Allied Races

Are y'all ready for another episode of "Shintar talks about game content or features that people cared about four years ago but that are very much old hat by now"? Well, ready or not, here it comes.

Allied races were introduced with the Legion expansion and even though I wasn't playing at the time, I remember there being quite a bit of hubbub around their inclusion back then. They are basically different species available at character creation that (in a post-level squish world) start at level 10 instead of 1, don't have their own starting zone, and don't have unique animations but offer different skins. People love additional customisation options of any kind, and I recall cries to make pretty much everything and everyone into an allied race, something I could only shake my head at.

Accordingly, I didn't pay too much attention to the feature when the husband I started playing retail again, but the other day I realised that with us having completed both BfA and Legion at this point, I had most of the requirements for all the Alliance allied races unlocked and only had to actually go through the associated scenarios/intro quests to trigger the unlock properly, so off I went.

The Kul Tiran quest chain was honestly pretty cool, even if I was a bit exasperated by the amount of flying back and forth cross-continent that it required. The scenarios for the other races were noticeably less impressive, though the one for the lightforged draenei still resulted in a very memorable experience for me, for reasons that were probably not intended.

You see, I did this scenario on my demon hunter, who's currently level 54 without ever having set foot into Shadowlands, but is wearing the best gear you can get from Legion content. The lightforged draenei scenario scales to your level, which means that it was filled with mobs my level or one below. Should be easy enough, right? NO! A single level 53 mob in that scenario was enough to absolutely destroy me.

After a couple of deaths I quickly learned to let T'paartos, the friendly NPC I was supposed to be accompanying, do most of the fighting as he was pretty strong and sturdy anyway. But then disaster struck, when one pull resulted in several adds and I followed my gut instinct of starting to AoE, which meant that I went squish instantly. Oh well, what's another death, right?

The problem was that dying in that particular spot caused me to respawn away from my NPC friend and on top of another mob, meaning that I got killed again right away. I tried to get up again a few more times but without much success - if I managed to evade one mob, I'd just aggro another. Eventually I waited for Metamorphosis to come off cooldown before reviving again and managed to clear a little safe patch for myself. Then I slowly and carefully started making my way back to where I last left T'paartos, taking great care to never start a fight with less than full health and several cooldowns available and to never get more than one mob at a time. Eventually I made it back to him and the quest could resume.

After that I was even more careful and did okay for a while, until we got to the big end boss, who seemed to do some kind of hard to avoid/unavoidable(?) AoE that killed me in a few hits even with cooldowns up. I tried to make it back in time while T'paartos was still fighting but got delayed by more mobs in my way. While I was still busy getting lost inside the cave this was all happening in, I suddenly got the message that the scenario was complete, as T'paartos had managed to finish off the boss on his own. That guy really earned his lightforged status, is all I'm saying. My entire armour was yellow from all the deaths by the end of that, but I guess it was kind of funny.

I did make both a lightforged draenei and a Kul Tiran alt so far and quite like them. I think I'm coming around to this allied race idea... if for no other reason than that still being able to earn meaningful rewards in old expansion content is something I like, as it flies in the face of the sort of planned obsolescence model that Blizzard applies to too much of its modern content in my eyes.