The History of Wesnoth Forums

[boru]

Note the date on that, Crend.

[Crendgrim]

My post was meant to be ironic.

[Jetrel]

Also I think it was because they wanted to give undead that type of attack too, which of course, wouldn't make sense for obvious reasons.

I remember seeing one of the developers (I think it was either Noy or TSI) say that this was the crux of it. The undead, as they were, had only cold for their magical attacks. With "holy" being renamed "arcane" it could be used for both white mages and ancient liches. The undead faction could have a bit more vareity, etc., etc.
Strange, there USED to be a link in my above post...

EDIT: Here's the old thread on it. Right here
EDIT Again: and this is the very post where the name was first proposed.

(It's also used for the elves, to represent "faerie" magic.)

Yeah, holy->arcane was made not because we had anything against holy, but because we both mandate a very limited set of damage types, and because we wanted something much more general than holy.

We had a lot of call for attacks that were "pure magic energy" in nature, with absolutely no "elemental" affiliation. We could have done a whole panoply of elements or spiritual-affiliations of magic, such as "holy", "shadow", "fey/ethereal/astral", "nature/plant/wood", "water", "chi" etc, but we decided that with our unit tree and gameplay such as it is, they weren't different enough to merit having this whole spread, so we generalized "holy" into being "arcane".

[Maeglin Dubh]

I remember the dark times.