Tauren Druids and Sunwalkers

[Octosaur]

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 in shady, overgrown forests worshiping the moon. Tauren live 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.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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.

[Ferngall]

I second this.... I main tauren druid an this sounds cool

[Crimsonclaws]

I agree with this so strongly it hurts!

[Octosaur]

I agree with this so strongly it hurts!

Thanks. A big problem with retail is that there's a lot of stuff that deserves more focus but didn't get the sauce for one reason or another, and instead of addressing it later when they had time Blizzard just added new stuff which would never get the sauce it required.

Tauren are real cool customers and it's a shame how rare it is they ever got spotlight.

[Berdal]

Holy shit, this is the answer! Yes, please do this!

While you're at it: remove the horns from Tauren Druids forms. It's just awkward and misplaced. On the topic of horns, I wouldn't mind seeing unlockable (quest? spell book?) character customizable antlers for Night Elf Druids signifying their evolution of druidic powers @ lvl 60.

PS:
https://octowow.st/forum/viewtopic.php?t=371
https://octowow.st/forum/viewtopic.php?t=410
https://octowow.st/forum/viewtopic.php?t=895