Oh my… thank you for sharing, Sairelle. As a current Dracthyr main due to raid comp, this pleases me.
The more I think on it – and not to be negative – the more I feel this was a very mixed bag. Part exciting, part hopeful, part disappointed.
Almost feels like they got their wires crossed with Classic + and Retail.
The hero talents are cool but sort of shoot down hopes for new specs. They present 39 new terms to know and understand.
Imagine if the announcement for the 3-part saga included:
2 new support specs and 3 new tanking specs in The War Within – with more to come in patches and future chapters of the saga!
Player housing!
Almost anything other than Earthen, or at least something in addition to them.
People in retail want their Warlock meta-form tank, they want a Shaman tank! We need more classes to be able to either tank, heal or support for queues.
And for anyone paying attention, 39 hero trees should let you know that the shifting imbalance of a seasonal meta is the design intent, and “but class balance is hard!” is one of this, or any MMO’s, greatest myths.
I guess if anything, this 3rd tree lets the seasonal meta be more honed.
Well… at least we got a San’layn tree for DKs… I wanted a bard spec for Rogue or Pally, instead I can make my Rogue “Fatebound” whatever the hell that means.
…so, uh, is that pretty much it for the faction war?
Shadowlands couldn’t really be said to have a lot of faction conflict. Dragonflight expressly forbade it. The War Within looks to be pretty faction neutral, what with the Earthen and Thrall and Anduin cooperating again. Midnight is apparently about reuniting the Elves. The Last Titan is…probably not going to end on a faction war note?
Huh. Well. I guess that’s that. We’re friends now. All is forgiven.
I’m not actually so sure about this. I feel like they wouldn’t be making a point about there being “warbands” if just everything was account-wide. It seems like there’s at least some stipulation for how many can be in it.
(otherwise my 22 max level orc alt army will be bulldozing through all content immediately )
" * Warband Bank: Share Items between all of your characters on a single Battle.net account in one convenient bank."
And that little camp thing is for your main and favorite alts, regardless of faction, then every other character on your account is below or something… but I hope we can make multiple groups of 5 or whatever the “campfire cap” is ^ _ ^
I think given that we know next to nothing about them as yet it’s premature to jump to that assumption.
It sounds like they’re an embattled remnant of the ancient human empire that preceded the 7 Kingdoms. Their worship of the Light, or Holy Fire as they call it, isn’t in and of itself a sign of Scarlet Extremism. It’s very much common sense for this antiquated version of human society. I mean the Light as a religion permeates all of the human Kingdoms on some level, except maybe Dalaran (even Kul Tiras has Light-worshipping NPCs in Drustvar).
The red colour scheme is unsurprising given the vague “Roman Empire” references, not to mention the red that has always been used by the Kingdom of Stromgarde, which controls the heartlands of ancient Arathor.
The raging hate that the faction war has been getting from the playerbase kind of makes holding hands and singing happy songs together the only path forward, short of annihilating the factions altogether or making the entire Horde conduct regular rituals of self flagellation every Tuesday.
I just hope they don’t nullify the factions entirely. I like the factions, quite a bit actually. I miss the Alliance-Horde Cold War. I’d like us to cooperate, warily and distrustfully with occasional efforts to sabotage each other.
I do like aspects of the faction war, but considering every time there is a Big Bad Villain, we group up and take him down? I feel like it has overstayed it’s welcome, for the most part.
There has to be a middle ground and if I haven’t said it enough, I want the Goblin trikes. Anything that gets me closer to that, is good with me.
It seems like they have a way to put your favorites at the top (up to 5?) and then the remaining characters will be listed below, but not shown unless you move them.
He did say that they feel like it’s not respecting player’s time to have them log in, change realm, log on a character for 1 little thing, log out, change realm, log on another character, etc. They want all characters available in one place.
This feels to me like a step towards reducing servers again or something condensing, etc.
ETA: which I should say, I am fine with.
Related: This may also be a way to move towards allowing WRA and MG (massive faction imb), to co-exist, without co-existing on the same server.
We can cross realm guild with them, send items to them, etc etc.
They could have their vibe, we have our vibe and we still have the communal vibe.
It’s because they didn’t know how to write an actual faction war and have a victor that didn’t completely screw up how the status quo of the game works. That’s the entire reason they pulled N’Zoth and the Naga out of their Azshara.
There was no way to let the Alliance win (because they always have to win) without it leading to the disbanding of the Horde. So toss in the Civil War plot, toss in the ‘larger evil’ and just try to forget you just spent a entire expansion focused on trying to kill each other okay?
The Status Quo was stale back in WarCraft 3, that’s why that game functionally did away with it and ended up having four campaigns. Because just a Horde and a Alliance campaign would have been too narrow a focus.
Biggest problem with the Faction War is it has to mean something. Garrosh reigniting the conflict with the Alliance made sense. Varian was no fan of the Horde, tensions had been ratcheting throughout three expansions. The build up made sense and it lingered across two expansions. It wasn’t just one and done.
Then Legion happened. A sword got stabbed into the planet. A new resource is discovered. The Horde and Alliance start shooting at each other because they’re worried what the other will do with said new resource. Things spiral, and before the end of the expansion we’re suddenly dealing with an Old God totally unrelated to whatever nonsense Sylvanas was on about.
That was the key difference. The Fifth War had no build up of tensions. I remember back in Wardads it being laughed about because the Horde’s entire justification for Ashran was “Yeah but what if?”
We had the Alliance being mad about Broken Shore (Despite the fact a single diplomatic envoy explaining Vol’jin had been mortally wounded and Sylvanas made the decision to pull back Horde forces that were being overwhelmed/overrun would have cleared up all of that) and Azerite being the sole justification for BfA.
I’ve no problem with a faction conflict so long as it feels earned. But by that same token, I also am an Alliance main. I dislike the faction war narrative because historically speaking, every time there’s a faction war the Alliance goes down a major faction settlement with no replacement.
Wowhead: That typical end of an expansion, everyone expects that last tier to take eight months to a year.
Anne Stickney: Yeah, speaking of which, 10.2 is not the last patch of Dragonflight. We have so much more story to tell and you guys don’t even know. Oh my god, I can’t wait for you to see it.
This has me excited that we won’t be spending the last year of DF just cleaning up expac things.
The concept of a faction war is cool. It’s the heart and soul of Warcraft. It’s armies going to war. Action figures being played with.
What makes the faction war tiresome is Blizzard’s either inability or complete reluctance to actually write a story. The hallmarks of a faction war (the wins and losses, the changing winds of fortune, the escalation and tension) are absent from Blizzard because they just stick to the old formula of “Horde destroys a kitten orphanage, Alliance calls the manager, Horde destroys multiple more kitten orphanages, Alliance writes sternly-worded letter, neutral party shows up, denounces both, demands they forget the kitten-burning and fight Some Guy Who Just Showed Up.”
It’s almost unfair to say that the faction war is tired because there’s never actually been a faction war story. Just two Horde stories.
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