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.
Physiology
Aging and Lifespan
"Good health, long life." It is a common expression among draenei, but one that sometimes puzzles shorter-lived races. Why would such a long-lived people need to wish a long life to one another? The answer lies in the first portion of the phrase: good health. Another clue can be found in another frequently used blessing: "May your days be long and your hardships few." The draenei never wish only for longevity, but always qualify it with something else; in this case, less hardship.
To understand the lifespans of draenei, and how important health and hardship are to them, one must shed preconceived notions about how living things age. The draenei evolved to the point of near-immortality. Unlike the kaldorei, this was not achieved by some great magical blessing or a powerful connection to nature magic. Rather, it a result of their biology; though magic may have played a role in the evolution of that biology.
The way the draenei explain it, nearly all biological beings have natural, internal instructions that cause their bodies to age — infants grow larger and more self-sufficient, children gain strength and intelligence as they become adults, and in time adults begin to wither as they reach their elderly years. The draenei lack these instructions for old age. They reach adulthood, and the aging process simply stops, their cells continuing to function and reproduce themselves eternally…at least theoretically.
The same "code" that gives the body instructions to age also instructs the body on how to heal from injuries or recover from illness. The draenei are not immune from these woes. When they suffer wounds and ailments it can cause little "blips" in the recovery process. They are minuscule irregularities, completely unnoticeable until they have piled up. A few hundred or thousand blips later, and the draenei may not be recovering quite as well as they used to, their cells no longer as responsive. Tiny irregularities start to become larger ones, and these can start to manifest as signs of aging: wrinkles, aching joints, impaired mental capacity, etc. Of course, this can take thousands, even tens of thousands of years before a draenei starts to see such effects. While it is conceivable that a draenei could live forever if they had perfect health and never got hurt, that simply is not a realistic scenario. All draenei will face sickness and injury in their lives, and after thousands of years it will inevitably happen.
Death
Draenei rarely die of natural causes, but it can happen. As mentioned above, it is possible for a draenei to suffer enough weathering through the millennia due to ailments that, in time, they simply can no longer recover sufficiently and their body begins to fail. Usually this can been seen coming long before it happens and the draenei can prepare for it, providing the dying with as much comfort as possible as they pass.
Far more often, draenei deaths are premature. Few draenei reach a venerable state. Those that die typically fall victim to other circumstances, such as an accident, a deadly disease, an animal attack, or foul play. Thousands upon thousands of draenei were slaughtered by the orcs in the genocide on Draenor. Multitudes more were lost in the 13,000 years prior while fleeing the Burning Legion through the cosmos. After so much violence, the natural passing of a draenei has become a celebrated, if somber affair.