Our Draenei

For all of its flaws, perhaps my favorite aspect of Warlords of Draenor as an expansion was that we finally got an expansion in which the main Alliance race was not Humans. And even better than that, the main alliance race was the Draenei - the oft-neglected people who really haven't had anything happen with them since they were introduced in Burning Crusade - and even then, they had a far less dynamic plot than the Blood Elves, their Horde counterparts.

(As a brief aside, I think it would be great for them to push non-Orc/Human races as the focus of future expansions. I was very disappointed to see that the Forsaken story in Wrath pretty much ended after the Battle of Undercity - though to be fair, it was one hell of a story, which is sadly mostly inaccessible post-Cataclysm.)

I don't think it would shock anyone who reads this blog that I'm a huge fan of the Draenei. They are the most original Warcraft race (they share some cosmetic similarities with Tieflings from D&D, though really only in the sense that they look sort of demonic,) and they simultaneously bring a certain sci-fi peanut butter to Warcraft's traditional fantasy chocolate while also being inundated with magic and imbued with divine blessings. They're also incredibly long-lived - possibly totally ageless (if there's some other explanation for why Velen looks old) and unlike the Night Elves, they don't have some special magical tree that made them that way - they're just like that. They open the Warcraft universe from pair of planets into a giant cosmic struggle.

And honestly, I identify with them, given that half my ancestry is also from a people who wandered for thousands of years after being exiled from their homeland and who suffered a massive genocide in relatively recent history.

It was fantastic to see the way that Draenei society had built up on Draenor, and there's a certain satisfaction to be had in knowing that the Draenei of this alternate universe should be able to survive with their civilization intact (and potentially, with a new prophet, if I interpreted Velen's actions at the end of Shadowmoon Valley correctly.)

My co-/vice- main in a Draenei Death Knight, and during Warlords, I've played my Draenei Mage a lot as well (essentially as my #3 toon.) Both characters would look at this world wistfully.

See, the thing is, as nice as it is to help Yrel defend her people and fend off the Iron Horde and the Burning Legion, the glory of that success only reinforces how horrific the failures were in our timeline.

There was no Alliance to help shield the Draenei from the sudden aggression of the Horde, and no older, wiser New Horde to undermine their alternate-universe counterpart. The beautiful Shadowmoon Valley is now a black and fel-green blasted wasteland.

The difficulty with the alternate-universe setting of Warlords is that it doesn't really change things for us. Thankfully our Velen is still alive (which does take a bit of the importance from his doppelganger's death in Draenor.)

But while it's been cool to see the Draenei before, it hasn't really done much to flesh out the Draenei we know.

Our Draenei - the ones we play as or ally with (or PvP against) - live in the shadow of the Horde's genocide. Remember, these are people who live for tens of thousands of years at least. We don't really know what it would be like to live that long, but we can generally infer that it would feel as if an event 30 or 40 years ago had only just happened.

Velen has declared that Azeroth is where they will make their stand against the Burning Legion (an event that looks like it's imminent,) but most Draenei are probably still reeling from the slaughter in Outland. We're not even talking about the "we should get these guys to talk to therapists" stage - they should practically still be in shock.

That trauma is pretty weighty stuff, and I can understand that Blizzard wants to keep the Warcraft universe relatively on the simple and fun side. One could argue that having the Naaru around would help a lot - some find solace in religion after a massive trauma, while others lose their faith, but the Draenei have the closest things they have to deities literally floating around in their cities, which I could imagine being a pretty serious comfort. In fact, the Naaru might even emit a kind of calming, soothing energy that can heal even serious psychological problems like post-traumatic stress disorder. Maybe that's why the Draenei are so chill, and even forgiving.

The thing is, the only universe-A Draenei character we got in Warlords was Vindicator Maraad, who sadly died about halfway through the leveling process. While it would have been nice to get more about this in-game, we did get the fantastic online animated short about him during the Warlords series. In a sense, dying in defense of alternative-Shattrath gave him a fantastic redemptive exit to the story, but it also robbed us of a perspective I would have liked to see more of in Draenor. The Draenei story became entirely about dealing with the imminent threat against their civilization, rather than getting closure by preventing something horrible from happening all over again.

I also suspect that we're going to be leaving the Draenei of Draenor behind, and as such, we haven't really explored more thoroughly how the Draenei fit into the Alliance. I think it would have been a really interesting plot point to have some Draenei decide to stay in Draenor - to take advantage of the fact that their 300-year-old society still existed, in a sense, while others would feel compelled to commit to Azeroth as their true new homeland.

Especially with the Burning Legion invading Azeroth, it would be good to know what our Draenei are doing to prepare us.