Wouldn’t they be damaged instead?
I’m confused 
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Plot armor reverses the effect.
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Yeah, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. This is why I think we’ll eventually see Forsaken Paladins, when the story allows for them.
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It’s an example of gameplay and story segregation.
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Pretty much this.
Gameplay wise, Priests and Paladins literally not being able to heal Forsaken, or Death Knight Tanks in general would be kind of a dealbreaker.
Another example is that Night Elf, Human and Troll Priests all worship different powers. Lorewise, they should have different abilities. But that’s too complicated so they just made it so they all get the same toolkits and in Vanilla they also had racial spells (which were axed later on due to imbalances) to emphasize the difference between the races faith.
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Yeah, Forsaken and Death Knight stats would have to be front loaded to compensate for no healing or interaction with the light. It’d be a bit absurd, but probably pretty interesting.
I understand the balance issues, but why not at least have unique spell visuals for the different races or different sources of power. That seems much more doable.
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In other games they typically balance out Undeads weakness by giving them immunity/regeneration from sources that would normally damage the living.
In Divinity, poison damage heals the undead and healing damages them. (With heals not having “unfriendly” fire turned off, you can one shot most packs of undead by using a big heal, it’s pretty cheesy.
In Pathfinder, they use a Positive/Negative energy system. Cure Wounds does positive energy, which means it heals the living and damages the undead. Inflict wounds does negative damage and damages the living while healing the undead.
It’s pretty interesting but it gets real messy if you don’t have complete control over how your party is built.
I mean probably? Though I’m not gunna guess the resources needed to make a different skin for Priests toolkits for every different faith, even if you cheesed it by making Humans/Dwarves/Belves/Draenei all use the same one (since they all worship the Light).
Especially not for ~2004 era Blizzard.
Quite a while ago, I remember reading something (it was either a blue post, or an article with a quote from someone - it was from a Blizz source). It had said that when a Forsaken/DK was healed by the Light, that while it would heal them, they would experience a very unpleasant, burning feeling from it.
I remember mentioning this to one of our main tanks at the time, back in WoD, so I think I had read about it before then.
Ah… ok… I may have found one place where I read it:
" When undead channel the Light, they do not disintegrate or explode from channeling the Light, though they may wish they would.[36] Instead, it feels to them as if their entire bodies are being consumed in righteous fire. Forsaken healed by the Light (whether the healer is Forsaken or not) are effectively cauterized by the effect: the wound is healed, but the healing effect is cripplingly painful. Thus, Forsaken priests are beings of unwavering willpower. Forsaken and death knight tanks suffer nobly when they have priest or paladin healers in the group, and Sir Zeliek really hates himself.[9]"
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This is correct. Some things merely exist for game mechanics purposes. Forsaken are technically undead, but cannot be shackled because if they as a race had a CC type all their own which would work against them and not against anyone else, it would be dumb.
This is another such example of game mechanics trumping lore.
Thank you! I remembered hearing something similar, but I never had a point of reference from anything concrete! My DK alt can now rest easy knowing it’s not a disease 
It’s just that the light hates him
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lol, pretty much.
I think that was why I had mentioned it to our tank, because he played a DK. He was pulling everything in creation, and I got snarky with him, telling him every time I healed him, his character was in agonizing pain. 
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There was a time it was. Original beta sort of thing. Sort of.
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Recently it was retconned to necrotic energy, not Shadow, that tethers a Forsaken’s soul, with the Light thinning the energy to the point that a Forsaken or other Undead’s soul is almost as attached as it was in life. This causes some obvious sensory problems that Undead who usually have deadened senses for the most part don’t usually have like smelling their own rotting, feeling the decay of their bodies, tasting the stuff they eat (Forsaken have gone on record as saying food all tastes like “ash” to them), etc…
also yeah the light causes them pain because to the Light they are unnatural wicked creatures that should not naturally be.
Hmmmm I have a priest alt… time to burn some friends It’s all for their own good, of course
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Same reason why void elves can be healed by holy magic be it from priest/paladin.
Shouldn’t in theory be the best idea but it would be too game breaking to not have.
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Most of the time yeah but it was handwaved for players. One of the head honchos at the priest class hall is a forsaken so it all depends on how big a connection to the light they had in life
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The Ask CDev thing they had many years ago also had this question:
Q. Are there long-term effects on an undead who is in regular contact with the Holy Light in a positive way?
A. It is difficult to say, as there are no known records of undead wielding the Holy Light before the Third War. There are reports, however, that some Forsaken have slowly experienced a sharpening of their dulled senses of touch, smell, etc., as well as an increase in the flashes of positive emotions that have otherwise become so rare since their fall into undeath. Unfortunately, this may be the cause of the Forsaken priesthood’s increased attempts at self-destruction; regaining these senses would force the priests to smell their own rotting flesh, taste the decay in their mouths and throats, and even feel the maggots burrowing within their bodies.
They also had this blurb about the effects of holy / shadow magic in a question about priests spells, which I thought fed well into implications about the state of undead minds:
Q. Is there a reason that many priest spells, especially shadow priest spells, have names that refer to psychic phenomena like " [Mind Spike]" or " [Psychic Horror]"? Are priests implicitly telepaths?
A. The Light is often said to bring about feelings of positive emotion— hope, courage, comfort— and the like. Shadow abilities are just the opposite, able to impart feelings like despair, doubt, and panic. In a poetic sense, it can be said that the emotions which the Light brings about come from the “heart,” whereas the emotions manipulated by shadow are often based on survival logic, and therefore affect the “mind.” That said, priests and their abilities are not necessarily always psychic or telepathic in nature.
I always thought that Forsaken Paladins made less sense than Forsaken Priests, because priests seemed to be more about wielding the light on-demand, while Paladins were more about being infused with the light non-stop during a battle to empower their physical abilities (like with paladin auras).
The CDev answers made it sound like that constant level of light interaction would drive a Forsaken paladin insane or, since it gave them back “positive emotions” in combination with the pain, would make them leave the Forsaken faction, which was pretty clearly evil. So in that situation, I could see a Forsaken paladin existing in lore, but only as a non-playable character that would have to leave the player faction. (Back then, I also used to think that Sylvanas might get redeemed, and that if she were, it would be heavily connected to her being struck by massive amounts of Light, to restore her connection to positive emotions, but her mental condition has since been retconned to be due to her soul being split).
Even though those Cdev answers were “official” from Blizzard’s creative team at the time, it’s a bit in question how canonical they are today. Since that time, Blizzard’s implied a bit of a retcon about regular undead too (not just Sylvanas), making the undead emotional state sound more like PTSD than the result of their soul’s normal state being cut off from the light absent traumatic contact with it, and they made Calia Menethil into a Light-based undead.
So right now, I think the rules are pretty uncertain.
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How do you ress an undead back to undeath? Imagine casting ress on an afk undead character and they became a live human.
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“I’m alive? I’m alive!!” random Forsaken gets killed again seconds later and gets rezzed as an Undead again “Awwwww… I liked being alive…” and it just continuously cycles through THAT over and over again.
We need a WoW Machinima of this now, just title it “Schrodinger’s Forsaken”.
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/gets rezz’d by a holy pally and can smell things again
“Oi, wtf is that smell? It’s like burning rotten flesh. Oh, it’s me.”
/dies and is reborn again
“God damn it.”
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