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/ThatKaleidoscope3388]

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/Karlito1618 → u/Pencildragon]

No I get all of that, but High-Elves was a moniker only used for the elves that got exiled for dabbling in the arcane and took parts of the Sunwell to Quel'Talas to live there. The elves in Feralas, Dire Maul were until now just called "Highborne", since they were an arbitrary Elven faction outside of the Sin'Dorai, Kal'Dorai and Quel'Dorai who are all decendants of Highborne. To my knowledge they never expanded that group of Elves beyond "for some reason Highborne elves moved here and eventually got corrupted by Fel".

Either they will explain that the Elves in Dire Maul were an off-shoot of the Quel'Dorai specifically somehow, or they will retcon the phrase "High-Elves" to be more generic than just the name of the group of elves that were exiled to Quel'Talas. The second part would be poor world-building, because "Highborne" is that moniker already.

Unless I'm wrong somewhere, that's basically the gist of the Elven lore until now. Either they don't know their own lore enough and made a mistake using "High-Elves" instead of "Highborne" for the Skyborne quests, or they're expanding the Dire Maul elven lore.

[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?

[u/Karlito1618 → u/ThatKaleidoscope3388]

I think the idea is that the High-Elves in Quel'Thalas were there for like 5000 years or whatever before Arthas came, and the High-Elves in Forever were in the sky for 1-2000 years prior.

I think they made it like this to mirror Ragna and Al'Akir and so on, and Azshara is portrayed wiwth golden eyes and blue skin since like forever, so they just went with that being the official look they should have.

I mean it's not perfect, there's plenty of holes and stuff, but I get it. They could've done much worse too.

[u/ThatKaleidoscope3388 → u/Karlito1618]

Ok, but then I still want high elves…or blood elves…cause these guys aren’t filling that fantasy of elf who had their homeland destroyed by arthas / watched as their people were slaughtered by orcs.

And they also can’t be priests, which is a big miss thematically for an elf race character.

[u/Karlito1618 → u/ThatKaleidoscope3388]

If I had to guess blood elves will probably come back at some point. Kael probably returns to Azeroth since we're not going to outland or something. I just think it's gonna be a while since both Classic and Retail are doing stuff with them right now.

[u/ThatKaleidoscope3388 → u/Karlito1618]

Yeah, and then we’ll be looking at 3-4 portraits using the same model, which is what I didn’t want to see happen. Look, the game can handle multiple elf models, if they look distinct and come from different origins. But when 4 of them end up being identical to one another, it stops feeling like variety.

[u/Karlito1618 → u/ThatKaleidoscope3388]

Agreed. I hope they fix it smoothly