I honestly feel like one of the themes in the story overall is “Don’t misuse the powers given to you!” and, like, sure, we can do that. But are we going to let it slide when we can’t do cool things like canon characters?
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I don’t mind Warcraft as a setting moving away from DnD, even if the Warcraft roleplaying game added the best lore + worldbuilding to date.
Schools work in Elder Scrolls cos all magic, regardless of who uses it, is just magic. But in WoW, arcane is the only magic category with different varieties/schools, and in recent lore I don’t even know how canon they are.
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I think they were still considered canon in Legion??? After that? Who knows… I doubt Blizzard even knows at this point
When in doubt: Bring out the idea hat.
Evocation/Divination/Etc. is just a classification made up by the (incompetent, loser, idiotheads) Kirin Tor.
Other arcanists - highborne, draenei, etc. should ideally have different classifications for spells.
Not that we’d ever see a hint of that. We can’t even get a consistent view of religious beliefs, nevermind something like different ways to classify spells.
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Humans/Kirin Tor already stole everything from the Highborne/High Elves(including their fancy, pointy, hats), so they might aswell have stolen/learned the Highborne’s classification of magic from the High Elves aswell 
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“I will hurt him using Pain Magic.”
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Shadowlands magic system is all painfully literal, to the extent that classifications are entirely self-descriptive and as such there’s literally thousands of different magic ‘schools’.
I blame the Kyrians.
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To this day I am still not quite sure if The Gorian Empire from WoD was intentional or not.
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It’s just the dnd wizard schools straight copied too. All the worst bits of rpg lore are just nicked wholesale from dnd with no changes.
They did make a slight change - Enchantment in D&D is the mind-affecting school, charms, mind controls, Otto’s Irresistible Dance, etc. - but in WoW it’s the buffing people and also making magic items stuff.
Because they already had the enchanting profession and Enchantment and Enchanting being different things would be too confusing I guess.
Not that the Kirin Tor know what they’re talking about since they put Necromancy as an arcane school when anyone who’s read wowpedia knows Necromancy is Death Magic. IDIOTS!
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The schools in Elder Scrolls are also made up constructs to help novice mages compartmentalise their studies into more manageable bites. In the current era ESO takes place in, the schools of magic aren’t even adopted by the Mages Guild yet because it’s a concept that the Shad Astula made up to mass produce battlemages for the war effort by teaching them the skills necessary for a war mage, and calling those specialisations “schools” leading to an absurdly high graduation rate from Shad Astula with the implication that each individual mage is highly specialised, but all their eggs are in one basket.
Once you start any in depth studies into magic, the schools quickly fall apart because they don’t represent reality. Say you levitate an object, it can be classified as Alteration, Mysticism and Thaumaturgy all at once, or telepathic communication as Illusion, Mysticism and Conjuration - in the end magic is magic and it does whatever you tell it to do.
That said there’s precedence in The Last Guardian for this school (heh) of thought in WoW as well. Medivh famously points out that people who over analyse the nature of their magic are a bunch of failures who waste time debating pointless philosophy and semantics.
You say the words. Fire happens. That’s all you need to know. Who cares about the “why” behind it?
So says Medivh and I for one agree with him.
come to think of they don’t refer to schools of magic at all in that novel. They use the word “school” exactly once (1) in the entire book and it’s not in relation to magic classifications. The names of the “schools” are more used as adjectives and nouns in sentences.
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I should really pick up that book one day…
It’s an excellent book. Laid the foundation for arcane magic in WoW, and a lot of its lore remains untouched by retcons even after all these years. More specifically they consistently build on top of the foundations The Last Guardian laid down.
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Mage roleplayers hated this for he told the truth
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nooo you have to understand the intricacies of how we’re interacting with the universe to be an expert mage! how will you be powerful if you don’t have a firm grasp of theory!!!
medivh: hahaha magic go brrrrrrr
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chad medivh magics his clothes on instead of getting dressed like a normie
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Footage of Medivh in action:
Ngl I never understood the need to want to understand everything or have some deep understanding of X games’ magic lore to play a powerfull mage.
Hell. I don’t understand anything anymore about Warcraft magic and I RP a Highborne D:
Well I will deffo buy it now, I was afraid it would be any other book who has been retconned thrice over by now already! D:
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Can’t say I’m a fan of the lore regarding the First Ones - really wish Blizzard had just given some respect to the Titans, since they’ve been the creators for what, twenty years?
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