Why can’t Nightborne be druids?

Ok I see what your saying.

And I just saw that lol.

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Not directly, but the Zandalari Empire predates the creation of the Night Elves. And the trolls have a longer tradition of being in tune with nature. It was the Night Elves that fell away from nature, quite probably upon their creation from the Dark Trolls and the influence of the Well of Eternity.

The Druidic mindset was on maintaining the balance and the requirement to pull off the Magics themselves required delving which in turn required patience. Young Illidan lacked this.

The Druids of the Flame went against the Balance and still have been shown being able to summon roots to entangle their enemies along with the shapeshifting. The Druidic mindset is not required for Druidism despite being the whole point for which it was designed for. The patience to delve into Nature and other things like the Elements is.

The Flame Druids all started out as normal Druids so presumably they once had the proper mindset to be trained as such.

Or indirectly.

True.

True.

Quite possibly true.

None of this is wrong. I’m not aruging any of it. That said you’re kind of talking in circles trying to get around the fact that lore is lore and lore back Malfurion, that’s it. The existence of Zandalari druids don’t have an affect on the current lore because we already know that their are Darkspear druids and the existence of Darkspear druids doesn’t clash or retcon the current lore because 1. we know the time frame in which they became druids, and 2. there is no lore that says the only way people can learn druidism is from Malfurion and by extension Cenarius.

I see and understand what you are saying but until a dev says or blizz releases a book or an ingame quest/text stating that the Zandalari were druids some 10 or 11k plus years ago, Malfurion is the first mortal druid, point :clap:t5:blank :clap:t5:periodt!:clap:t5:

I think we’ve just seen the invention of NightElf Fundamentalism.

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They should be called Priestess of the Moon.

No it’s an accurate description and understanding of the lore, and you’ve just proven multiple times that you are ok with ignoring the lore or you just don’t know it. Either way you’re wrong until Blizz says otherwise.

Or warriors of the moon. How about lunar sentinel or celestial knight or celestial warrior?

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Pretty much almost any race could be almost any job. What tends to limit it is cultural leanings of a race. Blood Elves, dwarves and NIghtborne could definitely be druids. Hell even undead might be able to with the whole Drust stuff we have seen recently. However none of those races really has druidic practice as a common part of their culture and so most people just aren’t going to get exposed to that while they grow up and find their role in life.

Beyond that there is also something of a mindset to it. With classes like Shaman and Druids there is a definite interaction and give and take with the forces your working with. It isn’t just a matter of learning a few spells. It is developing a relationship. That approach might not gel with the cultural world view of some races. An example of that would be Illidan. He had plenty of potential as a druid but had neither the mindset or desire to build the relationships needed so he persued arcane and then fel for power.

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Actually, what Cenarius said Illidan lacked was the understanding of sacrifice.

That understanding is key to understanding balance. Balance is about give and take, loss and gain, ebb and flow… Illidan wanted the knowledge Cenarius had to offer, but didn’t want to give anything for it. He didn’t respect the fundamental value of druidry because he didn’t understand (or maybe didn’t want to understand) it’s nature.

He did, in the end, learn this principle, but by then it was too late for him to walk the path. He decided against it when he decided there was nothing he wouldn’t give up to reach his goal. Because giving up everything, though it does show an understanding of sacrifice, is not balance; it’s skewing the scale too far to one side.

The Druids of the Flame did not actually go against that basic principle. They continued to maintain a balance (not the right balance, but a balance); they continued to sacrifice of themselves as much as they gave.

But what you give is what you get back, and so they reaped the reward for their endeavor.

The druidic mindset of maintaining balance is required for druidry, it is near to the very definition of druidry. Patience and “delving” into (whatever it is you think they delve into), may be a part of their development and perhaps part of nurturing their relationship with the balance that they keep, but those are not essential components to being druids; more like side effects, or stepping stones. The path is broader than the stones, and the balance is the path. Following that path is the definition of druidry.

Of course, that doesn’t make balance good or bad (because it’s balance it doesn’t actually take sides), and it doesn’t make that path the only way to be good or bad. Illidan was good, he was right in his fight against the Legion (even if it may have done a lot of damage along the way), but he did not utilize balance to achieve that end. And the Druids of the Flame, though they walked in balance, were wrong in what they did.

So, ultimately, It is not patience, or humility, or “delving”, or good, or bad, or any specific kind of magic or magical ability that is required for a person to be a druid. It is only the understanding and willingness to maintain balance.

There are plenty of ways to use nature magic, but the actual druidic aspect comes from a connection to the Emerald Dream. That’s what sets druids apart from, say, Quillboar and the like, or the original Harvest Witches. And said connection to the Emerald Dream is something that needs to be taught. Even a barely present connection is something all druids have, the ones with the title in lore.

Because of this, Druidism proper has two branches, Cenarion and Gonk, because these were the two Wild Gods who taught the first druids how to connect to the Emerald Dream and go to the next level in terms of nature magic. It’s somewhat unclear if the Thornspeakers have a similar connection to the Dream, but the implication is that they do. In which case the original Drust were probably taught that by Freya, many thousands of years ago.

In short, the playable Druids all have a connection to the Emerald Dream in some fashion, which requires a certain mindset and training. The Nightborne directly manipulate nature around them, altering it with the Arcane in a way that certainly simulates nature magic, but isn’t. Their very mindset makes it almost impossible to connect to the Dream, and even if they could, they’d still need to be taught. And no Druid would willingly teach a Nightborne that sort of connection unless they were practically night elven in lifestyle and mindset.

It doesn’t matter timeline wise because they’re Highborne, and Druids were usually lowborn. Not to mention no druid would have any reason to intermingle with highborne that weren’t allied with them before the war of the ancients proper started.

Well, I think it’s mostly because they didn’t want to have Pandaren be the only ones with the Monk class, and branched that out to all of the core races as well. I also imagine the ways of the monk might just be a bit more easier to pick up than other skills other classes require.

Otherwise? Cultural reasons, mostly. Druids are deeply rooted in culture, a druid has to have a deep reverence to nature, a willingness and ability to protect it, and a connection to the Emerald Dream. Not all societies have that, though you are correct that it probably could be taught to willing students, but those would be individual cases more than anything.

The Lich King seems to be fine with what he has now, though Blizzard has expressed vague interest in letting allied races at some point in the future.

Honestly, Blizzard has no problems changing the lore to make more races have classes like in this DF expansion making all races able to be mages, priests, and rogues. So it will come eventually. I honestly have every race/class combination in the game including the subraces introduced in BFA.

What prompted you to bump a four year old thread?

There really wasn’t any lore changed when the new race/class combinations were added on Dragonflight’s release. The reasoning to exclude those races from the respective classes they were granted were trivial at best, so it was a simple thing to flip the switch on classes that were once locked.

Similarly, there’s nothing inherent in the Nightborne that would require lore to be changed in order to facilitate their becoming Druids.

Because Blizzard would have to make new Druid forms.
Yall ever curious that the least racially diverse classes just so happen to be the ones with unique forms/mounts/totems?

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When Suramar was sealed the total population of Night Elf Druids was…

One. Malfurion Stormrage…

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Same reason Blood Elves can’t, I guess.

Cenarius is much older then any mortal race.

All elves should be able to take it up. A connection to the dream is what you need before you can even begin. Night elves have it thus so do Nightborne. Being trapped in that bubble could have severed the connection but apart from that there’s no real reason why they shouldn’t have the option.

Irrelevant, no matter how old he is… he did not produce any mortal Druids before Malfurion and Trolls had had civilization that predates the Night Elves by millennia and quite a few of those tribes were heavily in tune with nature. It’s quite probably that they developed the druidic arts without his teaching.

Remember that the Night Elves had a much longer tradition of being in tune with the arcane. before the Stormrage brothers were born. For all we know the name Stormrage may. have trollish roots.