tiran ships are apparently so good mostly because of Tidesage magic. With all their Nature and divine magic (and even a bit of Arcane), this should have been something else in the Night Elves favor. But The Plot had already decided who won the War of Thorns, and circumstances had to warp themselves to uphold The Plot, Night Elven lore be damned.
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Isn’t it the amount of well made ships that’s important? With the fear of a Horde-Zandalari pact and the Golden Fleet joining the Horde, the Alliance needed to build up their fleet to compete. It’s not necessarily the KT ships themselves that’s important, but how many are already available.
If it was possible to rapidly build gnomish subs and gunships fast enough to counter the Golden Fleet, then that would’ve been done, but the fact that they are going to KT is, to me, the story saying the Alliance can’t build a fleet that fast and needs to find one elsewhere.
In fairness, the vast majority of Alliance humans do not seem to be necessarily too interested or invested in technology either, or even magic for that matter. They simply prefer living their simple lives, making a living however they can, and minding their own business.
I hate to hit on this meta point again, but the Night Elves would’ve won if Blizz didn’t write them specifically to lose. On paper, with the forces they already have, the Horde should never have made it through Ashenvale. Not with the forces they went in with, which was ground troops and a ton of demolishers. With the forces the Nelves have in their own home territory, the forest should’ve been a charnel house.
But that didn’t happen, because someone at Blizz thought it would be really cool to see Teldrassil in flames so they told the story team to make it happen. So we get scenes like the one in “A Good War” where a Blood Elf rogue kills an entire squad of druids. At night. In Ashenvale.
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Here’s the thing about the invasion of Ashenvale. The manner in which Elegy was written basically canonized that the Horde had players with them, and the night elves didn’t. That’s what all those Horde rogues were. So the nature of their forces was rendered irrelevant because gameplay trumps story.
The whole thing was essentially contextualized as “kill twelve guards and three named officers”-type quests taking place, with rogues that were in effect player-inserts one-sidedly butchering trained NPC guards and officers en masse before Vanishing unscathed.
It was questing mechanics turned into narrative, and it frankly wasn’t a great thing.
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Elves tend to be magicky race. Not just in WoW. LotR kinda made it standard. And like in in LotR. Why use technology when they have magic? Magic aren’t really define and therefore can do anything. Anything technology can do magic should be able to do, too. Using magic as elves is as natural as other race use technology.
If the night elves embraced technology, they wouldn’t be wood elf expires. Not embracing technology is part of their racial identity.
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Keep in mind that the Horde pretty much has everything the Night ELves have, they have arcane, they have nature magic, and Orcs and Forsaken have a lot of experience with guerilla tactics. (although the latter still favors the defender in home territories)
You can’t say that night elves haven’t embraced technology. What else would you call (sometimes rapid-fire) giant shuriken launchers? The engineering necessary for such a feat is just as impressive, if not more so, than gunpowder cannons.
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I think the Night Elves are much more advanced than gnomes and dwarves, just not in the same way. People like to claim the Night Elves are stagnant, or even regressive, just because they rely on primitive technology when compared to the other races of the Alliance. Yet, for thousands of years, they lived with completely renewable resources. No disease. No hunger or poverty. Completely one with nature. Which is something technology has never been able to do for the races from EK.
In War of Thorns, they held the line against the Horde, completely alone and out numbered eight to one. With nothing but their town militia, and a small token force. Their military was completely absent, and it was said several times that the Horde would have lost if the full might of the Kaldorei had been there.
War of Thorns was a complete military blunder for the Horde. So it would seem the lack of tech does not hinder the Kaldorei’s combat prowess in any significant way.
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No amount of tech wouldve saved the Nelves from Blizzards writing.
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maybe, but in cataclysm at least, in wolfheart, it seems that the goblins are killing scores of n. elves without even blinking
Technology isn’t stronger than magic. It just lets those without magic compete with magic.
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I mean, Richard Knaack and all his WoW books can just disappear as far as I am concerned. But we also only see that from one perspective. I don’t think Goblins were killing Nelves any more than Goblins were being killed by nelves. Considering the Nelves won that front, I am willing to be the Horde lost more than the nleves did.