I think this is a good way of reasoning it out on your part. Nothing’s going to be perfect of course but Blizzard kinda leaves it up to us to think outside of the box and bend the lore a teensy bit.
Lore wise they’re not possible.
When a Demon dies it is reborn in the Twisting Nether. There’s no way to circumvent that.
IMO, this is one of the reasons why all classes for all races, and these types of customization option expansions, is a bad thing. What Blizzard should have done, in my opinion, instead of giving Draenei and Lightforged Draenei access to warlocks, is turn some of the allied races (Dark Iron, Mag’har, Lightforged Draenei, Mechagnomes etc) into sub-races and then create Man’ari as a sub-race for the Draenei, giving that sub-race access to warlocks, but taking away their option to be death knights or paladins.
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Tyrant Velhari a Man’ari Draenei has a word for you. She’s a paladin as is her order you fight in Hellfire Citadel in WoD. Also Man’ari Death Knights would be among the best Death Knights since they’d be present for thousands of years of Nathrazim death magics and picked up plenty of knowledge along the way. They could have been a Death Knight raised by Arthas from the corpses of the demons who died as Lordaeron fell. Remember Archimonde came with a host of demons. We see them in Kalimdor as well during Warcraft 3.
They literally cannot exist.
When a demon dies, they return to the twisting nether to be reborn. That’s how the lifecycle of demons works. Hell, prior to Antorus getting destroyed, the process of rebirth was extremely quick. Could a fallen demon’s body be reanimated with necromancy? Possibly, we’ve never seen it, but it could happen. However, they would be soulless husks, no different than zombies, because the soul of the demon is being reborn in the Twisting Nether.
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I can think of a couple of quests where we did just that.
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I mean. Obviously if you kill a demon in the Twisting Nether, that changes things, because the demon’s soul is obliterated and ceases to exist, so they’re dead for good (at least as far as we know). And demons can be captured in soul gems to contain them. Although they’re still alive when that happens and if the gem breaks, they escape and become living threats again.
But I don’t recall any quests where we reanimated a dead demon.
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The question as I read it, was about permanently killing one.
Ok, we are considering a Man’ari turning a DK, but what about the opposite way? A Draenei DK being fel infused to the point of getting the usual red skin, no need to even become a demon completely.
I am assuming we are going to ignore the intro scene since it makes the players walk a homogenized path. I would headcanon that the dreadlords of the Burning Legion had the LK make one of the Manari into a DK as an experiment. Maybe they were happy with the results and put the DK in an icecube as an abandoned project or one to pursue later.
I personally think this could work with enough suspension of disbelief with the current timeline.
I mean i guess in theory they could be a leftover from the burning legions invasions and were risen into undeath later.
Actually we already have precedence for undead demons and that’s Mannaroth in WoD. AU Gul’dan resurrected his skeleton than literally patched him back as a undead demon and Mannaroth was furious as this made him a meat puppet of his old corpse. He rathered resurrect in the Twisting Nether and reform a new body.
Demons can be resurrected and be forced back into their old bodies without much problems. They are undead and loving it! If worse comes to worse. They can just reform a new body after their old one finally expires.
“Gul’dan yells: Faithless fools. The Legion wills it; it will be done.
Gul’dan yells: Return Mannoroth… Yes, yes! Your masters call you to this world once more!
Mannoroth yells: Wha- What is this? Gul’dan what have you done? I am… so weak…”
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Not quite. Mannoroth’s resurrection was done via a ritual in order to reduce the time he needed to spend in the Twisting Nether, and while he does initially start the fight as a skeleton, he doesn’t stay that way. By the end of the fight (when it was done in WoD, now he is solo’d before he gets close to that stage) he is fully reconstituted in his old body and empowered.
So no, Mannoroth wasn’t ‘reanimated and turned into undead’, it only appears that way if you only see the second stage of the fight, which these days is as far as most people see with how quickly he dies.
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Man’ari DKs make sense, at least Blood and Unholy ones do. Frost is more of a stretch though.
It just takes a bit of RP ingenuity. You can be 0.5 edition death knight, the progenitor of such magic to begin with. It would be nice to not have blue eyes, though.
Questions of plot holes aside, I think Elune is more powerful than Sargeras, so it makes sense that her power could overcome his.
That said, how would the Lich King’s necromancy work if the Man’ari have demonic souls like Illidan and the Demon Hunter PCs?
Arthur could’ve killed manari, or had them killed. They’d be in such small numbers that it wouldn’t matter.
Death Knights are resurrected by necromantic ritual. Gul’dan created the first death knights and AU Gul’dan showed he could reform very dead Mannoroth. If one can return to their previous body. Why can’t an Man’ari?
This is my Man’ari death knight (the person who made this thread). Hence the reason why I posed this question.
I just like making sense of the characters I’m playing so I can be immersed in the story properly. After reading what a lot of posters are saying I think I’m going to use my own head canon to believe that this demon came through with the original summoning of Archimonde where he destroyed Dalaran. Sometime later he must have encountered Arthas and was struck down by him. Frostmourne prevented his soul from reanimating on Argus, instead being a death knight for the Scourge.
This has been a great discussion and I love all the feedback and insight from everyone here. Very helpful! Thank you all!
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In the case of a Man’ari Death Knight you wouldn’t be wrong! Arthas did have powerful wizards/necromancers at his disposal. Subverting the cycle of death is what the Scourge was about!
Man’ari Unholy DKs would just be literal necromancers in plate armor basically. Could say blood is just a twisted blood knight. Frost you could RP as a rune knight
None of those options really breaks lore all that much, if at all.
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