I feel personally attacked.
/thread
I think a lot of the reason people like blood elves (especially male blood elves) is because their model is probably the closest thing to human males in real life. Yes, blood elves look more like human males than in-game humans look like humans. Yes, this doesn't apply to the head models, but the reason why is that in-game humans are far too chunky and their proportions are off. Look at the legs on in-game humans. They are like tree trunks. Whereas the blood elf males have a nice V-taper from shoulders down to the feet, which is more aesthetically pleasing and more similar to the ideal human physique.
I think a lot of the reason people like blood elves (especially male blood elves) is because their model is probably the closest thing to human males in real life. Yes, blood elves look more like human males than in-game humans look like humans.
Perhaps if you are in Thailand hanging out with ladyboys... Dont ask, it was a business trip.
TBC should have given High Elves to Alliance, Forsaken Elves to Horde, and have Blood Elves be an Outland faction only.
Horde still gets an attractive race. Lore stays intact; not just because Blood Elves don't belong with Horde (pretty sure they hate trolls, any troll, more than Garithos), but because Draenei should have never been in the game in the first place.
TBC should have given High Elves to Alliance, Forsaken Elves to Horde, and have Blood Elves be an Outland faction only.
Horde still gets an attractive race. Lore stays intact; not just because Blood Elves don't belong with Horde (pretty sure they hate trolls, any troll, more than Garithos), but because Draenei should have never been in the game in the first place.
Undead elves would be badass and fit with the lore, why are there no undead orcs/gnomes/dwarves/whatever as playable characters?
After reading more about this it looks like the New Alliance leader Garithos sentenced the Blood Elves to death for working with Naga, and Kale Salad Sunstrider decided that he loved demons or whatever, so the remaining Blood Elves in Azeroth sided with the Horde since the Forsaken and Blood Elves both wanted vengeance on the Scourge.
I feel the same way towards Worgen. I switched over to alliance on MoP because all friends had changed side after Cataclysm, which I didn't play, and fell in love with the race. I just can't play any other allied race.
In TBC I had a friend who really, really, wanted to play paladin, now that there were paladins over on Horde, but he hated Blood Elves with a passion. Even the running animations. And we used to make fun of the character because he was so "pweety". Also the fact that people started picking Blood Elves as their primary ERP chars probably didn't help at all to the cause of that race on our realm xD By the end of the expansion I think everyone got used to the elves specially after patch 2.4 when the Isle of Quel'Danas was introduced with Magister's Terrace and Sunwell. Also the fact we were killing elves helped!
Beatrice i feel the same way. Best I can do is play a Human in Classic. Classic would be twice as good with worgen.
TBC should have given High Elves to Alliance, Forsaken Elves to Horde, and have Blood Elves be an Outland faction only.
Horde still gets an attractive race. Lore stays intact; not just because Blood Elves don't belong with Horde (pretty sure they hate trolls, any troll, more than Garithos), but because Draenei should have never been in the game in the first place.
Undead elves would be badass and fit with the lore, why are there no undead orcs/gnomes/dwarves/whatever as playable characters?
After reading more about this it looks like the New Alliance leader Garithos sentenced the Blood Elves to death for working with Naga, and Kale Salad Sunstrider decided that he loved demons or whatever, so the remaining Blood Elves in Azeroth sided with the Horde since the Forsaken and Blood Elves both wanted vengeance on the Scourge.
What I don't get is, why are there Blood Elves remaining in Azeroth anyway? It would seem that all Blood Elves went to Outland in TFT, and those that didn't were High Elves still. There are clearly still High Elves aplenty in Vanilla WoW. We have them in Alliance-friendly settlements in Loch Modan and Hinterlands and random ones chilling in various areas such as Menethil Harbor ready to give quests.
Point is, all of the High Elves in Silvermoon being converted to Blood Elves for TBC appears to be something that was done on purpose to give the Horde Blood Elves. Before TBC hit, Silvermoon was inhabited by High Elves and was Alliance leaning neutral. Once TBC hit, Blizz torched the lore and was done with it. Anything to get Elves on the Horde, except the really obvious solution of adding dead ones. Horde didn't really need another reason to go to Outland - there's orcs there. Alliance? There's Turalyon and Alleria!
This sounds incredibly silly, I know. But I have never seen this expressed anywhere, so here it goes.
I cannot play any other race than a Blood Elf. It's a deal breaker to me. I cannot bare to see my character be anything else. I tried Humans - they're funny, weird and incredibly boring. I tried the Undead - they are the closest to the Sin'dorei in lore, sure, but they're still Forsaken, still barebones (haHAA), still filthy.
Don't get me wrong, it does not pain my soul or anything (TBC > vanilla anyway, so not playing Classic is fine in my book), but it still feels wrong when this world [of Warcraft] is not for me. The funny thing is that I agree with Horde traditionalists tirelessly proclaiming that my race does not belong on the faction. It definitely does not. But having them unplayable breaks my heart more than working with filthy Orcses and Trolls :)
My [vanilla-destroying] fantasy would be to have the BC races and starting zones in 1-60. Along with the 2.3 quest additions to the Dustwallow Marsh zone because it's a cute improvement. But fear not, nothing of the sort is ever going to go through.
As to the reason why I love them - it's due to their being a magical race par excellence, having nothing left but their hunger for glory.
...the Blood Elves' passions will lead them not only to the highest pinnacles of power, but to the darkest depths of madness. - Mojo StormStout's Guide
At least, I still have Reforged to wait on where hopefully they will be depicted as it suits them. I'm an optimist on that front.
Remember though. The more people playing Vanilla, the more chance that TBC Legacy server will be a real thing. I love Vanilla, but TBC was my favorite expansion.
Peace, and Love.
TBC should have given High Elves to Alliance, Forsaken Elves to Horde, and have Blood Elves be an Outland faction only.
Horde still gets an attractive race. Lore stays intact; not just because Blood Elves don't belong with Horde (pretty sure they hate trolls, any troll, more than Garithos), but because Draenei should have never been in the game in the first place.
There's more to it than that, and Blood Elves fit perfectly with the Horde and Draenei are a perfect Alliance race.
The Lore is perfect even in BC. The Blood Elves don't even hate the Amani trolls, they just need to kill them in order for them to survive. The Elves see them no different than we do wild animals. We can't let them live because they are dangerous to us. The only race the Blood Elves might "hate" would either be the Scourge (not Forsaken) or the Night Elves.
The Alliance has High Elves. Granted they arn't playable because there are only a handfull left, but they exist.
Draenei are an incredibly important people in the Lore. It's through their actions that led to the Orcs being on Azeroth to help defend it from the Burning Legion in the first place.
TBC should have given High Elves to Alliance, Forsaken Elves to Horde, and have Blood Elves be an Outland faction only.
Horde still gets an attractive race. Lore stays intact; not just because Blood Elves don't belong with Horde (pretty sure they hate trolls, any troll, more than Garithos), but because Draenei should have never been in the game in the first place.
There's more to it than that, and Blood Elves fit perfectly with the Horde and Draenei are a perfect Alliance race.
The Lore is perfect even in BC. The Blood Elves don't even hate the Amani trolls, they just need to kill them in order for them to survive. The Elves see them no different than we do wild animals. We can't let them live because they are dangerous to us. The only race the Blood Elves might "hate" would either be the Scourge (not Forsaken) or the Night Elves.
The Alliance has High Elves. Granted they arn't playable because there are only a handfull left, but they exist.
Draenei are an incredibly important people in the Lore. It's through their actions that led to the Orcs being on Azeroth to help defend it from the Burning Legion in the first place.
The Draenei were not mutated Eredar in WC3 - we didn't really know what they used to be, just that they'd suffered a whole lot when the orcs trashed the planet. Blizzard's lore for the Eredar was that they'd helped corrupted Sargeras, not the other way around. TBC involved a whole lot of cutting up old lore (Holy Light to Naaru was a mess to get Blood Elves Paladins, and I hate the Human's religion being relegated to weird geometric aliens) to surgically add new stuff.
The Troll Wars get glossed over, and so do the elf children that got murdered by orcs.
"It wasn't me, it was some other orc" is a good reason to call a truce, not up and change factions when the old one did much less to you and you had a whole lot more in common with them.
You're viewing this too much from an after operation standpoint. The lore was heading a different direction before they forcibly steered it the way Blizzard wanted so that they could add Paladins and a pretty race to Horde and Shaman to Alliance with pseudo-demons.
The lore was heading a different direction before they forcibly steered it the way Blizzard wanted so that they could add Paladins and a pretty race to Horde and Shaman to Alliance with pseudo-demons.
The way I heard it, Blizz was originally planning on Pandas for both factions in TBC, but the Chinese government (who had initially ok'd this) said no fairly last-minute. What, in that case, they planned to do about the paladin/ shaman balancing issue and underpopulated horde I don't know.
@OP, it was a sad day when horde got belfs.
I'll just point to this post when it comes to belfs and Alliance: (x)
The lore for why High Elves would remain unplayable in WoW and remain a neutral faction is solid (except that it's doubtful that the lore he lists is around at that time, but even if it wasn't it could be explained that losing Silvermoon weakened them to a point where they don't fight yada yada yada), and a good choice, but everything about every high elf suddenly becoming a Blood Elf for TBC (when they were evidently not at the end of TFT and during Classic), and neglecting to emphasize why they hated the Horde and instead downplay it is shallowly written in an attempt to bend things.
They finangled everything to get the Lore where they wanted for gameplay purposes instead of writing a solid story and disregarded or wrote around everything prior instead of building on it. As you can see, almost everything here is new lore, not existing at the time of Classic or TBC, and without proper references I'm not even certain that the "old" lore was around at that time or added in later to better explain things (he references Chronicles, which is new).
WoW is a terrible story vehicle compared to the campaigns of TFT, but it doesn't help that the story itself has taken a back seat to getting more iconic heroes and villains as raid bosses or more playable races without introducing a new faction.
Don't get me wrong, I love blood elves, but it shouldn't be a dealbreaker. If you're a roleplayer, you could always roll a night elf with lighter skin and put in your TRP that you're a high/blood elf (before they joined the Horde so Alliance makes sense). You just won't get to see Eversong Woods or Silvermoon. Hopefully, Blizzard releases TBC Classic.
Their skeleton and animations are practically the same as night elves in vanilla.