Orc priests and the lack of cultural identity with them as it stands on the PTR

Wyrmrest Accord
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This is copied and pasted from twitter.

Blizzard… This isn’t the way. You have made a long rich history and vastly diverse cultures for just about every playable race that has a lot of untouched potential for something truly great, but this is not the way to do it. The orcs are a primal themed race that reverie their ancestors and the elements. They have always been this way and I get it. You want to add more class/race combos. But to make them no different to the Alliance; The Humans to be exact faith isn’t going to work. You run the risk of harmonizing every single race and culture with this route. Even the Tauren have long established their own in lore reason why they have priests in the form of Sun Seers who worship An’she. The Sun in their culture. It adds so much lore and uniqueness to them. If you clog everyone and everything together, you’re actually robbing true creativity to your world and to your writing. I don’t want to beat a dead horse but that was one of the biggest complaints about Shadowlands and it robs a sense of wonder for everyone’s favorite races. Again, I understand why you’re adding these new combos but it’s kind of odd that you added some neat lore to the Draenei’s new rogues and just slapping pure Light worshipers for the Horde’s races. I hope that you see the problem here. There is a lot of different avenues you can take in lore reasons for these class combos. You guys done it before with the Tauren Paladins by making them “Sunwalkers” who uses An’she’s light instead of the light itself. Night Elf priests worship Elune instead of the Light. And people are now concerned about the possibility of harmonizing Night Elf Paladins if they do come with just the generic human lore which does have its place for the humans. But it’s not for everyone. You can do so much with this rich awesome and imaginative world. And I will admit, I haven’t been the nicest guy on twitter when it comes to the lore and the current writers. I have every right to be ignored by those I insulted. But this isn’t about that. This is about your dedicated fans who loves your game and its lore. So please, reconsider and put in the effort into actually expanding the lore instead of just adding more hominization. It hurt actually hurts the game more and we all want DF to be the best expansion ever and we want the next expansion whatever that might be to be better than DF.

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Gotosh wrote up an interesting thread about orc priests a while back that might interest you.

Here is the link:

UPDATED Story Approaches, RP and Lore for Orc Priests

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Besides this extremely well written thread article, there’s also a link on Lightbound on Wowpedia:

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Lightbound

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cries in shadow moon clan

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Having them worship An’she is the most logical and frankly the most easy excuse which I would be ok with. Just not this harmonization that’s just too lazy and uninteresting.

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I too know that pain…

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Nooooooo. Did the thread get deleted? It was a good thread with a lot of well thought out ideas.

sobs in shadow moon clan

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It’s there.

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/story-approaches-rp-and-lore-for-orc-priests/1376610/1

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The forums has been weird for me and I don’t know why. I fixed the link though.

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Kinda just figured they picked it up from their pals.

In the better part of two decades of interaction I’m sure some Orcs may’ve converted to a Loa, or the Holy Light, or An’she worship, or the Forgotten Shadow, or Tax Exemptions as is I believe our Bilgewater’s friend’s faith - with enough zeal to be proper clerics.

The lore for Orc mages in Cata at least was the Forsaken taught them. So I figured it was a similar arrangement.

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Now I understand what is going on. This has to do with the NPCs being added to Orgrimmar.

I absolutely totally agree!

That was one of my biggest complaints with the Legion Order Halls, particularly the paladin order hall. Homogenization. It felt if the race wasn’t human, they lost some of their cultural identity. It’s just more of that. We get it with the class flavors they are adding. I am all for class flavor but not at the expense of the cultural identities of the races.

It really just comes down to business. The company wants to make the most money with the least amount of effort. Homogenizing everyone takes the least amount of work that can be slapped on everyone where as adding flair for each race and their NPCs is a lot of extra on the side. It’s a flaw of capitalism. Creativity and love for a creation is lost for the sake of making the greatest profit. Funny enough, putting more creativity and love into your product really increases the value and that becomes greater profit. If the product is successful.

If Blizz wants Azeroth and the greater warcraft universe to feel genuine, they need to keep adding the lore for the new race/class combinations like they did with the Tauren Sunwalkers. I really hope they accept the criticism I am seeing online and make the necessary changes.

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thats how i feel about Blood Knights. I’d much rather they kept the “Mastering Magic” they had going for awhile, but noooooo they had to go the human route with 'mUh FaItH"

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Honestly Ive just worked with it as another way to interpret shamanism. Soley working with the spirit side of things than the elemental.

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I’m very very honored of my mention of my thread!!!
It’s not perfect…largely because I’m dyslexic and tend to add useless words or the sentences are weird. But I do whole fully believe in my view point of orc priests and the fact their cultural identity would be just one of the many beautiful off shoots of their spirituality. Both shaman, and those who can connect to a greater spirit but are not shaman.

I feel like orc priests are a great in to explore the nuances of orc culture in the direction of showing that they have so much more to them and that PEOPLE are more than just one thing.

The Shadowmoon Clan is of course, the biggest example I can give because if you can traverse their main city (that was made hostile) you can see that their whole clan is a spiritual clan. Their spiritual leaders were extremely important, that the very chieftain was a shaman themself (and possibly many more in a line chieftains). This was something unheard of just because of how hard it is to be both. But their foundation is so built upon their love for the world, the moon and the stars that it comes naturally to them.

And it would make sense to me that there would be people who might not be shaman (meaning they might lack key things like elemental summoning ect) but have a knack to draw power from the moon, to fully represent the moon and only the moon. Think of how some people fall so in love with one aspect of something, they dedicate their life to it. With that amount of dedication, you don’t need to be a shaman to speak for something you believe in. With orcs, your dedication and commitment to your people, and your cause, will gain you the respect that will elevate you desire as a spiritual leader.

Put the rest of my thoughts under summary.

Summary

I think the pure joy, elevation and community of spirituality is something I wish could be more celebrated among the spiritual races we still have. Orcs most of all, because of how deeply I feel for an ‘othered’ race to be framed in a spot light where we can see them cry when it finally rains or to feel moved by the talks from their spiritual leader as they are comforted in ways they can’t reach out to. There is a deep native aspect that was not just lost because of the Legion, but unfortunately lost in the writing along the way.

So I very much agree, that making orc priests be a generic human centric aesthetic does an injustice to all these fantasy races that have a lot of heavy real life inspiration. It just makes me think of the fact I learned in my research, that the monstrances that are used to display the Eucharist was changed to look like a small cathedral to a sun so they could better convert the indigenous population of south america by applying the sun, something they worshiped, to Christ to convert them.

I actually made sure that I HAD TO GET THAT POST OUT before the patch dropped because I needed to put out all my connections to orc priests so people could approach their characters with a more nuanced approach so they can think about the culture. Because I just knew for a fact that something was going to be misrepresented. Many people keep saying they don’t see it. But I did, every time orc priests were brought up one or two things are said.
“Oh riiight. Orc priests. Yeah I guess they’re going to be accepted by the church now” Or “Huh, I wonder what the lore is going to be with the church for them…”
Or on the flip side “Oh yeah, guess it makes sense. Void priests, for sure.” no.

So yeah, over all…I definitely saw this coming. There is a strong chance this is just a generic place holder but on the off chance that it’s not, it’ll horribly skew the player perception of how the Horde is spiritually portrayed.

Can there be orcs interested in the church? Sure, but I find that a highly individual path, than a wide spread one.

But thank you all again for the kind words toward my post!!!

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Imagine complaining about orc priests when night elf mages exist.

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I thought the deal was there they were Highborne survivors in Dire Maul and the Kaldorei let them repatriate?

That tracks for me. There’s a lot of WoW lore addendums I find preposterous but older societies reevaluating some of their more hardline stances with the benefit of new perspectives and experiences seems reasonable.

Like I presumed they’d cooled it on the Kill All Mages policy about the time they were letting human and gnomish ones wander around their tree fort.

No where they screwed up in Cata was letting Pile Of Cliches Varian become High King. Really sat there and decided taking marching orders from a “There’s Two Wolves Inside Me” anime hair guy with convenient amnesia was a good idea.

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The thing that makes me laugh about Kaledorei Mages is that they got brought back in because Garrosh was pushing in on the Night Elves southern flanks that the border had basically broken and it was outright slaughter all through Ashenvale.

Even then, there was a lot of bad blood from the Kaledorei people and the mages suffered even as they took on apprentices from the population to try and counter the Horde’s sudden burst of ferocity.

Fast forwards to Legion, and Tyrande and, to a much lesser extent, Shaldris are going off on a tear about the Shal’dorei being mages and using arcane magic.

Makes me want to roll a Kaldorei Mage who knows that as soon as the looming threats to their people is over, the Night Elf Mages are going to be excommunicated again by the rest of their people.

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Wasn’t Suramar basically the equivalent of like a super wealthy town that just hid away rather than trying to deal with the BS they’d directly contributed to, though? And they were basically magical baseheads when Tyrande turned up.

There’s a reason they’re the Sin’Dorei’s AR. Pretty much no other race would be overly sympathetic to their rich wizard problems. Worked out well for the Horde though. Sure Lor’Themar feel free to bring the lady you met at Wellaholics Anonymous. We’ve petropunk goblins and Frankenstein’s monster dudes setting stuff on fire in the breakroom. Who cares. Matter of fact that dumpster full of raccoons that just crashed through the gates? They’re getting a seat too!

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This is what doesn’t track for me. And maybe it’s just personal taste, but it just seems to water things down to say, “Okay, this is allowed now.”

It’s the difference between what Gotosh did for rationalizing how and why an orc “priest” would work within their existing society, versus just saying, “Okay, they do holy magic now. It’s fine.”

And I know night elf mages exist in Dire Maul. But bringing them out of exile to be used as a weapon against the Horde is the exact narrative thread that would would eventually backfire. Not just … continue to happen?

Draenei warlocks don’t exist just yet, but if they do I’ll blame night elf mages for breaking the mould.

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Honestly I figure you could justify anything with interpretation.

Oh that’s not a Draenei Warlock. He’s an Exorcist. They use sanctified tomes to manipulate, ensnare and banish demons.

Oh that’s not an Undead Druid. She’s a RAS Mycolomancer. They wield fungal plague magic and use potions to shift into beastial abominations.

And so on and so on.

How lame or cool any of that would be would be in inverse proportion to how much work Blizz wants to put into it. If they actually get like some unique spell effects and lore beyond “idk there’s some now” I think any class race combo could be interesting.

But stuff like Priest and Mage, far as I can tell, is a career someone can train you to do. So in cases like that I don’t need much explanation. Like there’s Tauren Mages in the Kirin Tor, and I just kinda presume some Tauren youngsters grew curious about the arcane from exposure to their allies’s use of it got accepted into Wizard School. Why wouldn’t they?

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