I will say Dark Irons are 100% worth it, if nothing else because they have a LOT of story relevance and a solid background. They’re evergreen, they show up everywhere, they got the extra quest for weapons/a mount with blood elves. Their customizations are limited but they have great Dragon Age style dwarf tattoos and that’s groovy.
And some great hairdos.
Also the fantastic and superior dwarf base.
On the other hand, the thought of doing the war campaign in this day and age makes me wince, so fair enough. I would recommend the mount from doing it, but that is a lot of BFA and… well… yikes.
Does not the Suramar quest chain give enough rep to unlock them or do players still need to grind?
That said the Suramar storyline is one of the best in the game.
I would say it’s worth it for the mounts, but I would honestly be lying through my teeth.
As much as I like my spikey red horse and very fluffly blue and gold wolf.
I assume the reason that void elves are a lot less present than the other allied races in Dragonflight is building up to ELF OVERLOAD THE EXPANSION, but that’s only when I’m being positive. Otherwise, when you compare them to their counterpart, the Nightborne, it’s pretty grim. And again, these are void elves, who we DESPERATELY need to get to know since they didn’t have an entire “getting to know you” zone. Or even a dungeon.
Can’t remember the patch number, but yeah, they got rid of the rep and prerequisites beyond having a character of level 40+ to do the quests with.
I was literally just a few hundred rep away from being able to unlock Nightborne when it dropped… and yes, I had known it was coming before hand and I still was doing the grind…
And look, maybe the intention with void elves was always to leave them short on lore because, by their nature, blood elf lore is their lore.
But for a concept as hefty as void infusion and defection, they’re awfully light on identity. And the reluctance to give them something, explain how they interact with other Alliance races, or even explain where more void elves are coming from (obviously the reasonable answer is the Alliance aligned short elves who sometimes hang out with them but we have NO LORE ON THAT) is just, not to put too fine a point on it, maddening.
So maybe the real void elves were inside me all along.
The initial batch of allied races (and the Mag’har) definitely are weird as hell, with the ren’dorei being one of the more contrived ones for sure. The sheer level of coincidences that need to line up, coupled with the retcon towards the Sunwell? Very weird.
But that’s what happens when you have devs that shriek in terror when someone so much as mentions High Elves.
The thing is I actually think making the High / Blood Elves Horde was a great idea. It changed the sorts of stories you could tell with the Horde. It was a legitimately interesting turn of events that made the sorta Slobs VS Snobs Red VS Blue aesthetic way more interesting. As the slobs now had the ultimate snobs, and the Alliance’s Johnny Generic rear sure could use something as wild as crystal spaceship moon goats.
Where they screwed up was constantly dangling the High Elves in front of the Alliance. I think humans or Gnomes should’ve been the lead magical race for Blue and the Thalassian Elves should’ve been the Horde’s.
Thinking about this more and reading the ongoing discussion, I remember having this take as well that I wanted to add:
Void Elves should’ve always been ‘voidified’ High Elves and never Blood Elves. It would’ve been so much less contrived than the story we got.
Alleria already had a contingent of High Elves in her roster, why couldn’t they have implemented some sort of incident on Argus involving L’ura? By making them defected Blood Elves, they not only muddied the waters of Blood Elven lore but created an inconsistent narrative that didn’t need to be implemented.
Heck if they REALLY wanted them to be Blood Elves for some reason, there’s even opportunities with leftover populations in Outland where Void entities are just chugging about in places like Netherstorm. Although, I’m unsure of the canonical state of those places or any leftover from Kael’thas’ fall from grace.
I guess all this to say, they had ample opportunity to spin up something viable but flopped astronomically in the storytelling department. Which is sadly the vibe nowadays.
Because I’m still not sure what the titular Battle For Azeroth was over. It pitched itself as a battle between the Horde and Alliance for dominon over Azeroth. But that kinda petered out midway through. But Saurfang said for Azeroth before he got insta killed by Sylvanas evil fart beam. So. Not sure what they were going for there.
Then N’Zoth turned up for a bit. Menacing approximately 2 zones and not even full time as I’m pretty sure the Mogu were just kinda there taking advantage of the chaos. And that was sorted out pretty handily thanks to some gawdy jewelry and a cape made out’ve Wrathie’s uncle father.
So. With nothing else to show for the whole experience but the ARs, clearly the real Battle For Azeroth was the friends we made along the way.
And isn’t that all that really matters?
Uh no it was a narrative abortion that managed to offend everyone, please no one and somehow make even SL look good at least from a gearing perspective.
But ya know. There’s some fox dudes and emo elves for our trouble. That’s pretty much all their lore right there. Certainly isn’t a net positive but not really a negative either.
Um. We talking about the same character because he betrayed his people to the Scourge.
Granted I don’t know much about him. Given his really stupid hat, description in the Sylvanas novel and hanging out with then probable incel Lor’Themar I can’t say I looked into him too deep.
Why would I. He wasn’t in WC3 and my best earliest memory of him was a fairly tedious march through a Scourge fortress.
Seriously Scourgeholme really should’ve just been a dungeon.
I haven’t played that enough times on Alliance but if I’m remembering correctly he’s just a fire mage.
And fire mage is definitely part of Blood Mage but they feel way more Destro Locky to me. I’d do some dark ish to get the ability to replace an infernal with a phoenix.