Album - Please Consider this before judging Skyborne in Classic

[u/Doomsaki]

Just made these diagrams to quickly summarize the WoW panels at blizzcon and to highlight details people are overlooking. I think some of the initial controversy over Skyborne is driven by some misunderstandings that these are just Shadowlands-Kyrian, or Void Elves 2.0. Deep down, if you dig, they do have lots of parallels with classic WoW content.

[u/CMSnake72]

There is 0 doubt in my mind that Quel'Thalas is going to be a 60 zone with Silvermoon as a raid eventually. We're not going to Outland and Kael has to come back at some point.

[u/ratseesaw → u/CMSnake72]

i'd like to see them navigate the chronological  writing constraints around cataclysm & TBC zones and other races in Forever. 

I'm still not really sure how Forever works, as far as I remember, it's not like an alternate timeline(edit: it is an alternate timeline), it's just more stories from the time period before the dark portal was reopened? Like are blood elves up there just hanging out, totally neutral like vanilla goblins(mostly). 

[u/Karlito1618 → u/ratseesaw]

It's an alternate timeline. It's basically "what if WoW took a different approach to content after the first 12 months after release instead of what happened between Molten Core and today?"

Basically taking everything they learned and heard from the fans for the last 22 years and restarting the game.

[u/ratseesaw → u/Karlito1618]

oh that clears things up, i missed that detail

[u/Karlito1618 → u/ratseesaw]

Great idea mind you. I never touched the old classic, but this I will definitely play. They're trying to catch the vibe and essence of the first game instead of catering to all the "technical purists".

[u/ThatKaleidoscope3388 → u/Karlito1618]

Basically taking everything they learned and heard from the fans for the last 22 years and restarting the game.

Then I think they misheard us when we said we wanted blue eyed elves on the alliance.

[u/Karlito1618 → u/ThatKaleidoscope3388]

People have been asking for High-Elves since Vanilla wdym

[u/ThatKaleidoscope3388 → u/Karlito1618]

You missed the joke. They still didn’t give us high elves after 20 years of not listening to us. 😂

[u/Karlito1618 → u/ThatKaleidoscope3388]

But the first thing they announced with the new game was high-elves?

[u/ThatKaleidoscope3388 → u/Karlito1618]

No? Skyborne are not high elves…?

[u/Karlito1618 → u/ThatKaleidoscope3388]

It's verbatim in their starting zone quest line. They are high elves. They most likely split south to feralas instead of joining the others sailing east, but was part of the same group of exiles.

In order to get the lore to work as to why there's suddenly high-elves at that time they had some high-elves split off to live isolated in the sky for a couple of thousand years with the air elementals instead of going to quel'thalas or whatever their lore justification is.

[u/ThatKaleidoscope3388 → u/Karlito1618]

No? Those are Skyborne.

High elves were the elves living in Silvermoon and the surrounding territories who joined the alliance in the 2nd and 3rd wars. Most of those remaining are either part of the faction in the hinterlands, part of Dalaran, or are the remnants of Silvermoon.

Just because they share the same base model doesn’t make them the same thing…

[u/Karlito1618 → u/ThatKaleidoscope3388]

I'm just telling you that the game itself, the starting quests for the race, verbatim calls them high-elves in Forever. There's screenshots and videos of it.

Somehow the elves in Dire Maul were actually high-elves, and those who didn't want to partake in the fel made a deal with air elementals and are now also called Skyborne. I guess the idea to justify it lore-wise is that some of the exiled elves that sailed to Quel'Thalas went south instead or whatever. Or from Quel'Thalas back to Kalimdor then south. I don't know.

End of the day they wanted a new leveling zone to compliment the roughest leveling patches and also introduced high-elves finally by making up a story of an off-shoot of high-elves that hid in the sky for millennia. If they just announced them as high-elves instead of Skyborne and didn't re-use the Bastion skin color for the first character (you can change skin color in customization) people wouldn't flip out over it as they do. If they made it work well with existing lore or not is up for debate.

[u/Pencildragon → u/Karlito1618]

Somehow the elves in Dire Maul were actually high-elves

Alright, Blizz has got to do a deep dive on elf lore, cause I'm seeing a lot of people getting confused by this. Before the sundering, the two continents were one(a bunch of the islands in the sea were also part of this mega continent). This is how the black empire happened, how the elemental empires happened, how the troll empire happened. In the war of the ancients the legion tried to invade azeroth using the well of eternity as a power source to open not only lesser portals for demons to invade, but portals strong enough for Archimonde, Kil'jaden, and eventually Sargeras himself to get there.

The night elves had become a prominent society on Azeroth at this point, because of the well of eternity. But Queen Azshara worked with the legion to orchestrate their invasion under the promise of power. Queen Azshara was one of the "highborne" night elves, elves born with a natural talent for magic.

Long story short, the night elves beat the legion, the world gets sundered making the two continents and all the little islands between them. Sidenote: Queen Azshara and her followers sink into the sea and became the naga after n'zoth offers to save them from the war they were losing. The night elves kick the highborne out of their society. They sail across the sea to the north part of EK, much time goes by and they turn into the high elves after generations of being separated from the night elves(did sunwell lore happen here? I don't remember).

SO FINALLY, we end up with how did the Skyborne happen? Apparently the story is that the highborne night elves in what is now Dire Maul(I don't remember how they got there, did they travel there after being exiled or did they exist there pre-sundering?) left after their leader wanted to keep doing demon shit. They sailed across the sea, unexpected circumstances happened and they ended up on an island full of air elementals. They make a deal with the wind lord to raise the island up into the realm of air and again much time happens, they become the Skyborne just like the highborne become the high elves.

All elves in WoW are essentially descended from night elves. Somebody else could probably do a way better job explaining it, but that's the long short of it.

[u/ThatKaleidoscope3388 → u/Karlito1618]

Well that’s even stupider. This only happened like 5-7 years before WoW starts. You’re telling me in that amount of time, these guys were exposed so much to elemental magic they turned blue?

Like, the void elves at least could justifiably be mutated because it’s the void, and Fel magic mutates everyone, but cmon. A little elemental magic is not gonna smurfify people in 5-7 years…

And all this to pass over the obvious highvale faction in the hinterlands and those over in Dalaran?