slow down…nature is to be savoured!!
1 Like
the nightborne effect where i was super excited to play one, but the model they released was basically a night elf with very few of the trimmings that made nightborne feel distinct.
they’ve been mostly fixed since then, but they still don’t feel as unique as the npcs
2 Likes
Of course they don’t, with how many different civillian clothes do the NPCs have compared to the big nothing the Nightborne PCs are allowed to use.
4 Likes
the lack of proper posture and the usual nelf sized eyes was what really killed them at launch.
It may be me, I get other people had alot of fun with them, but… does anyone else feel the allied races of late have been either lackluster or felt weird to add them to both factions?
The drachtyr , I am sorry but their original form looks as if they let a deviantart-artist loose on it.
The earthen I felt should’ve just been Alliance, and now potentially these Haronir… I don’t know, but I can’t say I feel that hyped about them either.
That and, age-old complaint, some allied races should’ve been customization options for existing ones ( Dark Iron, Mag’har, Lightforged, Highmountain).
4 Likes
my gripe with nightborne is we could have arcane druids and astromancers but dont. sadge.
1 Like
Not of late, of always.
I don’t think all of them were bad, Kul Tiran and Zandalari felt pretty fitting for their expansion ( though again, arguements could be made they ough to have been customizations even if they got their own skeleton-rigs). In that regard BfA felt a bit like Warcraft 2 again, races joining either the Alliance or Horde to duke it out.
if they could send orc to the chiropractor without its own seperate race they can de-hunch darkspear
3 Likes
lit mages wear red 
Allied races have been hit and miss since they were released.
Dark Iron, Mag’har, and Lightforged, as you say, should have been customization options. Mag’har also got a godawful storyline that retroactively made all of WoD pointless.
Nightborne looked like a bootleg version of the Suramar NPC models, and it took two expansions and a player exodus for them to get any decent customization options.
Mechagnomes… exist.
Kul Tirans were the only allied race in Legion and BfA to get unique animation skeletons. The rest reused skeletons of existing playable races.
Dracthyr look like they were drawn by a FurAffinity artist. “We have dragonborn at home”.
Earthen should have been Alliance-only, with haranir released alongside them as a Horde-only race.
9 Likes
The males have actual, somewhat realistic torso proportions however. Further highlighting how strange male night elves look in that department. 
It’s also funny how people still call them harronir half the time. In fairness I have no idea what prompted the change to haranir late in TWWs development.
3 Likes
Hard disagree. This only encourages Blizzard to half-arss it even more or sweep potential races under the rug of ‘customizations’ to appease the fan base.
The latest example of this is the Eradar Draenei skin. - It could have easily been another sub-race under Draenei alongside Light Forged with unique racial feats to reflect their lore. - It could have allowed Blizzard to tell a deeper story than three quests.
They should go full throttle, not step off the gas. - New lore and new races won’t be developed or explored in the manner they deserve if we tell them it’s a-okay half-arss it or hide it beneath an already existing race.
Whilst this is true the case is closer to Zandalari and Vulpera, where they initially didn’t have full armour capability, but later got it; Harranir didn’t start with full capability for wearing player armours, but now they do have it which indicates there’s a 99.99% chance they’re probably being made ready for player use. There’s no real other reason to give them full accessibility where even Sylvar only really had half accessibility.
A disaster and we have paid the price ever since. The Alliance gets 3-4 races that are just skin-tone differences meanwhile the Horde largely got actual new races. It also gave us Void Elves, the greatest disaster to this game’s lore since its release in 2004 as an MMO 
Allied Races don’t get personal unique quests anymore than the existing OGs do. The more we add the less everybody gets until we reach a singularity where everything is progressing so slowly that nobody gets anything.
4 Likes
What a shame about Dalaran - it being destroyed was actually a wonderful opportunity that has gone to waste. In world-building terms, you could really have dived deep into what the destruction of the city means. It is essentially the magical capital of the world (no, elven cities do not count, it’s not their primary modus operandi, and the inclusion of a wide variety of races helps with fresh thoughts and developments that a monolithic culture does not allow).
Trade of high quality enchanted items would at best shift - where to? What are the implications to the people who survived? (the citizenry represented in broad terms, not a few select major NPCs). How do the various political entities that have historically relied upon the Kirin Tor (it’s in the lore - the good old lore, that is) for advice react? Who do they turn to? Make up more questions yourselves.
A problem with the epilogue seems to be that the writers wanted to tell a story in which the Kirin Tor were not only blinded by monumental ignorance, but also felt supremely confident in their rule and arbitration through power and knowledge, and motivated by conceit and arrogance. And I wouldn’t mind that at all (I actually think that’d be interesting), but that’s obviously not how the modern incarnation since WotLK has been portrayed. You could make a strong case for certain members of the Council of Six before, during, and after the Second War, but that’s neither here nor there. Instead, the organisation has more or less been used like a blunt instrument in the form of a world police that shows up to combat the villain of the week, which is boring and stupid. That’s not even mentioning that their use as the only mage organisation is criminal from a worldbuilding stand-point.
A trend I’ve noticed is that a lot of people seem to have influenced by the line of thinking that now Metzen is back in charge, the story will improve, which is an error in judgement in my opinion. While he has created some great stuff, people forget he has also made some horrible contributions. (P.S. the majority of the writers that were responsible for the lore from the days in which the story was considered by many to be at its peak? Those guys don’t work at Blizzard anymore, they have moved on; see Bethesda, Bioware, etc. for similar cases.)
But I am not surprised, because I saw this trainwreck coming a mile away. I’m not even disappointed, because the story stopped being worth my investment a long time ago.
9 Likes
Eh?
The allied races are basically 1-1 for both sides on ‘reskins’ and ‘new race’ stuff.
VElves (BElf) : Nightborne (NElves)
Lightforged : Highmountain
DIrons : Mag’har
Kul Tirans : Zandalari
Mechagnomes : Vulpera
Zandalari reused Mnelf and Ftroll rigs, Kul Tiran got an entire new rig. Vulpera got a modified goblin rig with a tail added, Mechagnomes were just gnomes with some pants customisation options (and a new swim animation I think)
Pretty much the only ‘new’ race is the Vulpera, so I guess 
supremacy wins again, but 1 ‘new’ race isn’t ‘largely’.
2 Likes
Why are these the only ones to get proper new customisation though?!
I’ll give you some of this list, but not the entirety of it.
- Alliance: Lightforged (reskin, virtually no lore), Horde: Highmountain (reskin, basically just tauren with antlers, but with some lore)
- Alliance: void elves (reskin, utterly lazy lore), Horde: nightborne (an actually cool and meaningfully different race with lots of lore and relevance for two patches, with a whole city of their own)
- Alliance: Dark Irons (reskin), Horde: Mag’har (reskin)
- Alliance: Kul Tirans (just big humans, but custom rigs), Horde: Zandalari (a meaningfully different troll culture, but with reused rigs), both with cool lore of their own and expansion relevance
- Alliance: mechagnomes (patently lazy diaper gnomes), Horde: vulpera (an actually new race, not a subrace of anything)
Overall I’d say Horde wins.
5 Likes
Couldn’t have put it better myself.
Also am I really the only one who is glad Dalaran is gone?
I’m surprised it survived this long.
3 Likes
I don’t miss Dalaran as it was used for the game storyline as the headquarters of Azeroth’s Avengers that, as Valven put it,
I can understand why the current writers wanted this form of Dalaran taken out of the picture before they set up new world-threatening villains, but the way they did it was akin to curing a headache with a guillotine.
I do miss Dalaran as a cool RP location, a cross-faction hub for mages from all over the world. I wouldn’t have minded Dalaran’s loss as much if the writers gave the Kirin Tor some goal to work towards after its demise — as opposed to them just giving up and leaving RPers with nothing to work with.