Don't look for holes when there aren't any. I'm not talking about the Pandaren race as a whole. I'm talking about playable Pandaren who do in fact choose sides. Since both Factions have their own sub faction of playable Pandas, the race is then defined as "neutral" for mechanical game play purposes. Which ultimately, by WoW race standards, would mean the same for belves and helves.
Once again read my long post last page.
No, the pandaren are considered "neutral" because you start the game "neutral" as a pandaren, without taking any sides, help both Alliance and Horde as they crash on the Wandering Isle, and by the end of your journey, you pick which faction you want your pandaren to join.
The reason elves would not be "neutral" is because adding high elves to the Alliance means your high elf would already be Alliance-aligned when you start the game. You would not be forced to go through a similar "neutral starting experience" like the pandaren. You wouldn't have to start 'neutral' and then pick your side by the end of your 1-20 adventure.
read my post.
I personally don't see an issue with the way Pandaren were implemented. As high elves and blood elves are the same physical race I see no reason why they can't have the panda treatment so long as it's done carefully. Here's my take on it. Im doing this on my phone so mind any spelling or grammatical errors.
Update eversong/ghostlands and add them to the continent. Lore development would consist of the silver covenant and the void elves beseiging silvermoon with Lorthemar and maybe the Nightborne on the defense.
This would be the major Alliance/Horde conflict for 9.0 and would include a new BG and warfront if blizzard decides to move forward with them. Season 1 PvP gear would have a red and green/blue and silver thalasian theme.
New arenas in Ghostlands and Bloodmist Isle.
New elves choose their alliegnce at the culmination of their starting quests. Blood Elves are changed to Thalasian elves in the creation screen and are then given blood/high after choosing their faction. Elves have brand new customization options including blue,green, and yellow eyes along with many of the options in this threads OP.
Death Knights
The Alliance had high elves during wrath so their intro quests do not need updating. The player chooses their faction after Lights Hope when Darion gives them a choice.
Demon Hunters
This issue has two solutions.
#1 all Thalasian DH are Horde. (Lame solution)
#2 DH intro is revamped lore wise and includes multiple races for each faction. (Sweet solution, more content yay)
To compensate for the loss of Belves as a core race, the Horde would receive Vrykul (i personally think vrykul would look nice as a Horde race)
Allied Race Imbalances.
Velves were treated as the Horde swap for Nightborne. If thalasian elves are neutral then it screws with the balance.
Two solutions to this.
In both scenarios the Alliance gets the Kvaldir(vrykul AR swap) to balance out the Nightborne. Horde on the other hand get...
#1 san'lyan (kinda lame. too many elves,)
#2 Pandaren Varient AR (not as lame as pandas don't have an AR)
Now as you can see this route of implementing high elves gives the game a substantial amount of content where as a simple AR obviously does not.
Last edited by Varx; 2019-01-21 at 03:11 AM.
The entire point of VELFs was to supplement the Alliance's desire for HELFs. The existence of VELFs is further proof it's not gonna happen. Even the LEAD DESIGNER (you know the person who decides what goes in the game) already said you can already play a HELF right now since BELFs are them. And since VELFs are just voided up BELFs, you technically already have HELFs!
"It's not what we don't know that gets us into trouble; it's what we know for sure that just ain't so." ~ Mark Twain
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time" ~ Jesus of Nazareth
"把它放在我的屁股,爸爸" ~ Dalai Lama
@Varx No, read his post.
As I wrote earlier, the difference between High Elves and Blood Elves is not purely one of allegiance to the Horde or Alliance.
"A crucial difference between high elves and blood elves is that no high elves have decided to feed their hunger for arcane magic by draining that magic from alternative sources (now that the Sunwell is useless). Even today, though, a high elf might still succumb to that addiction and become one of the blood elves" -- Warcraft Encyclopedia
The problem is that new High/Blood Elf player characters aren't 1 year old. The destruction of the Sunwell took place in year 20. BFA is year 33 or 34. That's only 13-14 years while all playable characters are adults. Therefore the playable character was around during the destruction of the Sunwell and would have to have made a choice between draining magic from living beings or not.
Then there is the eye color issue:
"The situation regarding blood elf eyes is, in fact, extremely similar to that of the green skin of orcs: just being around heavy use of fel magic turned the eyes of the blood elves green. You could be the most pious of priests or most outdoorsy of Farstriders, chances are, if you were a high elf in Quel'Thalas or Outland following the Third War, you were around fel energies, and your eyes would turn green. Like the orcs' skin color, such an effect would take a very long time to wear off. Fel magic works a bit like radiation in this sense; it permeates the area and seeps into anything in the vicinity. Anything near a source of fel magic shows signs of slight corruption, it just so happens that high elves and orcs manifest it in a very visual way." -- Ask CDev round 3
Therefore, any new player Elf around in Quel'Thalas would have green eyes, or nowadays yellow eyes. According to Ion Hazzikostas there aren't blue contact lenses for High/Blood Elves yet.
Of course lore could be adapted to solve these issues but your neutral High Elf race idea in the present time would fundamentally mean a choice for current Blood Elves living in Quel'Thalas to defect to the Alliance since there is no large neutral population of Elves in Quel'Thalas. For Horde players this would feel like they are loosing part of their population.
"I guess only blood elves feel like the odd man out for the Horde. I hope that we've engineered that into it as deftly as we could, but you know, it's the equivalent of a bunch of white chicks hanging out with goblin or tauren. It's weird." -- Chris Metzen
"It's not what we don't know that gets us into trouble; it's what we know for sure that just ain't so." ~ Mark Twain
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time" ~ Jesus of Nazareth
"把它放在我的屁股,爸爸" ~ Dalai Lama
"It's not what we don't know that gets us into trouble; it's what we know for sure that just ain't so." ~ Mark Twain
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time" ~ Jesus of Nazareth
"把它放在我的屁股,爸爸" ~ Dalai Lama
I don't bother reading half of what you write cause 99 times out of 100 it's just pure head canon and "muh high elf" bias.
If you looked from outside the square you'd recognize the glaring issues with introducing playable high elfs. Namely the negative impacts it would have on the Horde and Blood Elfs especially. But you don't care about that. It's "not your problem" is a common response I'm seeing lately. But when making requests, it IS your problem to consider the positive AND negative impacts given that it is YOUR request. Most pro-high elfers choose to forget the negatives though (cause it hurts their feelings) and expect Blizz and the rest of the community to ignore them as well and just implement high elfs cause "muh alliance light skinned elf".
If you want the model, go play Horde. If you want the lore, it's already there... unfortunately it's very limited though as Blizz have progressed the majority of thalassian story via the Blood Elfs (who are the high elf trope of the warcraft universe). I suggest you roleplay if you really want to be a high elf so darn much. Like you said, it's relatively hard to tell between an armored void elf and blood elf... with that same point you made I offer an alternative to you .... put armor on your void elf and role play to your hearts content. If you don't want that... well you know... the light skinned high elfs are waiting for you on the Horde
Blood elves are our high elves - Chris Metzen
"It's not what we don't know that gets us into trouble; it's what we know for sure that just ain't so." ~ Mark Twain
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time" ~ Jesus of Nazareth
"把它放在我的屁股,爸爸" ~ Dalai Lama