Night Elf Heritage

This is kind of a part two to my post about dusting off my original priest. I actually did the night elf heritage quest chain! Aaand... it was pretty disappointing.

While trying to find out what other players thought about it, I came across this reddit post ranking all the heritage quest lines in game so far, which taught me two things: 1) that there already are a lot more of these than I realised, and 2) that it wasn't just me who found the night elf chain disappointing. The OP in that thread put the human heritage quest line that I liked so much in second place out of ten, and the night elf version in dead last.

It started out alright - there'll be spoilers from here on by the way, but trust me, there isn't really much to spoil - with a reunion with Arko'narin, the night elf prisoner turned Wonder Woman that you rescue from Jaedenar in Vanilla. She remembered my priest rescuing her back in the day too and I was like, yeah, nostalgia! Also, we learn that she has a younger brother called Lysander who's a mage and voiced by Max Mittelman, whom I mainly know as Arn Peralun from SWTOR. I've also heard him in WoW before though, most memorably as Prince Farondis from Azsuna. I can't help but feel that he's really being typecast at this point, always playing troubled young men trying to overcome past trauma.

Anyway, the three of you are off to Felwood together to revisit Jaedenar, which despite the Cataclysm and everything else that has happened since then, is still corrupted (or again). Maiev Shadowsong is also there, and maybe she has something to say to the player if you met her in Legion, but obviously she had no special connection to my never-made-it-past-Cata priest.

And then... basically the entire quest is that you go into Jaedenar again to put out some braziers and slay a dreadlord at the end - just like in the old days, huh? Except that with fewer, less dangerous enemies and no less than three NPCs by your side, it's not at all an exciting experience, just slow.

The only real narrative comes from the NPCs talking to each other. One thread here is that Maiev still hates mages (I mean, they've been available to night elves since Cata, but I guess when you're thousands of years old that's like, yesterday) but kind of overcomes that thanks to Lysander's brave example, and the other is Lysander more generally struggling with past trauma and not wanting to be defined by it, something in which I guess he's supposed to be a stand-in for the night elf race as a whole.

Those could be interesting enough themes I suppose, but the problem is that having NPCs monologue at you while you do a slow and boring escort quest is far from the most engaging way of telling a story. And Maiev's change of heart is just way too predictable and fast. At the end she even whips a tattoo set out of nowhere to grant Lysander a cool face tattoo for his services. That's... quite a turnaround from actively hating mages twenty minutes ago. (In fact, based on what I've read, saying that Maiev "hated" mages is downplaying it - apparently she actively murdered them in the Wolfheart novel and that's being retconned now or something...)

Also, where the human heritage quest line basically has people throwing a little parade for you at the end, the night elf chain finishes with Maiev handing you your reward behind a bush at the Stormwind embassy, which is a pretty funny contrast. I mean, night elf heritage was always going to be tricky to handle what with several of their most iconic zones having been razed throughout the years, but it feels like Blizzard could've done better than that.

The ultimate joke was that when I unwrapped the cosmetic rewards, I realised that one of them was a glaive transmog and that actually, I could have just done this whole chain on my demon hunter without reviving my old priest. For some reason that thought hadn't even crossed my mind, as I just tend to forget that she's a night elf because the identity of "demon hunter" kind of overpowers everything else in my mind (and it's not like they can be any other races). Kind of funny, but I have no regrets in that regard. I just wish the quest chain had been better.