Here’s a question for you elves out there: do elves starving for mana tend to eat more regular food as a result? Does normal food sate the hunger for mana? Or the opposite, can consuming a lot of mana sate your regular food hunger? Do elves even need to eat regular food?
Especially Blood Elves are all super skinny, and most of the food you find around their place is just piddly grapes and stuff… entirely possible they just snack a bit for the taste, but most of their nourishment comes from mana?
And of course asking more broadly… how the heck was anyone feeding all those Orcs in Hellfire Citadel? Or Illidan’s elves and naga in the middle of Shadowmoon? Maybe the fact they were pumped full of fel magic took care of a lot of that?
That’s a lot to unpack here. And the answer is: it depends on the kind of elf.
Night elves, at least those living in conventional night elf society, eat regular food and don’t have a mana addiction. And they do need to eat; we know they can get hungry, see https://wow.gamepedia.com/Ribs_for_the_Sentinels.
Nightborne, until the events of Legion, couldn’t even digest regular food; millennia of feeding on the Nightwell changed them physically, leaving them dependent on it for nourishment. For them, mana was food; going without access to mana for too long would turn them into feral creatures called Withered. However, with the PC’s help, Thalyssra’s rebels changed that state of affairs in Legion by growing the arcan’dor, whose fruit, when consumed, cures nightborne of their dependency on mana and allows them to gain nourishment from regular food.
As for high and blood elves, they consume regular food for nourishment, but have a mana addiction and had a period of withdrawal following the destruction of the Sunwell. Blood elves fed on alternate sources such as fel magic in the meantime, until the Sunwell was restored by Velen, while high elves coped without feeling on magic — which is possible, and doesn’t kill them outright, but it requires strong willpower and leaves one more vulnerable to death from disease or old age. It does not, however, seem that lack of access to magic is lethal by itself for Thalassian elves.
The simple answer is Blizzard not considering logistics as usual.
To be honest, I think all elves are addicted/dependant on magic for their continued existance. Night Elves simply never ended up in such conditions where they were cut off from magic for an extended amount of time.
Pretty sure Night Elves were kind of upset when their big magic tree got destroyed… kinda like the High Elves when their big magic well got destroyed…
So I’m gonna doubt on that mana addiction bit.
This sounds suspiciously similar to what the Night Elves experienced too!
I loom dangerously in the distance to remind people the vast majority of bloodelves actually fed from trinkets, golem cores, arcane wyrms (this is why there’s a schism between belves and helves) and arcane sanctums and not fel.
Uh, yeah, they lost their immortality. That’s not the same thing as a mana addiction. The HElf/BElf addiction specifically come from the Sunwell bathing them in magic constantly - Nordrassil didn’t do the same for NElves.
Are you sure about that? Isn’t one of the cornerstone buldings of the night elves the Moonwell? You know, a repository of the arcane water of the Well of Eternity that is used for quite mundane things like blessing the very food the night elves eat.
Night elves might be more suffused with magic than we think.
I’ll just link a post of mine in the headcanon thread, where I try to explain how all elves are dependant on magic, with a focus on Night Elves and High Elves.
Yes. Nordrassil’s been exploded for years without any apparent ill-effects on the NElves as a whole, while Blood Elves were suffering basically immediately and scrambling for solutions.
Nope. The novels establish pretty clearly that mages enslave elementals with arcane magic. The concept of shaping arcane to take on the properties of fire is a weird headcanon players perpetuate because of that one line in the Last Guardian where Medivh and Khadgar share that latest news in Dalaran and Medivh calls everyone who believes this particular theory a failed mage whose careers amount to nothing.
Thrall asked the spirit of air for aid again. A gust of wind, raging at near-hurricane levels, blasted Jaina so fiercely that the mage stumbled backward, toppling to the sand. Her hand was torn from the Focusing Iris, and the whirling air snatched the words of command from her mouth.
Thrall used the precious seconds to direct his full attention to the towering wall of water. Spirit of water, struggle against this spell that enslaves you. Take my strength; use it to—
He heard and felt the heat behind him. Lamenting the need, he re- directed his imploring from the spirits of water to a spirit of fire. Thrall whirled, his hands up to do what he could to protect himself from the massive fireball hurtling toward him. The Spirit of Fire was angry and tortured, and for a moment Thrall feared it would not hear him in time.
Later Jaina uses the Focusing Iris to boost her power to the point where she enslaves Thrall’s water shields and uses them against him. Mages just use the same elemental spells as shaman sans the consent.
*a good headcanon that makes much more sense than this bit from Tides of War that says otherwise, assuming I’m correct in remembering you’re basing this upon that one line about Jaina enslaving water elementals
Like, I’m genuinely curious how you think it makes more sense that mages actively enslave elementals when they’re basically never called out upon doing so? I mean, if they did, wouldn’t they essentially be on the same level as dark shamans, greatly detested by shamanistic cultures?
The cultures that venerate shamanism and the ones that have an emphasis on mages don’t tend to overlap much, is my guess.
but yeah they’re pretty similar bar dark shamanism (in the siege of orgrimmar sense) being a corrupting process done through the element of decay, not just through arcane
The bit from Tides of War is based upon the bit from The Last Guardian where Medivh theorises drawing upon the Elemental Plane way back in 2002
How does it make sense for mages to shape arcane to take on the properties of fire when they have never confirmed to do so outside of the one IC theory circulating in Dalaran pre-First War that’s quickly debunked by every reputable mage as being the one objectively and demonstrably false theory regarding how their fireballs work?
Keep in mind that this has been the canon stance for 18 years now.
Also this. What sets them apart from Dark Shamanism is that it enslaves and corrupts the elements. Mages just enslave them. Both are bad, but one of them is worse.
It’s worth mentioning that the high elves had a tradition/celebration of subjugating the water elementals at a lake in the Ghostlands to demonstrate their mastery over the arcane and nature.
Yes, obviously. But we have troll mages and orcish mages and the forsaken and blood elves and other fans of (arcane) magic are reliable and honored allies of the shamanistic races. Surely they’d point out that all their mages are committing great heresy? Because I can’t really remember any instance of that ever happening in-game.
We also have death knights, demon hunters and void elves that everyone loves unconditionally in-game despite their status being very much reviled in lore.
I think this could largely come from ignorance and the fact that the blood elves are distant in geography and as allies. Up until BFA the blood elves have only ever really sent token forces - e.g the handful of Blood Knights at Theramore.
Forsaken and Blood Elves as the most prominent arcane users have never been particularly close allies. As Aerilen says, a lot of Blood Elf forces have been fairly token in nature, and the Undead have always kept to themselves since Classic. They practically have a proud tradition of ignoring whatever the Orcs think about them.
Troll and Orc Mages have also never been a particularly large force within the Horde. The most common Orc Mage I can think of are the Kor’kron Arcweavers in Siege of Orgrimmar, who were presumably already into sipping that enslaving-elementals juice.
Individual characters might point it out, sure, but I’d hazard a guess that the mage-inclined factions being usually isolationist, and the shamanic factions not having many mages, means it just doesn’t come up.
Or the Horde are hypocrites who can tolerate one type of person enslaving an elemental but not the other.
