Official High Elf Discussion Megathread

[Ignaz]

Was wondering when this thread would rise from the seventh hell again.

Bad people last longer

[Thalassian Bob]

Why are you so focused on diminishing the legitimacy of High elves by your own personal theories?

I mean, we know what we know, and even trying to save face by saying that it would have been Kael'thas' followers and not the ones that stayed at Silvermoon is not only not accurate, but wrong, since unless we take into account literally drinking demon blood and other activities related with the Burning Legion and Illidan... What Taela says is completely applied to almost every Blood elf, there is no point to try to move it to your field by saying that 'oh, she must be referencing the Kael'thas followers'.

Calm down, my dude. I'm not trying to "diminish" anything. Everybody is allowed to have their own interpretations of in-game information and speculate accordingly.

I merely offer the Allerian high elves as a potential explanation for the blood elves getting blue eye options if they do with the coming customisation expansion in Shadowlands.

Of course, what Taela says can be applied to all blood elves. I just have a hard time imagining every other remaining high elf being as ridiculous as Hawkspear and his ilk.

[Aldo Hawk]

Calm down, my dude. I'm not trying to "diminish" anything. Everybody is allowed to have their own interpretations of in-game information and speculate accordingly.

I merely offer the Allerian high elves as a potential explanation for the blood elves getting blue eye options if they do with the coming customisation expansion in Shadowlands.

Of course, what Taela says can be applied to all blood elves. I just have a hard time imagining every other remaining high elf being as ridiculous as Hawkspear and his ilk.

Well... Bronzebeard Dwarves are getting what should have went to an Allied race, and same with Darkspear Trolls, so I don't think we should try to make sense out of the hypothetical case of Blood elves with blue eyes.

[Thalassian Bob]

Well... Bronzebeard Dwarves are getting what should have went to an Allied race, and same with Darkspear Trolls, so I don't think we should try to make sense out of the hypothetical case of Blood elves with blue eyes.

Those options are almost certainly there to give people the ability to near-as-dammit play as Wildhammer and sand/dark trolls etc. To suggest that people have to assume their characters are still strictly Ironforge or Dark Spear because of logistical limitations would be pedantic to the point of absurdity.

If blood elves get blue eyes, people are perfectly entitled to suppose a potential origin for those blue eyes beyond the woefully boring "It's just cosmetics" argument. Preferably within a lore-friendly framework. Role play is one of the most exciting elements of an MMORPG.

[FlubberPuddy]

Those options are almost certainly there to give people the ability to near-as-dammit play as Wildhammer and sand/dark trolls etc. To suggest that people have to assume their characters are still strictly Ironforge or Dark Spear because of logistical limitations would be pedantic to the point of absurdity.

If blood elves get blue eyes, people are perfectly entitled to suppose a potential origin for those blue eyes beyond the woefully boring "It's just cosmetics" argument. Preferably within a lore-friendly framework. Role play is one of the most exciting elements of an MMORPG.

Thank you for pointing this out.

Yeah, this avenue they're taking is to make it so that you, the player, can RP more freely how you want your character to be.

People trying to gate-keep and say, "well it's still not X because of A!" doesn't matter. Majority will not give a shit once the option is available.

If someone whispers me on a Nightelf Mage that gets Highborne customization and says, "you know you're not a Highborne right?" I probably will be having too much fun to care

People trying to dictate how others should play is one of the slimiest things ever.

[Koroniss]

I wonder...

Within Shadowlands, it would be appropriate to encounter good ol' Garithos somewhere, perhaps as a dungeon boss or an elite quest target. An additional bonus could be him making special remarks when engaged with elves.

I hope even the most hardcore proponents/opponents to the main debate here could find some common ground in attending to a lovely and amicable rendezvous with the guy. Blizzard needs some familiar faces to populate the zones anyway, so here's hoping they will pick up the idea.

[Wyrt]

If blood elves get blue eyes, people are perfectly entitled to suppose a potential origin for those blue eyes beyond the woefully boring "It's just cosmetics" argument. Preferably within a lore-friendly framework. Role play is one of the most exciting elements of an MMORPG.

The lore explanation would be super simple.

Green eyes are the result of being in or around Silvermoon when it was being rebuilt using fel magic. Any elf who wasn't around Silvermoon at that time would still have blue eyes, just like high elves.

There's nothing inherently special about high elves that let them keep blue eyes, it was all just their distance from the city while it was being rebuilt. A farstrider who was out in the wilds, or a mage who was in Dalaran, or an ambassador who was off in some other nation, etc. would all still have blue eyes and could choose to be blood elves. Because being a blood elf is ultimately just a choice.

[Aldo Hawk]

Those options are almost certainly there to give people the ability to near-as-dammit play as Wildhammer and sand/dark trolls etc. To suggest that people have to assume their characters are still strictly Ironforge or Dark Spear because of logistical limitations would be pedantic to the point of absurdity.

If blood elves get blue eyes, people are perfectly entitled to suppose a potential origin for those blue eyes beyond the woefully boring "It's just cosmetics" argument. Preferably within a lore-friendly framework. Role play is one of the most exciting elements of an MMORPG.

I am not saying that, what I am saying is that it is not a replacement of an actual High elf option.

Everyone can roleplay what they want, and in the case of Dwarves and Trolls, it is more effective, as it can be currently done with Mag'har orcs, saying that yours is not from AU Draenor, when that is not the case.

I hope you can understand what I say.

[Manariel]

From Reddit :

Alliance players have been asking for high elves before blood elves were even in the game. 14 years later and the most the devs are willing to give us has been a shitty compromise in the form of purple "I can't believe its not high elves!"

Just to really let the absurdity of the devs' Horde bias sink in, imagine if the original 4 races had been humans, dwarves, night elves, and blood elves for the Alliance and orcs, tauren, undead, and goblins for the Horde. When people ask why the Darkspear trolls aren't playable, despite interacting with them throughout several questlines, the devs tell them that there simply weren't enough to be playable because they all came from a small island and most of them were wiped out but maybe they would add them later. Then, the first expansion comes around and they do several rewrites to the lore and have a large faction of trolls join the Alliance because they felt betrayed by the Horde. Horde players are rightfully annoyed that the race they wanted to play as since vanilla were shoehorned into the Alliance but even worse is the fact that they simultaneously tease you by added the Darkspear trolls as an unplayable NPC faction to the Horde. Then the next expansion comes out and a very large faction of Darkspear trolls on the Horde form an army to aid in the assault on the Lich King but still remain unplayable. People point to the obviously significant number of them and ask again that they be made playable only to be told that they don't want to blur faction lines and that there simply aren't enough Darkspear trolls to be playable.

Several expansions of featuring the Darkspear trolls prominently at the forefront of the story go by without even so much as a hint of them being made playable until finally we reach BFA. Allied races are the perfect time to finally add Darkspear trolls to the Horde but instead of Darkspear trolls, exactly what Horde players have been asking for since the beginning of the game, they get void trolls, a few dozen trolls that come from the Alliance faction of trolls that are an obvious bastardization of what you've actually wanted to play for ages now. When asked why they made up something that nobody ever asked to play as instead of the race they've requested for more than a decade, they simply tell you that Darkspear trolls are Alliance trolls and that if you want to play as a lanky, long-tusked mojomaker, the Alliance is there waiting for you. No matter how much feedback you give on how the Darkspear trolls are different in the lore or what customization options could set them apart from Alliance trolls, or even how every supposed rule for why they can't be made playable has been contradicted by other playable characters over the years you'll just get hordes of people telling you to suck it up and accept your shitty compromise.

If that wasn't enough to annoy you, they also spend years neglecting your content in favour of developing the Alliance zones and story first, even going as far as to reuse assets on your new mounts while the Alliance get 3 brand new models. Your complaints are met with dismissal as you're told that the Horde is just boring and generic orc fantasy tropes so you should just accept your reskins and unfinished content because the Alliance is so much cooler. When the Alliance finally get to play as Vrykul, you get fat orcs instead of ogres. When the Alliance get to play as the the cool new race of Sethrak they've been asking for since BFA was first announced, you instead get amputee goblins with robotic limbs that people generally find unsettling more than appealing. Just to really rub it in, they announce new customization for the base game races a month later, making your new allied "race" look even more shitty when its essentially just customization for an existing race compared with the Alliance's unique and brand new playable race. They also fail to address concerns of a dying population for the Horde, making it harder and harder to find groups for content because absolutely everything in the game is catered towards the Horde and the snowball effect of people jumping ship is just further exacerbating the issue with each passing update. Despite all of this, Alliance players will still tell you to shut up and accept things because you're just being whiny without any legitimate grievances about the game's biased development.

If all of that sounds ridiculous, petty and spiteful, that's because it is.

It's so true it hurts, and it'll perhaps help horde players understand why we want High Elves.

[Garfurion]

The lore explanation would be super simple.

Green eyes are the result of being in or around Silvermoon when it was being rebuilt using fel magic. Any elf who wasn't around Silvermoon at that time would still have blue eyes, just like high elves.

Green eyes were not not caused only by rebuilding Silvermoon. From AskCDev:

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.

Since this doesn't explain Alliance High Elves in Outland still having blue eyes it could be speculated that draining mana from living beings also must have played a role...or blue eyes are just a game device Blizzard uses to visually distinguish between Blood Elves and High Elves.

[Eapoe]

From Reddit :



It's so true it hurts, and it'll perhaps help horde players understand why we want High Elves.

We get it, you want high elves because they are pretty.

[Manariel]

We get it, you want high elves because they are pretty.

Yeah, you got nothing. We want High Elves because they make sense, are culturally distinct from Blood Elves nowadays and they already exists in far greater numbers than VE.

That they look like BE shouldn't prevent them from being playable. Blizzard bias does.

[Eapoe]

Yeah, you got nothing. We want High Elves because they make sense, are culturally distinct from Blood Elves nowadays and they already exists in far greater numbers than VE.

That they look like BE shouldn't prevent them from being playable. Blizzard bias does.

No, you want them because they are traditional fantasy elves, they don’t look like Night Elves, and someone mentioned one day they look cool and it rolled on from there. Bottom line, you want them because they are pretty.
That’s cool. I don’t care what your reasons are, but the ways people twist their reasonings around to justify it is laughable. People want them simply because they like the idea behind them and like the aesthetic. Translation: they are pretty.

[Thalassian Bob]

Thank you for pointing this out.

Yeah, this avenue they're taking is to make it so that you, the player, can RP more freely how you want your character to be.

People trying to gate-keep and say, "well it's still not X because of A!" doesn't matter. Majority will not give a shit once the option is available.

If someone whispers me on a Nightelf Mage that gets Highborne customization and says, "you know you're not a Highborne right?" I probably will be having too much fun to care

People trying to dictate how others should play is one of the slimiest things ever.

I wholeheartedly agree.

And on Kaldorei Highborne, I've always been of the opinion that, if I see a night elf mage with white hair and no face markings, I'm looking at a Highborne from Shen'dralar or somewhere similar.

The lore explanation would be super simple.

Green eyes are the result of being in or around Silvermoon when it was being rebuilt using fel magic. Any elf who wasn't around Silvermoon at that time would still have blue eyes, just like high elves.

There's nothing inherently special about high elves that let them keep blue eyes, it was all just their distance from the city while it was being rebuilt. A farstrider who was out in the wilds, or a mage who was in Dalaran, or an ambassador who was off in some other nation, etc. would all still have blue eyes and could choose to be blood elves. Because being a blood elf is ultimately just a choice.

A very succinct synopsis. I've personally always thought that many Sin'dorei Farstriders probably wouldn't have those iconic fel green eyes because, as you highlight, their duties probably kept them quite far from the arcane crystals imported from Outland and hung around Silvermoon and they were also far less likely to even need to siphon arcane energy from crystals, artefacts or fauna. That's why as soon as they were available, I gave my hunter golden eyes.

You're also correct in pointing out that being Sin'dorei is more of a choice or ideal, rather than becoming something wholly different like the Ren'dorei. Waves of Thalassians may have been tempted to return home after the societal dependence on questionable magic sources had subsided. Particularly once the Sunwell had been reclaimed and reignited.

I am not saying that, what I am saying is that it is not a replacement of an actual High elf option.

Everyone can roleplay what they want, and in the case of Dwarves and Trolls, it is more effective, as it can be currently done with Mag'har orcs, saying that yours is not from AU Draenor, when that is not the case.

I hope you can understand what I say.

I hear you. You're right that it wouldn't be giving Alliance players the ability to play Quel'dorei who have remained supporters of the Alliance, but it might, in theory, be giving the Horde Quel'dorei. Just those who value their homeland more than foreign powers. Ideologically, they would have to become Sin'dorei, but for whatever reason, they would have missed being physically affected by the events that took place in the aftermath of Arthas' attack.

[Wyrt]

Green eyes were not not caused only by rebuilding Silvermoon. From AskCDev:

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.

Since this doesn't explain Alliance High Elves in Outland still having blue eyes it could be speculated that draining mana from living beings also must have played a role...or blue eyes are just a game device Blizzard uses to visually distinguish between Blood Elves and High Elves.

Yes, that blue quote backs up what I said. The fel crystals that were used in the reconstruction of Silvermoon are what caused any high elves in the vicinity to have green eyes.

[Manariel]

No, you want them because they are traditional fantasy elves, they don’t look like Night Elves, and someone mentioned one day they look cool and it rolled on from there. Bottom line, you want them because they are pretty.
That’s cool. I don’t care what your reasons are, but the ways people twist their reasonings around to justify it is laughable. People want them simply because they like the idea behind them and like the aesthetic. Translation: they are pretty.

If I wanted them for their skins, I'd play a Blood Elves. But I hate Blood Elves, I've tried several times to create such a character and I never was able to play it past level 15, because I just can't stand them. The appearance of the High Elves doesn't matter, it's the lore, their character and history as a distinct faction from the Blood Elves.

[Alixie]

Even the Bronze Dragonflight knows that the High Elves belong on the Alliance side, and Blood Elves belong on the Horde side, and separated them accordingly.

[Thalassian Bob]

[IMG]https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/442591285317206021/641317281237958659/17681-wows-15th-anniversary-event-now-live-15-bonus-experience-and-reputation.jpg?width=993&height=559[/MG]

Even the Bronze Dragonflight knows that the High Elves belong on the Alliance side, and Blood Elves belong on the Horde side, and separated them accordingly.

The "elves" on the other side are "high elves" too.



Dragons almost universally adopt the look of high elves in their humanoid form (thanks to Knaak's shit lore), green dragons sometimes adopting Kaldorei forms and black dragons sometimes adopting human forms being some of the main exceptions. The portal keepers for the Caverns of Time in Orgrimmar are "high elves" too.

Since high elves are so rare and usually found in specific areas, I suppose having dragons adopt high elven forms helps players who aren't as up on their Thalassian lore as people like us distinguish them from regular, more populace blood elves.

[Wyrt]

If I wanted them for their skins, I'd play a Blood Elves. But I hate Blood Elves, I've tried several times to create such a character and I never was able to play it past level 15, because I just can't stand them. The appearance of the High Elves doesn't matter, it's the lore, their character and history as a distinct faction from the Blood Elves.

They're literally the same thing, just on different factions.

[Aldo Hawk]

They're literally the same thing, just on different factions.

Like Pandaren.

Except High elves and Blood elves have more visual differences than Huojin and Tushui, and they also have a history that makes them to be a different society all along.

And you also have motives to give them different racials, classes and customization options.