How do you think Ethereals will fit in the future of Warcraft?
I have thought up a few scenarios for their future inclusion as a possible playable race.
The first scenario is that they come as a neutral race seeking aid against the Void and returning to their home world.
Downside: After this expansion they will have nothing to offer other than being the transmog and Void Storage vendors in the cities.
The second scenario is that they are recruited into the Alliance as allies with the Void Elves.
Downside: negatively affects any semblance of balance in a Void expansion. The Alliance is already pretty heavily stacked in the fight against the Void and this will just add more to their already crowded roster.
The third scenario is that they join the Horde in some sort of trade and military partnership. This gives the Horde obvious representation in the fight against the Void.
Downside: Possible missed opportunity to see various interactions with the Void Elves.
The final scenario is screw all of this and they just stay not playable. The Consortium returns as a faction to grind reputation with.
I mean, realistically, weâd have gotten Ethereals instead of Void Elves. Missed opportunity in the extreme. I suppose they might go Horde to give it a more Void-steeped race, but given the Ethereals are already friendly with Void Elves that just seems odd. I mean, one of the Void Elf racials is, âEthereal Connection,â which provides a discount from services from Ethereals.
As far as a race goes I think they could provide some very interesting customization options. Iâm very much so in favor of playable Ethereals coming from a group that uses masks as some kind of symbol of their personality. Skin Tones could easily be bandage color/wrapping style. Hair style/color could be energy based. Think Ben 10âs Grandmother.
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/ben10/images/f/fa/Verdona_Anodite.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/310?cb=20181217085525
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âWhere will ethereals fit in as a possible playable race?â
They donât. Not that that stopped Blizzard from creating the renâdorei out of thin air. They have no reason to join either faction. The Void-aligned faction wants us dead. The rest of them only care for trade.
Iâm just tired of magical races. Give me Aldrachi, space lemurs, or anthro butterflies. More unique flesh and blood races, fewer âx race twisted/empowered by x forcesâ.
Seems like the have a built-in rapport with the Void Elves, so probably Alliance.
Also, Alliance needs more races that arenât just boring high fantasy races.
To be fair, all my years of indulging high fantasy did not temper my expectations for Void Elves.
Neutral race makes the most sense. There are multiple factions within the Ethereals, that have no problems battling each other.
From a smuggling/technological perspective they can find common ground with the goblins, and theyâre already aligned with the Void Elves through Locus Walker/Alleria.
Despite whatâs happening in BfA with Xal and NâZoth, it wonât be the last time we face the servants of the Void.
I suppose that would depend on which faction of Ethereals reach out to either faction. But yes I do agree there is a huge amount of potential with a relationship with the Void Elves.
I really donât want them to have a redo of Legion(most specifically Argus).
Ethereals would likely become playable if we were to have a void or otherwise cosmic-based expansion.
Iâm not really too concerned with the question of if they should be Alliance, Horde, or Neutral, because all that means is that a specific subfaction of Ethereals joins one of the factions due to story beats relevant to that expansion.
Goblins becoming a playable Horde race didnât stop them from continuing to show up in a neutral capacity after all.
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I could perhaps imagine them being another shared player race insofar as all it would take is two competing Nexus-Princes taking up extended contracts with each of the factions, since weâve seen that Ethereals have no qualms about killing hostile employees in matters of business. Aside from the void-aligned stuff and the anti-void Protectorate, their focus seems to be mercantile, and as we see with goblins war can be as much a matter of business as anything else.
Maybe have the factions contract them to provide mercenaries, technicians and ecodome-type infrastructures if we ever find ourselves traveling to hostile worlds (worlds that arenât just a bunch of lame five-minute jaunts to kill some demons in small areas full of recycled assets) in response to some externally originating threat and need someone to make our footholds more habitable. Perhaps we find out a planet somewhere with a world-soul has become Old God-infested, and we need to invade it to put a stop to such nonsense before they reach the titan within.
Being separate Nexus-Prince âcompanies,â instead of looking and acting basically the same like player-oriented pandaren do on both sides, they could be differentiated in behavioral and visual themes based on perhaps differing nations or even species of origin back on Kâaresh; after all, while itâs said a particular race created the shielding technology that allowed them to survive, that doesnât mean their worldâs other sentient inhabitants didnât also seek refuge in their protected cities and end up âetherealedâ along with them. Perhaps have some acquired differences from doing business in differing worlds and dimensions or differing focus in business practices. Maybe even have one side utilize the distinctly accented voices Ethereals had back in Outland, while the other could sound more like the Ethereals weâve encountered most recently.
Unlike the pandaren, Ethereals are made out to be an extraplanetary âcivilizationâ (in quotes because lacking one world, itâs arguably not just a singular civilization) that represents the remnants of an entire world traveling amidst myriad planets and planes of reality rather than just a fraction of a fraction of an expatriated group from one nation located on one landmass, so thereâs no hard reason every Trade Prince and his people would all necessarily have to look and act exactly the same as the others.
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I actually never understood the supposed relationship between Ethereals and Void Elves that their racial implies.
It feels like Blizz has forgotten that the majority of Ethereals we worked with back in BC seemed staunchly anti-Void. Hell, it feels like they forgot that non-Void Ethereals even exist.
If anything, I always imagined most Ethereals would be extremely wary of Void Elves, afraid they might go down the same path as the Ethereum.
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It is kind of odd; the only old-school âtraderâ-type Ethereal (i.e. the type associated with void storage and transmog) that we meet in Legion whoâs got anything to say about the void/Ethereal situation doesnât even seem to think very highly of Locus-walker.
Void-associated Ethereals - namely Locus-walker, his seeming peers at the Telogrus Rift and the Ethereum/Shadowguard - come across like aberrations rather than representative of most Ethereals in general, so making the normal Etherealsâ merchant-themed stuff part of a void elf Racial is indeed a pretty strange decision.
Call me crazy, but I feel like the original idea may have been to just make Ethereals an Allied Race, and instead we got⌠Void Elves. Maybe it wouldâve required too much work to make the Ethereal models playable. I mean, very little about the Void Elves even really feels all that Elven. They very much feel like Ethereals all around.