Monday, December 11, 2017

The Blood Elf Shadow Priest's Conundrum

Way back in Burning Crusade, an altoholic already (even having only played for a few months!) I decided that I would need to create both a Draenei and Blood Elf character. Not having a Priest, I went with that for my Sin'dorei. He's never been a high priority character (though I've enjoyed the Insanity mechanic introduced in Legion, which has bumped him up from his typical last place position,) but he's been there for over ten years.

As I've never been much of a healer, he's been Shadow most of this time, and with little lore dissonance - one could easily imagine that after experiencing the horror of the Scourge's assault on Quel'thalas, he decided that dark powers would be required to defend himself, and there is great power within the Void.

In Battle for Azeroth, the Alliance will be getting Void Elves as a playable race. For the first time in WoW's history, we're going to see a group of former members of the Horde joining the Alliance, rather than the other way around (though to be fair, the Horde group they come from had itself defected to the Horde from the Alliance, meaning a Void Elf character could have fought for the Alliance already during the Second War.)

The backstory on Void Elves, to the extent that datamining and such is reliable, suggests that the Void Elves were banished from Quel'thalas for communing with the Void. While Lor'themar and his regime will not tolerate this activity, Alleria Windrunner has mastery over this kind of volatile magic, and assists Alliance heroes in rescuing the Void Elves and recruiting them into the Alliance.

But what about my Priest?

I mean, if anyone has been communing with the Shadow, it's by Priest, who takes on a shadowform not unlike Alleria's at the end of Seat of the Triumvirate and clearly has a strong connection to the void. How is he not being exiled? Is it because, as High Priest of the Conclave (you know, for his individual character canon) he has proven himself too valuable, and that the Ren'dorei are meddling in things that they're not strong enough to manage? They do require Alleria and an Alliance hero to rescue them from the beings whose attention they draw - a position my Shadow Priest has never put himself in.

It's definitely possible that this is simply a case of Story and Gameplay Segregation - perhaps canonically, only the Forsaken have a large number of Shadow Priests, and in other cultures, you either go Holy or Disc or you pretend to do so.

However, I think there's another alternative:

Priests have a somewhat unexplored theme of being the Mind over Matter class. It's most obvious with Shadow Priests, given all their Mind-prefixed abilities (in D&D, while a Death Knight or a Warlock would both trade a bit in Necrotic damage, a Shadow Priest would be almost entirely Psychic.) But there are a few things even among the healers that seem to be mentally-themed. Think a Discipline Priest's Pain Suppression - you're not actually preventing physical harm, but you're making it so that the subject merely doesn't feel as much pain, which somehow keeps them alive. Even the theme of Power Word spells suggest that presenting the idea is enough to have a magical effect.

And in a way, that ties into the idea of Priests being disciplined minds: when it comes to magic, Faith is a kind of willpower - holding onto the idea of the miraculous so hard that it actually winds up coming true.

I've suggested way back when they introduced Insanity as a resource for Shadow Priests that it's sort of shorthand for a more complex idea: a Shadow Priest is building up and holding onto the paradoxical notion that there is power in an absence of things - that the Void, which by definition is completely empty, nevertheless has beings and power within it. The greater the power drawn from the void, the greater the paradox, and thus I think that staying in Void form is more and more mentally taxing as more power is siphoned off until the Priest must relent, reverting to a more stable and static Shadowform.

While the form is changed, like most priest spells, it is probably based within the mind - the Shadow Priest does not undergo any permanent physical change. In fact, the Shadowform itself may in fact by a kind of psychic projection - an illusion so real that it might as well be, even though on some fundamental, objective level of reality, the Shadow Priest is still a being of flesh and blood.

And that's where we get the opening to distinguish Void Elves from Shadow Priests.

Void Elves are not all Shadow Priests. They can be, and they are probably very well suited to the role. But they can also be anything from Mages to Monks to Warriors. A Void Elf Fury Warrior is probably not thinking very much about the mysteries of the Void when she charges into battle, painted in her enemy's blood and swinging a pair of massive greatswords. But she does carry the Void with her.

I would suspect that while a Shadow Priest engages with the Void on an intellectual level, the Void Elves have done so on a physical level. What they sought to accomplish with their experiments, we don't know, but they are changed in a physiological sense. Ultimately, my Shadow Priest can drop his void form, change his practices, and become a Holy Priest, who is probably not going to worry anyone in Silvermoon.

But that aforementioned hypothetical Void Elf Warrior is always going to be just that. They are tainted with the Void to a greater degree than the Blood Elves were ever tainted with Fel.

A class is what you choose to do. Race, in WoW, is who you are. One of these, lorewise, can be changed. The other can't (well, perhaps we should say that changes like this are a one-way street.)

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