As a wise man once said:
I was never book smart, I’m money smart. Makes me more intelligent.
I know this is a specific example, but I don’t think every culture of druidism has to be about balance or conservation. To me, it seemed that the Zandalari druids were more about warfare and adaptation of their forms in service of their people, which is distinct, in my opinion. We can’t want variety being the same but dressed differently.
Character concept: Goblin mage, isn’t actually a mage, just obscenely rich and uses a vast collection of wands and scrolls that he spends a portion of his monthly investment payout on, just because he thinks magic is cool.
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I briefly toyed with the idea of a Vulpera ‘mage’ whose every spell was an artifact they’d scrounged up from the sands or traded for.
They do some culling in the jungle sometimes, but I agree. Still, we don’t even get that, because after the Fourth War the Zandalari and most of the other faction armies don’t have much to do, in old territories or new. And that’s despite the Un’goro prepatch being a perfect ground for the dinosaur-shaped druids to spy or hunt as they please.
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Which is however still an improvement (if druidism being disconnected from night elves is something you view as good) over majority of WoW´s timeline. Until Cataclysm when we got the Gilnean “druids” (who were then taught the superior night elven druidism anyway because, as per Blizzard devs: “Harvest-witches have a limited control over nature, especially plant life, and the powers of harvest witches bear a coincidental resemblance to the low-level abilities of actual druids.”), we didn´t really have any form of druidism that wasn´t tied to Cenarius and night elves.
The first time we even got proper druids for playable races that weren´t an off-shoot of night elf druidism was in BfA. Now, these don´t get much lore post-BfA, but that´s the case for 99% of WoW´s lore when it comes to Shadowlands. So really we´re on first expansion where the world is getting story development again, and while it would be nice to get lore for everything, I don´t think people would enjoy Zandalari and Kul Tirans getting shoehorned in major way into Emerald Dream/night elf patch that was 10.2.
Of course they wouldn’t, it’s not the point. I was saying this about actual, even if secondary occasions now, or about the world revamp when it happens. In Barrens or Waking Shores we could do with tauren druids and shamans working together on the mess that happened, in Asure Span a thornspeaker would be a good counter to the decayed mess the gnolls spread around, and I won’t even mention how much the followers of Gonk would be eager to show the centaur how the hunt’s really done. It’s about immersion, not putting everything into a single tuskarr soup.
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Actually there’s an in-game book that confirms that Arcane Intellect literally makes the person physically smarter. When the spell is botched, it leaves you permanently diminished in intelligence.
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I bet a mage (idiot) wrote that book.
If mages are so smart and enlightened how come they still practice elemental slavery huh…
because my mage is a 
material girl
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Permanently? Seems excessive but then again we’re talking about the “We’ll hire private investigator adventurer to perform -innovative- interrogation methods on prisoners” Kirin-Tor (No, I refuse to let this quest go as it once was.). Wouldn’t be surprised if Mages purposefully did that to people they don’t like or wanna see fail in the professional ladder.
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Gargantuan carnivorous flying lizards somehow didn’t collapse the ecosystem!
Or, you know, the mind is a fragile thing and messing up a spell that affects it has disastrous side effects. There’s a bit in either Day of the Dragon or Night of the Dragon about how a botched scrying spell can snap your mind if it backfires.
Manual scrying without a medium or a focus (reflective surface) to share the load is dangerous if done wrong, because the strain is placed entirely on your mind.
Yeah, but if you give the trolls a fraction more lore they end up doing everything earlier then every playable race except maybe draenei.
They actually didn’t. They held reverence for nature and Wild Gods even during the Imperial days, it was the Highborne that went crazy.
The majority of night elf society continued honoring the old ways of revering the wilds. The fact that these folk still lived in harmony with the land warmed Cenarius’s heart, but he knew they had no influence over Azshara and her arrogant followers.
~ Chronicle I, Chapter III, Page 95.
As the Highborne continued experimenting on the Well of Eternity, a young night elf named Malfurion Stormrage honed his ties to nature. under the tutelage of the wise Cenarius, he had become the first mortal druid on Azeroth.
~Chronicle I, Chapter III, page 98.
From the depths of the Emerald Dream, he unleashed his druidic magics upon Azshara’s trusted servant Xavius, striking him down. Not only did this act destroy one of the Highborne’s most powerful sorcerers, but it also proved the incredible potentional of druidic magic to Malfurion’s allies.
~Chronicle I, Chapter III, page 100.
For those people that say tauren and night elves had druids before Malfurion, they really didn’t, not from Word of God and not from Cenarius’ own mouth. (unless he forgot he taught them earlier).
They might’ve lived in harmony with nature, they might have acted like druids, they might’ve cared for nature, but in the warcraft world they were not Druids.
Because if they were Druids, then the average Farstrider and Joe the Shmoe farmer would be a Druid too.
I don’t get it? It makes sense the tauren use night elf druid ways, they were taught by the night elves.
Atleast the Kul Tiran, Zandalari, Darkspear, and to lesser extent Gilnean druids have atleast bits of their own unique druid cultures, I think a bigger problem is that every mage on Azeroth currently is a Kirin Tor mage.
You’re a orc from Orgrimmar who wants to learn magic? Off to Dalaran with you. A Draenei? Dalaran it is. Worgen? Jeez, its called Dalaran. Night Elf? Highborne teachers? no you’re going to Dalaran.
Edit: Or every paladin is either a human-style Silver Hand or human-centric Tyr’s Guard paladin.
In fairness, their knowledge is canonically 10,000 years out of date.
Now they are. 
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Yeah, they did.
But if greatness was to be Illidan’s, he first had to curb both his temper and his impatience. He had come with his twin to study this new path that used the power of nature—their mentor termed it “druidism”—believing he would be the quicker student.
-War of the Ancients.
Sorry but a direct source is better than the Titan’s incorrect perspective on the matter. When the Kaldorei Empire was nascent, they lost their Wild God roots and only regained it later, shortly before the War of the Ancients, with Cenarius, at which time it was “new”.
Indeed such practices marked Malfurion as an ‘outcast’:
His shoulder-length, dark green hair surrounded a narrow visage akin to a wolf’s. Malfurion had become something of an outcast among his kind. He asked questions, suggested that old traditions were not necessarily the best, and even dared once mention that beloved Queen Azshara might not always have the concerns of her subjects foremost on her thoughts. Such actions left him with few associates and even fewer friends.
It’s one of the few quests in the game I absolutely refuse to do. Another one is the quest in Mount Hyjal where you’re asked to kill defenseless rejected initiates to prove your loyalty to the Twilight’s Hammer.
These quests seem to have been written in the times when it was presumed the PC was a murderhobo with no morals open to the highest bidder.
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Oh cool, then Malfurion goes back to bieng the first mortal Druid since everything else that suggest he might not be is actually Titan/other Person’s perspective on the matter (like the tauren).
This reads like old Warcraft III/RPG lore, because in the WotA books he wasn’t really an outcast afaik.
I mean… He kind of is. BfA PC has you serve the Old Gods’ plans and reviving their Bae-Blade. If we had a morality system that is binaric or the DnD Lawful-Chaotic-Good-Evil system, sure if I was more keenly aware that this influenced the story my character is enacting, I wouldn’t do that quest. On that front, I do envy the SWTOR MMO.
It’s literally a quote from the WotA book, like two paragraphs before the Illidan quote.