Guild Canon: The contents of this page are considered canon within Cobalt Company's "RP bubble". Guild canon may go beyond official WoW canon and is usually inspired by and extrapolated from it. However, guild canon will not contradict official canon.
More Guild Canon
Healing & Resurrection
Healing
Magical healing works along a spectrum of effectiveness from "like you were never hurt" to "not at all," based on the following factors.
- Timing - The sooner after damage is received, the more completely your body can be "convinced" that it never happened.
- Compassion - Especially with Holy healing, the extent to which a priest can summon sincere caring and sympathy for the patient contributes a great deal to effectiveness.
- Skill - With time and training, priests get better at feeling compassion for a variety of strangers, as well as skillfully wielding their chosen form of magic.
- Consent - If the person is consciously or unconsciously unwilling to receive the blessing, that resistance will reduce effectiveness.
Because of the temporarily intense bond that shared danger can create among a group, and the speed at which during-combat healing is applied, a dungeon crawl would work almost as it does in game, with a priest almost instantly negating damage done to those they heal. But outside of that situation, various factors may reduce the effectiveness of healing, so that damage leftover after the spell is cast must mend the natural way over time, possibly leaving scars, etc.
Resurrection
The same factors are involved with resurrection as with healing, along with two extremely mysterious added factors:
- Soul 'Strength' - Priests can ONLY (even given all other factors in alignment) resurrect those rare people whose souls retain a sense of awareness and agency even when separated from the body. These "strong souls" often belong to great heroes, but the cause/effect relationship isn't clear. Some truly rare souls can find their way back to their bodies even without a priest's summons!
- Fate - The most unknowable factor of all. Sometimes it is simply someone's "time," and no matter how strong the soul or skilled the priest, they cannot be resurrected.
Necromancy
A standard soul departs from its body immediately and loses all awareness and agency until it arrives at the Shadowlands. And even the strongest soul cannot re-enter a body that has begun to decay. Only necromancy can reanimate a body under these circumstances.
Some bodies are simply animated by necromantic energy, and their once-attached souls have no awareness of what has become of their earthly remains. But advanced necromancy allows people to draw a soul back from limbo or the Shadowlands to its own body — or in even more advanced cases, such as certain Death Knights, to another body altogether.
An undead person's soul "accompanies" their body in a similar way to a living person's, though it is always "stitched together" in a metaphysical sense and is never truly united with the body as a living person's is. Physically, this prevents the tissues and organs from returning to a living state. Mentally, this can manifest as varying degrees of detachment, amoral behavior, derangement, or other personality changes.
"Final death" for an undead person amounts to the tearing apart of the necromantic "stitching" holding the soul to the body and the soul once again making its way to the Shadowlands. Under known circumstances, resurrection can only replace an undead person's "stitching," not return the person fully to life.
Druids
A common question that arises regarding shapeshifted druids is: "Can they speak?" The simple answer is that yes, they can…but not all do. The more complex answer is that whether or not a druid can or will speak in their animal forms can vary greatly from druid to druid. It is most definitely possible, and is a skill that can be developed. For some druids it comes very naturally, and a handful seem to manage speaking in animal form without trouble almost as if simply because nobody told them they couldn't. For most, however, it takes a bit of discipline, re-learning how to communicate with different sets of vocal cords and mouth shapes.
There are also psychological factors. For instance, a druid's voice in other forms will sound different from their normal voice, and some can find that unnerving. Feral druids often feel no impulse or desire to use verbal communication when in their animals forms, as they start to think more like beasts when shapeshifted. That said, they can easily communicate with other druids in the same shape, and to some degree even normal animals of the same species.
When it comes to the more unusual forms like the moonkin or the tree of life, the same issues still arise. These are new forms that communicate differently. Previous experience relearning to speak always helps (as does being naturally gifted).