Continuing the discussion from Quel’dorei High Elves as an Alliance allied race - 2024 (Part 3) - #5038 by Obelisk-1298373.
Previous discussions:
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Reposting the OP’s initial thread post;
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I remember when the ‘High Elf primer’ was written, and it is at the top of all these threads.
So I think it is fair the ‘anti High Elf primer’, which was assembled in response (and not by me), get pride of place this time as well. Much of the following information is out of date but that hasn’t stopped the reposting of the High Elf primer.
- “High Elves are different enough from Blood Elves!” I see this one a lot, but no. Sorry. They aren’t. The High Elves went through no mutation, no physical change, no evolution or otherwise genetic alteration after Quel’thalas was sacked by Arthas and the scourge. Kael’thas renamed the High Elven people Blood Elves in memory and honor of their fallen, and for no other reason. It’s been only 30 or less years since Kael’thas renamed his people Blood Elves. They are racially, genetically, identical. While people love to think of High Elves as “pure” or Blood Elves as “tainted”, which are both untrue, given the recent golden eyes of the Blood Elves, it doesn’t appear that tapping demons’ magic to sate the elves’ magical addiction did anything cosmetically permanent. Blood/High Elves that succumbed to their hunger became Wretched. Blood Elves that overindulged in fel became Felblood Elves.
2: “Blizzard did Pandaren for both sides, they can do Blood/High Elves on both sides! How could it dilute faction identity more than Pandaren?” I’m going to go ahead and say most people asking for High Elves don’t play Pandaren. Why? Because they represent the lowest number of players within their own faction out of ALL races. Last number estimates show about 2.5%, per faction. Combined across all of WoW, roughly 1 in 20 plays a Pandaren, whereas Blood Elf numbers are the most populous among Horde races, having been roughly equal to Human numbers in Alliance for most of WoW since TBC. Also, for or those that don’t know, Blizzard regrets doing Pandaren as a Neutral race, to the point that I can say we’ll likely never see another Neutral race. Since MoP, it’s basically impossible to write Pandaren lore now, because their forces are split faction, and we haven’t seen them do anything notable in WoW since MoP. Their identity is basically nothing.
3: “High Elves’ lore and history is rich enough to stand alone!” Except any High Elf history is also Blood Elf history. High Elven buildings, tabards, crests, architecture, vehicles, weapon style, etc. is Blood Elven except painted blue. The only notable High Elven characters left are Alleria and Veressa, but Alleria now leads and represents the Void Elves going forward, leaving only Veressa. The two have been separate for only 30 or so years. Not nearly enough to diverge or have enough unique history.
4: “Nightborne are just Night Elves, so we should get High Elves even if they’re just like Blood Elves!” Nightborne spent 10,000 years in arcane isolation from Night Elf society. They physically changed from the powers of the Nightwell, and their culture changed immensely from worship of Elune. They bear little cultural similarity to current day Night Elves. They are far more similar to the Blood Elves in that isolation around a magical font of power changed them drastically over time. Blood Elves originated as Highborne Night Elves that were cast out for continuing to practice in the arcane. This doubles as a lore reason as to why they find allies in the Horde through the Blood Elves, as they can empathize with their plight.
5: “High Elves chose not to feed on demonic magic! They sated their magical addiction through other means! Their culture is so different!”
If I make myself a ham sandwich and offer you one, but you tell me you don’t like ham and would prefer a turkey sandwich, I wouldn’t turn around and call you culturally different from me.
Regardless, as of the end of The Burning Crusade expansion, where Blood Elves were introduced to the Horde, the Sunwell was restored as a font of Arcane and Holy magic, removing the inherent need for Blood Elves (or High Elves) to sate any magical withdrawal. Lor’themar has also continued to allow High Elves to make pilgrimages to the Sunwell. You can see High Elves in a post-TBC-era Sunwell during the Quel’delar questline, and more recently, the Nightborne recruitment questline, where he even granted Alleria an audience.
6: “We can make High Elves different enough from Blood Elves! Look at all these tattoos and tribal motifs we made! Void Elves are not what we want!”
Re-imaging the High Elves to all look like extrapolations of some Warcraft 2-Era rangers isn’t solving the problem. The problem is that Blood elves are High Elves. The problem is that the fantasy of a traditional LOTR “High Elf” is a Blood Elf.
Blizzard hasn’t been deaf for all these years when Alliance ask for High Elves. It is NOT a secret, but they likely took a look at High Elves and agreed that they are just Blood Elves in fantasy, skin tone, hair color, origin, and feel, with the only difference to speak of visually being eye color.
So they made an attempt to see how they could spin and mix up a Thalassian elf enough to merit inclusion on the Alliance. They made a compromise. They gave it a prominent Thalassian leader with strong Alliance ties, and they provided it with a unique, flavorful aesthetic to set it apart from other races, most importantly their Blood Elf counterparts. In these areas, I think Void Elves were a success. They also currently number greater than any other Allied Race of either faction, so it sounds like most Alliance are enjoying them.
7: “You say there’s not enough High Elves left, but there’s even less Void Elves, yet they are an Allied Race!” Let’s start with basic stuff. Actual NPC numbers, towns, factions in WoW, etc, do not represent canon numbers. WoW is a representation of a multi-game IP. Example: The canon number of people in Goldshire is somewhere in the thousands, where as in game, I don’t think you can find more than 30 NPCs. The point being, we don’t know how many High Elves are left. We also don’t know how many Void Elves were created. People’s perception that there’s less Void Elves than High Elves is based on in-game representation, and Void Elves were literally just added, so of course there will appear to be less. This has definitely changed going forward as you can already see them in BfA events, and they even have their own Island Expedition team. High Elves, barring a single NPC here and there, will only see less and less limelight as Void Elf stories move forward.
8: “High Elves were there in the Nighthold cut-scene! They represented 1/3rd of the forces there!” The two main factions involved in that quest were the Blood Elven forces under Liadrin and the Night Elven forces under Tyrande. Veressa made an appearance so Elisande could insult her and her people for diluting their bloodline with humans (ouch!). Because she showed up to help Tyrande with a glaive thrower and a few of her Silver Covenant does not somehow equate to being one third of the forces there.
9: “Blizzard reverted their stance on Classic Servers! If we make enough noise and cry enough, they’ll cave on High Elves!” No, definitely not, and if this is the reason you keep arguing about it, please stop. The two are not at all the same. The lack of Blizzard Classic servers was causing unauthorized private servers to pop up and recreate this experience, and Blizzard has to protect their IP, so they shut them down. However, they realized there was more of a crowd/market for this than previously thought, so they announced official Classic servers to cater to this demographic. If you honestly think there’s as many people clamoring for High Elves as there were for Classic servers, you severely overestimate your vocal minority.
10: “Ion doesn’t know his lore. Ion isn’t listening to us! Ion should be fired!” While this isn’t exactly an argument and more of an opinion, I’m including it here because it’s flooding the forums while High Elf Hopefuls go through their stages of grief. Ion isn’t Lead Game Director because he doesn’t know his lore. He’s also not the only person that weighs in on these decisions, though it’s easy for everyone to bash him because he is the messenger. Ion in my opinion does what any good developer does: experiment, keep what works, cut or fix what does not. Through the Q&A’s, we’ve seen the progressing stance on unpopular things in Legion like Legendaries, RNG, AP grind, etc. and in BFA, all of these are getting addressed, while popular things like Mythic+ are seeing dungeons specifically designed around it.
11: “If Blood Elf is the High Elf Fantasy, then NIghtborne is Dark Elf Fantasy, and Horde are getting those! They look just like Night Elves!”
I would say no here. Nightborne were isolated for 10,000 years from Night elf society. That’s as long as it took for Night Elves to transform into High Elves after their exile, leading to the creation of the Sunwell, and those two are obviously different races.
If you hadn’t caught the obvious, the Nightborne was basically a Legion-era retelling of the Blood Elf storyline:
“An elven people (Blood Elf/Nightborne), physically and culturally warped by thousands of years by exposure to a mystical font of power (Sunwell/Nightwell), find their leader had consorted with the Legion (Kael with Kil’jaeden, Elisande with Gul’dan). A splinter faction within these people (Scryers/Nightfallen) rise up to overthrow their leader and purge them from Legion taint and control.”The only difference is that Velen reignites the Sunwell, whereas Thalyssra decides to destroy the Nightwell. Either way, they culturally and visually clash with Nigh Elves, who have shunned practice in the arcane since Azshara and The Sundering, having only recently allowed Night Elf mages to tenuously practice since Cataclysm.
Back to the question, Nightborne were given unique idle animations, had the Night Elf signature flip jump removed, and given only one eye shade between them. Nightborne get Warlock as a class option. Nightborne also have severely limited customization options, less than that of any Allied race despite being the most fleshed out in Legion. Whether that serves to severely limit their palette, or indicates they were merely worked on first, I don’t know.
I find Nightborne plenty different from Night Elf, considering the entire first story arc in Legion is dedicated to explaining and detailing this, and given the changes mentioned above.
- “High Elves being barely different from Blood Elves is just like Lightforged Draenei being barely different from Draenei, or Highmountain being barely different from regular Tauren!”
Yes, of course. But unlike High Elves, Draenei and Tauren are not crossing faction lines. They are just more Alliance Draenei. More Horde Tauren. More Alliance Dwarves. More Horde Orcs. The only two Allied Races thus far that “mixed it up” would be the Void Elf, a compromise to the Alliance to get the Thalassian model, and the Nightborne, a compromise to the Horde to get the Night Elf model.
Using any other comparisons between Allied Races to merit High Elves is a pointless endeavor, because Blizzard specifically catered these two to be opposing and opposite compromises for each faction. For an Allied Race that “crosses faction lines” a more drastic set of rules and distinction would be required.
So make of that what you will, no real point debating where it is wrong or outdated because it was written in 2018. Think of it as a historical document showing the thoughts of the other side.
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Because as Turtle WOW has showed this would utterly destroy the faction balance (64% alliance last time I checked the numbers).
That is not the same thing. You got your normal elf options now. You are salty over a name tag.
They were invited back to Silvermoon under HEAVY suspision. Because last time they had a free hand a lot of blood elves died back at Dalaran. Maybe Bob gets his own purge who knows.
We have 4 kind of elves and 2 kinds of trolls. I say that is infact enough elves. Even worse with Haranir we got a soda version light of more elves. Call that an elf fatigue if you will.
You gave yourself the answer. They are no 1 fangirls of the humans which no honorable true thalassian elf would ever do.
No Gaby just hates the idea the Horde might get the races they want too(That includes any ogres and the Amani). And he hates the idea of trolls he personally hates even harder then any traitors even more then being forgiving Vereesa and her followers. Sad how that goes but I ain’t stop nobody.
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From some standpoint I can respect the ogres H suggestion as the counter to helf A, whatever groundwork is needed to make the Amani make sense on Horde has not been made yet.
Though there is a whole troll patch coming up so who knows maybe things will change.
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You realize that since that post was written, we got fair-skinned, light-haired elves on the Alliance, right? It happened 5 years ago.
We actually got Fel-green eyes for them too in 12.0.5.
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Blizzard is rightfully afraid that we go back to the vanilla days when 2/3rd of all players were alliance. That is some sort of damage they can’t undo and I get that. Even with races like Vulpera, Nightborne and the Zandalari we are at a clear 50/50 balance atm and any other off goers would ruin that. Most void elf players RP themselves as high elves already and real high elves would make it worse.
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No I wasn’t talking about that. I was saving a space for the other primer. Yes it is old and out of date but the core arguments hold up and I think if the original primer can be posted without alteration, then its counterpart can be too.
As for this…I just don’t think they are happening because of the work it would involve, not out of any principled opposition.
they already see with the allied race system how it affects the community. And void elves beat all the others for reasons listened above. They won’t take that risk. And honestly I don’t want vanilla days back when the Horde couldn’t even form proper raid groups.
Possible, but at the same time I feel like we’ve had population swings like that in the past too, I recall a exodus over imbalance in racials from alliance to horde, then when that was nerfed the exodus continued because even tho racials were more equal, by now Horde just had the numbers and it was easier to form groups on the horde, so the exodus continued.
Now things are more even yeah and I feel like whatever exodus there would’ve been from belf characters to helf characters when they added customization that lets you look like a helf has already happened, sure as an appearance option on velf may not be ideal to play a alliance helf, but its miles more ideal then trying to play an alliance helf on a horde belf.
I’d expect for the most part it’d be velf’s population that helves would eat from in this sense and considering they’re both the same faction, that wouldn’t really do much for alliance/horde pop ratio.
I mostly think this because I remember how many belf characters in rp suddenly were helf overight, hey good for those players I’m glad they got a chance to embody what they want too in their RP.
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The biggest lore argument is the Windrunner sisters. And that’s it. They married humans and the crowd thinks it speaks for all elves which isn’t true. And yes gameplay trumps lore. That’s why they won’t endanger the current ratio which according to all sources is an almost perfect 50/50
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I don’t think that a population swing like that is going to happen, but I do think they don’t want to add the same race they currently have in retail to the Alliance again.
As I said, if the factions matter, you should play a Blood Elf as a High Elf would impugn on the identity of the Horde. If the factions don’t matter (which increasingly seems to be the direction they are heading in)…then you should still make a Blood Elf, as High Elves are redundant.
High Elves only make sense in a world where they care about the factions just enough that conflict between them is encouraged but they don’t care about them enough to start duplicating core races of one side to the other willy nilly. Or in practical terms, you screw the Horde to give the Alliance players fixated on this what they want.
Besides, my experience is that the Horde is in the majority over all?
Most Void Elves aren’t RP’ers and I won’t allow an RP’ers subjective experience to overwrite what the game is telling me.
In fairness this probably ended with fair skin tones on Void Elves. Yes, they’ve retreated from that over the course of Midnight by making it clear Void Elves are very much their own thing and that those tones are just part of the wider Void Elf phenotype, but it allows those who want to RP a private fantasy the ability to do so.
So long as they don’t expect that everyone else has to agree with it. Which of course is the core problem at the heart of this debate, who owns the legacy of the Quel’Dorei?
It’s the Horde of course. We have ownership of because the Blood Elves ARE the High Elves and it is a core part of Horde identity. Void Elves, by becoming their own thing, now require harder work to be played as a High Elf.
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No they aren’t.
idk numbers but I do know that populations tend to swing based on perception of which faction is the cooler one.
I imagine the first patch was stock increase for humans with Turalyon having done absolutely nothing wrong beyond that one slip of pretending he gets the sunwell better then the blood elves but we forgive him for that for the great father he is.
https://www.dataforazeroth.com/stats/classes-races
Night elves had a huge revival.
first thought was really after DF’s final patch and finale? but that’s also been a whole expansion in hindsight.
Was there a night elf that did something cool in TWW I missed?
Maybe its just a matter of elf expac, they did get some spotlight.
Edit: Oh, druid, I imagine some portion of that are botters (not all ofcourse), with some nodes now being with mobs I imagine there’s some value in shadowmeld too.
No they just realized how much better then nightborne their model looks.
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I’m still lowkey mad we didn’t get the NPC models of the guards NPC’s, they look just that much better.
The player model was done a bit dirty.
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Nightborne are ugly which is why they aren’t popular. Unlike void elves who are a carbon copy
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Part 4 already, very nice!
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