Bending the elements to your will is not exactly a new concept, we warlocks do that with demons all the time besides when we enter pacts. So why are they so seldom mentioned?
Bending the elements to your will is not exactly a new concept, we warlocks do that with demons all the time besides when we enter pacts. So why are they so seldom mentioned?
We killed them
Along with the rest of the Iron Horde.
They were all in the raid and we, as said above, killed them.
Thrall mentions it in the War Crimes book that the elements in that entire area around Orgrimmar were being tortured and forced to do things against their will by the Dark Shaman and afterwards the elements are slowly returning to normal.
They were so twisted and broken that regular shaman couldn’t communicate with them and use their abilities properly (as seen when Thrall attacks Garrosh in the raid and is attacked in turn by the elements)
They were a blight and it’s good they are gone
Lore wise, both Dark Shamans and Warlocks are abhorred by the Horde. Lore wise, Warlocks are very few and are not commonplace nor culturally acceptable like the prevalence of them as a playable class would suggest. Warlocks were made playable because the game team wanted an evil caster class, and WoW's flavor of green fire demons was more unique than yet another necromancer class with undead minions that every other MMO and WRPG had.
Evidently Blizzard didn't care enough to flesh out the Kor'Kron Dark Shamans with their own aesthetic or powers, and the WoW dev team became loathe to add new classes after launch (only 4 classes over 19 years!). Dark Shamans had no hope of being added over other classes that do have fleshed out aesthetics like Demon Hunters or Tinkers or Dark Rangers.
Primalists are Dark Shamans as they twist the elements to their will, but apparently WoW's current writers are so unfamiliar with the lore that they didn't connect the dots.
I think we might hear of them soon. Dark Shaman use Decay to control the elements so they might be part of the Decay subplot. Heck the Decatriarch very much is a dark shaman.
Source on the primalists' twisting elements? Everything I've seen about the Primalists seems to be focused on returning to an elemental world and stopping the "corruption" of the titans on Azeroth's "natural" path. The Dark Shaman were all about war and conquest, seeing elementals as a tool or a weapon rather than an ally. I haven't seen the primalists subjugating elementals the way the dark shaman have, but perhaps I'm overlooking something? If we draw a parallel between elementals and animals, the primalists are about reverting the domestication of animals while the dark shaman are more about training animals to become weapons in war. They feel very different to me.
Where was it clarified that decay was used by Dark Shaman? I'm pretty interested to see where the decay storyline goes, but I must've missed this connection.
Thanks for the answers! I'm curious to see where the story goes with these threads, particularly given that I don't think we have a firm link between the primalists and the gnoll decay yet. Given the decay's ability to corrupt arcane leylines, it seems a natural weapon for the primalists to use against the arcane-aligned titan influence.