It was discussed a bit when Ulduar came out: There could be a multitude of explanations, the first being they mean nothing.

However, the name "descent into madness" is the Old-Gods wing. We know (now) that it was also Old-Gods that offered Azshara and her followers immortality (via Naga transformation) to live through the Sundering. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to conclude that the Titans were artistically displaying the Naga, as a means of representing the Descent into Madness other races have already devolved into - as a result of Old God influence and corruption.

I'm not sure if the timelines for this work out. Were the Titans still around/did they build Ulduar after the Sundering? If they knew about the Naga corruption via another Old-God, why would they just leave Azeroth?

I want to believe the glass windows really mean something more and have a solid reason for being there, but I think it's more likely it's just a little easter egg Blizzard gave us (a slight nod to the Old Gods and Naga connection: which is yet to be fleshed out until another expansion)

I would think that if you're planning on adding a new race (or two) that can be druids, it would be the perfect time to redo the old models and perhaps the entire reason it took so long to have it done in the first place is that they knew they'd be adding another druid race and figured that would be the appropriate time to redo the models (specifically making them more distinct, as now faction wouldn't be an indicator of which race you were looking at and something more visual would help greatly).

I honestly think the stained glass and holograms just mean nothing lore wise and are just there since they look 'cool' and most likely do hint towards the future. We don't know exactly when Ulduar was built but I'd imagine it was built pre sundering considering the Path of the Titans seems to have been pretty destroyed during the Sundering and leads out into the ocean.

Aye, good point. Who's to say that the reason it took them so long to release the new forms isn't exactly because they've been working on art for 4 races and the design team just recently decided what the other two races would be? But hey... I'm just playing the devil's advocate here :P

Well, there are the constellation artworks in HoS and HoL that also meant nothing until we saw Algalon's model. Maybe not playable races, but certainly something that existed in the Titans' calculations when they built the place. Maybe a prophecy of some sort, or omens of how to tell if Azeroth was corrupted. Still, fighting the naga would be a good way to follow Algalon's lead to save our world :P

I really doubt the constellations mean anything since a few of them are of races that didn't evolve till after the Titans finally left. Sure we can play along that the Vrykul were created based on Algalon though. The Titans didn't know anything about the Curse of Flesh or effects it would have until their second return and the Vrykul didn't start having mutant (human) babies until after the Titans left. The Titans thought they fixed the problem with the Old Gods so I really doubt they were thinking that humans and other such races would ever come to be since otherwise Algalon wouldn't of been ready to tell the Titans to destroy the planet. We don't know when Ulduar was built but it was most likely pre sundering and probably before a tribe of trolls turned into night elves and Blizzard failed to actually give us taunka lore and whether both tauren and taunka were around or if one evolved from the other (and as far as we know the taunka/tauren are a natural evolved race on Azeroth).

I think much of Ulduars decorations have no true lore tied to them and were merely done to give it a Titan like look.

If we assume new races (if any) are druidic races, that focuses possibilities. A renegade naga faction can do whatever Blizzard wants them to, but of NPCs currently in the game, druids are limited to Furbolg, Centaur, High Elf (In WC2), and Lost Ones. Oddly, despite their importance to the epic flight form quest and despite their animistic nature, no Arakkoa NPCs are druids. (source)

Don't forget there are Blood Elf druid npcs as well. I am guessing Blizzard didn't create Blood Elf druids as being playable since they didn't want to spend development time on new forms and Spacegoats obviously not being druidic.

http://images4.wikia.nocookie.net/wo...t-Freywinn.jpg

Freywinn is the only blood elf druid, either in game or from outside lore. I consider him an exception, rather than an example of a broader truth.

Wildhammer druids only appear in the Warcraft RPG. That source also allows for human druids. I've never seen any, but I started playing WoW just after the honor system change, late in vanilla. That would explain their inclusion in the sprite darter hatchling quest chain; I wondered about that.

I do believe there are (still) Wilhammer druid NPCs in the Hinterlands, unless they got removed from the game along with the Revantusk/Wildhammer reputations back in Vanilla.

Still, some blood elves are still prone to the ways of nature, and given that they're no longer an isolated nation, some of them could find Runetotem's teachings to their liking.

If Blizzard went the route of just adding current classes to the current races then blood elf druids seem pretty feasible to me.

Blood Elf Warriors before Druids I'd think actually. They're literally the only class/race combo held back due to game mechanics(Blizzard had to limit themselves to 6 classes for them).

I'm not at all sure that's why there are no blood elf warriors. Lore-wise, the Blood Elves are a highly intelligent and cunning people, but great warriors among them are extremely rare. It's just not the blood elf MO. While Rogues are a melee class, they're based around the kind of behind-the-scenes cunning that the BEs are best at.

It's literally been said by Blizzard had to drop one class from Blood Elves for mechanical reasons at the time. They had to choose between Hunters, Rogues and Warriors as being dropped (They wanted to keep all three pure casters and Paladins obviously), and decided that of those three, Warriors were the least best fit. Warriors were originally planned in vanilla to always be available to all races, hence Gnomes having Warriors, despite the fact that Warriors really aren't the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Gnomes either.

This discussion about the stained glass got me thinking, what if the Naga weren't the first formerly landbound species to be altered/corrupted by the Old Gods? The glass could depict what was happening when the Titans were building Ulduar, the transformation of feral, nomadic humanoids that presumably already existed on Azeroth before the Titans created the "seed races" (and before they fell victim to the Curse of Flesh - hey, what if the Old Gods used those primitive humanoids' "DNA" for this? Explains e.g. genetic compatibility between humans and elves)
And the result of this still exists today, in the race of the Murlocs. There are several hints that the Murlocs are direct minions of the Old Gods, and probably already were when the Highborne were transformed into Naga.
I was always thinking that actual legs look odd on a seabound species, as these extremities are only really useful on land, and the way Murlocs swim is just like a human would. A simple counter-argument would be that the Murlocs' legs were (re)developed recently (probably by magical means) to allow conquest of the shores.

On a related thought, I recently read on the Suramar article that it's weird that the ruins of the city in WC3 show "motifs of a seaside civilization". A simple explanation in my eyes would be that ancient kalimdor wasn't just a "blot" of a continent (are there any official maps or just concepts of this old landmass?) but rather had one or more, uh, large bays, areas of sea with land to three sides. I'm thinking an upside-down U with the isles of the South Sea already existant. The Well and Zin-Azshari as well as Suramar were in or close to the inner coast of the curve.
This would explain the large presence of Murlocs in the sea between today's Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms.

Actually, in World of Warcraft: The Official Strategy Guide from BradyGames (which I for some reason bought when I pre-ordered vanilla) the following is stated in the Warrior section of the Classes chapter:

Always found that very funny. I don't know when that idea was scrapped (if it was ever in) and why BradyGames put that in for the final release (as vanilla was already out in the US when i pre-ordered in Europe), but I suppose they had gotten the idea from somewhere. Does anyone remember if Orcs were unable to become warriors at some point in the alpha/beta?

Somehow related to a possible naga race in the next expansion is a hint we get in the Frozen Throne night elf campaign, where we see a statue of Azshara having a tail. That is the only thing that suggests the transition from Highborne to Naga was not immediate, and that the race probably had to go through a lot of evolutionary stages before finally transforming into the fish/lizard hybrid we see today. And where there are several stages, it's possible that some individuals never made it to the next step. Given the naga's predisposition to slavery, I can understand why the ones that don't fit in would welcome the downfall of that particular society. How they'd get the mortal races to trust them and gain full membership into the Horde or Alliance is somehow difficult, though. Their best bet would be the Horde, though, since the predominating concern there is mutual survival.

The Knights of the Ebon Blade were once members of the Scourge, and quite frankly I'm surprised Varian even accepted Tirion's recommendation.

I can imagine the easiest explanation for player characters would be having the tail split into legs, which would resolve the art-related issue of having a damn huge tail in the way of pieces of armour. As for the naga themselves... well, I suppose evolution would streamline them as much as possible to aid with swimming, which would probably necessitate the degeneration of their legs. They'd be in the way, otherwise.

That would actually contradict all evidence of actual evolutions. Legs always evolved from flippers, and flippers from legs. The tail was just a collection of extra vertebrae.

Here's an idea I had about a way to bring in bipedal Naga. What if they are evolutionary throwbacks that pop up in a Naga clutch occasionally? Current Naga society would reject such babies as freaks and maybe have them destroyed via exposure, or just banished. There could be a whole group of these bipedal Naga that go about rescuing their kin that look like them. They would also have a reason not to like Naga society as a whole for rejecting them in the first place.

In this scenario, the bipedal Naga would also be able to breed true and keep the legged body plan. That could easily set up a little island nation of this Naga derived type that would be eager to go side with one of the factions, since if Azshara was doing a big military push, these guys would be in serious danger of being killed.

Since they would be throwbacks, the extreme sexual dimorphism would not be present either, so females and males would be pretty much the same in ability.

While certainly true, we're not dealing with evolution in the real world here, we're thinking of race design in a fantasy world. Think in the direction of mermen: typically these have a human torso with the tail of a fish in place of their legs, as little sense as that might make from an evolutionary standpoint. In regards to the actual statue, it looks more likely to me that it's a depiction of Azshare before she was turned into her current form. The naga statues we see in WoW of a figure whom is most likely Azshara makes her look more like the other female naga. See this picture as example: http://static.wowhead.com/uploads/sc...rmal/72718.jpg


Personally I'd say losing the tails is not a direction that Blizzard should take if they were to introduce playable naga. Their serpentine forms are mostly what defines them to me, and losing the tail for legs would lose a lot of feel of the race, even if you kept the more serpent-like heads of the males. The same would count for losing multiple arms on the female naga, that would just turn them into a generic set of female characters except with fins instead of hair (Obviously counting the tail being lost as well).

I think everyone could agree that the Naga as most people know them (slithery tail) would not work as a playable race for art reasons. Things like pants/boots etc would just not work. Any new race would have to have a sufficiently humanoid form.

That brings up the prospect of somehow having "legged" Naga. Now lore-wise you might be able to make something like that work. (Eg, Magic of the Old Gods holds them in a snake form, freeing themselves from the magic allows them to partially resume humanoid form.) But at that point are they really Naga? DKs were "redeemed" but are still DKs; they didn't undergo any radical body alterations to make them substantially different from what they were.

I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with taking the Naga, gathering up some group of them in new lore and saying, "Ala-kazam! There you go, you're still Naga but you don't really look like them or have much in common with the ones everyone knows."

If Blizzard is going to offer a new playable race at some point I really have a hard time believing they'd use the Naga.

That reminds me of something I was thinking about before. How loyal are the Naga currently to the Old Gods? If they are declared heretics for worshiping Neptulon (who is a servant of the Old Gods) then it makes it seem pretty likely that Azshara abandoned the Old Gods after the pact. I guess the expansion would play out with Azshara and her subjects trying to bring Sargeras back into Azeroth and then a heretic faction that continues to serve the Old God and Neptulon.

Bipedal Naga seem unlikely to me though considering we were told that any new race would be a race we have seen before and bipedal Naga are pretty unknown and would be going in the direction they did with the Lost Ones and Draenei. There are a lot of choices Blizzard can use that they can make up some island lore for. For example they could have a group of Ogres join the Horde who ended up landing on some island in the South Seas rather than Kalimdor.