Highlights
- Earthen characters leave piles of rocks when they die, not skeletons, showing attention to detail in World of Warcraft lore.
- The unique Earthen race in WoW: The War Within offers players new customization options, abilities, and dance emotes.
- Skeletons in WoW have a history, with Earthen breaking the mold by leaving behind rocks instead when they die.
A World of Warcraft fan recently noticed that Earthen characters leave behind piles of rocks when they die, rather than a skeleton. This charming detail is not only unique to the Earthen but is also a direct nod to the lore of the new World of Warcraft race.
The Earthen are a new Allied Race coming in World of Warcraft: The War Within. These stone-skinned dwarves will be playable on both the Alliance and the Horde and feature unique customization options, racial abilities, and even dance emotes.
World of Warcraft: The War Within Lets Players Get Married, Sort Of
A crafted ring in World of Warcraft: The War Within lets players form a special bond with another player using a unique and charming mechanic.
However, one World of Warcraft fan noticed an easily missed detail about the Earthen. When most races die in World of Warcraft, they leave a skeleton behind for a short time after they resurrect. As beings of rock and stone, Earthen do not have a skeleton, leading many players to wonder what happened when they died. Now that they’re available for World of Warcraft players to test in The War Within alpha, WoW fan Snek discovered that, once Earthen revive, they leave behind a pile of rocks in their wake instead of a skeleton, and shared their findings on Twitter.
WoW: The War Within Earthen Don’t Leave a Skeleton When They Die
World of Warcraft players were understandably charmed by this particular detail. While it would have been easier to simply have the Earthen leave behind a skeleton like their Dwarf and Dark Iron Dwarf cousins in World of Warcraft, the fact they made the effort to create this new asset shows a promising attention to detail. Fans jokingly asked if characters with the Mining profession could gather minerals from their corpses, and mused about how bleeding effects would work on Earthen as well.
Skeletons have an interesting history in World of Warcraft. Back in Vanilla, characters left behind a skeleton for 20 minutes every time they died, leading to some hilarious and iconic scenes, like the hundreds of skeletons littering Orgrimmar during WoW‘s infamous Hakkar Corrupted Blood incident, or when raids would attack enemy capital cities. That said, because people would sometimes use skeletons to spell out advertisements or obscenities, World of Warcraft later changed it so that each character could only have one skeleton – or in the case of the Earthen, one pile of rocks – in the world at a time.
Because of its censorship laws, World of Warcraft in China does not display skeletons when characters die, spawning gravestones instead. Now that World of Warcraft is coming back to China before The War Within launches, one has to wonder if its client will use the classic tombstone marker when an Earthen dies, or if they will break the mold and use the same pile of rocks other players get.
World of Warcraft: Dragonflight
World of Warcraft: Dragonflight was developed by Blizzard Entertainment and is the ninth expansion pack for the iconic massively multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft.
Dragonflight features an overhauled user interface, raises the level cap to 70, and introduces a new race and class.
- Released
- November 28, 2022
