I wonder if Blizzard could play around with it and use that internal trigger that enables the fel version of the gift of the Naaru and use it to allow NPCs to refer to the skin as their race over the main race. For example, when you have quests going “Greeting (race)” instead of saying “Greeting draenei,” they could say “Greetings man’ari.”
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Surprisingly quite a few people want something like this, I’ve seen a lot of people wanting that same feature implemented for Wildhammer dwarves and high elves, so instead of being greeted as “Dwarf” or “void elf” you’re greeted as “wildhammer dwarf” or “high elf”.
Honestly since it’s all optional stuff, i definitely would support it being implemented.
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Perhaps a better question is, why weren’t the Light-Forged Draenei just a look from the barber shop (other than nobody thought of it at the time)? After all, they’re just Draenei who joined the Army of the Light.
I mean, I get that they were a counterpoint to the Void Elves, but they were hardly outcasts as the aforementioned Void Elves were.
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You could say the same about highmountain tauren, there’s nothing distinguishable between the two other than larger horns. the tattoos don’t count since other races are starting to get access to tattoos also now.
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Yes, however, they are a separate race, unlike the LF Draenei who just joined the Army of the Light.
Eh, that’s sort of like comparing mag’har to green orcs. Lightforged are “blessed” by the light, thus they look different. Green orcs are “tainted” by fel blood, thus they look different. Neither are biologically much different, they just have a slightly different appearance. Green orcs simply invaded azeroth. Lightforged simply joined the army of light
Allied races are completely unnecessary i’m glad they went this route. They should have done allied races like this the whole time
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Allied races are a simple and cheap way of making races. They just re-use existing models.
Every company is quite happy to cut costs and spend less money on things, so it’s pretty unsurprising they went down this route.
Certain races like void elves were bound to happen no matter what though, since a vocal majority of players on the alliance have been asking for high elves since day 1 of warcraft.
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Aren’t they considered brands on Tauren? I put a fence up, please stop stealing my Tauren, you poacher.
I don’t steal tauren, i steal vulpera and tie them inside of plastic bags and throw them in the river so they drown.
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The only AR’s that were halfway successful were those that had a decent distinction from other races.
Notably Void Elves gave Alliance players a way to use the Blood Elf model and Nightborne gave Horde players a way to use the Night Elf model.
I see a lot of lightforged draenei players too honestly. the racials are pretty useful.
Because it was easier to make new customization options for the existing draenei models than it was to come up with a new race that uses the exact same model but has new hairstyles, voice lines, quests, etc. and parade it as something new, then do the exact same thing for the Horde. And because allied races were a one-time feature that hasn’t been touched since BfA ended and garnered a lot of backlash when they were new, hence Blizzard has chosen to add races like man’ari, Wildhammers, and Darkfallen as customization for existing races going forward.
This is another problem with allied races being a thing: they created a cycle of complaints. Man’ari are customizations for draenei, so group X complains that they’re not an allied race. If they were an allied race, group Y would’ve complained that they weren’t customizations for draenei. Blizzard can’t win.
I feel like outside of Kul Tiran, Vulpera and Nightborne Allied Races could of just been customizations for the Core Races which in turn would of added a lot of new customizations to the already existing races, it’s a much better way of doing it anyway.
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Never heard such a thing but if so I hope they realize it’s not too late for take-backsies and undoing this whole nonsense of allied races.
Just scrap em. Fix up the races that aren’t derivatives of existing races (Vulpera basically) and roll all the others into their base races. Go with the idea of racial sub-customizations. So people can be a Darkspear troll, a forest troll, Zandalari, etc but they’re all trolls. Or take high elven bodied elves. They could be a high elf (quel’dorei), blood elf (sin’dorei), void elf (ren’dorei) but they’d all be high elfs, just customizations there-of.
They could even let players choose which voices they want (why not lots of RPGs do that) out of the available choices they’ve made so far as well as what racials (among those available so far).
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Even if I want them as playable race, we need to keep in mind we have thin male Forest Trolls too like this one:
But yes I prefer to see them as playable race. As customization is only if we can’t get them. But if we keep the bulk model, you are right, they can’t become a customization so easily.
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I agree! I wish they would consolidate the races, it’s getting to fragmented and diluted. For races with sub-races, just let the players choose their preferred racial ability.
At this point, the Blood Elves should just be like the pandas, a neutral race.
I still think the Nightbornes should have been options for the Night Elves, and the Zandalari for the trolls. The Nightborne models are not that great anyways, so they are better off going back with the original NE models as cosmetic options.
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Personally, I prefer customizations on a base race instead of Allied Races. Whenever they put in new appearance customizations they almost never copy them over to the nearly-identical allied races like hairstyles, eye colors, accessories, etc.
I’d rather have Lightforged customizations available on my base Draenei than have a Lightforged allied race.
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Honestly I feel Man’ari would be more better suited as an ‘Allied race’ than Lightforged would be – especially due to the racials. 
Honestly what they should do is just merge a handful of the look-alike allied races (Lightforged → normie Draenei and Highmountain Tauren → regular tauren) and give them racial options for what they want more.
Put a defensive artifact on the Sunwell as a cap that prevents it from void corruption – Such as the eye of Aman’Thul, empowering it to an Arcane state too once more like it use to be, AS-WELL as the light — Have a questline where the void elves helped the Blood Elves & Nightborne retrieve the eye of Aman’Thul to make it possible, then make the Blood Elves / Void elves the same race as per the above paragraph (selectable racials) and pop them in the neutral race section, with obvious different cultures — perhaps make Silvermoon a neutral city, save except certain areas where they apply the Dalaran method (teleport the un-authorised peeps out).
- The selectable racial clusters (even renamed / with different visuals for lore, if you wanna be a belf but have void elf racials – like replacing void with arcane visuals or ‘surprise me’ time to time) would be good for filling the imbalance tensions with the two alike races.
- Along with the combined alike races would be good for customisations too because you wouldn’t have as many having a flipout in rage @ one getting X customisation over the other, or feeling inferior or irrelevant in comparison etc via lore and so on.
Personally I much prefer the OG orcs than the alternate dimension ones, and would’ve rather via lore that we just recruited them from Outland but in terms of racials & customisations – You could also poke around between the heritage armor sets to what suits the overall culture theme of your character too.
This is all obviously hypothetical, and merely ‘idea shooting’ so obviously there could be flaws with the above & refinements etc but yeah, it’d be worth at least entertaining the idea.
Even a modulation to the existing voice would be nice. Having my Big Red running around sounding like any other Draenei is a little weird.
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