Elves should be the best at magic

Sure elves should have the higher innate magic, but most just lack the discipline to study up on it.
Those few who do rigorously study up have a higher skill ceiling than humans, but most elves are too fickle to bother with such nonsense.

Agreed. I don't get why people are calling this bait. In most Tolkien inspired, western fantasy settings Elves are explicitly magical and almost always long lived. It doesn't make sense for some random 80 year old human being a better mage than a 5000 year old elf who has been breathing magic since birth.

>Their very first implementation was a hybrid melee/magic-user class.
Yeah, that's kind of my point. They couldn't surpass humans with magic in the earliest of editions.

>Those few who do rigorously study up have a higher skill ceiling than humans
I'd argue it's the opposite, considering humans learn in decades what takes centuries for elves.

Humans advance faster, elves have more time to git gud.
Abnormally good humans can come along and be better than any elf, but those are the exception, not the rule.

I think the biggest flaw is he forgot to reply to himself with some sort of "Have you tried not playing DnD?" response

>It doesn't make sense for some random 80 year old human being a better mage than a 5000 year old elf who has been breathing magic since birth.
Elves are phenomenally slow learners in fiction. Their psychology has been butchered by writers.

Though I guess this is the realistic point of view, considering 5000 year old individuals should be too alien to comprehend.
It's something often wrongly ignored. Long lived races/individuals bugs the hell out of me. They all act like children.

A 5000 year old human lich is generally going to outstrip a 5000 year old elf mystic.
Just look at (hate me all you want)Forgotten Realms

>Humans advance faster, elves have more time to git gud.

Elves should prevent humans from achieving immortality, lest they truly become the masters of magic.

>Elves are phenomenally slow learners in fiction
[citation needed]

Dumbass, OD&D elves were straight fighter/magic-users able to cast up to level 5 spells. Their big deal was the ability to create magic flying boats.

In 1st edition magic-user was their second highest class (level 11) they could rank up in.

And in 2nd edition they could only get to level 15 as a magic-user. Of the three races that could be magic-users they were the second highest behind human (20) and Half-Elf (12) not counting Gnome Illusionists (15).

From the very beginning elves have been casters to some degree. Just not the best because they are also fuckwits to concerned with spending 50 years drunk off their ass working on one still life painting and jerking off to be the best mages unlike the most dedicated of human casters.

That's why the encourage humans to go out and become adventurers. They tell them that the secret to immortality lies far away over those mountains and across that sea, deep in that dungeon crawling with impossible creatures and guarded by an ancient dragon.
It weeds out the ones stupid enough to actually try for immortality.

There are plenty of citations of elves maturing at a slower rate than humans. There are also plenty of citations of the exact opposite. Writers are plainly inconsistent.

One must look at the example characters. For some reason 40+ humans are somehow greater than millennia old elves at magic. It's bizarre, but canon.

That's just circular logic at that point. You're justifying elves not being the best casters by pointing out that some settings have humans be better than elves at casting.

So you concede that humans are greater in both potential and application?

Uh huh

I don't need to justify anything to determine the truth at this point. Humans have always been at least as good as the elves when it comes to magic.

Whether you like this or not, I don't really care. I'm a martial fag.

I never said they weren't. That was my original argument. It was either you or another person who made the ridiculous statement that elves never used magic until like 3.5 or some shit (or whatever they meant by "recent")

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It's sort of funny that the Netherese seem to be so close to how most of Veeky Forums seems to characterize elves.

Humans should be better than other races at everything or else they wouldn't be good underdogs.

Shitposting aside, halflings are the underdogs. Humans are the ones that do everything

>better than other races
>underdogs
This doesn't make any sense

HFY in a nutshell

Human wizards

Elf Wizards

Why not dwarf wizard?

I still had the last weeks thread in mind and thought about making a thread aksing about actual fluff and crunch examples of confirmed better elf wizards, not IF they should be better, but examples of where they actually are, not worded baitly in any way, without a girl elf in the OP to only get the attention of people that are actually interested. But here we are.

As far as DnD is concerned in chainmail they were stealthy guys that could attack with magic, and in early editions could wear special armor that let them cast magic without the chance for failure. They seem to have been magic-fighters more than specialized wizards. But without anything making them better wizard, just that they could multiclass into it easily, or have any bonus giving them a free spell. Somethign that way.

Some people mentioned 5000 yeras old elves, it can't be stressed enough that these barely happen in any system we tend to play around here. DnD might not be the only system, but it's popular enough that you should know that they tend to get 700 years old at max. Also some human wizards in fiction that are really powerful tend to exceed their lifespan, like the already mentioned Nagash, so that must not need much.

tl;dr except warhammer elves, what are some canon superior elf wizards, in fluff and crunch?

Because dwarves only make magic things.

>so that must not need much
*not mean much
Fuck me.

It depends on the setting. In my custom setting, only one continent's elves are able to use non-divine or nature magic and that's because they were extraplanar immigrants (against their will).

Also, humans are generally better because there are more humans and humans have a....hasty nature when it comes to learning magic. If they accidentally blow up their lab while practicing a Fireball spell but they still manage to figure it out, it's a success. Elves on the other hand might spend five years carefully studying and practicing before attempting their first Fireball.

That's the main difference.

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There are a good amount of superior elvish casters in various works, yet as user noted the opposite takes the majority.

It shouldn't be hard for you to find these pieces.
Not really much of a question in the long run.

Using Forgotten Realms lore

Elves are generally more in-tune and better equipped when dealing with the deeper aspects of magic and epic level spells. Being more respectful of magic.
Only they(other than the Chosen) can work High Magic(elven Epic Magic)

Humans tend to pursue the Arcane much further in such shockingly thin amounts of time, ambition and hubris paving way for more individual power.
The Netherese ditched Epic Magic altogether in favor of grander spells.

>It shouldn't be hard for you to find these pieces
Then it shouldn't be hard for you to name these.

It should be noted that the Imaskari had mastered epic magic rivaling that of the elves

Elves are shit

Relevant

honestly this, it's in-flavor and justifies magically superior humans without being a cop-out.

Look at TES for a moment. Just because Bretons are the most magically inclined humans doesn't mean they have the best human wizards. Even the High Elves and the Psjic Order are pretty much equal to the Arcane University, just with a different focus.

Elves have the potential to be the best, but most don't focus on it, I think. And it'd be dull if elves were always the best wizards - I'd rather see a dwarf up there, just to surprise me. Humans do take the spotlight a lot, but it's a safe option when people generally have strong opinions on other races - hard to find those who hate humanity.

The only real flaw with it is that it implies a danger to magic learning that some settings just don't have. And I don't want every game to have a Dragon Age or 40k approach to magic, especially if it's just background fluff that doesn't meaningfully affect me.

The greatest mage in TES was a Nord

You mean a Breton, the Sage.

>Elves have the potential to be the best, but most don't focus on it

Not necessarily. They have the 'spark', that's about it. Once a certain threshold has been reached it's fair game.

You don't need to hate humanity if you don't want to see humans succeeding at everything despite being the average race, you just may hate human-centric writing for getting wrong what it means to be the underdog.

Also pretty sure that TES states that fluff-wise Altmer are the best magicians, if the games portray that correctly is a different matter. The best mage I can think of in the games was the Dunmer guy that made female clones of himself anyway.

Ah, that book. I keep hoping to this day that it will be elaborated on. It's such a minor mention of a supposedly grand wizard.

I was referring to Shalidor.

>Also pretty sure that TES states that fluff-wise Altmer are the best magicians

They say that, but then the games and further lore contradict it.

>population

I think this might actually be a good argument.
Humans outnumber Elves by orders of magnitude, if we consider each generation of Humans against Elves in the same time period.

It actually makes sense that out of those numbers a hyper-savant type Human might be born once or twice.

After that you can just chalk it up to the story focusing on a "Heroic Age" and ignore the 400 years it takes between great human wizards.

They probably also say that there are cities in Skyrim that house more than thirty people, but the game does a bad job at portraying this.

A good reason why I said 'lore' alongside 'games'

I don't think anything objects that Altmer, as a race, in general, are the best wizards.

Elves have entire councils and courts full of venerable archwizards. Almost any elf can reach their level in time if they apply themselves.

Humans, on the other hand, are mostly mediocre, but they produce exceptional individuals at the greatest rate. Every few decades, a human will appear with such shocking talent that he or she eclipses all others, including elves.

So basically, elves have a very high median, whereas humans have a broader distribution. There is nothing conflicting about saying elves being the most magical race, but still getting out-wizarded by a human every now and then.

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Just make it a mental health danger instead of a physical one. It would explain why the basket case wizards who go around making owlbears and what not are usually human.

thats a pretty nice rack

just make it a respect for monasticism and philosophical teaching vs practicality and lack of cluttering teachings, kinda like ancient martial arts movies where one disciple would shun his master for teaching too much philosophical crap and not enough techniques. Bonus if elves educated in magic in the human world are better than both humans and other elf magic users.

It's not that they're not the best wizards, it's that there are other races who also quality for the status.

Namely Bretons, Nords, Dunmer and occasionally(especially in the past) the Redguard.

A few other 'unplayable' races are also clear contenders.

>Elves are women
>Humans are men

It would be easier to say that the elves are more consistent in application.
Humans, being so varied and numerous, harbor both the greatest and the worst wizards known in history.

There's a very clear bell curve amongst the two races.

If by Nords you mean the snowniggers that are fluff-wise even afraid of magic it only shows that the writing of the TES games is confused about what it wants to be.

The 'snowniggers' being afraid of magic is an essential part of why they're no longer venerated practitioners of magic.

Indeed, Shalidor wanted it restricted even among his own people. One of the greatest wizards of all time (possibly the greatest) was the reason for its neglect.

And what is their innate ability that made them such great wizards?

But thats a dragon user.

Seriously, that's the platinum dragon god Bahamut in his human form with his seven gold dragons that accompany him

Nothing. They were just devout practitioners. After a certain point the 'spark' of magic is irrelevant.

Eventually brains comes into the equation far more so than how much mana runs in your veins.

>Eventually brains comes into the equation
So Mer are still better, gotcha.

That... What? Not even sure how you came to that conclusion.

Whatever.

Someone setup a logarithmic graph of this. I always set my secondary races as (across the world not necessarially in one spot) 10% of the entire human poplulation except for orcs. Orcs are on a 1 to 1 scale.

Fermi estimations work great for this. 10 million humans, 1 million each for elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes.
Lets say that humans have a 1% magically gifted rate and of that 100,000, 10% actually do anything with it. 10,000 wizards and sorcerers in a population of 10 million.
we will go with 10% of the population for the elves, so 100,000 again. elves have the time to study their art so we will assume that 100% of all potentials reach some level of proficiency. thats 100k wizards.
Now, human ambition and sheer force of luck will put them on par in general with elves (some are worse) but 10% of that 10k, 1k, will end up becoming WAY more powerful than anything else on the planet.
is this a reasonable estimate guys?

>Now, human ambition and sheer force of luck will put them on par in general with elves
No, use actual numbers of very gifted people or savants we have in humanity instead of this lazy writer cop-out.

>Psjic Order are pretty much equal to the Arcane University
What?

Both of you are mistaken it was Sotha Sil or Kagrenac . Both of them elves but race is often a minor thing in TES.
Still if I remember correctly next most powerful would be Mannimarco (altmer), Galerion(altmer), Shalidor(nord), Zurin Arctus(imperial), Phynaster(probably altmer) Mankar Camoran(altmer) and Martin Sepim(imperial) deserves mention as well as Divath Fyr(dummer) plus we have Denstagmer but we don't know his race.
Altmer are in majority.

>Both of you are mistaken it was Sotha Sil or Kagrenac
They were up there. It's kind of difficult to compare them.

Interesting, but fruitless. Or maybe I'm just tired of this thread.

>trying to rank TES mages

Yeah, nope. That never works. Until Bethesda garners some coherent storytelling you're out of luck, buckaroo.

I believe it was mentioned at one point that the Greybeards would be more than a match for the Psijic Order.

Redguards are the most powerful mages. Or at least they were. They blew up a fucking continent.

Humans should be evil wizards elves should be good wizards. Then it's fair.

TESfags get the fuck out

It is a matter of discussion if we can name "shouts" as magic as they manipulate earth bones directly without using magicka.

>trying to rank TES mages
I'm not ranking them aside from god and mad guy that managed to disappear entire race a feats that nobody else managed to do.

Rest are in random order from mages known for their power. Dagoth-Ur probably qualify as one of the top.

And occasionally, one makes it through the filter. He's now the best adventurer ever, and worse than the elves had ever imagined. They created this.

You really need to consider all the other ludicrous feats performed by other mages before you can place those two at the top.

Debating this is only going to derail the thread further though, so I am withdrawing.

Greybeards have been called mages of a specialized sort before, Tonal Architecture or not.

I saw the post and it was so obviously bait. Pretty good bait, but so obvious. Still, well done. People really got hooked.

Give me one good reason why non-magical humans should be better than overtly magical fae beings

>muh ambition

Give me one good reason why overtly magical fae beings should be better than non-magical humans

Sorry no, that's not how this works.

we gave them the d

>elf takes centuries to become 20th level wizard
>human takes decades to become 20th level wizard

Gee, I wonder who the strongest caster is?

If you're playing a game, an elf and a human wizard would take the same time to become 20th level.

Now give that human immortality and WHAMO

Yeah. A game. Not according to lore. PCs are an outlier.

>tfw you remember that the first archmages in dnd lore were characters that gygax's friends played, so everyone based their characters on them

Or the one Ed Greenwood made, but that's a Marty Sue, so my point still stands.

I don't understand. What's so wrong with humans being on par with the elves with magic? Other races even. It gives variety to the setting's magic.

Have a single best race is just lame. I'm also of the above opinion that we don't see enough dwarf wizards.

>elves aren't the best at everything

>It gives variety to the setting's magic
Who uses magic doesn't automatically give variety to the magic.

They're apparently not the greatest at having noses