A week of Skyborne: weak racials, a 361-reply thread to hide them, and players defending the lore

When Blizzard showed the Skyborne at BlizzCon, the complaint was the price: the race and its starting zone are not part of the WoW Forever subscription but sold in the $29.99 Skyborne Hero Pack, alongside a mount and cosmetics. A week on, with the race playable in the beta, the argument on the official forums has shifted to what you actually get.

The racials: mostly utility

The most practical complaint is about power. Here is the Skyborne kit from the beta client, next to each other by faction:

Racial	Alliance Skyborne	Horde Skyborne
Walk on Air	Glide downward for 10 sec	Glide downward for 10 sec
Faction ability	Read Ley Line — activate a ley line for 100% more health and mana regeneration	Skysight — an elemental blessing for 10% run speed
Wind Blessed (passive)	+1% haste	+1% haste
Elemental Insight (passive)	+5% damage to elementals	+5% damage to elementals

The thread calling them the weakest racials in the game has 50 replies and more than 2,200 views. Its point is the comparison: orcs keep Blood Fury, humans have a stun break and sword crit, undead keep Will of the Forsaken, trolls have their haste burst, and gnomes gained a caster tool. Against that, a slow fall, a situational run speed or regeneration buff and 1% haste look thin.

Not everyone minds. Some players would rather a paid race not be the best choice, so the purchase never becomes pay-to-win. Others argue 1% haste will matter more at 60 than it looks at 20, and that 5% against elementals is a real edge in Molten Core, where many of the bosses and much of the trash are elementals — a joke in the thread calls Skyborne the best race for exactly one raid.

Class choice is the other sore point. Horde Skyborne can be warriors, hunters, rogues, druids or shamans; Alliance Skyborne swap shaman for mage. Neither side can play a priest, paladin or warlock, a sore point for players who wanted an elf priest or paladin.

“Can we get a toggle?”

The biggest Skyborne thread is not about racials at all. “Can We Get A Toggle to Turn Off Skyborn?” asks for a client option to show the elves as humans or orcs instead. It has passed 360 replies and 5,000 views, mostly an argument between players who think the race should be pulled before launch and turned into a later allied race, and players who say it will never happen. One Horde player sums up the other worry: they wanted to play Horde without half the faction being elves.

The lore defence

On the other side, a 168-reply thread titled “The Skyborne Hate-Train is Exhausting (And Lore-Blind)” argues that the Skyborne are high elves with real Vanilla roots — the Shen’dralar of Dire Maul and the old Highborne splits after the Sundering — rather than a race invented for sales, and compares them to blood elves, who were also added partly for faction balance. Critics answer that inventing a new branch of high elves is exactly the problem.

Blizzard has explained where the idea came from. Senior game designer Josh Greenfield told GameSpot, in comments reported by GamesRadar, that the race started with Chris Metzen and that the team knew early on it wanted elves in Forever.

What we would pick

If you are buying the pack for the zone and the look, the racials will not hold you back while levelling. If you are chasing the strongest character, our best race for each class page ranks every race by class, and the Skyborne race page lists the full kit for both factions.

No developer has posted in any of the three threads yet. Racials were already overhauled once for Forever, so they are one of the easier things to change before launch.