Did Blizzard phone this patch in for the Alliance?
Allied Races: BfA’s allied race additions for the Alliance have been head-scratching, at best, and infurating, at worst, causing Alliance players to accuse the Devs (who mostly play Horde) of bias that is beneficial to the Horde. With the addition of the Mechagnomes, it feels like the devs are trying to punish Alliance players by burdening them with having Mechagnomes on the Alliance faction.
First, Mechagnomes are the the first and only allied race that doesn’t allow the transmogrification of feet, hands and wrists equipment. It’s not fair that Blizzard is not configuring Mechagnomes to allow for complete transmogrification and it seems that Mechagnomes are half-built, being rushed out and released in such a broken state. Blizzard clearly put more time conceptually and mechanically into Vulpera and all the other Horde races, that can transmogrify however they want to. Why would anyone want to play a race with only half a transmog that is replaced with ugly pieces of scrap metal?
Next, Mechagnomes are unpleasant to look at. Their proportions are all wrong due to poor art design. Blizzard is giving the Alliance yet another allied race that they never asked for. Even the official “Mechagnome Allied race” thread, the thread where its “biggest fans” discuss how much they love Mechagnomes, is filled with more negativity than positivity about this race:
They will be DOA, due to the lack of excitement and lamentation on behalf of the Alliance players who wanted ANYTHING other than what has been dubbed “diaper gnomes.”
Finally, the devs are punishing Alliance players with unlocking these allied races. Even after the Alliance did more grinding than Horde players did for allied races, the devs have made it so Horde toons can fulfill the requirements to unlock Alliance allied races, while Alliance toons DO NOT fulfill the requirements to get Horde Allied Races. That means, Horde have quicker access to Mechagnomes (the allied race no one wants) whereas the Alliance has to create a brand new Horde toon, and spend weeks grinding Voldunai Rep for Vulpera. Interesting that the Devs, who reportedly there are more of, overlooked the idea of fairness and gave yet another EZ pass to Horde players, after an expansion full of them (Stromgarde, Horde racials, end content more prevalent Horde side.)
Heritage ArmorI won’t dwell on this one, but it’s pretty obvious that the Worgen heritage armor has gotten a lot of negative feedback about its coloring that has been ignored. At least with the goblin heritage armor, you can use the tabard and all of the pieces look good with one another. Unfortunately for the Worgen, if you want to look decent, you can’t use the ugly shoulder pads or the gilneas Tabard.
Blizzard has clearly shown that they really aren’t putting in much effort in bringing Alliance players back to the game and would rather punish them with lackluster and half baked ideas. They’d rather release Vulpera, and drive more Alliance players to the Horde. 8.3 is yet another death bell, ringing in a new year of mediocre and uninspired Alliance content.
