Re: Tauren Druids and Sunwalkers

[Octosaur]

Migrating this thread to the new PvE suggestions forum in case any further discussion takes place.

One of my longest-lived beefs ha ha with the Warcraft setting is how Druids are all Night-Elf coded. Tauren have no place aesthetically or culturally in Moonglade and the abilities of the Druids are predominately designed to reflect the Night Elves, not the Tauren.

Night Elves live secluded in shady, overgrown forests worshiping the moon. Tauren live (and until recently were mostly migratory) in sparse plains of megafauna with the sun beating down overhead. Night Elves hibernate for centuries at a time. Tauren barely even live to be 100. It makes sense that the Night Elves should be focussed on flora, on the night, on the moon, and on sleep, but Tauren don't have those luxuries. Tauren would realistically have a closer relationship with the sun (An'she) and with the animals rather than the plants. Heck, of the zones where Tauren reside two are deserts with almost no foliage.

In short... Tauren Druids should be Sunwalkers.

My Solution is threefold and any single one of these would drastically improve the Tauren fantasy:

Firstly: Remove Tauren from Moonglade and create for the Tauren a small Druid locale of their own in the vicinity of Sun Rock Retreat and/or Thousand Needles. The Tauren are humble and won't need an entire zone to themselves, just a mountaintop somewhere that is hard to reach by foot.

Secondly:
An entirely cosmetic editing of the icons, ability names, and sfx of moon spells from cool blues to burning reds. The glyph system already exists from T-WoW for the sake of changing the aesthetics of a spell so if Nelves/Tauren want to cast the other colour of spells I imagine that can be implemented.

Thirdly:
A change in the quests to acquire one's Druid forms. The Nelf Bear quest is already really lame and unintuitive, just walking off from Moonglade to find a random bear ghost out in an undecorated nook of the forest. The Tauren have endless cliff-faces into which a small cave can be placed with a hibernating bear spirit inside. Perhaps even waking the bear leads to a brief fight to pacify it. Night Elves could benefit from a more decorated little grove for their bear spirit, perhaps with some moonbeams.

An actual quest to acquire our Cat forms would also not go amiss. A prideful Barrens lion for Tauren and a subtle moonsaber for Nelves, but even though this would give further room to differently characterise the two races and their Druidism it's not a necessary change.

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Heck, I'll happily write NPC dialogue and text for the zone/quests if the workload seems too burdensome. I feel very strongly about this. Despite being Cows the Tauren are my GOATs.

Overall Druidism in WoW does Tauren a big disservice in terms of their identities. The Tauren are already generally overlooked in WoW culturally and it only gets worse as time goes by such as adding playable Priests and Paladins to them in an effort to give the race more flavour and in doing so robbing them of a lot of their tribalistic/pagan vibes (a mistake I wish Turtle WoW had never decided to implement on their own servers). This is a modular set of relatively lightweight solutions to give the race/class more sauce for themselves and to hopefully de-elfify the Druid class which will especially become a problem if further down the line the devs begin to consider adding Druid to more races and thus even more races start dressing and acting like Nelves.

Old Thread --> https://octowow.st/forum/viewtopic.php? ... uren#p3899

[Vespe]

The idea of a cross-faction peaceful zone for druids was much more novel when the factions were actually divided, but these days it would be a much smaller loss to trade that for your plan. Druidism was definitely a copy-paste from night elves, and it always felt a bit silly stomping around up in moonglade as a cow.

There's room to stick a zone in that corner between Mulgore, Stonetalon, and Desolace. I'd love to see it happen.

What would take the place of moonkin?

[Octosaur]

The idea of a cross-faction peaceful zone for druids was much more novel when the factions were actually divided, but these days it would be a much smaller loss to trade that for your plan. Druidism was definitely a copy-paste from night elves, and it always felt a bit silly stomping around up in moonglade as a cow.

There's room to stick a zone in that corner between Mulgore, Stonetalon, and Desolace. I'd love to see it happen.

What would take the place of moonkin?

It was novel to be sure but it was also kinda weird how the Druids would just... kill one-another outside of Moonglade and the Elves just opened up the heart of their civilisation to the Tauren who are actively aiding the Horde's destruction of Ashenvale.

The goal is to minimise dev-time so I think moonkin stays the same. Technically the Moonkin is the WoW version of the Owlbeast (which was a play on the Owlbear) and despite in WoW them being way more Nelf-coded they were originally in the Barrens tileset as well (I think). If there is to be any change then a bit of shifting around on the head to swap the owl head for an eagle head would probably be the best cost/benefit wise but I don't think it's necessary.

[Berdal]

I guess the devs would be positive to sort this out in the not-so-forseeable future. However, with the tremendous time required to implement and patch this up, I wouldn't hold my breath.