I’ve seen a bunch of people mention that as a negative on TBC when advocating for classic+ but they never explain why. Someone explain why it’s a bad thing
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It wasn’t. I’ve played blood elves almost exclusively for 12 years. Only swapped to alliance for BFA because I hate troll storylines and themes, and the alliance gained knockoff blood elves with british accents.
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Sure - when you were picking your faction in vanilla it was a huge choice to make horde or alliance. Lots of thematic things at play - but a big one is the access to paladins or shaman.
When TBC released the classes to both sides it was the first step towards the homogenization we see today - which as of legion was somewhat rolled back. Its all about faction theme and choice and consequence of that choice (not having access to the opposite side’s class or its benefits)
For reference my opinion comes from playing 2 paladins to 60 - and then continuing with 1 of them straight through to BFA. I loved the original game because it was the more knightly alliance vs the more tribal horde. Those themes were present in all the paladin quests - where you help widows, children, etc. Once blood elf paladins came about it was somehow about stealing life, stealing magic, it made no real sense to me. It destroyed the sense of story and theme of the paladin class.
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The horde in Vanilla was the dark side. Alliance was the light side. Adding paladins to horde, and giving the ‘pretty’ elves to the horde, in conjunction with adding the monstrous Draenei to alliance began blurring the faction lines.
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It only effected those who chose alliance to specifically play paladin or horde shaman. Limiting access in classic was a flaw. BC corrected that.
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I think blood elves and the goat races are fine, the horde paly thing is crossing the line.
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What a dumb way to look at things. Pretty vs monstrous? Really? That’s the argument.
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An exclusive class to each faction is a really great thing from a fantasy and identity standpoint. For an example let’s look at a hypothetical situation where there is two playable factions.
Faction A is stereotypical “good guys”. Honor justice, slay what is evil. etc.
Faction B is stereotypical “bad guys” think LotR Orcs, demons, etc.
Wouldn’t it, from a narrative perspective, be odd to allow faction A to have say necromancers or something, while faction B had paladins. Both counter what each faction stands for.
Now in WoW the factions are more ambiguous so it’s not that extreme, but they still had to chip away at the shaman and paladin to get them to fit in to BC.
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Down with homogenization!
Also, Horde only got Belfs because Koreans only played beautiful characters. When your entire existence in game is to make more people play Horde…I’m going to draw the line. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed or not, but we seem to have a problem with too many edgelords in dis here game making PvP a tight mess. They don’t need any help. Kthxbye
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But horde aren’t bad guys and the alliance aren’t Boy Scouts. It’s way more nuanced. It’s a simplistic framing and a bad argument
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The idea that paladins were the “guaranteed good guys” they were in D&D should never have survived anyone’s first Scarlet Monastery group.
What was bizarre, was that Blizzard catered to that idea as much as they did in BC, instead of just being all, “Yep, blood elves have their own paladins, just like humans, just like Dark Iron dwarves. Deal with it.”
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Did you read my post? I said Horde and Alliance were more ambiguous and was using a straight up good vs. evil as an example to make my point easier to understand.
1 Like
Quite a few people resent the fact that Blood Elves were really only added to the Horde to give them a “pretty” looking race. They liked the theme of the Vanilla WoW Horde, and Blood Elves messed that up.
Especially given just how dominant Blood Elf became on the Horde.
The Paladin/Shaman thing I personally didn’t like because it made the factions less unique.
Though I feel like they should have doubled down on that and made Druids unique to the Alliance(and given the Horde something unique in return) in Vanilla.
It also didn’t help their lore for Blood Elf Paladins were basically “Light Vampires” at first.
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But your point is wrong. Trying to hand wave the nuance doesn’t make it not exist. “See my point makes perfect sense if you completely discount the huge part that makes it wrong”
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It took away from faction identity. Horde had Shamans, not Paladins.
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Blood Elves as a race were broken OP. Basically, every class that could be BElf, should be Belf for PVP.
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Combined, not only did Blizzard give Horde Paladins, they took it a step further and memed it that Horde have best PVP racials by giving them best paladins.
In essence, oh you know that thing that made your faction different from the other one? Yeah we’re gonna go ahead and give the Horde a better version lolololol.
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And yet you still miss it just because you don’t like it.
Paladins had nothing to do with the Horde and their lore and class fantasy had to be altered to fit in with it, this took away from both the Alliance and paladin class in the process, and the same can be said except the shaman, only with the class and factions reversed.
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- Faction identity is bigger than shaman bs paladin.
- The game isn’t centered around pvp.
- PvP racials have been broken for almost every race. It isn’t exclusive to blood elf’s.
Next?
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No changes. That’s why.
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Have…have you been playing the same game as I have for 15 years? One side’s chucking nukes and one side’s letting their mortal enemies go with a stern warning.
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Blood Elf paladins had different abilities to Alliance ones, stop digging your hole deeper.
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