Currently they are just Blood Elves made available to the Alliance. No High Elves.
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Well that’s not true, by your account High elves are already in the telgorus rift being converted into Void Elves and with SL’s you’ll get your pretty fair skinned blue eyed elves.
But as far as the story goes, we don’t have playable Helves yet. If we would have them, then Blizzard would have surely acknowledged it by now. What we got are Blood Elves customizations.
And as far as I remember the Velves are Belves.
Nothing indicates that these are Helves at the moment. I would love to read an official confirmation for this as well but we don’t have one. This is one of the things I also forgot to see when I got hyped about the Alliance finally getting some bone thrown at them.
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Are you trolling right now?
https ://i.imgur.com/8CP2IhI.png
No, no trolling.
And yes, I have seen the video from the one AD-disrupter we do not name here on the forums.
I just think that they go the “convenient” route by given you the illusion that you can “roleplay” the character. The full text from wowhead is:
If you use Wildhammer tattoos, are you part of that clan? Seeing how you start in a Bronzebeard starting experience.
It’s complex - can’t make a starting experience for every subset, it would consume so many resources.
You have the freedom in your mind to roleplay your character how you like. You get to decide how you want your character to be.
With this said, I believe that they give us just the imagination that we could play one. Maybe they could be indeed true Helves who join the Velf-fun but as far as I can tell only the Horde get their Helves so far (back).
I think I simply want to hear an official confirmation that High Elves are playable at this point.
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I think it’s pretty clear that remaining High elves are being absorbed into the Void Elf bubble.
Let’s wait and see what the next customizations say about World of Elfcraft. My current stance is that we’re going to play Belves in the Alliance which is also fine by me.
Fair skinned light haired, blue eyed.I’m happy with this kind of Belves in the Alliance.
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"Giving that race directly to the Alliance would have blurred a lot of the lines between the two factions, but also there isn’t a clear example of who or what High Elves are as a larger group which remains in Azeroth. There’s a couple… We just met Alleria again… But they’re not out there in the same way. "
There you go, so they know the problem and they did it anyways.
Good job fixing that one Activision.
Same here. Whilst of course ideally I want High Elves to:
- be entirely seperate on the character creation screen
- have all variants of eyes high-elf npcs have (most notably the ones with white sclera one which is missing currently from the Blizzard annoucement)
- have non-void hairstyles and hair colours
- have non-void voices
- have their own mount (seperate from the one that requires an Argent tournament grind)
- have their own racial abilities
- be called high elf in npc/quest dialog
- have their own introductory quest experience (even if it’s just a matter of handing in a single quest in Stormwind like the other allied races have)
If that stuff is all off the table then simply having Blizzard state officially that the fair-skinned Void Elves are actually High Elves in lore it would be a big consolation. Otherwise the uncertainty is letting it remain a point of tension indefinitely because:
- A lot of High-elf haters will insist they aren’t high elves because they don’t want to allow them to be playable in any capacity
- A lot of Alliance haters and blood-elf enthusiasts will insist only blue-eyed blood elves are high elves, especially the kinds of Blood Elves who think having playable High Elves is an attack on their identity somehow (I never got this logic but it’s very common)
- Trolls will insist they aren’t high elves just for the fun of it
- Many Void Elf fans and High Elf fans will get upset/mad when they see large numbers of Void Elves identifying/RPing as High Elves if they think it’s not legitimate
What’s more is that the “it’s not a real high elf” mentality is a self-fulfilling prophecy because many who originally counted it as a High Elf might come to view it differently if enough people around them insist that’s not true.
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Which is why some of us are voicing for optional sub-race templates to be added as a part of the new customization screen. Former Allied Races could also be easily integrated there once they remove the unlocking requirements, as they can easily tie the different racials to the demonym and specific appearence.
Such as:
https://i.ibb.co/b5wzt92/subrace-customization-mockup.jpg
I don’t know how accurate this is but someone datamined some kind of subrace-template in the game files:
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Oh yes! I have seen that one (and pretty much fell off my chair)
As a matter of facts it is even linked in the first post of the thread I shared.
I know you said ‘ideally’ so I’m not trying to demolish your points here, just point out the problems with it.
That’s essentially asking for an extra race on Alliance, there would therefore need to be a Horde equivalent. The direct equivalent (Part of the faction since the start pretty much but not playable, has been asked for since Vanilla) would be Ogres. Can you -imagine- how the forums would explode about Horde bias if Alliance got a reskin of a Blood/Void Elf and Horde got a new race?
Personally I would go further, Blue eyes, but also Gold eyes, because High Elves can feel the ‘Light’ aspect of the Sunwell, even from far away (Source: Priestess Aurora in ‘Shadow of the Sun’), but also those sexy green peepers, because Blizzard confirmed how they work, and any Alliance High Elf who spent time on Outlands would have that eye colour, no matter how committed a member of the Alliance they were.
I originally thought whinging about hair colour was just utterly petty and needy, until it turned out that they don’t actually get black and white hair colours. If they had, I would have little sympathy, but because the only concession seems to be they have ‘non tentacle’ hair, then yeah, I can see that, that’s a reasonable request.
I don’t buy that. I play on a Roleplay realm, so as you can imagine, character personalisation is key to me. I don’t think of the voice sound, that just isn’t a factor, they say what I /say and they sound like what I want. Your boy Brigante for example has an accent that is a weird mash up of Irish and Welsh sounding, not the bizarre Transatlantic upper class accent that all Blood Elf Males have. It sounds like a ridiculously counter intuitive thing for me to say, as my profession is 100% based around my voice, but to be honest, the sound effects for your race have no impact on your roleplay, and if you’re not roleplaying, then does it even matter?
That’s not going to be possible as things are currently, as logically that would be asking for Void Elves to have two racial mounts, something no race, even the main races have. If it -were- possible, then you are asking for a complete separate race, with the attendant problems I listed previously.
I had some pretty good ideas for High Elf Racials (Or at least people here thought they were good) but as things stand, again, that isn’t going to happen, because they are a High Elf skin for the Void Elf race.
Doesn’t matter. Won’t happen because the actual race is Void Elf, but it just doesn’t matter. We’re playing fictional characters who belong to a fictional species, on a fictional world. There is a thing in Roleplay and LARP for that matter called ‘Suspension of Belief’ It is what lets you rationalise the fact that Stormwind seems to have the same population as just one street in a sleepy UK Village, It is what lets LARP’ers just ‘tune out’ an aeroplane going overhead, and not drop to their knees quaking going “Gadzooks, what manner of metal Dragon is that!” I mean for a start, no one speaks like that at LARP, and if they did, their character would likely have inherited a six foot deep plot of earth before the day was through.
Likewise, Suspension of Disbelief. Many of us will have played the Warcraft Games. Did we never stop to wonder why Humans and Orcs built houses that were too small to live in? Why a boat that can cross an ocean was the effective size of a canoe, and what the everliving heck was going on with Garithos’ chin. (And he had the nerve to call Elves ‘Inhuman’! 
)
Overlooking the word ‘Void’ and mentally replacing it with ‘High’ is small fry in comparison.
Again, the problem there is that it would de facto be a separate race. It isn’t. If you want to make a Wildhammer Dwarf, your starting quest experience is going to have been identical to a Bronzebeard, because the differences are purely cosmetic. -if- they were a separate race, then yes, but then again that comes back to the problems I detailed earlier.
I think that would be a pretty petty approach, If my Gnome, Draenei or Humans saw a thing that looked like a high elf, and said they were a high elf, then they’d be inclined to go “That’s a High Elf”, even if it was a Void Elf using the High Elf skin.
To be fair, that attitude, whilst I do not subscribe to it, stemmed from the point in time when (mostly US posters to be fair) were saying that High Elves should have a more muscular model than Blood Elves, and basically showing their complete ignorance of Wow Lore and desire to play Legolas rip offs. The reasoning was.
- Blood Elves live in luxury, High Elves had to struggle to survive in the wilderness.
Umm, wat? The Blood Elves -are- the ones who had to struggle, standing alone as a neutral nation , whilst the High Elves beggared off to the Alliance. The lifestyle was identical. Some Blood/High Elves lived comfortable lives in cities, like Silvermoon, Dalaran and Stormwind, Some Blood/High Elves are rugged outdoors types, like the Farstriders and the Highvale Rangers. The lifestyle of the two were identical, but for some reason some people thought that all High Elves were rangers and so should have extra options Blood Elves don’t have, despite there probably being more Farstrider Rangers alive than there are High Elves in their entirety…
If you mean the race, well I suppose if great great grandpa says so… If you mean the spiteful internet type of Troll, then who cares what they think, they are a mindless irrelevance.
That’s a problem that the community is going to have to resolve itself. Again, if it walks like a High Elf, looks like a High Elf, calls itself a High Elf, then its a High Elf. If some Void Elf players can’t let go of that, then they’re failing at Suspension of Belief.
That is -only- going to be a problem on RP realms, as lets face it, Raiders and PvP’ers don’t care about such distinctions, I would make the bold statement therefore, that any Roleplayer who sees a visual depiction looking, talking and acting like a High Elf, yet gets hung up about the fact that the Allied race is called Void Elf, is not in fact, a very good roleplayer at all, because they are falling at the first hurdle.
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I have to agree on that.
Said that, very sadly, there are many of such ‘roleplayers’… 
I wish I could say you were wrong.
At the risk of sounding pretentious (and I am aware that I can come across as arrogant at times especially in purely text based statements where context and tone are missing) I think I understand Roleplay quite well, I’ve been a tabletop gamer for more than thirty years, a LARPer for thirty years, and an online RP’er for fifteen or so. The essence of Roleplay is just that, Playing a Role in a Setting. The Setting is important, you could be someone who is absolutely awesome at roleplaying an Imperial Stormtrooper from the Star Wars franchise, you could be the worlds best at it, but if you try to play it in a setting like Stormwind, you would still be a very poor Roleplayer. Because Stormtroopers like that have no place in Azeroth.
Likewise in the setting we know High Elves exist, we know that many of them are in the Alliance, or at least Alliance friendly, so if someone is using a character model that -looks- like a High Elf, -acts- like a High Elf, and -calls- themselves a High Elf, then what possible reason would you have , to not then regard them as a High Elf. Who gives a fig what it says on their character creation screen? Its not like they are playing a Tauren who claims to be a Gnome, because that is silly. (OK, I mean someone -could- play a Tauren who thinks they are a Gnome, but it would be readily apparent that they are not).
If someone looks like what they are trying to play, and acts like it, then our characters can no more see the race on their character selection screen than they can see floating blue text over their heads saying their name, You go with the role they are playing, so long as they actually look like one.
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“It’s totally unfair that the Alliance got High Elves!”
“This is a spit in the face of every Alliance Player!”
Also High Elf fans.
Your point?
I cannot imagine it. If it would be truly a Helf/Ogres distribution, then everything would have been alright.
No, the Alliance had High Elves since Void Elves were added. These are still Void Elves even if they have normal skin tones. It’s still a type of high elf after all.
Does anyone know for sure if the Void Elves are getting ALL Blood Elf skin tones though or just a few though? Seems weird and a bit unfair if Void Elves not only have their own customisations but every single Blood Elf one as well.