It goes without saying that the treatment of the Night Elves and the Story in general was unacceptable in BfA and Shadowlands regardless of how good the resolution after 5 years is, but after seeing 10.2.5 I’m actually positively surprised because it’s a lot more than I was expecting this time.
What I had hoped for as a best possible outcome is for the Night Elves to find a new home and peace in the story and also for a positive ending for the Night Elf souls, but looking at what 10.2.5 has offered so far there are a lot of things I didn’t expect:
The Night Elves actually getting a usable city ingame even though it had little to no gameplay relevance because there was no additional hub needed
A rework of most night elf NPCs with the new customizations
New beautiful assets and buildings just for Night Elves
A (functioning?) port and portals to other night elf zones with settlers from other zones that are a response to the feedback about Kalimdor
I’d post pictures here but there are plenty floating around in other threads, twitter and other places already!
I didn’t think the day would come where I could finally be positively surprised about the Night Elf story. I didn’t think Blizzard was going to try to undo the damage they did in BfA and Shadowlands, even if it took very long.
Now to some suggestions from my side to make the new home even better:
Ships from Amirdrassil to Darkshore and Feralas (and back)
Ashenvale Settlers and portals to Ashenvale
Even more new buildings!
Making only a portion of it neutral to Horde players. I know this may be controversial but there’s a reason why we don’t want the opposite faction running around in our capitals, and especially the Night Elves haven’t had a good history with the Horde
Giving Darkshore the Alliance phasing permanently instead of flipping it regularly to make it work with the ships
Even more utility such as an auction house, transmogrifier and more to make it work like a fully functional city
Let me know if you have any more ideas! I’m actually looking forward to this patch more than I have to anything wow related in the past 5+ years. It’s a weird feeling to actually be able to look forward to a new patch rather than having to dread it.
And to think, some tilted Night Elf fans over exaggerated and acted like the Night Elves were wiped out. Hopefully now they realize the error of their ways.
Those posters must have so much egg on their face, it looks like a new type of facial.
a custom open design moon temple with Elune statues somewhere. There is currently none.
a central portal area where all the portals are accessible rather the current spread out place holder design.
Yeah putting a portal in an empty house or tent is placeholder stuff.
a custom asset for all the DK’s and DH “trainers” maybe a fort like structure we see in Warsong Gultch.
this one I am getting greedy but it could be legion ruin assets for the Shendelar or maybe even the Moonguard architecture itself.
If the theme is healing then lets do it all the way.
This patch is good but it could have been way better… i am crossing my fingers that when Midnight launches and the Blood Elves and the Horde gets another elven megalopolis they can spare a little of the budget to make Amirdrassil a proper city.
The night elves haven’t had a temple of Elune for 10000 years. It was the only building reminiscent of the Highborne era. There is no reason for them to have a dedicated temple, when they have an open space with a moonwell at Bel’ameth where they can live directly under the moonlight and the boughs of a tree gifted by Elune.
Sure, but this should be dedicated to the magi. The night elves as a “living with nature” civilization should simply be able to live in their wilds, and among the boughs of the world tree.
As such, their current home is quite close to Nighthaven which was their capital upto the Third War anyway. .
Teldrassil isn’t 10k years old. The Temple of the Moon in Darnasus there didn’t grow from trees.
We are seeing Night Elves from all corners joining the community at Amirdrassil, its not that kind of a hegemonic culture anymore otherwise those others would not even be allowed on the island.
We got mages, the undead and the fel all roaming around.
Isn’t the temple on Darnassus a temple to Elune? I think maybe you were being too literal with the naming here, IE Tomb of Sargeras as the Temple of Elune. I think what anyone means when they say a temple of Elune isn’t a rebuilding of that specific building, but more akin to the buildings we see in Darnassus, Azshara and Feralas.
I think it’s the start of a complete revamp of the old world… effectively WOW 2.0 All of the old Vanilla regions look rather primitive compared to new zones, this is the start of fixing that.
These folks were responding to what Blizzard actually wrote, and then proceeded to softly walk back in ways that allowed them plausible deniability.
Originally, the Night Elves were absolutely genocided. Blizzard has that in print, if not in those specific words. What we see now is Blizzard walking back that narrative choice - and I believe it has far more to do with the narrative team never wanting that story and doing their best to unwind Afriasiabi’s “shock and awe” narrative than taking any kind of mea culpa.
But yes, for two expansions, Night Elf players were left very much feeling like they had been wiped off the board, with no clear level-set from Blizzard to set the record straight. Anything to counter this narrative was either hidden away in mission table missions or glossed though passively or hinted at out of game (which generally means it isn’t actually true).
Horde players should very well be able to empathize with being written one, distasteful, way and then Blizzard quietly walking that back - though more often than not, Horde gets to play through the walk-back. But I don’t begrudge the Horde that blessing. I just wish Blizzard would give the same courtesy to the Alliance, instead of acting as if any kind of Alliance win is shameful.
My controversial opinion is that Amirdrassil should stay neutral all the way up until TWW. The same applies to Gilneas and Undercity, but to a lesser extent.
Mostly Amirdrassil, because I don’t wanna have to start worrying about accidentally flying into the one, sole hostile zone while flying at MAXIMUM ZOOM while picking flowers and digging for metals. And like, more content for everyone or something.
Actually, they do use that specific word. Only in the Alliance PoV sections (in Elegy), but they still signed off on including that specific, loaded word - to describe an event that half their playerbase was an impotent victim to (which is normal pre-WoW backstory for playable races, but hadn’t been a playable experience before), and the other half was a forced perpetrator of (which again had been backstory for some playable races, but was explicitly a thing they had been intentionally moving away from as the start of WoW’s story).
That word’s precise definitions do not always require that the population affected was nearly wiped out of existence, but that is one of its common uses. Add that to the homeless night elves left programmed into Stormwind for years and years while the only gameplay update was a ravaged Darkshore, and Blizz once again showed the players a picture that looked much worse than its tiny, out-of-the-way factual caption said it really was.
(Which is/was also my complaint about Amirdrassil’s placement - Blizz never had the night elves abandon Kalimdor, but the story’s optics left a lot of people who don’t read deeply into the lore thinking that they had, and I wanted the situation to look more close to what it actually was. That’s why I’m happy about the “[zone] visitor” NPCs getting added, because hopefully that’s something that more casual players can notice.)
I’m largely happy with how Amirdrassil turned out. I think it’s a good place to leave in lore-hole stasis for a while.
Sincerely hoping Silvermoon gets completely void bombed and Blood elves get a new city in Ringing Deeps. They’ll still have a portal to Quel’thalas tho.
Teldrassil and Darnassus was younger than orgrimmar, you know, the city made by a race from another planet, and thats realistically the only piece of land the night elves lost.
Relevance? Especially when the majority of the Night elf population moved there, apparently, from all over their lands. Which are either contested or blighted.
