Berdal wrote: Sat Jul 25, 2026 8:49 am
While a quite interesting discussion, there's no doubt gnome (and somewhat cows) are awkward races...
Like, Tauren Druid is weird as well, but alas.
Anyway, priest already had precedent to shape and adapt into the respective class. So it being adapted into whatever is reasonable and immersive for gnomes, I don't see a problem. Can't be weirder than Gnome Warriors. And if they get Priest, might as well get Paladin (as long as they have warrior)?
I think Druid should've been the Alliance class and Shaman the horde one. Since Priest is on both factions I don't see why Paladin's couldn't. But I'm no lore wizard.
Paladin is actually notably distinct to priest in the lore. It's not just being a holy warrior it's being so deeply infused with the Light that your body even becomes (in the lore at least) immune to diseases which is why Paladins didn't get raised by the Plague of Lordaeron. They all got buried at Light's Hope and it sanctified the ground so hard even the Lich King and all his armies couldn't beat far, far fewer Paladins there and he lost control over the Death Knights of Acherus.
It's also a very rigid class compared to Priest and is built around very christianised concepts of law, justice, kings, etc. in the lineage of Arthur/Aragorn. A very archetypally locked class that starts to lose a lot of its sauce the more generic you make it. You could make the case for Undead Paladins in that a Paladin CAN be reanimated but not through the Plague and that Lordaeron was the most fervent of the nations in their beliefs so their dire straits in undeath could pivot them even harder into their faith and their inability to actually infuse their bodies with the light because they're undead could be countered by a far more dogged and zealous faith, taking the pain and suffering as their penance for their failures in life to protect their Kingdom, etc. If you've seen Kingdom of Heaven King Baldwin (with the mask) is a good example of the 'Leper Knight' archetype where a man whose body is on borrowed time devotes himself many times over to faith:
"When I was sixteen, I won a great victory. I felt in that moment I would live to be a hundred. Now I know I shall not see thirty. None of us know our end, really, or what hand will guide us there. A king may move a man, a father may claim a son, but that man can also move himself, and only then does that man truly begin his own game. Remember that howsoever you are played or by whom, your soul is in your keeping alone, even though those who presume to play you be kings or men of power. When you stand before God, you cannot say, "But I was told by others to do thus," or that virtue was not convenient at the time. This will not suffice. Remember that."
So there is flexibility within the archetype for other races but Gnomes are odd ones in that the way for them to engage with faith in the first place is already pretty logically obtuse and requires a new worldview for them but the degree of zealotry and faith required for a Paladin is so rooted in passion and emotion that it's hard to see how it's reasonable for Gnomes to be engaging to that degree. Even Gnome Warriors already feel like kind of a cop-out with their existing drawbacks.
Tauren Druids DO make sense but definitely not in the way Blizzard has designed them. I did a dive into how Druid should be addressed to better represent Tauren here:
https://octowow.st/forum/viewtopic.php?t=610