New WoW Alliance Race Revealed

Now.Imperfect writes "The New York Times is reporting that Blizzard has slated the Draenei to be the new Alliance race in the up-and-coming Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft. The article also states that E3 visitors will also be able to test the new flying mount."

Comments

Finally an Ugly Alliance Race and Pretty Horde!

[Captain Kirk]

One of the bigh imbalances in WoW is that far more people roll "cute" Alliance characters and the Horde is played by people who think about issues like Stun resistance, enhanced melee speed and so on. This makes a HUGE difference in battlegrounds where Horde usually win because they have more thinking players and Alliance have interminable queues becasue there are often 3 to 1 alliance to Horde population imbalances.

I'm an Orc Shaman and we win in battlegrounds 90% of the time. My hope is that this will lift the level of Alliance players a little while encouracing more peope to try Horde characeters.

Re:Finally an Ugly Alliance Race and Pretty Horde!

[GodaiYuhsaku]

Yes there's a population imbalance.

However your post makes it seam that alliance are full of idiots.

They both have good players and they both have non-thinking players.

The population imbalance just means its harder to find the good alliance players.

More likely though is that it will cause the Horde to slowly become more like the alliance as the new flood of blood elves hit the servers,
where the good players are harder to find amids all the lesser ones.

--
60 gnome mage

Re:Finally an Ugly Alliance Race and Pretty Horde!

[SatanicPuppy]

This totally sums up all the "problems" people have with the paladin.

On the one hand, they only need to push one button.

On the other hand, everybody thinks its the wrong damn button.

There is no way to win. I stopped playing my pally because I could never get any pvp respect. Jacked criticals using a fast two-hander and laying down the hate about as well as a paladin possibly can, and what do I get? "OMG Duud why ar3nt joo healing m3?! N00B! U suck wtf" People would whine and whine because I had no interest in gimping myself and following them around healing. I'd duel them, win and they still wouldn't shut up about what my job was.

If there was a way to change your name to "IamNotYerHealBitch" I'd still be playing that character.

Oh yea: Gnomes are the second best at escaping crowd control, with their "Get out of Root free" card.

Re:Finally an Ugly Alliance Race and Pretty Horde!

[Incoherent07]

Um, not really, just that most paladins don't know how to play their class... including the guy above you who somehow thinks paladins are damage dealers, and that hate means anything in PvP.

Oh wait, did I say that?

Re:Finally an Ugly Alliance Race and Pretty Horde!

[SatanicPuppy]

Having played both of the "ZOMG SO OVER POWERED NERF NERF" classes to 60, I can confidently say that people who honestly believe that one class causes all the swing are completely wrong. For every alliance player who swears Shammys are unbeatable, there is a horde player who's frothing at the mouth because Pallys are unkillable.

Yea sure, 1 on 1 a shammy can beat a pally, I'd say 3 times out of 5 easily, all other things being equal. At the same time, 2 pallys in a pvp group is just fricking WRONG.

Considering that I've been playing for a looong time, on multiple servers, for both factions, the one thing I have noticed is that there is always a population imbalance favoring the alliance. At the same time, there is often a battleground win/loss ratio that favors the horde. Now why this is the case, I have no idea. But I have noticed that when the alliance organizes, they tend to clean up, because they generally have better equipment.

So why do they not do as well in even contests? I have no idea. Probably does have something to do with the differing mindsets though, people who would choose one side over another. What that says about the various sides, I have no idea.

Re:Finally an Ugly Alliance Race and Pretty Horde!

[Chris Burke]

The reality is that the Horde players and Alliance players are, on average, equally skilled. The fact that the Horde wins 90% of the time cannot be attributed to skill and must be attributed to simple balance issues. Face it, Shamans are horrendously overpowered. It's not skill, it's not luck, it's bad balance.

It can't be the fault of shamans, because I have the same experience in BGs with no shamans.

Really, my experience across multiple servers and multiple brackets on each is that the alliance is just as good at fighting yet is on average much, much worse at strategizing. The Alliance tends to win individual skirmishes as often as they lose. It's not character balance. If killing the other guy was all it took to win a BG, the record would be close to 50-50. Yet it isn't. The tendency of Alliance to pick strategies that are guaranteed to lose no matter how skillfully they play is striking.

In Warsong Gulch, they will turtle inside their flag room. This makes it hard to take their flag, sure, but eventually it can be taken and in the meantime they have virutally no offense. No offense == no victory.

In Arathi Basin, they will zerg around in a huge mob from node to node. Yes, they can easily take nodes this way, but they can't actually keep any. Just by letting them take the node they're trying for at the moment, and re-taking the node they just left, it's easy to make sure they never get more than two nodes. Taking nodes but never actually holding more than your enemy == no victory.

Sometimes you get a group that is on the whole clueful about strategy and intends to win rather than farm HKs and collect a single token. These are usually also good players, and these are tough fights with or without shamans on the horde side. This is where the 10% comes from.

Do I think this imbalance in ability to strategize stems from the races' "cuteness"? I'm not sure, but it's all I can think of to explain it. 25% of all WoW players are night elves. A large number of them are hunters, and a large number of those are named a derivatve of Legolas. Teenies who are thinking more about how they look like Orlando Bloom than how to win the battle? That's what I'm implying. I shudder to think of what's going to happen now that Horde is going to have blond haired fair-skinned elven hunters.

Re:Finally an Ugly Alliance Race and Pretty Horde!

[Anonymous Coward]

Paladins are "holy warriors who are always at the front line of the battle" according to Blizzard. Or, at least, that used to be what Blizzard said they were. It changed at some point in the last year.

The parent poster most certainly knew what he signed up to play. The fact that it isn't what he wanted it to be is Blizzard's fault. The more you play WoW, the more apparent it becomes that no one on the Blizzard QA team actually played the content from the Alliance side, and soley focused on the Horde classes. Paladins, the Alliance signature class, are incredibly poorly thought out, while Shamans are incredibly powerful.

I have yet to check out the Shaman review, but I have a feeling that they'll be receiving more buffs yet again.

Face it, Shamans are more powerful than Paladins, and this is a flaw in the game design. Blizzard told Paladin players that they would be playing "holy warriors", not that they'd have to sit in the background and heal constantly. It's not surprising that people want to play their character the way it was advertised.

Ah, talking out the arse, then?

[Moraelin]

"Seriously do any of you WoW players see the string that is tied around that ever-fleeting carrot?

Having never played I can speak down upon your addiction with impunity but I do feel for you all...please get well soon."

So, you've never actually played something, you have no first-hand experience with it, but you feel qualified anyway to pass judgment upon it and compare it with a carrot in the stick. Pray tell, on what do you base that judgment, then?

_How_, pray tell, do you know then whether WoW is good or bad, and what do those players find in it? Maybe, just maybe, it's not just illogical addiction, but paying for a game that's every bit comparable to Oblivion as both complexity and fun factor go. In fact, to about 10-12 Oblivions, since it has a _lot_ more content to explore and enjoy.

WoW has its own issues, later, much later in the game. You need to play pretty damn intensively for a month or more before you get anywhere near the level where it becomes a carrot-on-a-stick exercise. Or more if you try playing more than one character. At which point you got more content for your money out of it than out of any SP RPG you can get for love or money nowadays.

Still, yes, it has them. But you've never experienced them. So even then I'll rather hear about them from other players who _do_ know first hand what they're talking about. Do you even know what the carrot _is_ in that metaphor you sling about? What do you bring to the table, other than some more noise to drown the useful signal with?

So, yeah, I feel for you. Get well soon. Talk to a competent psychiatrist about getting your head removed from your ass. And maybe, just maybe, try talking about stuff you have any clue about next time. Might keep you from looking like a trolling retard, for a change. Because even as trolling goes, this has got to be the most retarded form of it.

Hi. You're a bit off.

[BitterAndDrunk]

So, you've never actually played something, you have no first-hand experience with it, but you feel qualified anyway to pass judgment upon it and compare it with a carrot in the stick. Pray tell, on what do you base that judgment, then?

I've never shot heroin into my cock, but I'm pretty sure that would be a Very Bad Idea. And I do feel qualified to say that.

Not completely disagreeing with you, but your point above isn't strong.

Just like any other game, then?

[Moraelin]

"I haven't played but working in IT everyone I work with plays it incessantly and all admit that it's reached apoint where they can't stop and yet they don't see any point in continuing. I don't need to use cocaine to know it's addictive and has no real finite purpose."

Some people get addicted to it, yes. But then people get addicted to anything else. Including:

- counterstrike
- BSD/Linux/Amiga/obscure-programming-language debates
- Everquest2 (and unlike EQ1, I can't even really see what a couple of co-workers even see in EQ2, since it's mostly just a mediocre idea and badly executed)
- sex
- porn (see people who end up unable to stop browsing for it even at work, and then sue the employer for firing them)
- karma-whoring on Slashdot

Etc, etc, etc.

The problem isn't as much the game, as the people. Some people are the kind that just has to find refuge in something and, unsurprisingly, a good game will collect more of them than a bad one. So, yes, you're more likely to find them in WoW than in crap games like Anarchy Online or SWG.

And some people basically have an Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder, so they can't leave anything they haven't 100% finished. They _must_ have opened every single chest, killed every single boss and collected every single armour piece, before they can consider a game finished and move on. I can see how some MMOs would trap them, because they're games designed so you can't really finish them. The end-game grind in WoW is there precisely so you'd need at _least_ a year of doing the same thing over and over again before you're finally "finished".

Again, I'd "blame" the people not the game. (Well, not as much "blame" as have some compassion.) The same personality types do the exact same in other games too. E.g., I had a friend who simply _had_ to find every single chest, secret door and quest in such games as "Betrayal At Krondor". I remember that game particularly because he's explicitly fumed about not being sure if he covered 100% of an area, and there could be some chest he's missed. Or in games like Panzer General he'd save before moving each and every single unit, and reload if the dice-driven result was anything less than _perfect_. (Meaning his unit had to take exactly zero damage, and the enemy had to take exactly the maximum attack value of his unit.) Not because he couldn't have finished it otherwise, but because it _had_ to be perfect, if he could help it.

At any rate, I'd venture a guess that it's not really the game which turned them into that.

Is it just addiction and carrot-on-a-stick for everyone? I'd say I'm proof enough that it isn't, seein' as I'm not even playing it any more. Can't recall any withdrawal syndrome either. If you _don't_ approach it with some silly idea that it's like a marriage for life, or that you _must_ finish everything before you give up, giving it up is actually pretty darn easy. It's just a game. You've seen as much content as was enjoyable, and when it starts being consistently unenjoyable, it's goodbye and good riddance.

As for my comments about "trolling" or "noise drowning the signal", they're not about your having an opinion. It's about your passing a harsh judgment on something you just don't have the data to judge. Knowing one IT guy who's a WoW addict doesn't make you an expert in WoW, and, no, doesn't give you enough data to extrapolate about why everyone else is playing it. It's like knowing that some terrorist was from South America and did drugs, and deciding that surely all people in South America are terrorists and junkies. It's that uninformed a judgment. That's all.