I mean it seems that dire trolls(or berserker trolls for old folks) are a naturally occurring mutation in most troll species. so it stands to believe that elves also should have the occasional dire baby. And for one last food for thought: why don’t MU orcs have dire variants but AU orcs do?
Long-term exposure to concentrated arcane Order may have stabilized the elves’ physiology as they evolved, making it less flexible. So elves are just overall less mutative than trolls. Their biology resists external natural changes (magical changes are a different matter), so they lack the trolls’ propensity for aggressive regeneration, environmentally instigated mutation and drastic size/shape variations like dire trolls.
While dire trolls are a mix of deliberately changed trolls and some just being born exceptionally large, dire orcs seem to roundly be a result of deliberate magical or alchemical alteration, be it imbibing even more fel corruption than most fel orcs in teh case of Gurtogg Bloodboil, infusion by Twilight magics with Raz the Crazed, being subjected to Bleeding Hollow blood magics with Ariok or consuming void energies with dire pale orcs.
Moreover, perhaps due to the potential for naturally born ones, dire trolls seem to more often still be lucid and self-possessed, while dire orcs are usually portrayed as driven mad or at the very least unnaturally bloodthirsty by the process that creates them.
Consequently, with the exception of Garrosh (who intended to recklessly transform his orc followers into aggressive supersoldiers, first with the Divine Bell and later with the Heart of Y’shaarj) the modern Horde’s leaders haven’t really been the sort of people to see either value or moral justification in infusing orcs with magics to turn them into vicious blood-crazed giants that can’t be reliably controlled.
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Nah, elves are insanely susceptible to mutations. Sneezing on them the wrong way can change their eye color. I assume felblood elves and demon hunters are the closest you’ll get to a “dire” variant. Go much further and they just end up as naga, or satyr.
I think the meta example is more about visual theming. Orcs and trolls are monsters, so beefing them up is an easy way to make them look more monstrous. Elves are stereotypically graceful and beautiful, so corrupting them just adds some catgirl-level horn or spike aesthetics.
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Evles don’t follow the loa and they are changed from Trolls once were. The connection is gone.
It’s hinted at that Dire Trolls are created by the Trolls (even if perhaps not all of them, we possibly even saw a children dire trolls in Zuldazar… possibly).
Perhaps they do. But perhaps they consider them such unsightly creatures that they strangle them in their cots? Elf reproduction is weird - it seems like they only have children with each other once every thousand years or so but they spit them out like watermelon seeds when they hook up with a human. It’s possible that when they weee mutated by magic to become elves that they los the genes required to become ‘Dire’. There’s no knowing for sure.
Yes, there is a young Dire Troll that is shown playing with other Zandalari children. Dire Trolls are considered to be blessed by the Loa Torcali in their culture, but are otherwise treated as normal trolls and pretty much all of them are born that way.
It’s the other tribes that tend to use voodoo or alchemy to cause Dire Trolls to be born or regular trolls to grow to their size. It’s notable that these kinds of Dire Trolls tend to be less lucid and more violent compared to their Loa blessed cousins - but they still get treated as being normal trolls by troll society.
Very much so. I remember this from the old lore and always likes how diese Trolls are viwed and threathed like regular Trolls. Some are even leaders and chieftains.
I would love to know what loa are seen as connected to them from the point of view of every tribe.
Keep in mind Rokhan a Shadowhunter didn’t know who Rezan was at the start of BfA. The loa of kings.
Not quite. Night elf mutations always seem to boil down to magical exposure. Arcane, fel, Old God, whatever else was implied to be going on with the Nightwell; it’s always some magical influence that significantly transforms their physiology.
Unlike with trolls, whose geographical origins by tribal group are straight-up identifiable due to the tribes visibly mutating to acclimatize to their surroundings, elf biology doesn’t seem particularly susceptible to the non-magical effects of their environment. The night elves endured for millennia before and after the Sundering effectively unaltered from their current form despite their empire spreading across most of Ancient Kalimdor, while the trolls empires’ tribes have long been visually distinct from each other because each major region they inhabited caused their physiology to change in order to better survive. The trolls seem to have a “looser,” more adaptive biology that reacts more readily to external pressures, while like the titan-forged races and their descendants, elves don’t tend to naturally mutate to fit their surroundings; they instead transform their surroundings to adapt to them.
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This topic makes me wish that Roid elves were a thing. Elves who used anabolic steroids to replace their mana addiction.
Big honkin’ bulky elves giving high elves and void elves wedgies and swirlies and trading lifting tips with orcs and Tauren bros.
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I think you just end up with a human in that case.
Yeah but WoW humans are lame
Obvious answer is that the transition to elves from trolls changed elf biology that enough that any natural dire troll mutation went away, and culturally it was a lot more acceptable to create warbeasts and constructs than to mutate elves into war machines. Hence why it takes being exposed to concentrated magical sources or lack there of to prompt elves to mutate, while trolls appear to mutate to their natural surroundings.
BFA also seemed to imply many Dire Trolls are actually created and the process has a severe downside of the ritual to become one is a prolonged death sentence from their body burning out.
The theory some have proposed that natural dire trolls might be some sort of loa blessing is also an interesting suggestion/answer. This would make you wonder why their aren’t dire night elves since the Wild Gods are just another version of Loa.
Weren’t dire trolls themselves mutated by being infused with some sort of magic? I could be badly misremembering, but I thought they weren’t “natural” either.
They do…
They’re known as Night Elves. Compared to High Elves, they’re both rustic and savage… and did you miss the fact that they have fangs?
Wild god blessings tend to turn you into something like a Dryad or a Harpy.