On this, we totally agree!
I just wish Blizz agreed. I’d love to see Blood Elves with conflicting philosophies clashing with one another. I want the warlocks and demon hunters to have more of a presence alongside the holy priests and paladins!
If nothing else, wouldn’t that be a cool angle for them?
I love the blood elf aesthetic, I love their visual style, and I love their themes. Blizzard just doesn’t do anything with them.
Yeah doesn’t make sense, but you had all the High Elf wannabes yelling
“IT TOTALLY MAKES SENSE, ABSOLUTELY!” – To get what they want (Which was High Elves).
After that they manipulated Blizzard into giving them standard customisations to paint that ‘High Elf’ picture, that throws away the visual distinction between Blood Elves and Void Elves (If you gave Nightborne the option to look exactly identically like Night Elves – I don’t think they’d be singing the same tune).
Aside to mention Void Elf lore pretty much takes a giant sloppy $#!% on Belf lore, essentially declaring all Blood Elf Shadowpriests / Void & Shadow using Blood Elves are now non-canon. So there’s that too, unless Blizzard tie-up that plothole, but they’re pretty stupidly ignorant when it comes to that kind of stuff unless a guy in a redshirt calls them out on their BS @ Blizzcon, so I doubt it.
No, they did not, that is not mentioned anywhere. Not in interviews and not in quest logs. We do find out, however, that the dwarf “diplomat” was concerned with the experiments that the Blood Elves was running on their Arcane Sanctum, deeming it too dangerous.
It is still up for debate whether the dwarf and his entourage of hidden Night Elves played a hand in that Arcane Sanctum “malfunctioning” with the dwarf having gotten so much knowledge about the sanctum’s inner workings, that he wrote down on a paper and handed over to the Night Elves, with the information that he would like to see what happened if such a sanctum ‘malfunctioned’. The Night Elves then just so happen to stand around said ‘malfunctioning’ arcane sanctum.
This and the fact that the Night Elves now had an entire army on Blood Elven soil, is what drove the Blood Elves away from the Alliance at that time and into the arms of the Horde.
They always were high elves. The name blood elf is to honor the slaughtered 90% of their population in the 3rd war. Nothing else about them really changed, they hunger for magic and it got them in trouble
I suspect “void” elves will lead us to another almost world destroying event like they always do. whether they be called void, blood or high elf it’s always the same story, their lust for magic and power leads to bad stuff
Of course a Blood Elf wouldn’t know how to properly count when it involves the real High Elves.
Lofty, aloof, few in number, and in my case enslaved by the Lich King.
They’ve always been high elves and previously high borne. But now they’re so much more.
We may be few, 90% fewer, and I’m definitely not a hunter or some blinded by the light Paladin. Also, I’m undead.
It fits into my head cannon that we have lost so much. Lost the world, lost our home, lost our sunwell, lost my kin, and lost my life.
In game, we seem to be too many and meme worthy, but this is not how I see myself. I am more like an undead Númenórean.
Somethin about this games idea of ‘character development’ being pretty much exclusively “they got better and became nicer” really stifles a lot of potential. What I would have given for blood elves that retained their “Hey if it works, it works” mentality, with Silvermoon as the anti-dalaran, a place where any and all magic is accepted, reckless and dangerous but oh baby those rewards
I can’t even really say blood elves got turned back into high elves either, the focus on the light makes them feel more like humans or draenei. There was a blood elf back in legion that described tomes on fel magic as “blasphemous” and… Man take me back to Outland lmao
Can Rommath do something other than backstory exile his own people?
Snort too much Sunwell or something?
Here’s the obvious truth about WoW - the devs had no idea that their game was going to be as successful as it was so it was structured more as a “Greatest Hits of Warcraft” speed-running through lore and wrapping things up quickly. Illidan was mishandled, Arthas was mishandled, Blood Elves were mishandled, almost all early lore was mishandled. I like the dungeons and art design and so forth but the story was not done well at all.
It’s Emet. You’re honestly not going to get anywhere. Don’t feed the troll.
Sigh…it’s misinterpretations like this that causes confusion to some players, that then feeds into the whole conspiracy rumor-mongering issues we’ve had to deal with from them on these forums for years….
Do you actually think they had Bloodelves up and ready to go and suddenly saw the faction imbalance and said “Okay…scratch that…make them Horde!” Maybe that it was just some whim of an idea they came up on the spot, without any consideration?
Of course not….any game developer, creative writer, or heck even producer will tell you this stuff is planned years in advance. It is all based on the plot that was building up and how best it fits into the entire story.
High elves were -never- going to be added as they are, Metzen confirmed long ago they wanted to move away from the common, and frankly overused, high elf trope and make something new and dark enough to fit into the wow universe: Blood elves.
Blood elves were already in production before Classic was even released. Yeah…it was that far in advance planned and being developed. The dark nature, survival mentality and sinister aspect of them at the time made them perfect for the Horde. It was a new take for the Horde: Not a monstrous race…but dark within.
Funny thing is that it was Draenei that were the sudden last minute change, not Blood elves. Draenei were a rewrite and entirely new creation based on the Eredar not all “being bad demon“. I think at first they considered Pandaeren for the Alliance, I’d have to check my sources.
But yes, in conclusion, stop the misinformation spreading that BE were a random drop addition and game change to make them Horde just for the population balance. They SOLVED the population issue…but they weren’t added because of it. The BE going Alliance would have never made sense from a story perspective, and it was clear since WC3. 
Sigh… It’s comments like these that show people can extrapolate opinions that were never expressed in the original comment.
NOWHERE did I say that Blood/High Elves WERE going to be added to the Alliance and they scrapped it. What I’m referring to is where Ion, ON CAMERA, said that Blood Elves were added to the Horde in the hopes of addressing the faction imbalance that was prevalent during Vanilla.
And yeah, they “solved” the imbalance by causing it to swing violently in the other direction. The numbers are only just now levelling out because of cross-faction being added.
Again, never said they were going to be an Alliance race at first.
No what you’re doing, whether intentional or not, is using the same common quote and twisted rhetoric stated by forum troll posters, with little to no reference or history to the statement or expanding on what it meant, just in order to facilitate the misinterpretation to fit your argument. It helps no one.
If that wasn’t your intention, you would have initially easily expanded on the point. If anything you just proved in later comments that you knew the fully story but choose to omit parts that weren’t to your liking. You didn’t and choose not to, because you wanted to swing that same common phrase to imply it was “never suppose to happen but they did it out of desperation”.
All you’ve done is prove the Alliance’s form of nobility is inherently flawed and led to the near genocide of an entire species for hanging out with snake-men and using too much magic.
Put a random footsoldier in charge of the Alliance Remnants. He would have done an objectively better job without alienating an entire species (as of WC3, forgotten when velves joined)
The idea that Garithos was an isolated problem speaks to so much ignorance about how societal structures prop up and perpetuate evil people. If nothing else, it’s obvious that the intent of the writers (in WC3) was to portray the Alliance as flawed, with flawed systems that allowed deeply flawed people to rise to the top during an emergency situation. It’s kind of an insult to take their work and sum it all up with “one guy, that was such a stupid writing choice making Blood Elves leave the Alliance over nothing!”
Pants heavily Ok…for the love of God no more Garithos talk.
I just wish Blood Elves had some sort of hook or unique identity to them. What makes them uniquely Horde? It’s ironic, for how much lore-work Blizzard did to make the Blood Elves join the Horde in TBC, only for them to immediately go back to generic High Elves who, for all intents and purposes, would fit in with the Alliance far better than the Horde.
When it comes to the “faction” debate. That’s where the problem lies for me. BLOOD Elves do not belong in the Alliance. High Elves fit with the Alliance. Void Elves are closer to old-school Blood Elves than our current ones, but are back in the Alliance. Blood Elves have become nothing more than High Elves. So what’s the point of them anymore?
Looking back, I wonder what the dwarven spies and night elf saboteurs were so worried about in Eversong? Clearly the (modern) Alliance has 0 problem with destructive, corrupting magic now.
Someone didn’t watch the video I posted where Metzan says they did! It’s in the OP and available for anybody to click on. It’s even time-stamped! I can’t help you if you’re coming into this discussion without the context provided.
-The Troll formerly known as Xazzakzak
That’s your own fault.
We know that if Humans and Elves mate then kids pop up at record time. While if Elves stick to just Elves then the birth rates are suspiciously low for no explained reasons.
The High Elves are doing their part.
It’s time the Blood Elves did as well.
Someone did not do the quests in Eversong Woods as well as read ‘Blood of the Highborne’
“… It is still unclear in my mind whether…” it seems Metzen was putting out an idea rather than a decicive answer. Because the questline and visual story only shows, that Blood Elves lives off of arcane predominantly, with the burning crystals being explained as their source of power (electricity, if you will).
Kinda funny how that works . . . though personally I see them less as being high elves again and more basically being “Horde Humans” given the thalasssians of old placed great value on the arcane and these days the two most prolific blood elf characters are a warrior and a paladin . . . I’d say blood knight but the order of the blood knights has basically become the red silver hand at this point so yea, horde humans with their light worshipping ways.
They were always high elves, and now more than ever, with the return of the Sunwell.
We’ve had Lanesh since MOP which would allow some like myself to suggest unaligned high elves returning to Quel’thalas to take the blood elf name.
We played as high elves during parts of our heritage quest.
Your odd head canon about mages and that somehow linking to blood elves not being high elves is… a choice.
Blood Knights draw from the Sunwell so no that’s not the silver hand, but you do have player agency to think of your blood knight from anything along the lines of the older guard / vibe to the newer vibe since the Sunwell’s return.