Malfurion is probably the wisest leader the alliance currently has

Lore Story Forum
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Being wise, or even wisest, does not mean being perfect. The bluff also worked for 2,700 years. That was a long time that the Highborne did quit until they fell off the wagon.

Always possible. Or could have made more Xavius’s.

If everyone who wanted to practice magic was gone why would they ever revisit the law at all? Until the Shen’dralar needed a home with the Darnassian Night Elves the ban on magic was just on the books for no reason since there weren’t any Highborne or otherwise interest left around to even practice or teach magic. But then the moment the Shen’dralar did join them the Night Elves looked at the law and realized it was pointless, and now we have Night Elf Mages again.

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They seem to have thought guarding the second Well of Eternity was enough, since the first one acted as both beacon and portal to the Legion. I’m also not sure how long it was before they even realized the Shen’dralar survived. Iirc, some of the general citizenry were surprised when Mordent showed up again in late-Wrath/Cata.

I take this as a weird case of old lore not meshing well with new. Old lore was, they were content with guarding the world’s largest fount of Arcane energy, and never really left their forests in Kalimdor, and didn’t really know what was going on in the wider world. And that as soon as they joined the Alliance, they started telling their new allies how dangerous the High Elves were.

New lore is there are Night Elves all over the place, like Val’sharah and Highmountain, and sticking their nose into everything, like aiding the High Elves in the Troll Wars. So, yeah, in light of new lore, they should have taken a more active role in monitoring the world’s burgeoning civilizations, and dissuading use of the Arcane.

But, I don’t write this mess :man_shrugging:

That was the grand scheme of it, but it was also to keep watch for threats to the Night Elves in general. The continued threat of the satyr comes to mind (whether you want to count that as Legion, or Old Gods), as do the Qiraji. But, so far as they knew, the Legion only had one way onto the planet en masse, and so, they kept the Well on lockdown, while watching for minor incursions.

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The blood elves have some very recent beef with the night Elves as well. The animosity stems from a night elf attempt to disrupt the rebuilding of quel’thalas during the events of burning crusade. Also while it was the best chance at peace I wouldn’t really call it an act of compassion as much as a pragmatic approach to a political divide in their civilization that had been building up since the founding of the empire and finally reached a head. As I said before the high borne had a strong leader as well In dath’remar sunstrider. Also take into account that there were still three surviving highborne cities still around at the time of this schism.

Eldre’thalas a thriving highborne city that was still highly populated until 1200 years before the dark portal when the prince of that city purged the city to cut down on the power consumption on their new source of power.

Shandaral another populated high borne city that wasn’t destroyed until 6000 years before the dark portal

Suramar the second largest city in the old empire was still around with a powerful group of high borne.

If malfurion would have tried to execute the high borne dath’remar would have led the highborne in a civil war against malfurion and the rest of the night elves. Logically dath’remar would realize that a retreat would be in order if they were going to survive, and being a member of azshara’s inner circle he would know about eldre’thalas and would probably make a desperate flight to that area in the hopes of gaining a tenable position. Naturally upon arriving he’d discover another population of highborne and being that he was the highest ranking member of the highborne in existence and having a vial from the well of eternity it’s very likely the city would have welcomed him. Now being that dath’remar’s rebels are capable of teleporting and the regular night elves couldn’t the rebels would have a decent amount of time to formulate a plan before the night elves found them.

In this time dath’remar would be attempting to rally whatever remained of the highborne to their side. The highborne have scrying so scouting the old cities wouldn’t be a problem so in theory they could locate shandaral and with the promise of a new well of eternity the elves of shandaral would undoubtedly migrate to eldre’thalas.

Suramar is a wild card I’m not sure if they’d join dath’remar but based on what we saw in legion I could see elisande helping.

I imagine it wouldn’t take the night elves an incredibly long time to find dath’remar especially with the wardens. I only imagine it taking three months to a year. The night elves would bring the entirety of their armies down on eldre’thalas and that would have been quite a bloody seige.

This is a worse case scenario of a civil war and any number of things could have played out but even in the best case scenario it ends with the highborne taking a whole lot of night elves with them before they go( they created an arcane storm,and they weren’t even trying to kill anyone imagine if they were actually trying to destroy the night elves?)

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Not so much purged the city but he started feeding on his own population. By the time adventurers rescused th Shren’drelar, they were down to a handful and many if not most of them bought it during the War of Thorns.

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Chronicles states he purged the vast majority of the population.

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Again, as I’ve said before when books contradict game, I go with game.

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Holy crap, how terrible.

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I don’t disagree. But, if I recall, the person who wrote Lorash specifically said they forgot all of that. Thus, we have Lorash’s reasoning being his parent’s exile, and also that High/Blood Elves can live over 7,000 years, now.

Chronicle at least frames it as an act of compassion. Not just on Malfurion’s part, but on that of all the lowborn Night Elves:

In the end, the other night elves could not bring themselves to sentence so many of their brothers and sisters to death.

Emphasis mine. The lowborn Night Elves not only viewed their Highborne kin as brother and sister, but also seemed to believe they’d have been able to execute the Highborne with relative ease, but chose not to.

Perhaps Dath’remar in and of himself was. But most of the surviving Highborne were not the top tier in terms of power. Most of those went down with Azshara, and either fell in WotA, or became Naga (or satyr). Elisande was probably the only upper echelon Highborne left, and maybe Tortheldrin, if his rank of Prince was anything to go by. And they were both locked away in their respective cities.

Shandaral is described in Chronicle as just an outpost, even in the times of the Empire. It also says they were completely cut off from both the Night Elves, and Dath’remar’s Highborne.

They were all bubbled up, and quite content in thinking the rest of the world had burned down around the barrier. It would be quite some time before they ever realized anyone had survived outside of the bubble, and by then, they were too dependent on the Nightwell to travel far from it.

You would think that. But, somehow, Chronicle still describes Shandaral as totally cut off and isolated. Likewise the Shen’dralar never left, no matter how bad things got. Idk why or how all the Highborne managed to seem to forget how to teleport :man_shrugging:

All the rest of your suppositions on a civil war doesn’t match up to what we have. As I said, the lowborn and Malfurion seemed quite confident they could have executed the Highborne. They just didn’t.

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Sure did:
https://twitter.com/RoBrooks13/status/1026641679757991936

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You’re being willfully ignorant of the situation at this point. The entirety of the highborne with dath’remar were high level highborne they were part of azshara’s inner court. They rescued tyrande from the legion these guys weren’t the push overs you’re making them out to be. The night elves can be as confident as they want about being capable of carrying out the execution but I go off feats and these are the same ones that summoned an arcane storm and the forefathers of the ones that would summon a fire storm that would wipe out a troll empires army. As for the teleportation it’s quite obvious the highborne were capable of this minor feat that’s why the night elves had survivors from teld because highborne teleported people out. It was more of the lowborne put a giant tree on top of the new well masking it’s energies so there was no point of going anywhere it wouldn’t cure their addiction and it wouldn’t bring them a new fount of power.

The arcane was how the night elves built a massive world spanning empire to begin with. I mean seriously do you think that the people who were the Masters of this would be such push overs? That’s like walking into the druid borrows and saying we’re going to put the druids down, it’d be like walking into a meat grinder then being surprised when you take mass causalities.

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Decidedly not. Chronicle says they were going to be executed, but the Night Elves showed them mercy. It’s just what the book says. For whatever reason, be it lack of power, or lack of numbers, the Highborne didn’t push their case, and accepted their exile (and probably their execution, had it come to that).

That was the Humans. Chronicle specifically says the Highborne had never had the idea of casting a spell cooperatively before that point. It’s dumb, but that’s what it says.

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That literally can’t be the case the high borne worked together to create an arcane storm that’d be like forgetting your country owns nuclear weapons. I very much doubt that the high borne would have accepted execution in mass, that’s a point we can agree to disagree on but I can’t think of a single point in history where an entire group willing rebelled against what they saw as an unjust law and then the next day willingly accepted a death sentence.

Also why would they push their case to stay when dath’remar had a vial of the well in hand? I’d want to get as far away as possible if I planned on building a new well.

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Oh, I never meant they willingly would have accepted it. They would have accepted it by force, just like they were forcibly pushed out of Ashenvale.

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Yeah okay buddy I’m not going to even begin posting all the times where the night elves did something brash after underestimating the situation. The lore supports fairly well that it would have turned into a civil war. The example I gave was what I thought would have been an interesting way for it to play out, but no matter how it played out a lot of people would have died on both sides. These are the same high borne that were able to repel the amani empire for millennia I don’t think you’re understanding this at all.

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I mean, that’s all they managed to do, is hold the Amani off. And even that began to fail, hence recruiting the Humans, who went on to win the war for them. And that’s after having a couple generations to expand their population. Dath’remar’s people that Malfurion was contending with were a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the Highborne, who by definition of an arostocracy, were not comparatively numerous to begin with.

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At this point I’m talking to a wall. If you believe the night elves could pull off a purge of the highborne with little loss of life against a group of people who can pull off feats like creating barriers around cities and making arcane storms that’s cool, but I l think we both know you’re being blantly bias.

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Perhaps. But it’s a bias backed up by the book. It’s right there, in black and white, in Chronicle. The Night Elves were going to execute the Highborne. They just decided not to, out of compassion.

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Maybe they would have been able to put up a fight. But they would have lost. especially with the full force of Night Elf Hunters, Rogues, and… Druids turned on them.

The Highborne rescued from Eldre’thelas? They were wiped out by Forsaken Rogues in the War of Thorns, so theyre not nearly as omnipotent as you seem to think.

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Again I wasn’t stating the highborne would have won I was saying that it would have sparked a bloody civil war. The highborne wouldn’t have stood much of a chance of winning vs the vast majority of their own race but they wouldn’t have been helpless and incapable of defending themselves in an organized manner. As for eldre’thalas I was stating that was the most likely place they’d fall back to, the city had a fairly decent population until 1200 years before the opening of the dark portal, and would have bolstered their numbers making the fight even more costly. As for the rogues killing highborne I mean no kidding the characters in the game aren’t superman malfurion got dropped by an axe to the back does that somehow make him less powerful because the same thing that would happen to anyone if they were stabbed in the back can happen to him?

Because people can die from a fairly unimpressive thing doesn’t mean that they are any less powerful.

Edit: also druids aren’t some hard and fast counter to mages like you seem to be implying.

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That’s really what rogues are for Mages don’t do well when they’re stun-locked to death. It was rogues after all that took out the Highborne mages at Darkshore. And Arthas and his scourge rolled up the Dalaran mages including Antoinidas himself… like a carpet.

The one thing that Night Elves really don’t do well is provide support for spellcasters.