So it has randomly occured to me that there are several NPCS and mobs that bear the title of “Nethermancer.” but there seems to be very little official information that I can find about what that actually means. Obviously it implies that they tap into the Twisting Nether as a source of magic, but that is about it.
My thoughts are that affliction Warlocks are actually Nethermancers, as they call on the shadowy substance of the Nether for all their scary occult magic, rather than incinerating people with Fel fire, which is the typical MO for destruction Warlocks. Then again, this might just be me trying too hard to come up with in-universe explanations for different specs.
The impression I get is that “mancer-type” spellasters are basically just practitioners of a given magical field who specialize in a specific area. So a geomancer would be a shaman or mage who specializes in manipulating the element of earth, pyromancers for fire, cryomancers for ice, hydromancers more generally for water, etc. Necromancers obviously focus on raising and controlling the dead, which can be done by a mage, but also directly with Death magic, by way of void magics, the fel or even the darker facets of alchemy and voodoo.
Nethermancers have been rather specific to Outland in-game (in particular Kael’thas’ blood elves and one type of ethereal mob), so presumably they’re spellcasters who specialize in weaving and shaping the ambient energies of the Twisting Nether, either by way of their educations as mages or warlocks. It also appears mainly in Netherstorm, suggesting that it may be a field of magic they acquired by deconstructing and studying how their captured naaru dimension-ships interact with the Nether’s magical energies in the process of building the mana-forges.
There are other exotic “mancer” types who’ve popped up like fungalmancers, astromancers, voidmancers, shadowmancers, chronomancers, and telemancers; all seem to basically be sub-sets of the bigger magical “schools” and associated disciplines wherein the individuals are focused on prioritizing and honing a particular facet of their field above the rest.
Well, technically it’s not the antithesis of Life. Death is. Fel (i.e. Disorder) is the antithesis of arcane/Order.
I get the sense that while ostensibly “at odds” six ways, the six cosmic forces may kind of align along a two-sided balance in the physical universe, wherein Spirit and Decay are like the “scale” by which that alignment is determined. The more Spirit there is, the more things trend toward Light, Life and Order; the more Decay (or more pointedly, the less Spirit) there is, the more it skews into Void, Death and Disorder. Moreover Decay would encompass the loss and lack of Spirit, and thus sync with how Void, Death and Disorder are all empowered by consuming the three Spirit-enabled energies while Light, Life and Order are empowered by dispelling their counterparts.
Light, Life and Order inherently strive to build up while Void, Death and Disorder strive to break down. The former proliferate while the latter consume. Even with six different overall forces involved, there’s a sort of “hemispheric” trend going on, and the Spirit/Decay dichotomy may well amount to the balancing medium between them.
The frustrating thing is that the information that is available on this topic is so vague, that I think just about any of the interpretations brought up so far on this thread could be considered valid. I think Raselle is closest to hitting the mark though.
Back in the OG days of WoW, the Twisting Nether was sort of like ‘The Twisting Gateways to all realms’.
So it had realms of magic, chaos, spirits, fel and vast mysteries that many were keen to delve into.
Obviously many demons were summoned from the nether because well, they’re a bit invasive and it proved as a good means to travel to other worlds for them to cause havoc & disorder (If you recall, you could also see Azeroth from roofs of the Black Temple through the veil of the Twisting Nether).
I’d imagine ‘Nethermancers’ were those that sought to learn more further mysteries of the Twisting Nether. Personally back in BC / WOTLK, I thought Warlocks would be able to get a quest to succeed somewhat and be able to summon Eldritch terror beasts & pets / the stuff of Old Gods but alas, Blizzard’s retcons and ‘new lore’ (Soft-retcons in some-cases) has caused the details of the Nether to be quite a jumbled mess.
Personally I liked how the Nether / Twisting Nether was presented in the Burning Crusade; the twisting nether wasn’t evil, but it was dangerous - The twisting vast dimension of infinite gateways had infinite possibilities, but not all those possibilities were ones many would like to see.
In a way it kind of still is that. Due to its less-than-entirely-tangible nature and Disorder always eating away at the rules of existence, the Twisting Nether seems to often be a sort of intermediary realm through which the different planes can be temporarily bridged by taking advantage of the laws of space/time being less defined there.
Arguably the Twisting Nether might even be the reason that the cosmic forces are able to reach into our reality at all; were the tangible Great Dark all there was, with its hard-and-fast laws of space/time, they might all be locked out. The Twisting Nether existing in universal tandem with the Great Dark might provide a sort of semipermeable “membrane” across all of existence through which the whispers and influence of the external realms can get in.
