Ive wondered, off and on, since WoW released how they made the decision to split nature and the elements into different schools. Its not just a Druid/Shaman divide, Shaman have Natures Swiftness, Druids have Cyclone. But just the concept of Life healing being both leaves AND rain.
Is this concept prevalent in D&D or other precursors to WoW?
Warhammer does, not sure about D&D.
I don’t know about other fantasy works, but I think it makes sense.
One deals with inanimate matter, the other deals with living beings.
Basically, Shamans are geography, Druids are biology lol
It seems hard to separate vegetation and water, in my mind
It’s not split in D&D. Nature-themed casters can use a variety of both elemental and wildlife oriented spells. Druids can summon animals, shapeshift, and control plants, but they can also learn a variety of elemental and weather spells that in WOW is split off to Shaman.
If I remember right back in 3.5E D&D, Shaman and Druid had the same list of spells. The main difference was that Druid use Wisdom as their primary stat and functioned like Wizards in that they could learn a large selection of spells, but they had to prepare them ahead of time. Where as Shaman (or whatever the class was called) was based off Charisma and functioned more like a Sorcerer in that they learned less spells, but didn’t have to prepare them.
That’s because vegetation needs water to survive.
But it’s pretty easy to separate water from vegetation. There’s a lot of water in the universe in places where vegetation doesn’t even exist.
So they are not indivisible and they are not the same thing. There’s a relation, life needs the environment to survive, but that’s all.
Sure, but they all combine into Life.
What other school is this divided?
I mean, do they?
If you mix water, fire, earth and air together, can you make a living being?
Chances are you will just make mud lol
Now personally I don’t see much difference between living beings and inanimate matter. To me we are all some weird self assembling robots of meat that were crafted by random chance.
But people generally like to think that there’s some sort of characteristic that separates living beings from non-living matter.
That’s where that division comes from.
I mean all of the components in the life school. Not the elements.
But Shadow, Light, and Fel aren’t divided like this. Or am I missing something?
I think you might need to specify what exactly do you mean.
Like do you mean how different elements of elemental magic is typically divided, or are you referring to different subcategories?
Because Shadow, Light, and Fel are divided though… aren’t they?
And nature magic, both in WoW and other typical fantasy settings, is usually divided into elements like lightning, thunder, earth, and so on. With life, light, and healing all playing usually different roles even if they can be combined in different ways.
Or am I missing something of what you are asking?
“Nature” is more of a consolidated element, not a split one.
Most elements are fairly independent in many other fantasy settings. These are the usual ones:
Poison is a weird one, sometimes independent but often associated with something else.
Fel/Chaos is often unique to the setting.
“Life” is weird as it tends to bounce around, sometimes its own thing and other times just an aspect of something else.
“Nature” in Warcraft is a consolidation of lightning, earth, water and wind. And covers both life & poison.
If you mix water, fire, earth, and air together you’ll get a clay sculpture. Assuming you do it in the proper order. 
Gotta mix that water and earth, hit it with the fire, then let the air cool it down.
Elements are primordial, life and nature come after and are different.
Fel is a bit weird.
Sometimes it does fire damage. Sometimes it deals shadow damage. Sometimes shadowflame. Sometimes chaos.
I remember a time when Chaos Bolt did shadow damage even though Chaos Damage was a thing lol
Um yes.
Captain planet
The original Warcraft game was heavily influenced by Warhammer. So it makes sense that that influence will continue as things got fleshed out.
I can’t help but feel like the Elements would work much better in the cosmology as being a sort of deconstructed version of Life and particularly what is collectively seen as Nature rather than just the primordial building blocks of all matter. I imagine that’s more or less how many who care about this stuff see them anyway, which makes perfect sense given that just about everything part of what commonly represents Nature is arguably composed of various Elements combined; something that can’t be said as definitively for the other forces.
Part of me suspects one potential reason the cosmology is the way it is was largely mechanical, to allow elemental effects in various forms of magic without it being seen as a hybrid of primordial forces, especially those seen as opposed to Life.
Here. I helped with the obvious autocorrect
I look at it as a scalar thing. Life/nature need the elements. But the elements don’t inherently lead to life/nature.
The cosmology chart also has them separate:
I have seen some sources put Poison under Water or Nature. /shrugs