Any advantage at all is a big advantage. Two different racials crippling three different classes and also making virtually every other class weaker is huge.
This is a consideration for sure, though Shaman are more offensive and Purge is huge.
Why would so many, “better” players want to be Horde if there wasn’t a tangible and worthwhile advantage?
“Anything is Big Anything” - no it isn’t.
“crippling” is utter hyperbole here. Absolute hyperbole.
That’s a good question, if it is true.
I only really have a problem with WoTF having such a short CD. A priests only player CC can be stopped every time, unless you managed to survive for a 26 sec CD to do it again, which likely won’t happen. Then if they decide to corpse camp you, WoTF is off CD by the time you get back to your corpse and you just repeat the same thing again, this time with half health/mana.
Alliance racials are too hyper specialized and situational. You’re asking for some kind of raw data when that would be impossible to collect.
For example, the arguable best pvp class, rogue, has basically 25% less chance to win against any orc of any class. Will of the forsaken is the most useful pvp racial in the game because shadow priests and warlocks are also excellent pvp classes, and that racial deletes them. Tauren having aoe stun with unlimited targets means that given equal numbers, if even two players are tauren, then the horde group will auto win because they run in, stun the alliance group, and everyone goes ham on them.
You should really re-read the alliance racials and their cooldowns, and really consider them AS IF you were rolling an alliance pvp toon. I’m not saying actually roll one. Just genuinely look at them and consider them.
They’re ridiculously crappy.
The only good bow in the whole game is Rhok’delar and Berserking is a pure PVE racial.
Warstomp is okay but the only class that wants to be Tauren is Druid because they don’t have other options and even Druids would prefer to be Nelf.
Alliance have pretty good racials too which everyone seems to be ignoring.
My rating would be:
S+: Orc
S: Gnome
A: Undead
B: Dwarf
C: Nelf
D: Human
E: Tauren
F: Troll
It is far, far better than “ok” and only gets better and better the larger the number of combatants is.
WoTF is unarguably an amazing racial. I’m definitely not disputing that. It’s situational though, and in WPVP, I can definitely see there are a lot of situations to take advantage of it. But, there’s also a lot going on in WPVP, if you have relatively large numbers on either side, or even small-ish 10v10 15 v 6, etc.
I’d actually be quite surprised indeed, if there was a case that could be made to show that the amount of advantage for Horde racials over Alliance would equate to 10v9 in BGs being equal and fair, though, for example.
Among the best players, minute advantages are massive. Among casual players it’s not as big but WotF/Hardiness have such a low skill floor/ceiling that it’s just that big of an advantage.
We’ve seen this countless times. When faction transfers became a thing, the best players moved - the PvPers were Alliance for a while for EMfH, then gravitated towards Horde after its nerfing. The PvE’rs swapped to Horde as well when there was tangible advantages from the racials.
It’s no coincidence that Horde is dominant in live and in vanilla (where raiding isn’t that hard and both sides have benefits and disadvantages). There’s not much of an advantage left that I know of in live, but it’s a remnant of there being a very real advantage. If there’s no reason for the Horde players to transfer to Alliance, they won’t. The community is very solid and thriving on the Horde because of the trickle down effect of the top guilds transferring.
You do realize Priests and Warlocks rely entirely on Fear (or Charm) for the bulk of their CC right? How is that not crippling to them? Also, a gigantic chance to resist stuns can completely negate Rogue and several other classes.
I feel like you’re arguing for the sake of it now. The Horde have the bulk of the playerbase, and while there’s no real, “top player” in Classic, live WoW does have almost every top guild being Horde.
Players like Vurtne and Mute were only able to do what they did through skill primarily and WotF. You can see them lean heavily on it when they fight anyone with a fear, including Warriors.
When I kill scum like you in PvP I sometimes S key over your corpse.
It’s a more effective taunt than sitting on your face over and over.
I wonder what he says when every encounter is 3v1+ to his advantage.
QFT, watch the vids.
I’m alliance on Herod. The 3 to 1 advantage is in Horde Favor here.
The best part is you don’t even have to time it incredibly well. If you pop too early, you still immune the fear. But you can also break it with that. Can you do that with other abilities, like Berserker Rage? I feel like you can’t.
That’s… my point. He’s talking about how, “unskilled” Alliance are when we’re always outnumbered.
The thing about wotf was that it was balanced around paladin anti-undead abilities working on undead pcs (and priest’s shackle undead).
That is why wotf is so ungodly powerful. Then, everything was in parity.
Then, they removed the ability for alliance paladins and priests to use those on enemy players and did not remove and replace wotf with something else.
And here we are.
They removed the 20 second immunity on fear and gave it 5 seconds instead.
To this day Horde actually cry about this being a nerf without realizing how much of a racial advantage exists.
It wouldn’t even matter if it were just a fear-break with no immunity. That is so silly op in pvp that it’s comical, because:
The four best offensive pvp classes are, in no order, rogue, warlock, arms warrior, and shadow priest (on alliance).
WotF covers 3/4 of those.
Orc Hardiness covers the last.
Again, “minute is massive” just doesn’t actually make any sense. No, it isn’t.
I think I understand what you are trying to say, which is that if you take two equally unskilled players, and give them a small advantage, then due to them being so unskilled, they will never even notice it. And, that may be true.
Sure. There absolutely, and undeniably is a shift in factions by PVPers when there is an advantage for some races (like humans) who have popular enough classes for a lot of people to take advantage of that. And, I’m not saying that that is not happening in Classic, but that is in no way evidence that it is happening in Classic, either.
Are you sure? How can we know this?
As an example, and I’m not claiming that this is fact or truth, but anecdotal, so please go ahead and correct me if I am wrong, but as an example, for me:
I rolled Horde with my friends from Highschool, during Vanilla WoW. I went with a Female UD Warlock, and it certainly wasn’t for WotF; it was because my first ever Diablo II character was a Necromancer, and Warlock seemed closest to that, and I chose female, because I thought there might be some swiftness advantage or something.
I eventually achieved max-level, it was already BC by then, and I started forming groups, doing Heroic instances, and raiding, and also Arenas. I realized that I was on a PVE server, and that disgusted me, really. There was a sinking feeling in my gut that made me feel like I’d been wasting my time playing on a poor version of the game, and I hated it (idk exactly why, but needless to say, I don’t particularly like PVE servers).
Anyway, since I often formed groups (because who was going to invite a newb warlock to their runs), I new that finding tanks and healers was much more difficult than finding CC or DPS classes (back then, we’d spam LFG with things like, "lfm cc for "), but I felt like tanking was difficult, and required advanced knowledge of the game, so I decided to roll a priest on a PVP server. I chose Laughing Skull, because it had a cool name. You may know that server, because it had one of the top world guilds Deus Vox, and another guild Pals For Life, that made Leeeeeeeeeroy Jenkins a thing in WoW, both on the Alliance side.
Back then, it was no secret that Horde was the underdog. People HATED blood elves, and often ridiculed people for choosing them… esp. male Blood Elves, but still they were quite popular. I think a lot of people thought of them as Alliance rerolls. Anyway, AFAIK, Blood Elves were introduced to help increase populations for Horde. Fast forward to Retail WoW, and it seems like almost everyone is an elf.
So, while I may be alone in my own perceptions and opinions about WoW and its population, I came to Classic expecting Horde to be the underdog faction, especially since there are no Blood Elves.
I suppose that a massive amount of the Classic population has come from private servers (unfortunately, in my opinion, as I personally wish there was a way to prevent private server players from mingling with non-private server players, as I feel it detracted from the experience while leveling, but meh… that’s a relatively small gripe, and I don’t expect anything could have been done about it anyway - nor likely should have been… I just don’t like it, for whatever reason), and maybe came in with that mindset of dominating in World PVP.
I don’t know though. I don’t have numbers, and I don’t really have a strong understanding of whether any issue actually exists with regards to faction balance.
ROFLMFAO
This guy buries his head in the sand. There’s actually hard data on this throughout history. ALSO, there’s even data on the massive faction swings when they did make changes to racials.
Cringe.