New Customization Options for Blood Elves and Void Elves

we had to do the full nightborne quest chain, the full hm tauren quest chain, as if were trying to get them as ARs, also the other reps too, for val’sharrah, azsuna, stormheim and broken shore, THEN we also had to do 1-2 months more for velfs and lightforged, with velfs taking even longer than lightforged. while horde were already playing their hm tauren and nightborne, alliance was still grinding rep for up to an additional 2 months. the fact, we almost fully unlocked the horde ARs, but horde didnt have to almost fully unlock alliance ARs in order to get access to horde ARs, is the point i was making.

the only upside was, it didnt take any time at all to get the horde ARs after that, since we already had done their rep grinds on top of our own. lol we couldnt even unlock argus to do the velf/lightforged rep grind until we had exalted with nightborne, hm tauren, and so forth. and that included the achievements for the story quest chains

AR are like a premium feature of the expac

yeah kinda my point - its premium, it should have even more features, not less. the way it is currently is similar to the concept of leveling and gearing up a char to raid, only to have the drops/rewards in the raid be worse than normal dungeons. you dont have to expend any energy or game play time, to make a belf or core race. no effort involved other than what customizations you want and you get alot more than an AR. its kinda backwards.

I’m ultimately happy with the compromise.

Sure there’s a few details I’d like squared away such as in-game acknowledgement that Alliance High Elves and Blood Elf Defectors are actually joining the Ren’dorei and not just taking the 10 cent tour, and I’d like to know some details how they are obtaining their powers.

And of course that doesn’t mean I can’t or shouldn’t also ask for more customization in general (even if I have to wait for 9.1 or 9.2 to get it), such as additional hairstyles and hair colors (that don’t have to come from Blood Elves).

But even if all I get are the skin tones and the eyes we saw in the teaser, I can make a reasonably decent looking High Elf character come pre-patch if I wish to, and the implications of the High Elf Wayfarers at least provides some sort of indicator even if the devs don’t add any additional in-game exposition. It’s not as satisfying as it would be with my above wants but I can make it work.

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Only for that build, the customization string is still there and hints to every race INCLUDING kul tirans getting it.

yeah no doubt. core races already have many more customizations then ARs do, before shadowlands. with the new core race customizations coming, if ARs didnt get access to alot of new customizations, they would feel rather lackluster. they almost do now. 2 of my skin and 2 of my hair color options are identical. same thing happened to nightborne.

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Good I want my Blood Elf character to have access to the jewelry options and so I hope it is for both genders!

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For now, no model update. All female high elves have that eye in alpha. Let’s see how things evolve.

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time seems to be moving in slo mo. lol

Yes, it is. This year has been harsh.

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Oh, especially here in Eastern Australia. I wish 2020 never existed.

If they do end up giving some exposition as to how Void elves have more skin tones, than I really do hope they also explain the presence of the named blue eyed elves among the blood elves as well, like Lanesh the Steelweaver, Teris Blightsunder, and Astromancer Darnarian. Perhaps Danuser might even follow up on his tweet regarding telling Lanesh’s story in-game rather than over the internet, which would a wonderful way of tying in these new customization options.

Something interesting I noticed was that the blue eyes for Teris, and Darnarian were replaced with the standard glowing green eyes when the initial eye update went out for all of the elven races, but have since had their blue eyes restored to their models. Coincidence? Possibly.

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Well, I am still waiting for that explanation from Blizzard. Which can be an extremely long time at this rate, considering they think more important voices need to be heard instead of a community of gamers…

That is because there is always a bit of a “test” before changes are finalized and often NPC"s are used to test stuff even if they don’t receive it.

Well I guess what’s more interesting to me is that it suggests that their blue eyes weren’t merely the result of some model mixup, but were fully intended to have that color from the start. That someone went back and purposely changed those specific NPC’s eyes back to blue gives me the impression that the choice was entirely intentional.

Originally these two models had blue eyes with a slight green glow over them (Which many High elf models suffer from) so I never felt comfortable using them as evidence, but since the update those glows have been removed and replaced with a much cleaner version.

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We’ve known this for a while though haven’t we, comrade?

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Now if Blizz would rename Void Elves to High Elves, they might be happy

Well we knew their models had blue eyes, but there was never any evidence that suggested it was anything more than a model-mixup until now. And the green tint over their eyes only furthered player suspicion on their authenticity. Lanesh was the only one to have been officially confirmed by a dev, and that was only because I was lucky enough to get a response from Danuser on twitter.

What I find interesting is that their eyes were changed to green during the eye update, and then deliberately changed back to blue shortly after, which would make no sense if their blue eyes really were the result of a model mixup.

Edit
If Blizzard does plan on implementing some exposition over these new customisations, it would be interesting to see if these NPCs are involved.

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Then they’ll want Blizzard to adopt their fan fictions and demand retcons for Blood Elves to make them corrupted and retcons for High Elves to make them noble.

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I wouldn’t want that.

You were never one of the posters doing that anyway.

That’d need like 20 years of retconning to catch up.