World Of Warcraft

Saw this around MMO-Champion earlier.

So fancy, I would give up both legs if Blizzard made these guys playable.

edited 18th Nov '17 5:27:15 AM by NaraNumas

I'm amused by how, for some reason, the concept of Allied races has led to people demanding everything be an allied race. Naga, ogres, those new fox-people, everything is now potentially an allied race to random people.

And if Blizzard were going to give us naga or ogres they'd just be a new race rather than an allied race. "Allied race" is a nice, proper feature term for "subrace", not everything and their dogs can now become a player character.

Thematically, yes, but development-wise the Allied Races are in effect "Recycle animation sets to cut down on art team time."

That's mostly why it's caused such a frenzy, there's a lot of races out there that share animation sets with currently-playable races to at least a degree (Mogu - Draenei, Vulpera - Goblin, Saurok - Worgen, off the top of my head) that puts a big question mark next to them.

Though I agree that people hoping for Ogre/Naga and such are pipe dreamers, giving the above statement about recycled animations. And I say this as someone who REALLY wanted Naga and was upset at their disinclusion.

Still though, I want Sethrek, we have three furry races, will be four if you count HM Tauren as separate, give the scalies some love. And the Allied race thing applies to them because they have a lot of model love and some familiar things (Femworgen walk animation, pandaren casting animations)

edited 18th Nov '17 8:21:58 AM by NaraNumas

You don't just add a new race by throwing together some animations. They need a capital (or to be integrated into an existing capital), a full set of lore, starting quests, voices, emotes, and countless other things. Every race Blizzard adds involves substantial development resources.

Like the void elves.

Sorry, that was a little rude. But it does kinda show if people want a race to be playable, Blizzard will probably make it playable even if they have to write new lore to justify it (and as much as I like the design of the Void Elves, their storyline from what we've seen so far is full of what).

That said, some definitely DON'T have the lore to justify ever becoming allied race because they already have lore to paint them as Always Chaotic Evil (Mogu are too xenophobic and superior, Saurok are sub-sentient at best), but these new races have a lot of "maybies" to them, the only way we'll know for sure if they fit the rest of the criteria is to wait until the Beta at the earliest to see their culture and degree of intelligence they have.

Blizzard really opened the can of worms, the players are taking the bait.

I also don't think they're gonna have starting quests, the closest thing is gonna be the recruitment quest to unlock them, hence them starting at level 20 (where the racial starter zones stop scaling) and not 1, not likely to have racial capitals either (sure NB come from Suramar, HM from highmountain, but they're likely not going to be redesigned into capitals)

As an aside, does anyone know enough Warcraft Elvish to know what the Void Elves will refer to themselves as? What is Void in Thallasian?

edited 19th Nov '17 5:33:32 AM by NaraNumas

My only complaint about Void elves is that we got them instead of High Elves for no good reason.

The only major difference between High Elves and Blood Elves is eye color and I can understand that they didn't want two races that were effectively the same appearance-wise. At least Dark Iron Dwarves and Highmountain Tauren are immediately distinguishable from their vanilla counterparts and Lightforged Draenei have different customization options and general color scheme.

It's not a great excuse but it's understandable enough.

edited 19th Nov '17 12:02:57 PM by LordVatek

Stormwind City in the Elune server was lagging so badly, it used up a concernedly large amount of my computer's memory that I had to close it.

That's never happened to me before.

Void Elves are High Elves, they are going to apparently look normal in some fashion but its not going to be like Shadowform or Worgen shapeshift.

Personally I think it should be an 'in combat' only thing or just when casting.

Dialogue confirmed they're exiled blood elves, not high elves. The blue eyes are the void magic, not the natural high-elf blue.

As for High Elves, when the Sunwell was destroyed, the High Elves chose to learn to curve their addiction by meditating and carefully rationing their arcane cravings until they were almost entirely weaned off of it (though the threat of withering still exists, as shown by a small sub-quest series in Eastern Plaguelands), whereas Blood Elves decided to replace one addiction with another, eventually ending up with Fel because of Kael'thas.

Because of the self-restraint that remaining a high elf comes with, there's a non-sustainable population of them as NP Cs compared to the ones that stayed behind and became Blood Elves, much less enough High Elves left to be a PC race.

Void Elves, from what little we know, are Blood Elves that decided to tap into the void instead of the Fel, and it bit back on them way harder because go figure the void is way worse to try to eat than fel magic is. Hence them kinda sidestepping the issue of how low High Elves' population is. However, that's just at this current juncture, there's no telling what could change story-wise between now and when they release.

Edit: Wait... I misread whoever said that entirely, don't type tired guys, it's a bad idea.

edited 19th Nov '17 6:44:35 PM by NaraNumas

They still have their blue eyes and they did not tap into Fel or Blood magic thus not Blood Elves.

By that logic, an elf using a power source -> suddenly a new subrace, "High Elves" are a new one too. Being cut off from Vanilla Sunwell had the same effect on all High Elves. Alliance has a population of Hipster Elves that efuse to admit that. All this is is magic favored identity choice.

We will have to see how they do the plot but that could be indeed be true and each Windrunner sister will be allied with each faction.

That would make sense, though having both sisters on the side of her enemy will probably make Sylvanas more embittered than she is already.

In another matter, is it me or is Anduin being shaped as Reconstruction/Foil of Arthas?

That's bluntly stated in War Crimes. By Garrosh of all people.

Curious, I'd have expected Jaina to say that, well I'll add it to his character page then.

How do you mean?

Both are blonde royals who started out as princes who had a pair of big shoes to fill (Therenas for Arthas, Varian for Anduin), learned to wield the Light (Paladin and Priest respectively) and became active players of the realm before their fathers died. They also end up wielding a sword at an important point of their lives (Frostmourne and Shalamayne).

However, where Arthas was vengeful, Anduin was diplomatic; while Arthas quest to destroy the scourge ended in him being broken and turning more and more evil until he reached Frostmourne, Anduin maintained his pacifists views up until his father's dead, not losing his moral compass in the process and then becoming the King of Stormwind for real, maturing into the man he needed to be.

Even that resurrection/healing spell he uses in the Battle for Azeroth cinematic is not that different from what a Paladin could do in theory.

edited 19th Nov '17 9:46:31 PM by raziel365

Or a Death Knight, to further the foil route.

An heroic version of what Arthas did in the Wrathgate cut-scene.

Hissss! Discipline Priest! Anduin has as much Paladin in him as a random Death Knight.

edited 19th Nov '17 10:24:07 PM by googlebot

They've also both fought with Sylvanas.

edited 19th Nov '17 10:23:55 PM by LordVatek

I mentioned Death Knight because Arthas was a Death Knight I'm the Scourge Campaign in WCIII and because they have Army of the Dead, to boot.

edited 19th Nov '17 10:26:46 PM by sgamer82

I should have worded that better. Priests seem to be more flexible and adaptable than Paladins in general. Where Paladins face a foe they either brake or overcome. Priests add understand/subvert/convert/etc. to that list.

Who knows, maybe he ends up being the one who kills Sylvanas at the siege for Lordaeron.