I played horde in the TBC days and was thinking it might be fun to level an Alliance Warlock and Shaman for TBC. PVP being the main thing I will be doing, how do y’all think it will pan out?
I am not even sure an ele/enh shaman is even all that good in PVP, but I know warlocks are. But I am mainly wondering about the faction balance.
I’m leveling a night elf druid in anticipation of lower queue times for bgs for easy gearing
Not familiar with tbc pvp gearing, can u plz quickly explain? Cheers
From all the guides and videos I have read, alliance have some strong racials for pvp. There will always be faction in balance however shorter queues will be great as you you need marks from the bgs for your non set pieces. (I think?).
you can get pvp sets from bgs, not the current best set from arena but one or two sets before it (forget how far back it goes, I think it’s the previous season’s set but I could be wrong)
all the current season’s offset gear is also available from honor
season 1 and season 2 weapons are available from honor eventually too
I would be playing human/undead for my lock and the human racials are not so great: https://web.archive.org/web/20080516033655/http://www.wowwiki.com:80/Racial_traits
Man, it would be hard to give up fear break and as horde not having to face a fear break as a horde warlock…
And canabalize!
All for fast queues. Tough decision here
TBC is going to be 99.9% horde. I hope all alliance jump on pve servers. I know I will if I stay alliance. For the first time in my wow history and it goes back to vanilla. I would play on a pve server. I got tired of fighting X amount of horde every 5 feet on Herod. Not going through that again.
That is true too, I hope I can find an experience like I had on Grobulus for levelling. It felt quite balanced.
Alliance do have weaker racials than horde, but some alliance racials can be extremely strong against certain comps.
Stoneskin on hunters playing Hunter/Priest is incredibly strong against rogue teams. Perception also can be quite strong (though at the higher tiers of play only human rogues really get much value out of it). Shadowmeld is one of the weaker racials but can protect healers drinking. Escape artist also can be massive for melee against any class that can kite them.
In the end none of these really compare to WotF or Hardiness, mainly because alliance racials just aren’t as globally useful.
Yeah racials aside, I wonder what the BG experience will be like. Queue times vs wins etc.
Who knows.
What is it like now? I haven’t played Classic in a while.
Alliance will have instant queues where horde will have 30min+ even for WSG/AB.
Racials matter for your class but Alliance’s racials are not as underwhelming in PvP as some are making them out to be. Human’s perception is so good because you will encounter soooo many rogues and druids that it could be top 3 racials in arena.
You gear pvp in BC by expending honor to purchase the gear. It takes over 250k honor to get a full set of gear, maybe even more. This includes cloaks, bracers, chest, helm, legs, etc. All have different costs.
You also need marks of WSG or AV or w/e to purchase gear alongside the honor. Honor is accumulated much more slowly than in classic now. So do not think “well, it’s easy to get 100k honor per week in classic.” In BC you get like a fraction of the honor you do now.
You’ll spend a lot of time doing battlegrounds alongside arena to get gear. Arena provides conquest points which can be spent for stronger pvp gear. You get conquest points depending on whether you play 2v2 or 3v3 or 5v5 and your rating. Each week you get a set amount of conquest points you can spend. Different gear requires different levels of rating to acquire.
I remember the Alliance dominating the early PvP scene in TBC but they got semi-nerfed in 2.3 by blind no longer being a poison (Stoneform) and Fear Ward becoming base for all races. That was the beginning of the PVP racials getting skewed in the Horde’s favor for several expansions.
Overall I would expect BGs to favor Horde. Arena is another story. I would say both factions are fully viable it just depends on the comp.
BG’s have always favored horde throughout TBC, with the exception of 2.4.3 AV, which alliance won in 10 minutes almost every game.
Alliance usually lack healers, and the horde ALWAYS have at least one in each BG which is an instant win for them. Based on my experience in classic, alliance will still not have any healers and with the introduction of resil and god mode druids, horde are going to have an even easier time winning than they did back in the day, with the exception of AV, of course.
Which the exception of perception, alliance racials are pretty garbo. Escape artist gets you out of one CC, which just gets instantly reapplied. Stoneform isn’t as good as blind isn’t a poison any longer. Only noteable alliance racial is Shadowmeld in arena to get the free drink in, but otherwise horde racials are superior in every way.
You’ll see a lot of people exaggerating but a lot of people will be humans rogues, dwarf priests, dwarf hunters, gnome mages, gnome warriors and night elf druids whose racials can be effective for their respective class
I’d be human if I could. Druid racial is garbo compared to human. Escape artist is good in classic specifically against mages, but as frost mages get like 50 different ways to freeze you in TBC, it becomes underwhelming and nearly useless. Dwarf priest is exceptionally good in arena due to being able to instantly remove all stacks of wound poison, but going human for perception could be just as beneficial to keep the rogue from opening on you in the first place.