The Blood Elves? Nah, they didn’t reform. That’s essentially the whole divide between High and Blood Elves in a nutshell. High Elves went to rehab (EDIT: Or at least weaned themselves off magic enough to overcome their excessive coonsumption). Blood Elves just switch to new drugs to get their fix.
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I feel Pre-Third War High Elves were fairly frivolous, specially on the city itself. Without much conflict, I think elves tend towards decadence. I say this was mostly in the city because frontier-wise High Elves still had to deal with the amani, so it was the “inner” population the one that enjoyed of such a more frivolous lifestyle.
Modern High Elves are said to be “peasants” by Elisande, only playing at nobility, which makes me think most Modern High Elves are either soldiers, or traders and scholars that saw better opportunities in human realms than Quel’thalas itself. If we are to be honest, most HE displacement pre Third War had to have happened because the human reals offered something Quel’thalas didn’t, and that really kinda just makes sense if you weren’t part of the high class, other wise, moving into human lands is just a clear lowering of status.
In the same vein, I feel most modern Blood Elves are part of that high society, survivors of a decimation where they HAD to step up and replace the fallen combatants to defend Quel’thalas, people whose former lifestyle was mostly frivolous and safe. And they survived, and they flaunted it; they wrapped themselves in resilience and opulence, they became bolder than ever before. Hedonism on the face of such tragedy, and overcoming it, it’s a celebration. It’s not frivolity born of stagnation, but the knowledge safety is not guaranteed and have to fight for it and die for it.
So in the way I feel Modern High Elves have wrapped themselves on temperance and frugality, Blood Elves have done the opposite, doing so with opulence and unabashed deliciousness. Both are ways to cope with their generational trauma, but Blood Elves lean on the hedonism as celebration. Even their piety in the light is zealous, intoxicating, exuberant.
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Blizz needs concept artists too! You’d be good at that.
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Reminds me of the tbc quests where there are people concerned with their garden party while silvermoon is collapsing.
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Pinnacle of the Blood Elf fantasy?
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…including yours.
Flips hair
I get the impression you firmly hold that, before a race can be playable, it must appear first in the game, as an NPC?
Waits intently for the reply
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You nailed it right up until the last sentence.
Please keep your otherwise-wonderfully detailed and thoughtful posts free of personal attacks: leave that to us REAL trolls!
Mea culpa.
Flips hair and goes back on the prowl
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That ‘party’ and it’s quest always gives me a chuckle. I do it on each Horde character, Belf or not, and PROUDLY keep the permanent ‘invitation’ in my main backpack!
PROUDLY flips hair
Addendum: When I think on it, that party does typify so much about the elven psychology in this game: War or no war, Dead Scar or not; on the whole, we’d rather have a good time until the very end! Now, back to the party…
Pass the hors d’ orderves, dear…NOT THOSE! By the Sunwell, that plate has been there for nearly an HOUR!
Spoiled! SPOILED, I tell you!
Away with it!
sighs So hard to get good help these days.
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Well, back in Vanilla, Priests all had two abilities based on their race to exemplify these differences.
Night Elf Priests had Starshards and Elune’s Grace.
Undead Priests had Devouring Plague and Touch of Weakness.
Dwarf Priests had Fear Ward and Desperate Prayer.
Troll Priests had Shadow Orb and Hex of Weakness.
Human Priests had Feedback and Desperate Prayer.
It ended up being axed later as part of the homogenization you mention. It is a shame, because it did give each race a spin on the class, however minor. Reality gameplay-wise was that it was just another set of balancing to deal with on top of racials. Devouring Plague was amazing in PVP, and Fear Ward was incredibly valuable utility.
It’s not that WoW’s gameplay systems don’t allow for it, but more that this design philosophy has changed, for better or worse (and in my opinion, worse).
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Hookahs and throw pillows everywhere!
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Yup. Basically, did you want to get into a raiding guild? Be a Dwarf priest. Moment you hit 60, that was it, everyone wanted you
I wish they would have expanded this system for other classes rather than just scrapping it entirely.
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Making racial variations for classes would be hell to balance. No way it could be done.
But I do think cosmetic racial effects for some classes should be done more often. We see it in druid forms and shaman totems, but little else. I think Blizzard should do it more often. Druids, priest, shamans, even mages, warlocks and paladins should have more race-based spell effects.
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If they made each class thematically appropriate for each race, like KT and ZTroll druids, that would also be pretty sweet.
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Honestly? This is what the ‘new’ glyph system should be.
If Blizzard were going to make a trade skill about cosmetic spell changes, there’s actually a ton they could have done to make that actually exciting and interesting.
The current glyphs are pathetic.
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Blizzard seem to have abandoned the glyph system. During MoP, you had a ton of new glyphs every patch. Now we’re lucky if a single class gets one glyph.
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Man you guys are dedicated to fighting the fight.
I hope for the best for your wish of High Elves but I firmly believe that they won’t happen in a straight-forward implementation of them as long as Ion and the current dev team are in charge.
I think it’s more likely they’ll give more conventional options for customization of Void Elves.
They could even do a quick quest line about it where Alleria finds some High Elves that want to do more for the war effort and want her to train them to use the void the way she did.
Then when you create a Void Elf you can go conventional void-infused elf or void-trained. Racials could be the same but you could get some blue and purple tinged flesh tones (like the Belf redtones) and blue/platinum/silver hair.
It would correct what, imo, was a poor choice all along which was having Void Elves being Blood Elves instead of High Elves.
Much like Death Knights and Demon Hunters can have two very different looks, Void Elves could as well.
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Blizzard drop various systems and ideas constantly. Honestly, WoW’s various systems have a lifespan of, at most, one expansion pack these days.
I’ve never played another MMO that doesn’t follow through with supporting its own ideas and mechanics the way WoW does. Every new expansion they just toss it all out and start over. It’s bizarre.
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None of us believe to get High Elves in a short term, maybe next expansion, but BfA is a ceased case. But, Ion might not be in charge for much longer, his record as game director are one decent expansion and the two worst expansions, and we currently are in one of the latter, but most importantly the playerbase is pissed with most of his decisions in charge and the way he address issues and communicate (when he does) with the players. Even if he didn’t go away from his position, the dev team have to accept the criticism and change their philosophy starting to make more player friendly decisions, because they didn’t did that in BfA and the results are disastrous.
Bringing that to our discussion, the first Allied Races they made weren’t attending traditional player demands, they just throw a bunch of new stuff that they thought were cool. Perhaps after all the backlash against the Allied Races so far, they might hear suggestions for the playerbase and release Allied Races that are popular among them like High Elves, San’layn, Wildhammer, Ogres etc. I didn’t mentioned Vulpera because Vulpera are pretty much confirmed.
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