Originally Posted by
Mace
An excellent point, and one I thought of as soon as they announced monk, it's one of the reasons people were arguing for Monk druids, but the problem with that, was that druidsm only came to the night elves properly not in the initial Cenarius contact before the arcane civilization took route, but post Sundering, after the Pandaren had already gone into seclusion.
But with the monks, I would say yes! By all means it's possible, some people will ofc challenge this and ask you to quote a source, it isn't specifically mentioned, which is why you're asking, (at least as far as I know) but common sense dictates it should be possible... you don't need a source for everything when it makes sense, but you can certainly ask blizzard to confirm and carry on in that position until you're told otherwise.
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pet peeve here, but why do you say the Highborne and not the NIght elves? the highborne were the elite rulers, but all the night elves were part of and very much in the arcane civilization, they are basically exactly how you see the nightborne in Suramar, that was all night elf society, (in fact the only reason i tink we have a distinct race for nightborne and they're not using night elves is simply because they're here to stay and blizzard wants the arcane night elf group distinct from the current night elves, so they can do their own thing...and blizzard always loves doing this sort of race redress every expansion, give us a variation on a playable race, this time it's the night elf. but you should note, that while it's their bodies that have changed, nothing else has, they are the original night elf culture of ancient times.
It's the same culture of the highborne of Eld'rethalas, as much as variations between cities on opposite sides of a global empire can be, highborne was highborne afterall. Differenceis Eldre'thalas is ruined, so we got to see nothing of the ancient night elf life. THis is is what we get to see in Suramar, this is what the developers told us they wanted to show (check gamescon 2015 and blizzcon 2015), in the nightborne, they are showing us the arcane civilization of the night elves in it's full glory that continued on, unlike the Highborne and unlike the Darnassian Night Elves.
But back then it was all night elves. The whole society chronicles tells us were not satisfied with the initial pre-druid life with Cenarius, and kept plumbing the dpeth of the well till thier knoweldge of the arcane grew, and they all went arcane, the most powerful of them later under Azshara became known as the Highborne. WotA novels shows us all them were very much arcane, like you see in Suramar, little children learnt spells like they did reading and writing.. druidsm was non-existent, Malfurion only comes across Cenarius in his adult life, and Cenarius trains him, he alone is student of nature, and after the sundering he teaches the post-arcane night elf group druidsm, which they adopt wholey instead of the arcane simply because using the arcane for spell is banned - because they're fearing it will summon the legion back.
So, it was the night elves, that the Pandaren would have picked up, as a society, not necessarily the highborne. Besides, remember as time grew on the highborne (not all, but generally) got really arrogant, even against other night elves, they'd not have been bothering with Pandaren - that's later though, not earlier, remmeber how Azshara views other races.. and you see that in Suramar too, look at the place, every where else even in modern times save maybe perhaps Silvermoon, looks like a dump in comparison, and Silvermoon looks like it's getting there, but not quite there yet. So imagine what it was like back then, they'd have really thought other races lesser, the highborne even moreso, so it would have been the nicer lot, that would have interacted. [as an aside - see when you kill nightborne they say "impossible" and other things like that, well I can imagine that's exactly what the night elves would have been like when they first encountered the demons in the War of the Ancients, shocked that any thing or anyone could beat them]
Saying that, they do say that the interaction happened earlier, before the legion, so the highborne perhaps had not reached the level of insufferable arrogance they had.. it was around that time, because the night elves had started becoming so unfriendly driven a bit to haughtily by their ever increasing powers that the Pandaren withdrew from them. Like Cenarius did centuries earlier, if not millennia.