Playing BfA as a Paladin character is just downright painful in ever conceivable way. Sure Xal’atath I’ll help you restart the Void’s conquest of Azeroth! Why no I won’t be concerned by this at all and won’t ask any of the 1000 people I know way more educated on this matter to just destroy you.
Edit: Actually come to think of it, why didn’t we just destroy her then-and-there? The plot relevance of the dagger turned out to just be uhhh [checks notes] Nathanos looks at it in a cutscene for 3 seconds.
I believe so but all that seemed to amount to was uh. . .making N’zoth birth Squid’zoth because he was angry at being stabbed? I guess? Then we just. . .leave it there, to be taken. By that point Xal’atath was already gone from the dagger anyways so it wouldn’t have mattered much but one has to wonder why our first thought as the Champion of Azeroth was “unleash the ancient evil unto the world” rather than “let A’dal burn the dagger with the rays of a thousand heavens”. Utterly bizarre that as a Paladin I just had to help this Dagger-Entity kill tonnes of people instead of just sealing her away in some thousand-enchanted, Light-protected vault for eternity.
The dagger was just a discount phylactery for N’zoth.
Edit : Speaking of phylacteri… Didn’t we also hand over KT’s instead of… Smashing it? Granted the context is more like giving it to the professionals for proper disposal but Liches phylacteri have never been displayed as needing professional help to be destroyed.
I feel like repeating the copout that Blizzard copied from Pyromancer to explain why they can´t stick to their own definite lore encyclopedia is a pretty bad gotcha moment.
For all intents and purposes, when Chronicle came out in 2016, it was meant to be THE canon, placed above decade old books such as War of the Ancients Trilogy and even if Blizzard is wiping their rears with it (just like with much of the rest of the old lore, albeit I wonder how things will look with one of its authors back in charge instead of Anuser), it´s still a better lore source than 20 years old book that has also been retconned to hell (anyone remembers demonic hunger for Arcane as main motivator for Burning Crusade, and Old Gods wanting Sargeras to come through because it would free them and they would easily destroy him?).
According to a blood elf. Doesn’t seem that objective of a source. She might have been right about those arcane constructs, but I doubt that translates to every bit of knowledge they have. After all, they were sitting on a repository of tomes and scrolls filled with knowledge of the kaldorei empire which has proven useful as recently as BfA. I also doubt they have done nothing of magical research and advancement at all while living in their city for 10K years. They had to come up with a way to summon Immol’thar somehow.
Fair enough, they are the catty sort to make fun of you for bringing out something old fashioned when all they have going for them is making them lazy.
See also the basket weaving letter. Elves know words can break you.
Mind you, the Shen’dralar Highborne were able to summon and trap an powerfull demon like Immol’thar, and then suck its magic for immortality and their Arcane fix, while filtering the worst of the Fel corruption away through their pylons. No physical manifestations of fel corruption ever appeared on them, and they waned themselves off their Arcane addiction within 3 years.
Their research into Void magic was unsurpassed, and Wrathion laments how much of that knowledge was lost during the Horde’s invasion into Eldre’thalas and the burning of their vast library.
Also lets not forget the Shen’dralar were an elite organisation of Highborne who served as Queen Azshara’s personal research team. And during the War of the Ancients, they were able to defend their city against the Burning Legion as one of the few holdouts, without help from the Kaldorei Resistance.
Also they originally brought back the long forgotting knowledge of transmogrification, opening up a shop for it in Dalaran, before they allowed the Ethereals to take over shop.
I feel like this is a case of early lore weirdness and inconsistency rather than a statement on their great skill.
What I´d say the case with Shen´dralar having outdated knowledge is not just some subjective statement that can be discarded, but rather something we can also see in real world. Two civilizations that, whether through circumstance or through conscious decision, break contact, tend to evolve in two different directions and often end up with different technology as a result of progress not being shared and old knowledge sometimes being forgotten by only one of them.
Shen´dralar, unlike high elves and Nightborne, have a reason for being more primitive in terms of their magic use: They killed most of their population off. Where Silvermoon and Suramar thrived, Eldre´Thalas fell into ruin. All the Arcane knowledge high elves (+ humans and gnomes) and Nightborne were able to develop throughout the millenia of their civilization couldn´t have been developed after Shen´dralar killed off the rest of their people. On top of that, much of existing knowledge must have been lost.
Then, as final nail in the coffin, Horde went into Dire Maul and killed off most of Shen´dralar, meaning the ones we meet might be experts in some areas, but hopelessly outperformed by any blood elf or Nightborne.
You know things are bad when even Riot can have the spine to say “Right, we realise this is a mess. We’re consolodating canon into one, True thing and then building up from there. If there’s bits you don’t like, well, tough.”
Blizz: “Ooh, but canon hard, why not shiny instead…?”
-sigh-
I imagine this is partially true. There will have been areas where the Shen’dralar ran on outdated knowledge (The example of the arcane constructs comes to mind), but on the other hand the Shen’dralar as a collective come from an unbroken line of the empire, much like the Nightborne. They also had a source of magic much like the nightborne. And they had a lot of time.
I think there is something to be said for knowledge and expertise having been lost in the purges, raids and other disasters, but that doesn’t have to translate to outdated knowledge, in my opinion. Seeing as they were a very research focussed sect, it wouldn’t surprise me that the death of one expert would be a perfect opportunity to rise on the social ladder by taking their place (so new insights could be developped instead of always relying on the same research angles). Sometimes this wouldn’t be possible, but when it is possible, I think it could even lead to accelerated advancement of knowledge.
The main problem is the loss of people. Imagine there were 10 experts on Telemancy and 500 Telemancers in Eldre´Thalas. After first purge, you might have 9 of those experts left and 20 normal Telemancers. After Horde went ungabunga, maybe you only have 1 expert and 2 normal guys. What´s the likelihood that the remaining expert knows completely everything in his field? And what if all the experts died and there are now only 2 normal Telemancers among the Shen´dralar? Would they be able to learn everything again in few years? Would they even have tomes they could read given how they had to flee their big library?
We have many examples from real life of events very similar to what happened to Shen´dralar in Vanilla. When Crusaders took Constantinople, they ended up destroying or taking absurd amount of priceless items gathered throughout 900 years of that city´s existence. One of dates for end of Golden Age of Islam is 1258 when Mongols sacked Baghdad and destroyed House of Wisdom and other libraries. Losing majority of your population twice and then getting booted out of your home is bound to lead into regression.
Of course, now with their return to the world, it´s likely any obsolete and inferior practices are going to disappear as they can now learn from anyone.
Which means, on top of having way larger population and resources, the high elves and Nightborne also had 1200 years of added progress.
What you say makes sense, and I am sure the effects in this case might have been similar, though in smaller proportions. These people live for millenia, after all, with plenty of them having seen the days of the kaldorei empire. It would make sense to me that the “expert” among them knows everything there is to know about their subject(s), just as much as it would make sense to me that their subordinates in the chosen field would probably know a great deal too. And that which they wouldn’t know would have been available in their libraries.
I would argue that the examples you gave is what actually happened to Azeroth after the Sundering, and that the collection of knowledge both in their Athenaeum and in their own heads would in fact be the House of Wisdom, the Alexandrian Library, and whatever other knowledge has been lost to us in our own history.
I don’t agree with this, either. There is nothing that says they suddenly stopped their way of life after the purge of Shen’dralar. Quite the opposite. It allowed them to have enough power to continue their way of life. Sure, they abandoned parts of their city, but it’s unlikely they didn’t move all their knowledge and tomes to the parts they did choose to live in, which contained the Athenaenum. And we know they continued gathering information and knowledge, judging by them knowing about the Ashbringer (at the very least) and books such as “The Light and How to Swing It”.
In case of the Blood Elves way more in % of their population, let alone their knowledge was lost, yet for some reason the big loss of population % never crippled then in the slightest, so why would it do to the Shen’dralar?
(Re: the whole of Silvermoon was destroyed, and half was rebuild over night including their magical libraries, apparently, or did they remeber that knowledge and rewrote it?)
Something that hasn’t been mentioned is that Quel’thalas and Dalaran didn’t just make their own brand of magic, but rather continued and improved on what the High Elves (then Blood Elves) already had inherited from their Highborne past.
It’s not that Highborne / Shen’dralar magic is any less powerful or intricate, I mean, it’s quite literally the foundations on the most widespread order of magi in modern Azeroth’s knowledge.
It’s that, by what the lore tells us, high elven and human magic made it their task to improve on what they had already laid down on the table, like the texts we recover in the Arcane artifact questline which were one of the basis for Arcane magic among humans and high elves that was written by a Highborne thousands of years before the humans even united as a civilization.
Having said that, this setting isn’t rock paper scissors. This conversation about who could be more powerful in current Azeroth’s timeline could go on forever without reaching a conclusion, because, thankfully, the writers haven’t just made a stable power scale scheme and slotted every character and faction in there.
