If they do canonically use death magic instead of life magic, their powers should appear more similar to those used by witches or death knights, rather than the powers of traditional druids.
I know for game mechanics they have to have traditional druid spells, i’m just saying canonically their powers have very little in common with a normal druid, right?
Why shouldn’t they? I mean, I agree that at some point WoW should really look into unique spell animations for different race and class combos, but the powers a Thornspeaker commands are much the same as that of a normal Druid - even moreso when you realize that Thros, the place that the Drust draw power from, is just another part of the Emerald Dream. It gets even easier to understand when you know that life and death are part of the same cycle.
Traditionally, I don’t really see much wrong with Thornspeakers having dominion over the powers an average Druid has.
They are, but light and void are also part of the same cycle cosmologically, but they still do very different things.
Fair enough. However, I don’t really see anything that says the Thornspeakers specifically and only use powers of death. In fact, in most cases where they appear, they seem to be using powers of life - Ulfar just cites that life and death are part of the same cycle.
Yet Priests can wield both.
Drust Druids just focus on both Death and Life where traditional Druids focus only on Life.
Thornspeakers still use nature magic. They arent using death/shadow magic.
They are just focused more on the autumn/fall/decay aspect of nature but its still nature magic.
I mean…Thornspeakers don’t actually use death magic. That’s made out to be specifically the point of contention that caused them to split off from the rest of the Drust under Gorak Tul.
They acknowledge death as necessary, but ultimately so do other druids. Really the Thornspeakers never actually do anything to suggest a uniquely emphasized focus on death. I feel like people have this idea that Kul Tiran druids are some sort of “death druids” just because their shapeshift forms look passingly “skeletal” like Drust constructs.
Except unlike Drust constructs, those aren’t actually skulls and bones incorporated into the druid forms. It’s living wood. Kul Tiran druid forms are all part plant, with their features basically being like animal-treant hybrids. It just looks kind of “skeleton-like” wherever the meat melds into wood and the features are being shaped from plant matter instead of flesh and blood.
But, the point of contention was that Gorak Tul was using their magic inappropriately, twisting it. Not that he was using a different, darker power.
Shade of Gorak Tul yells: You would share our gifts with these wretches, Ulfar? You deserve to burn with them!
Ulfar yells: Who are you to judge who’s worthy? Your twisted ways have disgraced our kind, Tul!
They’re using the same kind of magic, they just disagree on the application (and on the degree of Gorak Tul’s brutality in using it, when he tore Sef Iwen’s soul from her body).
Doesn’t seem that hard to follow to me. An animal dies, is consumed by other creatures, what’s left returns to the earth to nourish it. Stewarding that process is as druidic as managing growth.
Don’t mix up the Thornspeakers with Gorak Tul’s Drust. Everything we’ve seen from the actual Thornspeakers - that quest with the mushroom people for example, or the quest with the corrupted wolf spirit - is very in-line with what we’ve seen from other druids.
Thornspeakers using Death Magic is an assumption with little basis. As a poster said above they use life magic instead of death.
As an above poster stated, the Thornspeakers dont claim to use a different power than Gorak Tul did, they just use it in a different way.
The thing is, what Gorak Tul does involves jamming the souls of the dead into runed constructs, possessing living creatures and granting power to the covens through sacrifices. Hence the wicker constructs being inhabited by Drust souls and the repeated evidence of Heartsbane witches having betrayed and ritualistically murdered their own families to gain their powers. That stuff outright isn’t druidism. There’s nothing remotely druidic or “nature-y” about it. Capturing souls and binding them to animate normally inert material is the purview of fel, necromantic, shadow or death magic, as is possession and the committing of ritual blood and soul sacrifices.
Gorak Tul is shown in-game to use shadow/possibly death magics, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t still consider the druidism of the Drust to be “only theirs” and forbidden to outsiders. If anything, I feel like being a bunch of particularly bloodthirsty vrykul (which is ultimately what the Drust were) who glorified the slaughter for its own sake probably led Gorak Tul and his followers to tap into darker magics than druidism as they found ways to use the deaths they caused to increase their own power.
Gorak Tul’s “twisted ways” aren’t referring some alternative path of druidism. It’s reference to the fact that he and his followers’ ways were the ways of a bunch of cruel, bloodletting maniacs who reveled in butchering anyone and anything that wasn’t of their kind. Which, to a druid, is logically a just plain twisted and wrongful way for anyone to be. Killing just to kill is fundamentally not how one exists in balance with the rest of the world.
Well no.
It’s not like they’re necromancers that happen to turn into animals. They are druids, they’re just druids that pull from a slightly different place than most. We even see the ol bear clear out some wood of Witch magic.