The Mag’har and Lightforged dilema has led me to get very confused about something…
So, right now there is no way to defend Mag’har warlocks, while unironically there is a lot of potential for lightforged using light-domination on fel beings? Corrupted lightforged?
Yet, when we see other class-race combinations, there is way more undead paladins and darkfallen light users - but I have never heard of undead druids, unless we want to consider the nightmare druids as undead - They have the darkfallen customization.
This leads us to two avenues, either a lot of gameplay options are just simply not canon AND/OR people will have to be more creative to make them make sense in the world.
Could there be? Unlikely. Especially given that the Forsaken do not have any ties to nature and instead insist on blighting it and turning it into a plague riddled mess (or at least they used to. Not clear if that’s still something they’re going to be doing now that the Desolate Council is in charge rather than Sylvanas).
We have seen with Kira Iresoul that we can enslave demons with blood magic
a Maghar Warlock can be:
Shadowmoon Void Magic
Bleeding Hollow blood magic to summon/enslave demons without fel
uncontrolled elemental fire like Ritsynn has done as a Blackrock
Drust magic taps into Death
“Some Thornspeakers were in Capital City when Arthas killed and raised everyone, likewise some Forsaken who were raised were actually Humans from pre-Church of Light days with old witchcraft traditions. They have adapted their arts in their state as undeath, tapping more into Thros and its death powers”
But these will be Elune nature loving druids.
Kind of like Holy void elves or void LFD priests are head scratchers so will this.
This can of course be solved with customizing spells but it is what it is.
You and I both know the next guild hall, druid leader and everything else will be Night Elf Druid themed
This makes sense in-universe, but personally I hope the Lordaeron undead druids are their own thing, based off the corrupted Tirisfal glades - although having the Kul’tiran visuals would still be a huge win.
I’d say that the closest we have for that, would be Nightmare or Drust Druids.
Issue with that, is that they would basically be a class on themselves.
I quoted this official definition in other places, but to expand more on it I’ll do so here too:
Guardians of nature who seek to preserve balance and protect life, Druids have unmatched versatility on the field of battle. This is in part because druidism is much more than a fighting discipline—it’s a way of life steeped in traditions so ancient that even the origin of their kind is preserved largely in mythology passed on through millennia.
Druids harness nature’s raw energy for an incredible breadth of offensive and defensive abilities, as well as to restore life to the wounded. Through communion with nature and the demigod Cenarius, Lord of the Forest, Druids are supernaturally endowed with the gift of shapeshifting, allowing them to take the form of all manner of nature’s creature and access powers as distinct as they are diverse
Bold parts are the ones that do not mash well with most of the alternatives that these druids under these themes, offer.
Well, here’s more of my head-canon but there is a way The Cult of Forgotten Shadow could come in place - a balance between the undead unlife in the glades, and the invasive species of healthy animals.
At moment, none from the Forsaken population. Surely there is some undead shape shifter somewhere in lore, but I can’t think of it off the top my head.
Surely some Apothecary got bored one day and started doing some deeper fungal and nature experiments and turned themselves into one of those undead vultures. So lets just full speed ahead for Forsaken druids, lets have fun with it!
Yeah thats what they are doing. Classhalls kind of just unified everyone under one banner, once upon a time all priests were different, back in vanilla Night Elf priests had a starfall spell and the Dwarves I think had a fear ward.
Every race had something unique and even devs were clear that all Forsaken priests are actually shadow priests but for gameplay reasons they can do holy as well but it hurts them.
Anyway thats all gone now. Its all under one umbrella
The gameplay aesthetics do not reflect narrative realities perfectly
But yes, the Legion Class Halls were a bit of an incoherent failure for that reason. The only class halls that made sense to an extent are all the “darker” classes: Death Knights, Rogues (the way IRL intelligence organizations collaborate), Warlocks (outcasts banding together but would’ve had them take over scholomance instead of some random legion world)
This is honestly the best defense of Mag’har warlocks I’ve seen. Them just being Shadow focused Warlocks makes sense.
To reply to OP no there’s not, that said I think a Plague Druid would be cool. I mean bacteria and parasites are life too. Not sure if that would really work with WoW’s animal form centric druid though.
Undead druids SHOULD be able to exist as far as I understand the cosmology and how it works.
Essentially, the Forsaken that we have were raised through Death magic and druids are heavy utilizers of Life magic via nature. That said, we already have a precedent for these two opposites coming together and that is Ardenweald.
The Winter Queen and the entire zone have heavy ties to the Emerald Dream, and to take things one step further, she is the sister of Elune, who the Broker in the Shadowlands book surmises to be a member of the Pantheon of Life.
They are sisters in the sense that they are two sides of the same coin, both relating to nature as a cycle. She is the Winter Queen as winter is a natural season in which most plants die, and much like how life comes back in the Spring, she is connected to the Emerald Dream which helps establish a cycle of rebirth.
So in short, yeah, Undead Druids work actually surprisingly well in lore and could be interesting to see how these forces interact with the Forsaken post-Teldrassil.
If you want to look into the old (now non-canon) RPG there were Plagueshifters - a Horde druid organization created by the Tauren trying to treat the plauged lands.
They have learned to use Plagues, Diseases, and death related magics in their druidic techniques in an attempt to heal the land. (And use in offense as well)
They could always be brought back, and shared with the Forsaken.
Because as much as Baal would love to apply his own headcanon to warlocks, the fact remains that the warlock class does not use blood magic, nor does it use shadowmoon void magic, or untapped elemental fire from the firelands.
The warlock class uses the bog standard warlock class spells, all of which corrupt the wielder.