Necromancy is Not Necessarily Death Magic.

[Aucald]

Out of story, it's an appeal to authority to tell us that no, really, she's totally Forsaken, despite another NPC (Belmont) saying five mins. later in choosable dialogue how different she is. Their end goal is to make Calia the face of the Forsaken but backlash forced them to make this in the most prolonged and painful way possible with as many sops to the fanbase as they can squeeze without compromising their love of world peace and their end goal of having them be represented by her going forward. In service of this, they've swapped strategy from telling us how great it is that the Forsaken can be like her to instead tell us that she's actually like them, she just doesn't look the part. Look she's helping out with traditional Forsaken activities.

There's more to being Forsaken than just being undead, though; which is why the various undead mobs around Brill during the quest aren't considered Forsaken, and why Prince Farondis' legion of ghostly Night Elves in Aszuna also aren't Forsaken. Calia's concern in the 9.2.5 quests was that her unique nature (e.g. being an undead being created by the Light) would make it impossible for her to bridge the gap between her and the other Forsaken - that they were two fundamentally different as beings for her to ever be "accepted." Sin'dane laid those worries to rest, more or less, by telling her that her origins via the Light were immaterial insofar as undeath is concerned. She still has to cross the cultural bridge between her and other Forsaken, though; since she doesn't share in their history as victims of the Third War, and additionally bears the name of and a relationship with their most hated adversary. She's got more work to do before she's got universal acceptance among the Forsaken, which is likely going to be part and parcel of her story going forward.

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Necromancy with Nature Magic. Or Arcane.

I mean, because why the fuck not?

Already happened, really. The Botani reanimated dead Orcs in Gorgrond via Nature magic in WoD, and Meryl Winterstorm reanimated himself via Arcane magic in the Troll Wars.

[Iain]

Necromancy uses dead flesh. Animates it and such. But it stays dead flesh.
A ressurection is never necromancy.

This creates possibilities, for example undead paladins

Then light-based necromancy is entirely useless to Forsaken Paladins, and it certainly doesn't create the possibility for them. That's not to say that forsaken paladins aren't possible, it just means that light-based necromancy is irrelevant in that matter.

Already happened, really. The Botani reanimated dead Orcs in Gorgrond via Nature magic in WoD, and Meryl Winterstorm reanimated himself via Arcane magic in the Troll Wars.

Not unlike how Kul'tiran druids use Drust-based nature spells. I suppose Drust is all about decomposition and returning it back into the cycle of life.

[omeomorfismo]

i mean, thats old lore anyway. primals used life magic, meryl used arcane, in shadowmoon valley, au nerzhul used shadow, odyn litteraly use light magic for his valkyrs, surely there are fel examples....

[Raetary]

This is more a semantics game really.

Magic schools in wow have been overlapping in function for quite a while.
Their main difference is mostly in how they come to be and what they excel at rather than what they can do.

[Ielenia]

Resurrection isn't necromancy, is it?
We're talking about raising an Undead, not a perfectly live being.

It is necromancy. "Necromancy is the act of animating unliving flesh". A dead body is unliving. Whether you're resurrecting them or raising them, it doesn't matter.

Not stole. But, was probably integrated by the Dreadlords.

"Integrated by the dreadlords" before the dreadlords were even on Azeroth?

[loras]

Agreed, but that makes the reason for Blizzard to insert this piece of exposition even more dubious. I'm not opposed to 'light necromancy' per se. But it's just thrown into the player's lap. The complete opposite of how Blizzard introduced the Drust. Which was handled beautifully. A slow burning plot line that unravelled the mystery and a cool pay-off in the Shadowlands.

Now we get a NPC saying 'actually necromancy is when we revive things, and we can use anything to accomplish that'. It doesn't resolve any problem in the lore right now so it's got to be either a setup for something that will come later or it's a pointless thing to say altogether.

There was no shortage of 'death magic' was there? We weren't running out of any supply and just like the Drust, the Death magic kept seeping into other worlds to be used in abundance.

So:

- If necromancy doesn't require death but can be sustained with anything without any difference, why does Blizzard felt the need to point that out?
- If Blizzard thought this was an interesting observation, then why didn't they weave it into a story and let the player slowly piece this together themselves?
- If light necromancy is instead different in some way (and I'm not saying it is, I'm just hoping that's the case), why wouldn't mr Sin'Dane further elaborate on this unprompted bit of trivia?




I always felt that necromancy was at least philosophically different in that it reduced the remains of a being to pure utility. The revival is imperfect because it doesn't need to be perfect. The being that's now revived is just a means to the Necromancer's end. That's how you defile life. There's no such thing as altruistic Necromancy.

And of course the Light has shown itself not to be inherently altruistic or even humane either. But it the Light does pride itself on purity. So if the light can be used to create 'impure' necromatic stuff then what does the Light even mean? It seems to imply that all these schools of magic sort of do the same thing and are only distinguished by the colour of their spell effects.

That's why I'm struggling with this. This new piece of information doesn't create anything new, it just collapses two distinct ideas into a homogenous mush.

I see what you mean, but that's why i suggested more subtle differences in resurrection; Calia may be undead, but she's clearly intact (and apparantly not decaying) otherwise, a "pure" undead so to speak.

Likewise when thinking of fel undead they tend to become fel-tainted and somewhat demonic, void causes creepy void stuff, arcane does its machine-like stiffness thing. And perhaps Bolvar is a "life-tainted" undead?

And it's not always intentional; failing either through incompetence or some interfering factor to properly resurrect someone or some thing is a common trope.

[Ielenia]

No it's not, necromancy is an entire school of magic. You could say that necromancy is synonymous with death magic

Are you intentionally trying to be daft, here?

The game literally separates necromancy from death magic. They are literally not synonyms.

"Whether these rituals are mpowered by Death or Light or any other magic, neromancy is necromancy. You perceive a difference where there is none."

[loras]

Necromancy with Nature Magic. Or Arcane.

I mean, because why the fuck not?

Don't the drust do the death druid thing, necromancy through nature magic?

And Kel'thuzad started out using arcane magic.

[Ielenia]

We already knew this, fel has a long history of raising the dead, as has void magic. Naturally death magic can do it too, and evidently light can now do it as well. I seem to recall that even arcane has known ways to do it, what with Dalaran's outlawing of necromancy.

Yes, pretty much. The problem is this has always been 'thinly implied' and never 'outright explained'. It's good to have it out on the open, unambiguously.

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SL ruined so much just add Necromancy to the list.

It didn't "ruin" necromancy.

This has always been the norm. It's just spelled explicitly and unambiguously now.

[Iain]

Don't the drust do the death druid thing, necromancy through nature magic?

Drust represent the bottom feeders in nature. The Detritivores. Because there was a drought in Ardenwald they too experienced a shortage at the bottom of the chain and they began to work their way upwards (I feel I'm explaining this better than Blizzard did at this point).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detritivore

And that's why the Kul'Tiran Drust Druids work so well. Though if there's going to be mono-specialisation classes at some point. I do hope that drust-druids get their concept deepend out.

Drust are easily the coolest thing Blizzard came up with since a long time.

This has always been the norm. It's just spelled explicitly and unambiguously now.

Even if that's the case (and I'm not buying it) then that still raises the question why it was handled in such a rushed way. Figuring out that necromancy can be tapped through different forms of magic would be such a cool plot twist in a major quest. It's a complete shoe-in to have some major character die in some place that has no death magic (for bladibla reasons) making it impossible to revive that character, but wait! Light necromancy! Who would've thunk!? Mind blown.

What a waste.

[ONCHEhap]

Yeah it's not like necromancy literally means death magic or something
Just like how pyromancy doesn't meant fire magic or cryomancy doesn't mean ice magic

[Iain]

Yeah it's not like necromancy literally means death magic or something

Technically it translates to 'corpse/tissue magic', so mr NPC man is technically correct. And 'death magic' can also involve ghosts and spirits and plagues, so the two are neither mutually inclusive nor mutually exclusive.

[Super Dickmann]

There's more to being Forsaken than just being undead, though; which is why the various undead mobs around Brill during the quest aren't considered Forsaken, and why Prince Farondis' legion of ghostly Night Elves in Aszuna also aren't Forsaken. Calia's concern in the 9.2.5 quests was that her unique nature (e.g. being an undead being created by the Light) would make it impossible for her to bridge the gap between her and the other Forsaken - that they were two fundamentally different as beings for her to ever be "accepted." Sin'dane laid those worries to rest, more or less, by telling her that her origins via the Light were immaterial insofar as undeath is concerned. She still has to cross the cultural bridge between her and other Forsaken, though; since she doesn't share in their history as victims of the Third War, and additionally bears the name of and a relationship with their most hated adversary. She's got more work to do before she's got universal acceptance among the Forsaken, which is likely going to be part and parcel of her story going forward.

I know that they aren't Forsaken, I've spent hundreds of posts on this forum arguing with people telling me Judkins is more representative of the Forsaken than Sylvanas. As I said in my post, the in-story point of the meeting is the validation Calia is after. She can hypothetically bridge the gap. But it's a false comparison because the way she was raised is fundamentally different from theirs to a degree where she physically isn't the same and has none of the same drawbacks. It's not only that she's socially and historically away from them and ran away from responsibility, all things the quests finally, after 5 years bother to acknowledge, it's that she's inherently different and that this should inform their relationship going forward. Calia doesn't have the drawbacks of undeath, but she does have all the positives and she isn't pained by the Light but can use it freely. Sweeping this under the rug would be a failure of writing and jury's still out on whether they intend to return to this plot point or not. I remain firmly convinced that this was a sop to the Forsaken playerbase and she'll be the face going forward, but provided the pressure is up, like it has been successfully given they basically soft-retconned both Shadows Rising and the Calia quest of BFA with this storyline, the chance is higher that they address it. Pretending it's a peripheral concern doesn't cut it.

[Rhlor]

death Necromancy

light necromancy

life necromancy

void necromancy

fel necromancy

[loras]

Yes, pretty much. The problem is this has always been 'thinly implied' and never 'outright explained'. It's good to have it out on the open, unambiguously.

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It didn't "ruin" necromancy.

This has always been the norm. It's just spelled explicitly and unambiguously now.

I agree, though i get what people are saying about it all becoming homogenous too. Perhaps some future content could show more explicitly the consequences of the different forces being used? Different tools fir the same job might all succesfully complete it, but the details will likely differ.

And we can already see that in Calia being different from "regular" undead, so perhaps making that less ambiguous would also be helpful.

[jackofwind]

death Necromancy

light necromancy

life necromancy

void necromancy

fel necromancy

That's pretty much it, it's always bee this way people just glossed over it and didn't pay attention.

[loras]

Drust represent the bottom feeders in nature. The Detritivores. Because there was a drought in Ardenwald they too experienced a shortage at the bottom of the chain and they began to work their way upwards (I feel I'm explaining this better than Blizzard did at this point).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detritivore

And that's why the Kul'Tiran Drust Druids work so well. Though if there's going to be mono-specialisation classes at some point. I do hope that drust-druids get their concept deepend out.

Drust are easily the coolest thing Blizzard came up with since a long time.



Even if that's the case (and I'm not buying it) then that still raises the question why it was handled in such a rushed way. Figuring out that necromancy can be tapped through different forms of magic would be such a cool plot twist in a major quest. It's a complete shoe-in to have some major character die in some place that has no death magic (for bladibla reasons) making it impossible to revive that character, but wait! Light necromancy! Who would've thunk!? Mind blown.

What a waste.

I agree, though personally i was a fan of the Underrot in Nazmir, the K'thir in Stormsong Valley and the Emerald Nightmare in Val'sharah as well. Though one could argue those are all continuations i suppose.

But the Drust don't work only because of that, they're far more, integrating both the primal "heathen" shamanism and celtic aspects, as well as desperation ("end justifies the means" corruption, like with Arthas), pride leading to a horrific fall, life after death and its blurring lines, etcetera.

[Rhlor]

That's pretty much it, it's always bee this way people just glossed over it and didn't pay attention.

I don't remember arcane necromancy but surely it must exist

[Gaidax]

I don't remember arcane necromancy but surely it must exist

Well I imagine if Arcane can be used to animate constructs, then at some point it may also be usable to animate dead bodies.

[Iain]

That's pretty much it, it's always bee this way people just glossed over it and didn't pay attention.

It's really just a categorisation issue. Yes, technically these are different forms of magic reanimating flesh. And well researched examples indeed. But to me, I never considered the non-death reanimations actual 'necromancy', even though that's indeed what they are in the most literal sense. 'Death necromancy' always was a tautology to me.

For instance that overgrown orc doesn't feel like reanimated flesh at all, but rather a living being that is possessed by some parasite or something. Keeping its bodily functions, just losing its autonomy.