This training is insane even for a fantasy setting!

Lore Story Forum
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So going back through BC classic, as a blood elf paladin, I’ve been going through the training a aspiring blood knight has to go through to join the order. But the training seems insane if you think about it, unrealistic even in a fantasy setting.

At lvl 10-12 you get a quest to go to an island in the ghostlands, but you aren’t told why, other than its a test. You get ambushed by a knight of the order at said island, whom you must kill in battle to pass the test. Now think about that, a person not even in the order yet, has to best a full member of the order to past this initial test. Though this doesn’t pose manpower issues because you’re told to revive the slain knight with some stolen light from M’uru.

But things just get more insane, at lvl 20, for your next test, You must battle 4 Blood Knight Champions, one after the other, and best all 4. Mind you, you still haven’t even entered the order at this point, you’re still an aspirant. So to qualify to join the order, you must best 4 of some of its best fighters, all in quick succession, without a chance to rest in-between the fights. After you succeed in this insane test, you’re still not even in the order yet.

Now you have to go find materials for a weapon before you’ll be allowed to join the order. The materials are all in incredibly dangerous places, a scourge fortress, deatholme, a warlock cult den, with demons as well, ragefire chasm, A castle full of werewolves, Shadowfang Keep, and a cave full of dangerous naga, with a favored creature of the old gods at the end of it, Blackfathom deeps.

This is all just to get your foot in the door as an adept, the lowest rank in the blood knights.

How the heck has this order not collapsed and ceased to exist due to all the people who want to join it being sent on a large number of suicide missions one after the other?

Never mind the fact that to become a master of this order involves things like large financial and material contributions out of your own pocket, as well as going to holy places of the light to commit actual blasphemy by defiling said holy place and greatly pissing off the spirits of the dead.

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Sometimes I am really happy that I ignore the text in the Quests. :joy:

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At that point, I think I’d start my own order then.

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Back in my day, I had to go to an island just to learn how to fight while really angry!

Yeah, Blood Knights kinda got setup to be more than they are, judging by quests.

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Blood Knights were initially set up to be supremely intense, borderline villainous, Paladins that’s didn’t subscribe nor resemble your conventional Light wielders. It may have been somewhat extreme, and often ridiculous, but it was meant to not resemble what you’d expect from an order like this.

As of late though, Blood Knights have somewhat been homogenized into standard Paladins, just decked in red rather than gold. This is likely because they lost M’uru, and the ending lesson for the Blood Elves was that what they did to M’uru was a bad thing, but y’know.

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I really did appreciate the blood elf take on paladins even if it was super duper edgy.

I would have liked to see blood knights be the horde paladin style to make Alliance and Horde feel unique in their own ways.

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Yeah Blood elves has it rough, went from being cool and interesting to well.

Humans with elf ears and green eyes.

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Blood Elf characterization suffers more from a lack of interest than not being edge lords any more.

Liadrin not being cool with Naaru torture or death trials anymore didn’t mean they had to make her this super generic commander. There is a middle ground between “super arrogant and mind stuck in darker thoughts in reaction to genocide and the continued thread of extinction” and super dry, preachy and obvious statements of “Killing officers messes up their chain of command, Champion”.

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Her old voice actor was miles more fitting.

Blizzard cant write good characters.

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I don’t mind if Blood Elves are morally white now, but I was kind of hoping that the Death magic discoveries they gained from the Isle of Thunder would play a much larger role in the narrative, if only just to serve as a reason for Bthem to keep their red color themes…

They really had us thinking the anima/vita stuff from ToT was going to be big. I guess the blood golems Belves use technically run on Death magic according to Shadowlands lore, which should be kind of a big ethical question for Sindorei culture.

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Indeed. In that Blood Knight dead zone between BC and WoD, we were told that they were still unique paladins who drew their power from the Sunwell rather than this full-blown conversion to the Church of Light. A pity they didn’t bother exploring that angle.

I actually remember Metzen talking about how the BKs were originally going to have a big role in WoD that would bring their understanding of their powers full circle from TBC. A shame that got cut along with half of everything else in that expansion.

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If I recall correctly from before Shadowlands came out, one of the devs said that the anima magic that belves took from the Throne of Thunder doesn’t have anything to do with the resource. They just happened to reuse the name for something else.

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In one of interviews I saw it was called a different thing, but compared in a way like val’kyr relate to kyrians:

There are a lot of interesting things with how the people of Azeroth have interpreted things that are more cosmic in nature. There are definitely ties between the anima of the Shadowlands and the anima of Pandaria. They are used in similar ways and without going into too much detail there, it is very similar to what we see with the kyrian. We have seen the Valarjar of Stormheim before and the Val’kyr of Northrend but we haven’t seen ultimately where these were drawn from – the core origins of them.

© https://sagamer.co.za/2020/05/28/a-deep-dive-into-bastion-the-shadowlands-realm-of-selflessness-and-greater-purpose/

gl hf

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What?! But being all bloody and necromancy-y, they almost have to bend over backwards in order to NOT retcon it into being Death magic. Talk about not being able to screw things up worse even if they tried…

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Apparently I was wrong, as Chronorabbit showed, but ToT’s anima magic was really just a form of life creation and flesh shaping, not necromancy. The mogu used it to shape saurok out of crocolisks, if I remember right.

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I would not say you are wrong, it’s just that their wording is ambiguous and they are quick with retcons. It’s not the same anima for sure, because the Shadowlands one is extracted from the deceased. And it’s not what was done in Pandaria.

But it might be some sort of imitation, like a val’kyr is a faux kyrian (or the concept is inspired by them).

gl hf

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Well, I guess it’s easy to kind of handwave, since Shadowlands so far has shown that Death magic is definitely more complicated than most of the other 5, as it seems to take on a lot of different forms and flavors depending on how its used. It could easily be shoved under the rug a bit by just saying that both uses of anima are just related to Death in a complicated but unspecified way.

After all, not all fundamental forces in reality are of the same complexity (in terms of how we understand them). Maybe Deatth is just more mathematically messy as a fundamental magic compared to the other 5?

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I can accept going on dangerous tasks to weed out weaklings, but I can’t get over the idea that there are only a set number of knights with insignias, so an initiate must adopt the insignia of a fallen knight. Just how many knights were there originally, and why wouldn’t they want to train new ones?

I also want to entertain the notion that the blood knights who went to Outland repaired their relationship with the Light during their journeys in Outland. We all know how it ended with M’uru, Liadrin, and the Sunwell, but I like to believe that, as the adventuring blood knights united with the Scryers, expat blood elves allied to the Naaru, encountered other Naaru and cooperated with them, and battled Kael’s blood knights, they regained their faith even as the higher ranked knights who remained in Quel’Thalas stayed the same until the Sunwell climax. It would explain how we kept our powers even after M’uru was abducted from Silvermoon.