Ruined Quel'dorei RP since Shadowlands (Orb of the Sin'dorei + Reflecting Prism broken)

Greetings, fellow roleplayers.

I have been wanting to write this post for a while now, in search for opinions, solutions, and possibly even a response/fix from WoW Devs, although I know the latter is rather unlikely to happen, providing the issue affects 50 players at best.

Allow me to explain the issue here.

I’ve been roleplaying a Quel’dorei in the Alliance for quite some time, years even, a bit before the Void Elves were even introduced into the game.
In order to RP this Quel’dorei in proper manner, meaning that I actually looked like one In-Game, I did the following: (If you know about the trick with orb+prism, you can skip ahead of the steps.)

1- Understand how the Orb of Sin’dorei works, or used to work, back then. The way it works, for those who don’t know already, is that it would change your race to Blood elf, with the exact number setting that you had your character customized with. This means that If I had a human with “Face number 4”, when turned into a Blood elf, the changed face would also be “Blood elf face number 4”. This worked the same for every bit of customization, hairstyle, hair color, etc.

2- Now that you understand how the orb works, you go ahead and make a character with the desired BLOOD ELF configuration, but with an alliance race. You can use a dwarf, human, etc. Whatever you like, just make sure you choose the right customizations based on the number that the blood elf counterpart showed.

3-Open a trial wow account (WOW 2) on your bnet, and make a rogue, level it to lvl 5 or so so that it has invisibility, and leave it in Stormwind, for example.

4- Log your main account with this placeholder character that you’ve done. Invite the rogue from your secondary account, use the orb of Sin’dorei and give your appearance to this rogue via Reflecting Prism.

5- Remove the appearance from your rogue, and use prism again, this way both characters have the prism image of the desired Sin’dorei look. Now you just have to put the rogue in stealth, and following you around, so that you can use your prism on him to renew your coveted appearance, and this way, RP as something more akin to a Quel’dorei.

This worked perfectly. It was INCREDIBLY BOTHERING, yes, the Prism itself only lasts for 5 minutes, so a Weak Aura that blasts your ears not to forget (or else you lose your appearance and have to re-do everything) is mandatory. But hey, at least we were able to RP our characters and have them look ALMOST completely Quel’dorei, if it weren’t for the eye color.

With the introduction of Shadowlands customizations, we traded all that we could do before, for the eye color, and skin, arguably.

Now, since the Sin’dorei have trillions of options to choose when customizing their characters (jewelry, bracelets, collars, tattoos, etc etc etc), there is no Alliance race that can match it. And since there’s no matching customization options, the results of the Orb of Sin’dorei is absolutely cursed.

I managed to make a dwarf, who has tons of customization, and managed to make it look MORE OR LESS accurate to what I once was able to do, but here’s the funny part.

When you use a Reflecting Prism on someone with Orb of Sin’dorei, the suddenly grow demon hunter horns, they lose their boots sometimes, and more stuff that wasn’t there is added, such as blindfolds, green eyes, etc!

Essentially, I am no longer able to make my character look like it used to look, and everyone that knew me is just… Confused. I lost my will to keep RPing that character just because of that, because I can’t make it look like it should. For me, the Shadowlands customizations actually removed some of my freedom for this particular case.

That said, I don’t know what to do anymore, I tried everything, and nothing works.

The solution to this is simple, give us all of the blood elf hairstyles and hair colors, maybe? That way we could actually make beautiful characters on the Alliance side. Now we’re locked to whatever little Void Elves can offer.

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I thought Quel’dorei RP flourished thanks to the addition of skin colour customisations etc.? Sure, the Blood Elves get a vastly larger amount of customisations but I must admit the jewellery options are meh.

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Just… use whatever appearances the void elves have and then describe whatever diffrences/accessories your character might have through roleplay/your profile or art?

I don’t mean to sound rude but I don’t really understand why you’re being so dramatic about this entire thing. I can understand that you feel upset that Blizzard is restricting certain options and you can’t use them, but at the same time, roleplayers in this game unfortunately have to be kind of used to jump through hoops.

I’m fairly certain that the people who you used to roleplay with won’t mind if you use a slightly diffrent model, I get that the ingame model is one of the ways you can express your character but it’s thankfully not the only one.

For example, I myself am not really fond of some of the human male customisations particularly when it comes to facial hair. I just really dislike the way they look now and no option really suits my character, so he doesn’t have a beard now. I don’t mean to sound patronising but it’s not the end of the world and personally I just think you are gatekeeping yourself from enjoying roleplay because of something you can easily overcome or just not pay attention to.

That said, it would be nice if those customisation options were extended and I agree with that wholeheartedly, I really don’t understand why a lot of these things are race-locked in the first place. WoW has had an abysmal customisation system and the changes in Shadowlands have made it better, but it still went from horrible to only bad, especially compared to what’s on the mmo market nowadays.

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According to Wowhead, it should as of now change you into a DH of the opposite faction, but if you use it on a DH character.

So unless you’ve been using it in a DH alt, it sounds very much like a bug.

I think it’s a matter of having played an established character for years, looking a certain way and now no longer being able to do so? Could be immersion-breaking for both the player and those who knew the character for years.

It flourished for those who are incredibly lazy, and do not mind having literal tendrils/tentacles on their hair, not to mention 5 colors to choose from. Purple, purple but clear, purple but clearer, purple but darker, and dead grey.
There’s only 1 or 2 hairstyles without tentacles on them and… Let’s face it, they are not for everyone. My elf wore that tiara with the massive mane behind. You can’t even get close to that now.

That is exactly it, Laurenn.

… Also several Alliance races have more options than Blood elves so you could still have done the thing that way anyway?

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It is a bug, yes. The appearance is alright, but as soon as you transfer it to another character, it breaks, and you grow horns out of the blue, even without being a demon hunter, not having any demon hunter involved in the middle. I think the whole thing broke because of how many customizations are being added, and probably the mess they are behind the scenes.

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While you are right, they are not matching internally speaking, from a code perspective. Before, there was generally 5 things to choose from, right? OR 6 perhaps, I can’t remember. IT was always face, hair, color, skin color, accessories, across all races, with FEW exceptions that had MORE. Internally they work the same, despite having different names, for example it was accessories on humans, whereas trolls got tusks, or w/e. But internally the numbers were linked, it was… Say: “Customization slot 1”. Now they are non related, and for example Blood elf jewelry is on a category that is completely unrelated to whatever customization Dwarves could have, for instance. I am unsure as to whether I am explaining myself properly.

Probably. Blizzard has generally always been known for having spaghetti code and thats why things at completely random/old content can break because they added a new rock somewhere etc.

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No you make sense, I understand what you’re saying. Seen like that, yes, it’s a shame for the Orb. But at the same time, the last problem for being a high elf on a Velf is the hair color and I think that’s easily solved by a note in the TRP, like “Blond hair” or “red hair” way more easily than the Orb before even. People will know when the skin is not blue.

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While everyone has their preference and while I don’t roleplay a high elf, personally I find it more easy to feel immersed roleplaying with high elves using a velf model compared to a human model or prism/orb that drops/needs prism every 5-10 minutes.

But that’s a personal taste.

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Yeah, I know these things can be easily fixed by stating them on the profile. Thankfully I have several art pieces of how she looks like… But still, what bothers me, is that I HAD the ability to look like my character before, and now I do not, whereas this “new customization options” should’ve further expanded our possibilities, without withdrawing any from the game.

…What?

Bros cant imagine that i am lazy for playing paladin ooc and blood knight ic

Like literally, what? lmao

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I mean okay

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This is exactly it!

So what you’re saying is - quel’dorei roleplayers are, what, lazy? Why? If anything quel’dorei roleplayers have shown us that we do not need 30 different hairstyles and that we do not need 16 different skin tones to be immersed in our roleplay and our fantasies. If anything, they have shown us that they are capable of having fun and immersing themselves with their fantasies without having to cry about it on a forum!

They are remarkable. Most of them. Some.

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I believe you are not getting the point of the post.
Thing is that while now you can get pink skin and blue eyes, you can’t have many other stuff, that you used to be able to have by using prism/orb thingy. So if you actually cared back then and wanted to look like an actual elf, you could do that, now you cannot.

That’s where you let your imagination take over, no? Are you going to be stopped from rping an elf just because your game customizations are a little limited?

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