Thank you! I wasn’t aware that there was more updated lore on it : )
EDIT: I should clarify that I’m not being facetious as this is the internet
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Zandalari monks could be explained as being followers of Krag’wa. Krag’wa is a loa that emphasizes selflessness, patience a modesty. Krag’wa also has a thing about being physically strong. All things that could fit a monk.
So it would make sense if Zandalari monks were followers of him. But that’d require some effort from Blizzard.
I kinda liked the idea of Zandy monks being Jaguar Warriors.
I just wish monks had their racial equivelants.
Like, a Zandalari monk won’t have the Ox, Crane, Serpent or Tiger appearances but aesthetics that make them look like Loa.
Same with night elves/worgen and their Ancients etc.
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Too much work for Blizzard, for too small a benefit that only a minority of the playerbase would care about. Models and animations are costly to create.
Part of the reason I am not a big fan of nonpanda monks is that Blizzard clearly went super duper all in with making them a pandaren thing, to a greater degree than any other class. Like, not just the animations and spell effects (like summoning clones of yourself wearing pandaren armour), the spell icons also are just a bunch of paw symbols, pandaren script, pandaren hands and feet, etc.
Monks are more themed around pandaren than demon hunters are themed around elves.
(My cynical take is that they probably wanted to make monks a panda only thing initially, just like they ended up doing with DHs, but then they realised that the pandaren race wouldn’t become popular enough and people would complain endlessly about it, so they said screw it and handed monk to just about everything).
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This actually seems fairly likely to me.
As it is, all Monks seem to be specifically students of the Pandaren martial arts (most of the class trainers are Pandaren, for example), so it does make sense the abilities are visually themed after them. How your character learned to be a master Monk in the like, 4 years in canon since we met pandas is another issue…
I actually do wish Blizzard would put in that bit of extra effort to make certain classes and abilities more race-specific: Priests, Paladins, Monks, anything that has specific cultural or religious ties.
And for those saying the extra art assets would take more work: well yeah, but they did it for Druid forms. And they make new effects for quests and items all the time anyway, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable thing to ask. The icons I think are fine as they are, they’re already a mix of races for any class.
Actually a better reason they don’t do it might be to keep things consistent for the players: imagine if they made Night Elf priest spells a more moon-like color. That’s a cool customization, but it might get a bit confusing if you’re a tank receiving heals. Then again, they let you customize a bunch of visuals already with glyphs, so maybe this isn’t really a concern.
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It goes further than that. Zandalari monk is playable, even though there’s literally not a single one of them in the game, not even a trainer. For some reason, monks are exempt from the usual standards of what allows X race to play as Y class (pre-existing lore). Apparently it’s enough that one of them might potentially exist, since that one could be the player.
It is kinda annoying that they hand out the special pandaren thing to everyone like candy, but are far more stingy with other classes (look at how long it took for everyone to get DKs).
I just wish they’d be consistent. Right now it feels like DH and monk are in totally different games, one being the result of the most lore-stringent mindset when it comes to options, the other being the result of the very moost loose and generous of approaches.
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My headcanon is that only Pandaren can be Monks, everyone else are just cosplaying as one of them.
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Or they’re all pandas in disguise!
There were a variety of races being Masters as far back as MoP. Monks were never shown as all that exclusive to pandaren only. There’s a blood elf, tauren, dwarf and gnome master at the Peak of Serenity.
These would also have had to become masters in a crazily short span of time, ie near-immediately after the mists were parted. What that says about the ease of the arts or the inconsistency of Blizzard’s writing, well…
I can appreciate that being frustrating to pandaren RPers.
Damnit guys, now you’re really making me doubt wether I’d make Mithralles a druid or keep him a monk 
Make him a druid, if for no other reason that male night elf druids are the supreme members of their class.
The real OGs.
I’m actually quite saddened that male night elves get to be priests and female night elves get to be druids… 
I wouldn’t mind if they’d add race/class and gender/class restrictions to those cultures it makes sense for.
Just give those with the wrong race/class or gender/class a option to either race change or gender change
Funnily enough it would make sense lore and culture wise as well as give more depth to the world. Where some cultures are more open to change, accepting new genders/races into their ways while others are very keen in keeping to the old rules.
Yup!
But, they should make warrior, hunter, rogue and death knight the standard classes for every race/gender/faction tho.
I’ll never get over the fact that they gave us Zandalari monks, but not warlocks…
It’ll always be funny to me how tauren or draenei rogues can’t exist, but LFD or velf DKs are totally fine. Lore never should’ve taken this much of a backseat in regards to its interaction with gameplay. Oh well… that’s one of the reasons why we have headcanon.
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This does ignore the possibility that these individuals may have encountered pandaren travelling throughout the world for years before the events of MoP took place, such as Mojo Stormstout, who has canonically been present in the Ammen Vale since before the Exodar crashed.
And as much as I personally hate them myself due to the simple fact they make little to no sense in the context with the overall lore of the Scarlet Crusade; xenophobic zealots are not ones for embracing the heretical ways of foreign bear men, I’d imagine, but the Scarlet monks that have been present since Vanilla were retroactively changed into pandaren styled monks.
I feel like we only got Zanda monks so that people who got the race after waiting for it so long can easily level to get its heritage armor.
Those monk masters were just a bad idea to implement no matter how you look at it. Aside from the day one master thing, they are also already on Pandaria by the time the player gets there, even though the mists should have made that impossible.
I honestly do not think Blizzard thought too hard beyond hitting ‘randomise race’ when implementing those masters. They even have pandaren names!
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