I quit playing in WoD, but came back for classic…haven’t done any of legion onward…what are these lightforged/highmountain prefixes all about?
Allied races. I’m sure there’s a blizz article out there somewhere.
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Lightforged Draenei are draenei that remained on Argus and fought the Legion and were imbued with the Light.
Highmountain Tauren are tauren from Highmountain.
Allied races, which are mostly reskins of existing races with new racials that you have to unlock by getting some kind of acheivmenet.
Lightforged Draenei are Draenei who stayed behind on Argus and have been further imbued with the Light to fight the Legion.
Highmountain Tauren are just Tauren from the Broken Isles in that expansion that have moose antlers, and are from the placed called Highmountain.
After discovering that there was a significant number of players who would feel compelled to roll characters of new races and would go to a great deal of effort to unlock them (and their transmog), they created the concept of allied races, which was implemented in Legion with the accompanying implementation of level scaling, which changed leveling from 30 hours to 120 hours and removed some popular leveling options.
You had to unlock your new allied race on a max level character. And if you didn’t have one already of that faction, you had to roll a new throwaway character, level them to max, do all the quests and rep, before you could roll that new allied race character, who you had to get to max level in order to unlock the transmog.
A lot of people didn’t make it and gave up somewhere along the line. People who used to enjoy leveling quit because of the time bloat they kept lecturing us would make leveling feel more rewarding.
Allied races are the subraces we wanted for a long time ago. Those races should have plain been customization. I think those are the least popular.
Many thousands of years ago after the draenei survivors left Argus a faction of them eventually split off from the rest. They later formed the Army of the Light, a group dedicated to fighting the Burning Legion. These draenei imbued themselves with the Light to become super soldiers. The Light is fused into their bodies. This is called lightforging. It’s like a more advanced version of paladins. Though not every lightforged is a paladin.
That’s why they have silver skin instead of blue. After the Legion’s defeat they settled down on Azeroth and are now part of the Alliance. They’re a very militaristic group.
Highmountain tauren are a sub-faction of tauren who live on the Broken Isles. Just like the taunka in Northrend and the yaungol in Pandaria. They were cut off from their cousins when the Sundering broke the world and turned their land into an island. After Legion they felt a kinship with the mainland tauren and joined the Horde.
The main physical difference is the highmountain have moose antlers instead of horns. In the War of the Ancients Huln Highmountain was a famous tauren leader who gained the antler blessing from Cenarius for his efforts. His kin and descendants in Highmountain kept that gift through today.
I like that it gives you encouragement to level up the other faction and experience their story-lines.
The ideal, to me, would be that the game unlocked a free Alliance side and a free Horde side character boost as a one-time offering for unlocking an allied race on each faction. So if you wanted to play Vulpera, you level up a Goblin or whatever, then get a free boost once you’ve unlocked one of the Horde races and can apply it to start playing your Vulpera right away.
The greed of trying to coerce you into buying a level boost or race change your “disposable” character is where the system is a bit degenerate. Whoever came up with that probably got a raise, even if it is scummy.
Some people I suppose consider that inspirational. To me it felt like blatant manipulation. And that has the opposite effect on me. I eventually unlocked a few of the earlier ones, which I had all the prerequisites for since Legion.