So we know the origins of the Draenei, how they were a “Utopian Civilization that Mastered Magic, Art, Science & Technology”. I mean this is why Sargeras chose to corrupt them into leading his army in the first place.
But my question is…
taking into account how much older the Draenei are compared to Azerothian races, along with the fact that their biological immortality affords them an eternity (if not killed) to hone their various crafts, and of course their earlier lives living on a pre-destruction utopia… why aren’t they more involved with advancements for the alliance/the world?
But my focus is really more set on their magical affinities and the lack of recognition they get for them. They literally Mastered the arcane. A feat that not even the night elves accomplished in the height of their empire (which i’m sure they would have if Azshara wasn’t a buttface.) And mind you they didn’t have any help from a titanic-magic source like the Kaldorei did.
And Yes… I understand that when they fled Argus, a lot was left behind… but much of that arcane knowledge would have survived in the minds of those that made it off the planet… And many of those some survivors are still alive today. Not to mention that knowledge would have only been bolstered when the Lightforged were reunited with the rest of their species.
So what gives? The Draenei have come further then most races when it comes to the arcane… why aren’t they recognized for that when it’s literally in the lore?
I think you’re wildly overinterpreting the word “Master.” The Night Elves absolutely “Mastered” the arcane by their definition, as did the Mogu, the Blood Elves, etc.
It’s hard to say. I think originally, they wanted it to be like the night elves, where the draenei had abanded the arcane (mostly) after witnessing what happened to Argus and the rest of their species. While the night elves embraced nature, the draenei embraced the Light. This is reflected in their society and appearances starting in TBC. Ever since then draenei characters are almost always either a priest/paladin or shaman.
This changed with WoD. In that, draenei society on Draenor was depicted as heavily based on magitech. The Light barely had a role outside of Karabor. Then we hop back to our Azeroth and we’re back in TBC-era draenei, because Azuremyst has never been updated and the only time the draenei have been relevant post-TBC was during the Argus patch. And even then, it was mostly the Lightforged who had been separated from Velen’s draenei since shortly after leaving Argus the first time.
So…yeah. We’re essentially caught between two different visions of the draenei from two different dev teams. Personally, I prefer how they were depicted in WoD. But we’ll have to wait until the mythical day when the draenei actually receive some form of story update on Azeroth.
They mastered the Arcane up to a certain level and perhaps made it more pervasive.
But they don’t seem to have any Medivhs, Aegwyns, or Khadgars among them.
Being immortal also has it’s down sides. In that you don’t have much in progression. You see this in Physics all the time, for the most part, the most brilliant scientists do their best work in their 30’s and then they go to the Advanced Science Institute in Princeton to die.
The answer is obviously that despite their longevity, the Draenei have risen as far as the Peter Principle allowed.
Draenei lore is something that’s really interested me since TBC and their use of magic is incredibly lacking in terms of what we know in lore. While we see some on Argus, that’s for the Eredar who are an almost entirely different culture than the Draenei we all know. In addition, the Draenei have suffered, much like other races, a lot of simplification and sanding down, making them far more one note. We quite literally don’t even know what a senior Draenei mage is called, nor are there any notable Draenei mages in lore at all.
To be entirely honest, however, the spellcasters of almost ALL the races are overshadowed in favour of the Human and Elf ones (Blood/High Elves to be specific). The Kirin Tor, a majority Human kingdom, dominates the magical sphere in terms of overarching presence in the lore, and Quel’thalas follows at a distant second. This is not speaking on lore characters mind you, but organizations as a whole, presence in the world itself.
Time is also an issue, because there’s some level of doubt as to how long the Draenei have actually been around, now. When the origin of the Eredar and Draenei was retconned, it was said that they ‘rose’ on Argus 25k years ago. But people for years took that to mean the Draenei had fled their homeworld 25k years ago. In Legion, a line seemed to imply that they’d fled in half the time, 13k years ago. Moreover, the nature of that travel isn’t known, as they could very well have been in stasis for a lot of it. Basically, most Draenei could very well be ‘only’ 5k years old. Which I’d honestly prefer because holy cow is 25k years a long time to be alive. But this would put them more on par with the Highborne in terms of magic, or the Blood Elves.
Another lore reason might be that, due to their embracing of the Light, their society just moved away from the Arcane and it became less important unless mixed with the Naaru tech and crystalsmithing. On Draenor, there was no Exarch for spellcasters, for instance.
It makes sense that the Draenei on Draenor are more about magitech and science as well as remaking Draenor into Argus then those in the BC era. The Draenei post genocide became obsessed in the Light as a means to make sense of the horrors they suffered.
The Draenei we see in WoD have no such genocide inflicted yet. So we see them as they were and we wish them to be. The proud super advance civilization that has mastered life and death on a savage planet. Even their dead are given options to be reborn in machines as guardians to their people.
Draenei we see in Legion finally have taken the first steps of redoing their great works on Azeroth and built a space ship to get to Argus and finally dedicate themselves not just to the Light, but to their sciences. We also cannot underestimate how much lost technology they recovered during WoD. If you do the whole story line in Shadowmoon Valley and watch NPCs there are MU Draenei teaching the locals about Azeroth and inquiring about events. Meaning that the MU Draenei were recollecting knowledge which was lost after the genocide. This had to be the biggest boost to Draenei society since the purges.
This is best seen in Legion when Velen’s son, Rakeesh, invaded the Exodar and we see the defenses used outside of the Exodar are the same tech we saw AU Draenei use on Draenor showing they’ve finally been able to replicate Arkonite tech and reforge their great forcefield machines. The Draenei further showed their revival as a people with the building of the Vindicaar. The BFA expansion also showed us Light Forged Draenei tech in action when they defended Kul’Tiras during the war attacks on Drustvar. This is showing that the Draenei if given a few centuries will remake Azeroth in their image at least their corner of it.
A lot of Draenic Arcane magic can be considered strictly on arcane domains. Barriers, transmutation, alteration, and the like. The draenei in their prime likely had the most whimsical arts about them. From the toys that were just casual pass times, to soul magic alone.
They had become a desired group to join the Legion and were forced an ultimatum; Join or Die. Their prowess made it clear they were not a threat taken lightly. If the triumvirate remained united; there might’ve been a chance that the united Draenei, or… at the time Eredar would’ve easily pushed the legion back with their sheer power alone.
I get the sense that rather than being a sort of “planetwide Dalaran” full of textbook mages, the particular mastery of the arcane that drew Sargeras to the eredar revolved more heavily around arcane engineering and artifice, so that rather then their civilization relying on a bottleneck of the most powerful arcanists providing the fruits of magical understanding, incorporating the arcane into mechanisms that anyone could use allowed for the citizenry to make direct use of magic even if they weren’t spellcasters themselves through machinery. Like how a nuclear power plant can provide energy to millions without everyone who works at the plant, maintains the power grid and utilizes electrical appliances having to be a nuclear physicist. So every eredar could readily make use of countless arcane implements to improve the overall quality of life in their own ways, even if most of them didn’t necessarily have the specific skillset, temperament and personal affinity to be mages.
Even in the Burning Legion, while they include enormously powerful warlocks and mages at the top, the most visible contributions the eredar brought to Sargeras’ army overall were a propensity for organization (after all, they’d kept an entire global society running smoothly on Argus) and a whole bunch of crystal-based technology around which powerful war engines and extensive, inter-planar/interplanetary logistical infrastructures could be built.
In universe it can likely be explained that the Draenie lost most of their more powerful mages to the Burning Legion, and do to being Refugees lost a ton of their research, notes, artifacts, and other objects during their several thousand year exodus.
Out of universe it’s because Draenei were a mess of a race created in Burning Legion to give the Alliance a monstrous race to go along with the Horde getting a humanoid one. They never really got a solid grasp on what they wanted from the Draenei til WoD and Legion, and as such their lore is full of contradictions and plot holes.
I think the most answer I can find from the Draenic Magic can be found in Argus Questing and in some of the Artifact Weapons quest but like mention before there are not to many times you get a chance in-game to a explore a races lore… it all depends where the narrative of the expansion takes us what races and race leader gets a spotlight. (IMO)
The real question is why are most of the Utopian or Powerful WoW Races have hooves? (Joking)
Sargeras had hooves at some point, Dreadlords have Hooves, Draenie/Eredar, Tauren, most corrupted races or Demons races have hooves, even the Ve’ nari… and yeah you cover them with armor but I see the hooves under that armor, with Margrave Krexus and even Sire Denathrius have the same model… And why does PC Havoc Meta have hooves, COME ON Blizz, like really!? (god I wish there was armor that cover troll and hooves like does 2 seem to have, I’m so jelly)
Same reason the Vindicaar is absent for the entirety of BFA, why draenei no longer have zappy-zappy automatic defense crystals, why they don’t have Vigilants to put their fallen warriors into, etc.
They kinda just sweep this stuff under the rug because the writers don’t seem to want draenei to be front and center. They don’t even seem to want to come up with more than 1 draenei character of any prominence. Twelve thousand elves? Sure. Half a million humans? No problem. But Light forbid someone other than Velen shows up to represent the draenei. Better kill off Maraad and make Yrel become a villain behind the scenes. Captain Fareeya can stay on the Vindicaar forever.
Draenei would be the most magically/technologically advanced race on the planet, which would get in the way of showing us human potential™ of mortal and elven mages or the wacky mad science tech of goblins & gnomes (or more rarely industrious dwarves).
Exarch Hataaru says: On our homeworld, art, science, magic and technology were all as one. Ah, such wonders we would build!
Exarch Hataaru says: Now, I have only spare parts and whatever primitive materials we can cobble together.
Many of the draenei turned to the light(and later shamanism). This is what Archmage Y’mera said(yes, I know she is lightforged but I think this was a cultural change for the ENTIRE draenei, not just her):
Few among us still wield true magic after we saw what tempted our brethren. I will take any advantage I can get.
Even Velen, who is/was a powerful arcane user became a priest.
There were not alot of draenei who did escape Argus(Rise of the Horde had it at a couple hundreds but recently lore probably has them at a few thousands). And even then, I honestly doubt most of the gifted mages of the draenei went with Velen, most were probably more draw to Kil’jaeden or Archimonde. Hence, why the Legion has a constant stream of Fel users.
Honestly, I think the draenei lost the technology to make Vigilants. Would be fitting considering the Protoss(lets not kid ourselves, these two races have plenty of similarity) have lost the ability to make Dragoons and now uses Immortals.
I only think this is dumb because Socrethar does it in Warlords. Theoretically they could have lost it between the Breaking of Draenor and now. But if it was that recent, seems like it’d be easy to recover. Or to have recovered it when they were in the other timeline.
I’ve said for a long time. It would have been great for the Forsaken as well.
That’d be a decent excuse if not for the fact that they had a prolonged interaction with the draenei in Warlords of Draenor, and the Vindicaar has a vigilant (snagged from Argus) aboard it.
Unless draenei are also really scatterbrained.
“So did you ask?”
“Ask about what?”
“The Vigilant technology. That’s why we sent you to talk to the Auchenai.”
“Ohhh. Right. That. Uh… Well, some demons showed up so I got a little side-tracked.”
“You were helping them for months before the campaign on Draenor ended.”
“I was very side-tracked.”
Not necessarily. Again, using the protoss as a template, they only lost the ability to make dragoons after Aiur fell. And the creation of dragoons required a specific temple.
Assuming the MU draenei could get the tech again, with the loss of access to AU Draenor, the draenei could simply have no access to either the material or the facility to create new Vigilants.
Sure, headcanon is possible. So far we’ve not been told this is the case.
I think it’d be weird lore given they could make them on Argus and Draenor. So it’d be rather strange there’s something on both those planets but not elsewhere to be harnessed.
I am just saying there are a myriad of possible reason for not using Vigilants. Not the least of which being the draenei are basically living in a broken down Exodar and did not have the centuries it took to build the infrastructure they had back in Draenor.
Something to remember is that they also spent a lot of time cooped up in the Genedar over the centuries, only living on any given world for a short period of time before moving on. There probably wasn’t much opportunity to get entrenched enough along the way to start reproducing the level of tech they had back home.
Consequently, Draenor’s probably the first world they lived on where they might have eventually become established enough to start rebuilding the sort of infrastructure that could allow the mass production of tech like they’d enjoyed on Argus, but between having far fewer people than they had on Argus and not wanting to immediately attract the Legion’s attention, they probably weren’t looking to create the sort of technological sprawl that had existed on their homeworld.
There’s also the possibility that, while it hasn’t been explicitly stated, being a planet that turns out to have contained a world-soul may have allowed for far more arcane-based tech to function on Argus, while we know from Chronicle that Draenor didn’t house a titan soul, so Draenor’s leylines may just plain not be charged with as much readily accessible arcane energy as those on Argus, limiting the amount of power that could be tapped to power their machinery.
They could perhaps feasibly rebuild what they once had on Azeroth someday, but then, even with the Well of Eternity nothing has ever said the night elves built their arcane empire overnight. Such things take time, and while Azeroth has its own native resources with various magical properties, like Draenor, if it isn’t rich in the specific materials (i.e. like argunite crystals) on which draenei/eredar technology operates, then the draenei might not be able to easily start replicating their old technological accomplishments in large quantities.
