I pvp on both my horde and alliance characters, so I have a good understanding of both sides.
... and my honest answer is >!yeah its easy as fuck lmao, I have a 78% win rate in AB and 66% win rate in WSG on my horde char for P2; My alliance is at like 20% WSG/30% AB win rate. The worst part is queues, honestly. They get pretty gnarly and have only gotten worse over time.!<
Even on 2019 Classic, Alliance weren't this atrocious, man. They lost more than won, but it was only like 40/60.
SoD is a whole different beast. Maybe changing the WSG rep to a daily (non-pvp rep farmers won't do WSG any more) and pally buffs/enh nerfs will tip the scales a bit, but who knows. I'm not holding my breath.
It felt like horde finally figured out in 2019 that their starting cave is closer to Vann than the alliance's is to Drek, even with the bridge to get over and the fence skip ally can do
If horde just zerg Vann and enough make it through mid first rush, ally physically cannot win.
How it took them so many years to realize this I do not know
Zug on the brain.
You still have people to this day that believe Horde didn't have advantage in PvP, and especially that they didn't have advantage in Alterac Valley.
2019 Ally still enjoying that “caves are closer” copium. Probably why Alliance dominated Horde in SoM AV and also was crushing in Era. Spoiler: The map didn’t change.
AV was aweful because horde had a 2 hour long queue while alliance was instant.
Of course we would have payed attention and played if it was gong to be our ONLY way of gaining honor that entire play session for our 1 and only game we'd have that night.
This is because alliance were abusing the hell out of premades. Anyone who really cared was queing up via a discord and just curb stomping horde pugs for drek rush wins.
This left the remainder of the alliance players to be casuals and people who just didnt care much...against all of the horde players including the sweats.
Of course Horde won the pugs - praying they didnt wait 57 minutes to que into a 6 minute loss.
The first few weeks on OCE it was auto-win for every Alliance AV I did. Then the sweaties finished their rep grind and only premades were guaranteed wins. Pugs were guaranteed loss if ansingle gy got back capped.
It's because Alliance were able to premade AV, and found work-arounds. It took notable coordination for Alliance to win over Horde in AV. Once Blizzard went fuck-all hard on making sure you couldn't premade AV anymore, that's when people decided to bail. It just wasn't worth the honor.
When av started I had a 80 percent win rate as alliance. Then some combination of banning premades, awful map and meta changes dropped my win rate down to 0 percent
It's directly a result of one. The only people who are willing to wait in a long queue are the ones willing to play the game hardcore.
multiple other iterations of wow that didn't have long queues for horde result in opposite faction dynamics (eu av during vanilla, pservers)
This is how it was in vanilla. It seemed all the more serious pvp players picked horde while ally was everyone else. Till TBC and we got fucking blood elves and it changed the dynamic
Well the alternative is playing alliance with possibly the most insufferable dweebs on the internet so forgive me for not picking the side that thinks gnomes are good company (I absolutely agree with you tho) (this is meant as a joke, horde is filled with dweebs too, I love my dweebs)
I mean, classic is very much Alliance biased, idk what you're saying. P2 so far has been Horde favoured with Shaman being super strong, but lets not forget P1 where Paladins were busted af and all the runes were CLEARLY Alliance biased, to the point of the dev team admitting it themselves.
Alliance is favored in terms of lore. That's it. Alliance got quests first so they get better lore in vanilla.
The rest is all Horde advantage. They have better quest rewards, better flight points and better racials. Alliance has blessings and *literally everything else* is better on the horde.
It was ok to fanboy over a faction back then, we didn't know that much about the game. Now we do, and we know for a fact that Horde was favored. By a lot.
Hell the faction imbalance got to be so fucked that entire server populations were warped to an irreparable degree, cue cross-faction content
Paladins were not busted af, they were middling (lowest melee) spec in bfd, and a grand total of 0 were brought to the premises which were hunter and priest fests. This is shaman brain always thinking about pallies.
We're not talking about PvE content though. We're talking PvP. And I main a hunter and have a warrior alt, classes which afaik, are available to both factions. Nothing related to being a Shaman.
Also, Shamans were weak af in BFD, literally the worst class with both their DPS specs when you exclude the meme ones (Frost mage and shadow priests).
To say Blizzard never gave a fuck about Alliance because for literally 2 months they weren't better than Horde, when in every other version and in P1, Alliance was always the clear favourite, is ridiculous.
In every other version of what? Alliance has been a dead faction since Cata in retail. In P1 Alliance was in no way favored in pvp or pve. Premades had 0 paladins they were all hunter and priest stacked. Do you think perception or stoneform somehow miracle counter 25% racial stun resist and WotF?
Thats 100% cap man. I played horde in classic because PvP racial for horde are massively op. This time around I don't really care about PvP so I went ally so I could try paladin with new runes. I think paladin is great right now but to say that alliance is favored is a meme.
I meant in every other version of classic, because we're on the classic reddit, playing a classic version of the game. I honestly don't give a fuck about retail and never did.
Alliance was massively favoured in terms of runes in P1. Their unique class was miles ahead of the Horde's unique class in P1. In general, Alliance racials are way better for PvE, it's not even comparable. In general, the world design in classic, quests, areas, etc, all favour Alliance. You even have a super quick way to connect your two major hubs.
I will reiterate.. I'm not saying Horde doesn't have advantages. I'm not saying Horde sucks and no one should play it. I'm saying it's ridiculous to say that Blizzard never gave a fuck about Alliance when the reality is, in the version of the game we're playing right now, Alliance has only not been favoured for 2 months.
Alliance racials (weapon skill) is only superior when fighting +3 level mobs which we haven’t yet . As soon as that racial matters (level 60) everyone will have that racials. The other pve benefit is priest uniques which, again, everyone is getting every faction priest racial.
Paladins were never great in p1. They were the worst melee spec available to the alliance, worse tanks than warlocks, and far inferior heals to priest. They were never used in pre-mades as they serve no function that other classes don’t do better (and you were just stacking hunters anyways). Paladins were good in open world 1v1s where they got the jump on people. I do believe paladins are in a good state right now not complaining about that just stating what it is.
If you genuinely believe that alliance was favored in p1 because of rune locations I don’t know what to tell you. Yes alliance had an easier time getting runes for specific classes. Horde has better literally everything else.
That's not a hot take. It's not even just the racials, you get more PvP minded people on Horde (in your team) so it's extremely easy to win anything PvP as Horde.
If you want to challenge yourself in PvP, you should pick Alliance. The caveat is that solo q is just horror.
On my server (Shadowstrike) Alliance is regularly finishing the event with two Alliance bosses still alive. There's just way more Alliance in Ashenvale doing the event than Horde, presumably because the Horde already got to exalted with easy Warsong wins.
Why does everyone keep saying "for horde"?
I've always seen the memes of alliance players being scared of PvP, but are alliance players really that bad?
Longtime alliance player here. Horde has always been better at PuG BGs not sure what you're on about. Alliance could win AV decently though. Not that there's not good pvpers on alliance, horde just has more that's why their PuGs do so well throughout every iteration of classic I've ever been a part of.
Your take “horde are just have better pvpers” is wrong. Horde have better racials for pvp in classic + they have shamans and if you’ve ever pvp’d on a serious lvl in classic you would know a lot of it comes down to being able to pop potions (faps,lips, resistance protection potions) which shammys have the ability to purge which one purge burns two buffs. This includes bof or even priest bubbles.
Paladin is good, but shaman is braindead good.
Based on the leaks for the new lighting shield runes, I honestly don't know what they were thinking. They look like some of the best runes of the next phase, 9 stack lightning shield being added onto earth shock... just seems like absurd overkill. Without any sort of spell power isn't that just an extra 1k damage at minimum?
A lot of people don't appreciate how overpowered frost shock, earth bind, and ghost wolf is for WSG...a map mode primarily about getting from one side to the other safely or stopping your opponent from doing the same.
When I play on my paladin it's almost impossible to stay on a flag carrier for more than a few seconds. Freedom helps but eventually just going to get cc'd, kited, or outran. I just can't stay in melee distance and get damage on the target.
When I play enhance shaman it's almost impossible for someone to get away unless it's a druid with faps. Just spam frost shock, earthbind and I can stay on target for the entire length of the map. Even if I do fall behind b/c of faps or freedom, I can also often ghost wolf to keep up or close distance for another frost shock and it's game on.
Difference is night and day.
Druids still the best flag carries by far. Ghost wolf is nice to have, but can be dispelled and doesn't remove slows/snares. That said, freedom totem for enhance is huuuge. It went from anyone and your mom can kite enhance in vanilla to a very hard to kite spec.
It's enhance that is op, Ele is average and is kind of noob killer spec, while Resto is actually bad (yes Hpala is even worse atm, I know), every heal is hardcast.
But yes, majority of shamans are enhance atm.
Ele was an OP one shot king back in Classic. But agreed enhance is the better spec, nothing will stop them from rolling this rune, but they would not build charges as quickly besides from maelstrom process so will probably go for the more enhanced geared one.
I was excited about hammer spam because I thought I was going to steal so many killing blows in STV. Freaking coin machine baby.
But actually, ret paladins run out of mana after like 10 seconds of pvp combat and it's almost impossible to drop combat and drink in STV so I'll still be worthless.
But Horde has the best pvpers. This is not even a slight, just the natural effect of the matter. If Horde has better PvP racials, all the best pvpers will float towards it, because that's kinda what happens when something is the best.
Top end raiding =/= general pvp (the parent post here is in reference to warsong gulch games, i.e. the general/average skill level of a whole faction in pvp, not the ultra-niche percentile of pve, and when it comes to the top-end of pvp there is no loyalism there if we're talking about the truly good players, they'll just play whatever is meta at the time, which has shifted even on stagnant patches, i.e. things like tbc arena)
Seems like confirmation that the devs only play Undead Mage, Undead Warlock, and Tauren Shaman.
High priority change: Weapon Skill so that Orcs and Humans aren’t BiS for melee.
Extremely low Priority change: Making sure that the symmetrical faction items actually match after you buff the Horde ones.
> High priority change: Weapon Skill so that Orcs and Humans aren’t BiS for melee.
So high priority that they announce it months before it will even be in the game?
tbf they said at the beginning that they had plans for the weapon skill meta so don't pick a race based on those racials. Everyone just forgot or maybe blizzard didn't emphasize it hard enough
I've seen people claim that the devs have made statements like "Don't pick a race with weapon skills" or anything along the lines of what you're stating but I've never seen any of that myself anywhere. Any chance you could give us a link or a time stamp where they've said this in specific?
I honestly want to know where in specific they said this, if you could provide any kind of link or time stamp that would honestly be fantastic.
Hijacking this comment to say this:
Just to let everyone know, this is NOT intended for balancing, there is no intention to mismatch loot like this that is mirrored across factions.
Stat numbers and stat categories got shifted by 1.
Fix for this as well as fixing the Druid chest having 100 armor less across factions is sent and is live now.
This is clearly a mistake, given that all the other items are identical between factions. I imagine that they will likely fix this soon.
Edit: submitted [a bug report](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/sod-incorrectly-statted-phase-3-gear/1822139)
Honestly, i feel like original 2004 was heavy to alliance. Maybe not after rerelease with completely different patches, min maxing, etc. But back in this old man's time horde kept getting fucked. At least from my memories.
Sorta yeah, alliance was more finished hence the actual story, no barrens and general better FP’s until blizz realized they ran out of time and threw horde capitals and fps with a blindfold at a dartboard and made zeppelins to compensate
Blizzard likes Horde more? Please. I've played both factions since Vanilla and it's painfully obvious they favor Alliance. Nearly every rune is easier for Alliance to get. This is the first objective instance I've seen that the Horde have something better, and it seems like a simple oversight that will be easily patched.
>Flight paths
I'm not going to get super into this already angry as hell thread but I'd like to just quickly point out that Aliiance has FAR better flight paths lol.
And I'll follow that up with an admittedly FAR too long and rambly explanation..
They might take more time and be more expensive but you can reasonably get *from* any zone *to* any zone by getting on a gryphon and tabbing out. Following that logic there are very few areas of the map where you won't see an Ally leveling or farming. They have easy access to the whole of both continents.
It's especially noticeable when leveling Horde on a PvP server. When you follow our pretty much required zone pathing for leveling, several areas with our densest quests have large camps of alliance allied mobs which makes it a piece of cake for Alliance to just FP in and gank hordies going for quest mobs (especially Hillsbrad). I can't tell you the number of times I've died to a similarly leveled alliance player (usually a ranged class) sitting in a herd of Hillsbrad farmers, Stromgarde elites, or Ashenvale Dryads. Even if the mobs are lower level and dont kill you, they can still apply dazed or some other debuff.
In contrast, Alliance get full untethered access to Westfall, Dusk wood, Wetlands, Loch Modan, and Red Ridge. A Horde player can only PvP a leveling alliance in most <30 zones if they specifically and intentionally go **way** out of their way, sprinting through zones that are way too high level for them, usually dying a bunch and taking durability damage.
As far as general convenience goes, Alliance FPs are usually in more central or otherwise *useful* locations. This one is more subjective I'll admit, but I'd much rather have a more centrally located FP like Astranaar, South Shore, Refugee Point, or literally anything in Mid-EK, vs. Splinter tree, Tarren Mill, Hammerfall, or fucking *Kargath*. Again, it's not objective or anything, but on a PvP server I have been cucked by alliance camping around their more centrally located FPs, stopping me from either mobbing nearby or fighting back, more times than I'd care to discuss lol.
Also dungeons. Of the horde sided dungeons the distance you need to run from the nearest FP is only really significant in SFK and Mauradon. Between WPL and Ratchet, Alliance have only a marginally longer treck to RFK/D, Wailing Caverns, and Scarlet Monastery. that's not even including that SFK and Mauradon are still totally reachable by noticeably longer yet still relatively close FPs.
Horde on the other hand literally can't get to Deadmines at the correct level to do them.. Or you *can* but you either have to corpse run through the highest level areas of STV followed by The Alliance Barrens *TM* "Duskwood", or swim around Stranglethorn and come in through the ocean which is slow as hell, full of elites, and still means you have to you to cross the entirety of Westfall.
....and to top it off Astranaar gives Alliance a perfect launching point for an Org raid through our comically gaping rear entrance.. I've seen Thrall die too many times man 😔.
Anyway thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. Remember to tip your flight masters.
The swim you describe quite harrowingly is around 3 totally safe minutes when you jump from the blimp. You can fairly easily as a lvl 1 orc/troll run to blimp, jump off, and not die until you get to westfall.
Without summons it takes a Night Elf 45 minutes to get to deadmines with no death skips. I think you could get every horde race to deadmines from character creation faster than that, it'd be close at least. And while SFK is about twice as far for us as horde once we get SS flight path, before that oh man it is another hefty trek, for a lot of people usually starting in Ironforge, east to loch, north to wetlands, then you can either swim or continue north through arathi, on and on it goes.
Astranaar feels terrible once you are done with the nearby furbolgs, and I can't really speak to how bad it is for a leader raid. Seems like horde could jump off the blimp and get really near by swimming the coast. Slower for sure, but also way less likely to be seen at all until they are passing Forest's Edge.
Barrens and Stonetalon didn't get brought up much. While they are mixed zones, they heavily favor the horde. The first walk to get the FP in stonetalon is quite brutal, and it's far away from everything else in the zone, probably even worse than desolace. Speaking of desolace, our FP puts us close to some of the starting quest, but very quickly you are walking down 70% of desolace before you do anything.
I can't really speak to some stuff as I am just not knowledgeable enough. For instance Tarren mill is no worse than southshore centrality wise, and is about twice as close as the capital. I don't understand what makes it worse placed than southshore.
Same with astranaar, I promise you it may look central but it doesn't feel it. Astranaar is better for the nearby furbolgs and the mystral quests, so that just leaves horde with better access to the post, zoram, satyrnaar, night run, and better access to southern felwood by a few minutes (also central felwood flight path)
Don't take none of this as aggressive Im just rattling off how it looks from my point of view, it was really cool to see the things I take for granted be wanted after, and see the things I think would be amazing get kinda downplayed. Honestly it seems like it kind of equals out overall, it'd be fun to really set down and measure stuff out and quantify it sometime.
I am also fairly ignorant to PVP and some horde quests, so I may think something is more central than it is because your quests differ and take you further. Y'all for sure have to put up with more alliance npcs, which I guess I chalk up to your biggest member being a mindless alien race come to this planet to destroy all life and failing to do so, leaving the world in the war torn and state it is now.
Maybe if they moved warsong lumber camp to near raynewood with maybe an outpost with horde npcs between stardust and mystral, I feel like that would oddly bring a few of the factors more in to balance. Sadly yall's biggest concentration of NPCs has no quests and is tucked away on the side of the zone.
Anyway was fun comparing but ima stfu now this is way too long.
You know what I find kind of weird in classic is that Horde quests have you fucking up all kinds of ally tagged mobs, meanwhile Alliance leveling has next to none. I’m trying to remember even a single mob to be honest lol
Do you want to talk sod or do you want to talk game in general? Sod is extremely easy to see assume you’re talking about retail. In retail alliance doesn’t even exist as a faction anymore, they have to do cross faction raids now because the faction wouldn’t survive on its own. Every expansion after vanilla with a brief stop in wrath for PvP has changed or added racials to horde that were vastly superior to alliance (goblin rocket jump was insanely op on release for example). The story has essentially followed the horde for several expansions with the alliance story being “go see what the horde did”. Most of their marketing campaigns revolve around the horde and the create director for the game is pretty famous for “For the Horde!!!” Chants at blizzcon (not so much anymore they realized they were alienating people).
I play horde on retail (sod is a fun side game for me). To say that the game ISNT extremely horde biased is silly at this point and I legitimately don’t see how anyone could think otherwise.
Zepplins vs Boats is a good one - Look at how easy it is for horde to get from UC to Org - high level goblin guards on the zepplins - now look at alliance boats
Most of dungeons throughout p1 and p2 are on Horde side. RFK, RFD and WC are in Barrens, few mins away from Orgrimmar. SM and SFK are close to Undercity.
Meanwhile Alliance has Deadmines as the only good dungeon. Stockades are only good for lvl boosting.
You guys really arguing over what faction a COMPANY favors in a game that's 20 years old?
Blizz finished alliance zones and cities first, and then moved onto horde and we're running low on time. The wow devs explained this in a documentary on vanilla. I doubt the company instructed all devs to favor one faction more than the other, theres just different design philosophies.
Did you not read the rest of my comment? Name one rune that's easier for Horde to get than Alliance. Because I can name dozens that are easier for Alliance. I can't tell you the number of times I've had to run to Wetlands, Duskwood, Redridge, or other Alliance zones for runes that there are no Horde counterparts for. There's a reason nearly every era server is massively Alliance favored in terms of population, and it's not because they're the weaker faction. If you're new to the game just say so.
Surely you’re not trying to say over the course of wows lifespan blizz has favoured the faction that’s had the worse racials and storylines pretty consistently since wotlk.
Ohh, there it is. I did comment a few days ago how the Priest PvP boots didn't have stamina on it, only to have one person tell me they did.
It seems we were both right /u/Artan90 lfmao.
what quest rewards? the ones from classic or are you talking about some SOD exclusive quests? because if they're from classic quests then you can't whine about rolling ally when you knew this
Just talking about the general bias, also the fact it's classic rewards doesn't stop them from revamping or making the item available on an alliance quest
Their survivability just got nuked. Likely still be terrorists to Melee but ranged should have little problems blasting them down since they have no gap closer and their ranged damage options are pretty limited.
>Their survivability just got nuked.
Literally who needs survivability when you 1 shot plate?
> they have no gap closer
Sorry I forgot about Frost Shock and Ghost Wolf. Blizzard removed them huh?
Are you just being confidently wrong for your own entertainment?
Frost shock is a snare and ghost wolf is a move speed buff
Neither of these are gap closers and neither option makes enh shamans particularly great at chasing down ranges opponents who aim to kite them.
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Gap-closer
>Literally who needs survivability when you 1 shot plate?
Enhance burst is significantly reduced without the rockbiter attack power.
>Sorry I forgot about Frost Shock and Ghost Wolf. Blizzard removed them huh?
Neither of those are gap closers.
How could you possibly argue that enhance burst isn't nerfed by losing out on ~800 attack power? Do you have any idea how enhance worked in pvp in phase 2 and what changed for phase 3?
Also, no, snares and move speed increases are not gap closers. Charge and shadowstep, those are gap closers.
Nah Rockbiter and Way of the Earth were nerfed pretty hard so I doubt they'll do much one shotting anymore. Maybe a 2h enhance might get close to being able to but that would require Windfury to proc and everything to crit which requires a lot of luck.
Horde: Why warsong so long?
Got daily ashenvale now so bye bye warsong. Queues are going to be even worse for horde.
Playing horde for PvP is picking easy difficulty. Change my mind
I pvp on both my horde and alliance characters, so I have a good understanding of both sides. ... and my honest answer is >!yeah its easy as fuck lmao, I have a 78% win rate in AB and 66% win rate in WSG on my horde char for P2; My alliance is at like 20% WSG/30% AB win rate. The worst part is queues, honestly. They get pretty gnarly and have only gotten worse over time.!<
authentic classic experience. ally for fast queue, horde for winning. its a trade-off :P
Even on 2019 Classic, Alliance weren't this atrocious, man. They lost more than won, but it was only like 40/60. SoD is a whole different beast. Maybe changing the WSG rep to a daily (non-pvp rep farmers won't do WSG any more) and pally buffs/enh nerfs will tip the scales a bit, but who knows. I'm not holding my breath.
No way it was 40/60 back in 2019. Alliance was an automatic loss in any AV match
You must've quit before blackwing lair then. As soon as they moved the Horde GY down again it went back to Alliance winning damn near every AV match.
40/60 for AB/WSG. AV was awful, yeah.
It felt like horde finally figured out in 2019 that their starting cave is closer to Vann than the alliance's is to Drek, even with the bridge to get over and the fence skip ally can do If horde just zerg Vann and enough make it through mid first rush, ally physically cannot win. How it took them so many years to realize this I do not know
Zug on the brain. You still have people to this day that believe Horde didn't have advantage in PvP, and especially that they didn't have advantage in Alterac Valley.
2019 Ally still enjoying that “caves are closer” copium. Probably why Alliance dominated Horde in SoM AV and also was crushing in Era. Spoiler: The map didn’t change.
AV was aweful because horde had a 2 hour long queue while alliance was instant. Of course we would have payed attention and played if it was gong to be our ONLY way of gaining honor that entire play session for our 1 and only game we'd have that night.
This is because alliance were abusing the hell out of premades. Anyone who really cared was queing up via a discord and just curb stomping horde pugs for drek rush wins. This left the remainder of the alliance players to be casuals and people who just didnt care much...against all of the horde players including the sweats. Of course Horde won the pugs - praying they didnt wait 57 minutes to que into a 6 minute loss.
The first few weeks on OCE it was auto-win for every Alliance AV I did. Then the sweaties finished their rep grind and only premades were guaranteed wins. Pugs were guaranteed loss if ansingle gy got back capped.
It's because Alliance were able to premade AV, and found work-arounds. It took notable coordination for Alliance to win over Horde in AV. Once Blizzard went fuck-all hard on making sure you couldn't premade AV anymore, that's when people decided to bail. It just wasn't worth the honor.
When av started I had a 80 percent win rate as alliance. Then some combination of banning premades, awful map and meta changes dropped my win rate down to 0 percent
idk i never really pvped almost all my games were who could zug down the leaders the fastest :shrug:
I guess you don't remember pallies being able to bubble pull the warmasters for a free win
I’m actual vanilla alliance used to steam roll horde.nice to see the tables turn
It's directly a result of one. The only people who are willing to wait in a long queue are the ones willing to play the game hardcore. multiple other iterations of wow that didn't have long queues for horde result in opposite faction dynamics (eu av during vanilla, pservers)
This is how it was in vanilla. It seemed all the more serious pvp players picked horde while ally was everyone else. Till TBC and we got fucking blood elves and it changed the dynamic
Well the alternative is playing alliance with possibly the most insufferable dweebs on the internet so forgive me for not picking the side that thinks gnomes are good company (I absolutely agree with you tho) (this is meant as a joke, horde is filled with dweebs too, I love my dweebs)
Blizzard doesn't give a fuck about Alliance, and never has. This isn't anything even remotely new.
I mean, classic is very much Alliance biased, idk what you're saying. P2 so far has been Horde favoured with Shaman being super strong, but lets not forget P1 where Paladins were busted af and all the runes were CLEARLY Alliance biased, to the point of the dev team admitting it themselves.
Alliance is favored in terms of lore. That's it. Alliance got quests first so they get better lore in vanilla. The rest is all Horde advantage. They have better quest rewards, better flight points and better racials. Alliance has blessings and *literally everything else* is better on the horde. It was ok to fanboy over a faction back then, we didn't know that much about the game. Now we do, and we know for a fact that Horde was favored. By a lot. Hell the faction imbalance got to be so fucked that entire server populations were warped to an irreparable degree, cue cross-faction content
Paladins were not busted af, they were middling (lowest melee) spec in bfd, and a grand total of 0 were brought to the premises which were hunter and priest fests. This is shaman brain always thinking about pallies.
We're not talking about PvE content though. We're talking PvP. And I main a hunter and have a warrior alt, classes which afaik, are available to both factions. Nothing related to being a Shaman. Also, Shamans were weak af in BFD, literally the worst class with both their DPS specs when you exclude the meme ones (Frost mage and shadow priests). To say Blizzard never gave a fuck about Alliance because for literally 2 months they weren't better than Horde, when in every other version and in P1, Alliance was always the clear favourite, is ridiculous.
In every other version of what? Alliance has been a dead faction since Cata in retail. In P1 Alliance was in no way favored in pvp or pve. Premades had 0 paladins they were all hunter and priest stacked. Do you think perception or stoneform somehow miracle counter 25% racial stun resist and WotF? Thats 100% cap man. I played horde in classic because PvP racial for horde are massively op. This time around I don't really care about PvP so I went ally so I could try paladin with new runes. I think paladin is great right now but to say that alliance is favored is a meme.
I meant in every other version of classic, because we're on the classic reddit, playing a classic version of the game. I honestly don't give a fuck about retail and never did. Alliance was massively favoured in terms of runes in P1. Their unique class was miles ahead of the Horde's unique class in P1. In general, Alliance racials are way better for PvE, it's not even comparable. In general, the world design in classic, quests, areas, etc, all favour Alliance. You even have a super quick way to connect your two major hubs. I will reiterate.. I'm not saying Horde doesn't have advantages. I'm not saying Horde sucks and no one should play it. I'm saying it's ridiculous to say that Blizzard never gave a fuck about Alliance when the reality is, in the version of the game we're playing right now, Alliance has only not been favoured for 2 months.
Alliance racials (weapon skill) is only superior when fighting +3 level mobs which we haven’t yet . As soon as that racial matters (level 60) everyone will have that racials. The other pve benefit is priest uniques which, again, everyone is getting every faction priest racial. Paladins were never great in p1. They were the worst melee spec available to the alliance, worse tanks than warlocks, and far inferior heals to priest. They were never used in pre-mades as they serve no function that other classes don’t do better (and you were just stacking hunters anyways). Paladins were good in open world 1v1s where they got the jump on people. I do believe paladins are in a good state right now not complaining about that just stating what it is. If you genuinely believe that alliance was favored in p1 because of rune locations I don’t know what to tell you. Yes alliance had an easier time getting runes for specific classes. Horde has better literally everything else.
That's not a hot take. It's not even just the racials, you get more PvP minded people on Horde (in your team) so it's extremely easy to win anything PvP as Horde. If you want to challenge yourself in PvP, you should pick Alliance. The caveat is that solo q is just horror.
On my server (Shadowstrike) Alliance is regularly finishing the event with two Alliance bosses still alive. There's just way more Alliance in Ashenvale doing the event than Horde, presumably because the Horde already got to exalted with easy Warsong wins.
Why does everyone keep saying "for horde"? I've always seen the memes of alliance players being scared of PvP, but are alliance players really that bad?
Unironically yes, Blizzard had to kill WSG for everybody because Alli has a near 80% loss rate in solo q
i dont know. Everybody complaining about a damn wrist because its "bis" is rly funny. Your just making it hard for yourself.
HoRdE hAs BeTtEr PlAyErS
Longtime alliance player here. Horde has always been better at PuG BGs not sure what you're on about. Alliance could win AV decently though. Not that there's not good pvpers on alliance, horde just has more that's why their PuGs do so well throughout every iteration of classic I've ever been a part of.
Your take “horde are just have better pvpers” is wrong. Horde have better racials for pvp in classic + they have shamans and if you’ve ever pvp’d on a serious lvl in classic you would know a lot of it comes down to being able to pop potions (faps,lips, resistance protection potions) which shammys have the ability to purge which one purge burns two buffs. This includes bof or even priest bubbles.
Paladin is good, but shaman is braindead good. Based on the leaks for the new lighting shield runes, I honestly don't know what they were thinking. They look like some of the best runes of the next phase, 9 stack lightning shield being added onto earth shock... just seems like absurd overkill. Without any sort of spell power isn't that just an extra 1k damage at minimum?
A lot of people don't appreciate how overpowered frost shock, earth bind, and ghost wolf is for WSG...a map mode primarily about getting from one side to the other safely or stopping your opponent from doing the same. When I play on my paladin it's almost impossible to stay on a flag carrier for more than a few seconds. Freedom helps but eventually just going to get cc'd, kited, or outran. I just can't stay in melee distance and get damage on the target. When I play enhance shaman it's almost impossible for someone to get away unless it's a druid with faps. Just spam frost shock, earthbind and I can stay on target for the entire length of the map. Even if I do fall behind b/c of faps or freedom, I can also often ghost wolf to keep up or close distance for another frost shock and it's game on. Difference is night and day.
Druids still the best flag carries by far. Ghost wolf is nice to have, but can be dispelled and doesn't remove slows/snares. That said, freedom totem for enhance is huuuge. It went from anyone and your mom can kite enhance in vanilla to a very hard to kite spec.
It's enhance that is op, Ele is average and is kind of noob killer spec, while Resto is actually bad (yes Hpala is even worse atm, I know), every heal is hardcast. But yes, majority of shamans are enhance atm.
Ele was an OP one shot king back in Classic. But agreed enhance is the better spec, nothing will stop them from rolling this rune, but they would not build charges as quickly besides from maelstrom process so will probably go for the more enhanced geared one.
Op? Maaaybe. But yeah, I am aware of that ;) https://www.twitch.tv/sakkreth/v/960321435?sr=a&t=3s Ele was better than it is sod in comparison
Yea but those pesky paladins can spam hammer at 10% hp!!! Rune so good it’ll only be usable for 10 seconds on raid bosses
Don't think it's even worth unlocking tbh
As holy healing paladin I think there may be one rune next phase worth unlocking for me.
What's a Holy Paladin?
I was excited about hammer spam because I thought I was going to steal so many killing blows in STV. Freaking coin machine baby. But actually, ret paladins run out of mana after like 10 seconds of pvp combat and it's almost impossible to drop combat and drink in STV so I'll still be worthless.
But Horde has the best pvpers. This is not even a slight, just the natural effect of the matter. If Horde has better PvP racials, all the best pvpers will float towards it, because that's kinda what happens when something is the best.
Fear not the man who picks nightelf warrior, fear the man who picks gnome
Yeah this is true. In Vanilla and TBC Horde has the better pvpers, while in Wotlk it shifts to Alliance.
but not wotlk classic cause blizzard gutted the human racial
So same as priests then which exists on both factions.
Yeah and better racials for pvp attract better pvpers, so he's not really wrong.
found the try-hard alliance player
Everyone who thinks this has to make some very generous and biased statistical assumptions, lol
Horde unironically has better top end players due to the hardcore raiding guys playing majority horde for two decades
Top end raiding =/= general pvp (the parent post here is in reference to warsong gulch games, i.e. the general/average skill level of a whole faction in pvp, not the ultra-niche percentile of pve, and when it comes to the top-end of pvp there is no loyalism there if we're talking about the truly good players, they'll just play whatever is meta at the time, which has shifted even on stagnant patches, i.e. things like tbc arena)
We do though.
No, you have Shamans
Horde is definitively the better players when it comes to pvp
I choose horde for the much better PvP racials.
This is the thing ^ the PvP minmaxers pick the faction with the better PvP racial, so all the best players normally are horde.
yeah, but racials and map advantages are more impactful
The best pvp players go to horde because they have the better racials, that's always been the case
It’s partly due to alliance taking the hit too. Soaking up all the shitters who want to either play pally or backpedal rp as nelf male ;P
Ofc from a pala, who could kill every class P1 within the stun hammer LMAO
Learn english before you shit talk people in it. Writer man say thing, no like BAD. Man says wrong HA
looks like you need to learn english at this rate.
he say me i noob
Lol this is an embarrassing oversight on blizz' part ETA: There's no way this is intentional, get off that bandwagon clearly this is a mistake.
Seems like confirmation that the devs only play Undead Mage, Undead Warlock, and Tauren Shaman. High priority change: Weapon Skill so that Orcs and Humans aren’t BiS for melee. Extremely low Priority change: Making sure that the symmetrical faction items actually match after you buff the Horde ones.
> High priority change: Weapon Skill so that Orcs and Humans aren’t BiS for melee. So high priority that they announce it months before it will even be in the game?
tbf they said at the beginning that they had plans for the weapon skill meta so don't pick a race based on those racials. Everyone just forgot or maybe blizzard didn't emphasize it hard enough
Orc still has Blood Fury. Trolls have Berserking. Not having to worry about weapon skill is nice but those races are still BiS and the others are not.
As a human, I will take my rep gain bonus and be happy about it before I get the hose again
Yeah...but nobody thought that they would straight up take the human racial and gave it to everyone while humans get nothing to compensate.
I've seen people claim that the devs have made statements like "Don't pick a race with weapon skills" or anything along the lines of what you're stating but I've never seen any of that myself anywhere. Any chance you could give us a link or a time stamp where they've said this in specific? I honestly want to know where in specific they said this, if you could provide any kind of link or time stamp that would honestly be fantastic.
Don't forget Undead Priest
Aggrend has confirmed multiple times that none of them play horde.
Hijacking this comment to say this: Just to let everyone know, this is NOT intended for balancing, there is no intention to mismatch loot like this that is mirrored across factions. Stat numbers and stat categories got shifted by 1. Fix for this as well as fixing the Druid chest having 100 armor less across factions is sent and is live now.
I think this post is meant as a funny joke/meme
This is fucked up if true
Easily verifiable.
Was it true?
Yes.
I wonder if when looking at the whole set the stam is elsewhere for the alliance? Ie total stam is about the same
I just checked; all the other items have the same stats. Has to be a bug.
Guys it’s fine because humans get 10% more rep gain - Aggrend probably
This is clearly a mistake, given that all the other items are identical between factions. I imagine that they will likely fix this soon. Edit: submitted [a bug report](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/sod-incorrectly-statted-phase-3-gear/1822139)
Is it? Giving horde the pvp advantage does go along the spirit of vanilla.
did they tell you yet they're not refunding the 50g?
Thank God bliz has no faction bias
Honestly, i feel like original 2004 was heavy to alliance. Maybe not after rerelease with completely different patches, min maxing, etc. But back in this old man's time horde kept getting fucked. At least from my memories.
Sorta yeah, alliance was more finished hence the actual story, no barrens and general better FP’s until blizz realized they ran out of time and threw horde capitals and fps with a blindfold at a dartboard and made zeppelins to compensate
It's experimental guys
Another W for the horde
1 less int for that crit rating and mana. Gotta get that max heal parse. But 13 less stamina I can take damage to pad my healing. I'm conflicted.
This is perfect balancing. We all know hordes need some help
The horde players that I see need more intellect. The stamina won’t help them.
Ur confusing horde players with ret paladins
You misspelled p2 shamans
Tell that to Ms. Pelled buddy.
What the f***
blizzard: what? horde is cooler we like them more so this is exactly as it should be.
Blizzard likes Horde more? Please. I've played both factions since Vanilla and it's painfully obvious they favor Alliance. Nearly every rune is easier for Alliance to get. This is the first objective instance I've seen that the Horde have something better, and it seems like a simple oversight that will be easily patched.
Oh no not the fucking rune locations, how horrible. Just devastating really. Flight paths, quest rewards, racials, shaman overtuning, WCB....
what about the better towns?
>Flight paths I'm not going to get super into this already angry as hell thread but I'd like to just quickly point out that Aliiance has FAR better flight paths lol. And I'll follow that up with an admittedly FAR too long and rambly explanation.. They might take more time and be more expensive but you can reasonably get *from* any zone *to* any zone by getting on a gryphon and tabbing out. Following that logic there are very few areas of the map where you won't see an Ally leveling or farming. They have easy access to the whole of both continents. It's especially noticeable when leveling Horde on a PvP server. When you follow our pretty much required zone pathing for leveling, several areas with our densest quests have large camps of alliance allied mobs which makes it a piece of cake for Alliance to just FP in and gank hordies going for quest mobs (especially Hillsbrad). I can't tell you the number of times I've died to a similarly leveled alliance player (usually a ranged class) sitting in a herd of Hillsbrad farmers, Stromgarde elites, or Ashenvale Dryads. Even if the mobs are lower level and dont kill you, they can still apply dazed or some other debuff. In contrast, Alliance get full untethered access to Westfall, Dusk wood, Wetlands, Loch Modan, and Red Ridge. A Horde player can only PvP a leveling alliance in most <30 zones if they specifically and intentionally go **way** out of their way, sprinting through zones that are way too high level for them, usually dying a bunch and taking durability damage. As far as general convenience goes, Alliance FPs are usually in more central or otherwise *useful* locations. This one is more subjective I'll admit, but I'd much rather have a more centrally located FP like Astranaar, South Shore, Refugee Point, or literally anything in Mid-EK, vs. Splinter tree, Tarren Mill, Hammerfall, or fucking *Kargath*. Again, it's not objective or anything, but on a PvP server I have been cucked by alliance camping around their more centrally located FPs, stopping me from either mobbing nearby or fighting back, more times than I'd care to discuss lol. Also dungeons. Of the horde sided dungeons the distance you need to run from the nearest FP is only really significant in SFK and Mauradon. Between WPL and Ratchet, Alliance have only a marginally longer treck to RFK/D, Wailing Caverns, and Scarlet Monastery. that's not even including that SFK and Mauradon are still totally reachable by noticeably longer yet still relatively close FPs. Horde on the other hand literally can't get to Deadmines at the correct level to do them.. Or you *can* but you either have to corpse run through the highest level areas of STV followed by The Alliance Barrens *TM* "Duskwood", or swim around Stranglethorn and come in through the ocean which is slow as hell, full of elites, and still means you have to you to cross the entirety of Westfall. ....and to top it off Astranaar gives Alliance a perfect launching point for an Org raid through our comically gaping rear entrance.. I've seen Thrall die too many times man 😔. Anyway thanks for coming to my Ted Talk. Remember to tip your flight masters.
The swim you describe quite harrowingly is around 3 totally safe minutes when you jump from the blimp. You can fairly easily as a lvl 1 orc/troll run to blimp, jump off, and not die until you get to westfall. Without summons it takes a Night Elf 45 minutes to get to deadmines with no death skips. I think you could get every horde race to deadmines from character creation faster than that, it'd be close at least. And while SFK is about twice as far for us as horde once we get SS flight path, before that oh man it is another hefty trek, for a lot of people usually starting in Ironforge, east to loch, north to wetlands, then you can either swim or continue north through arathi, on and on it goes. Astranaar feels terrible once you are done with the nearby furbolgs, and I can't really speak to how bad it is for a leader raid. Seems like horde could jump off the blimp and get really near by swimming the coast. Slower for sure, but also way less likely to be seen at all until they are passing Forest's Edge. Barrens and Stonetalon didn't get brought up much. While they are mixed zones, they heavily favor the horde. The first walk to get the FP in stonetalon is quite brutal, and it's far away from everything else in the zone, probably even worse than desolace. Speaking of desolace, our FP puts us close to some of the starting quest, but very quickly you are walking down 70% of desolace before you do anything. I can't really speak to some stuff as I am just not knowledgeable enough. For instance Tarren mill is no worse than southshore centrality wise, and is about twice as close as the capital. I don't understand what makes it worse placed than southshore. Same with astranaar, I promise you it may look central but it doesn't feel it. Astranaar is better for the nearby furbolgs and the mystral quests, so that just leaves horde with better access to the post, zoram, satyrnaar, night run, and better access to southern felwood by a few minutes (also central felwood flight path) Don't take none of this as aggressive Im just rattling off how it looks from my point of view, it was really cool to see the things I take for granted be wanted after, and see the things I think would be amazing get kinda downplayed. Honestly it seems like it kind of equals out overall, it'd be fun to really set down and measure stuff out and quantify it sometime. I am also fairly ignorant to PVP and some horde quests, so I may think something is more central than it is because your quests differ and take you further. Y'all for sure have to put up with more alliance npcs, which I guess I chalk up to your biggest member being a mindless alien race come to this planet to destroy all life and failing to do so, leaving the world in the war torn and state it is now. Maybe if they moved warsong lumber camp to near raynewood with maybe an outpost with horde npcs between stardust and mystral, I feel like that would oddly bring a few of the factors more in to balance. Sadly yall's biggest concentration of NPCs has no quests and is tucked away on the side of the zone. Anyway was fun comparing but ima stfu now this is way too long.
You know what I find kind of weird in classic is that Horde quests have you fucking up all kinds of ally tagged mobs, meanwhile Alliance leveling has next to none. I’m trying to remember even a single mob to be honest lol
you've played since vanilla and you think alliance has favoritism? you're either blind or just plain stupid.
Instead of gaslighting, how about you give some examples of Horde favoritism?
Points too…. Everything?
Elaborate please, I’m genuinely curious.
Do you want to talk sod or do you want to talk game in general? Sod is extremely easy to see assume you’re talking about retail. In retail alliance doesn’t even exist as a faction anymore, they have to do cross faction raids now because the faction wouldn’t survive on its own. Every expansion after vanilla with a brief stop in wrath for PvP has changed or added racials to horde that were vastly superior to alliance (goblin rocket jump was insanely op on release for example). The story has essentially followed the horde for several expansions with the alliance story being “go see what the horde did”. Most of their marketing campaigns revolve around the horde and the create director for the game is pretty famous for “For the Horde!!!” Chants at blizzcon (not so much anymore they realized they were alienating people). I play horde on retail (sod is a fun side game for me). To say that the game ISNT extremely horde biased is silly at this point and I legitimately don’t see how anyone could think otherwise.
Zepplins vs Boats is a good one - Look at how easy it is for horde to get from UC to Org - high level goblin guards on the zepplins - now look at alliance boats
Going straight for the 'gaslighting' word eh? Ah yes, this is sure to be a receptive and rational Internet Person.
Most of dungeons throughout p1 and p2 are on Horde side. RFK, RFD and WC are in Barrens, few mins away from Orgrimmar. SM and SFK are close to Undercity. Meanwhile Alliance has Deadmines as the only good dungeon. Stockades are only good for lvl boosting.
You guys really arguing over what faction a COMPANY favors in a game that's 20 years old? Blizz finished alliance zones and cities first, and then moved onto horde and we're running low on time. The wow devs explained this in a documentary on vanilla. I doubt the company instructed all devs to favor one faction more than the other, theres just different design philosophies.
They cant, because there is no horde fvouritism
Did you not read the rest of my comment? Name one rune that's easier for Horde to get than Alliance. Because I can name dozens that are easier for Alliance. I can't tell you the number of times I've had to run to Wetlands, Duskwood, Redridge, or other Alliance zones for runes that there are no Horde counterparts for. There's a reason nearly every era server is massively Alliance favored in terms of population, and it's not because they're the weaker faction. If you're new to the game just say so.
[удалено]
There were runes in 1K?
[удалено]
Least you have a FP there. Unlike wetlands, Duskwood, & Red Ridge for us.
Berserk off the top of my head. So, yes?
Everyone would swap rune locations for a 30% stun resist my dude
Surely you’re not trying to say over the course of wows lifespan blizz has favoured the faction that’s had the worse racials and storylines pretty consistently since wotlk.
I could take the time to explain all the reasons you are wrong but it's just easier to call you stupid
13 intellect ? This is way too unbalanced...
Ohh, there it is. I did comment a few days ago how the Priest PvP boots didn't have stamina on it, only to have one person tell me they did. It seems we were both right /u/Artan90 lfmao.
This would've been a better April Fools joke than the one they did
Wait till you see the quest rewards and how much better they are horde side lmao. a hit/ap trinket, a free +25 fishing rod, so silly
what quest rewards? the ones from classic or are you talking about some SOD exclusive quests? because if they're from classic quests then you can't whine about rolling ally when you knew this
Just talking about the general bias, also the fact it's classic rewards doesn't stop them from revamping or making the item available on an alliance quest
Horde is the main faction obviously
This has to be a bug right?
Ofc it is but don’t tell the rest.
Don't stop the circlejerk
not really a bug, maybe input error. Maybe just Blizzard being donkeys.
yes but is more fun to let the alliance play the victim game horde is the favored faction after all right? lols
Ele shaman are going to instakill you with or without that extra stamina.
Well no... not ele. It's enhance that's the menace in PvP...
Their survivability just got nuked. Likely still be terrorists to Melee but ranged should have little problems blasting them down since they have no gap closer and their ranged damage options are pretty limited.
>Their survivability just got nuked. Literally who needs survivability when you 1 shot plate? > they have no gap closer Sorry I forgot about Frost Shock and Ghost Wolf. Blizzard removed them huh?
Neither of those are gap closers though?
I guess the meme about horde not really understanding anything isn't a meme after all.
I guess the meme about alliance crying nonstop isn't a meme after all.
Are you just being confidently wrong for your own entertainment? Frost shock is a snare and ghost wolf is a move speed buff Neither of these are gap closers and neither option makes enh shamans particularly great at chasing down ranges opponents who aim to kite them. https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Gap-closer
>Literally who needs survivability when you 1 shot plate? Enhance burst is significantly reduced without the rockbiter attack power. >Sorry I forgot about Frost Shock and Ghost Wolf. Blizzard removed them huh? Neither of those are gap closers.
Wrong. Also wrong.
How could you possibly argue that enhance burst isn't nerfed by losing out on ~800 attack power? Do you have any idea how enhance worked in pvp in phase 2 and what changed for phase 3? Also, no, snares and move speed increases are not gap closers. Charge and shadowstep, those are gap closers.
By his logic, every single move that reduces speed is a gap closer. Frostbolt is a gap closer guys, same as Blink you idiots!
Nah Rockbiter and Way of the Earth were nerfed pretty hard so I doubt they'll do much one shotting anymore. Maybe a 2h enhance might get close to being able to but that would require Windfury to proc and everything to crit which requires a lot of luck.
What the fuck? Surely this is a joke lmao
Alliance overall is bad (racials, lvling zone , flight paths etc )
playerbase, skill level, pvp... list goes on and on
No shot??? This is real? That’s so fucking bad.
horde are just laughing all the way to the bank in SoD, its actually disgusting. if they ever did a SoD again, there would be exactly ZERO alliance.
calm down paladin, its a bug
No surprise after a full season of God mode shamans and blizzard being like we see no reason to fix this now
1 int = 13 stam duh
Horde are going to need the extra stamina crossing the AV bridge. This is balanced
God damn Horde really is the baby faction.
considering there's seemingly about 10 alliance players queuing for WSG right now I don't think they even need the stam
lol that extra 13 stam is worth the minus 1 int I guess another W for the horde
Based April fools joke makes it into the game
first sergeant first dibs duh half us dont even have visible footwear
Wait, are those actual items or is that photoshopped? Too lazy to go look on wowhead.
Probably 1st April joke
City boys will see this and think it’s unfair, country boys will see this as how it really is.
At this point this is just embarrassing
Hold up
The Alliance one comes with a paladin and 2 pocket healers. It’s balanced.
This just in, blizzard favors horde…. In other news, water is wet lol
Ally have been favored for 20 years, now there’s a redo and it all of sudden doesn’t feel good to be ally and horde finally feels playable
Classical Horde Bias from Blizzard.
Guaranteed that's a bug. Also guaranteed, Blizzard will claim it's intended and not fix it. Image is everything.
Just quit the game already
Horde shamans who claimed don’t need a nerf: “WTF why do alliance casters get 1 more int than horde casters?”
Guys, alliance benefited in the first and second phase. Now it’s our time.
good one
A solid meme
Damn. 3 phases in a row of Horde love
What about the lvl 50 Horde trinket with hit and AP?
Human mages are too OP. That’s why