It has, and lore is the reason why classes like the Shaman, Druid, and Paladin are not available to every race.
And since it seems like Blizzard has ditched the ‘every race gets every class’ disaster (as evidenced by neither Dracthyr or Earthen getting Death Knights, which every other race has), it’s likely that Blizzard will not be going in that direction. Which IMO? That’s fine. Create new classes to fill those same niches that Druids, Shamans, and Paladins provide. Tinker for example could be a hero class for Goblins and Gnomes that gives them the same functionality as Druids, but it’s lore friendly to them, whereas Druid is not lore friendly to either race.
To go off topic, ideally it would be player lead factions that fought each other. Like in several eastern MMOs. Like in EVE Online. That’s organic PVP where players are truly motivated to fight each other.
You know what, I’m just gonna come out and say it. Elf players are racists. If you hate elves, you are just being anti-racist, and that’s a good thing.
It’s more that these classes require specialized assets to make and are, therefore, a pain to make available to more races.
Worgen druidism was flimsy, goblin shamanism was flimsy, hell belf paladins were a late, somewhat flimsy addition that very nearly was simply warrior and druid was considered enough that some eversong animals likely started out as druid forms.
DF wasn’t even the first expansion to play with the idea of having elf shamans (or blood elf druids for that matter, and yes those druids of the flame are wearing the firekin set, not primalist robes), they just kept it NPC only.
Nelves should have had shaman in Cata when they were doling out class/race combos like crazy. However, they also apparently tried to keep the counts even (i.e. Horde and Alliance would each have the same total of class/race combinations or close to it).
We see nelf shamans as part of the Primalists in DF.
Look, if goblins, the actively most-disrespectful-to-the-elements race on the planet, can work out a deal to talk to spirits and conjure up elementals, why can’t literally anybody else?
The only races that don’t show up among generic primalists mobs are, by my rough observation, gnomes, mechas, forsaken and humans and I’m about 50/50 that I might have assumed a regular human might have been kul tiran.
To add to that:
If KTs can be shaman, no reason regular humans (and worgen, by extension) can’t.
You’ll notice that the only classes that every race doesn’t have access to are the ones that require custom assets (with exception of Earthen DKs for obvious reasons).
Paladins have mounts.
Shamans have totems.
Druids have shapeshift forms.
Maybe that could apply to druids, maybe. Because druids require multiple animal forms, so yeah, you could argue that for druids that matters.
But for Shamans? The only unique thing they require is totems, which could be knocked out in a few hours for each race. Paladins? All the animations the Paladin class has can work with other races. How do I know this? Because you can run your Paladin character over the engineering toy that turns you into various races, many of which can’t be Paladins, and all the animations that the Paladin abilities have work with those races.
Blizzard has specifically said that lore is the reason why those three classes are not available to all races. They’ve also walked back the ‘all classes for all races’ garbage by not having Earthen and Dracthyr have Death Knights and by keeping the Evoker class available only to the Dracthyr. There’s also the Demon Hunter class, which still remains elf only.
I think Blizzard realized how much damage making all classes available to all races would cause to the lore and decided to scrap it.
idk bruh i mean i hear you and i think it’s a bit of a head-scratcher to figure out how elves become shamans, but i think it’s also kinda limited to constrain the class to only being primitive spiritualism; elementals are literally the constituent parts of the world, manipulating them is hella powerful magic. i think it can be done well, in concept…
edit: apologies for weird edit, keyboard glitch
