I don’t disagree.
I’m not really sure who among the player base is that adamantly against dumping the faction system at this point.
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I don’t understand the controversy, really: transmogrification is really a MAGICAL effect. Stuff that magically looks like plate is not going to give you plate armor rating. I don’t understand how people don’t understand vanity(which really means emptiness) as a principle.
Said no oceanic player, ever.
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People that look like cloth but are not squishy, people that look like tanks but are squishy.
The PvP Hardcores complain that it would break PvP if they couldn’t look at a character and tell they a plate-class, mail-class, leather-class, or clothie just by looks alone without having to mouse over them.
Aesthetically and logically, the best system would be plate-users get plate/mail, mail-users get mail/leather (or better yet; just merge mail and leather into a ‘medium’ armor type and solve all the problems since the difference is so minuscule anyway), leather-users get leather and cloth; and clothies would still be clothies.
And @Stormkey Sorry, but I think that’s lazy. I would think that it’s everyone’s responsibility to at least know the ABC’s of each class. And some classes have exceptions to the rule.
I think you’ll need more than that lol. People aren’t leaving alliance for the Horde aesthetics, they are leaving for the available player pool. So it wouldn’t make any sense for them to return/transfer to alliance if that problem still exists.
I’ve said it before, but short of Blizzard dictating every players faction there will never be balance. Furthermore, at this point the imbalance is so large that the only thing that could reverse the pendulum will swing it entirely the other way resulting in the exact same problem backwards.
The best option imo is to allow cross faction instanced content. The imbalance wouldn’t be fixed, but it could be ignored at that point.
Honestly it’s time to move the factions to the background story-wise. Imagine if the factions were ostensibly working together, but had groups within each that still opposed the other faction. PvP would still happen (all those BG reps would still exist and be against the other faction’s version of them obviously), but for PvE content the factions would be working together like they always end up doing anyway. At least with my version there would be compelling story elements of certain groups still wanting war even if the faction leadership was trying to maintain peace.
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No, I am expecting to see the alliance losing even more people. I am thinking about switching side myself.
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Horde and Alliance are all the same players. I’m not really sure who is all 2005 era “check out my FOR THE HORDE tattoo” style super fans in 2020.
If anything more people will go Horde. We’ve already had a handful of Mythic guilds make the announcement they’re going Horde for Shadowlands.
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They’ve been massively unfair to the Alliance since WoD.
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“High elves” being available as a void elf customization option might tip the scale ever so slightly toward Alliance, but no. There isn’t any big reason to tilt the ratio yet.
Enough people to convince the dev team that a hard faction split is a “pillar of WarCraft”, at the very least.
… I think the dev team are missing the fact - the ‘morally grey’ area if I’m gonna be spicy, that you can have people playing with each other without outright deleting the factions!
Have they?
As I said I’m not a min maxer or a hardcore riader or nothing. Can you tell me what you see?
From a competitive standpoint the Human racial got nerfed to the ground, the one racial that was competitive enough to be compared with the multiple horde dps racials. We can even go further back to Throne of Thunder, the horde got free 5% bonus damage against most of the bosses there (beasts) just for being trolls. But did they nerf Arcane Torrent? No, they left an AoE silence racial untouched for another whole expansion, even now that it’s been reworked it’s almost as potent as before; most classes haven’t even got access to a single target purge and Blood Elves get it as AoE. This is actually deterimental to some classes, it diminishes the value of a priest or a shaman when a racial can fill their niche.
From a cosmetic standpoint the Horde got 4 highly requested races: Zandalari, Vulpera, Nightborne and Mag’har (idc how good or bad they turned out, you asked for them and you got them); nobody asked for HMT but they actually have some of the strongest racials in the game. We Alliance got none of our requests; Void Elves were basically a spit in the face to High Elf fans, Kul Tirans are forced diversity, Lightforged are extremly restrictive in classes and Dark Irons and Mechagnomes are a recolors to already unpopular races, of course they turned out unpopular.
The war mode bonuses did their job in 8.1. Back then, AOO gave gear which, if not great except the first week, was good - normal raiding ilvl for the first half of the patch, increasing to heroic raiding ilvl for the second half of the patch, comparable to what a player could get in pickup raiding - and that, along with the bonuses, not only helped balance war mode substantially, but also balanced the overall population of 120s, from 59/41 at the beginning of 8.1 to 54/46 by the end of 8.1. With the extra gear, this set the stage for balancing of the PVE scene as well.
8.2 unfortunately introduced more CTA quests, for Horde as well as Alliance, eliminating most of the war mode balancing effect of AOO. Now in 8.3, AOO is long overdue for an increase in reward from normal to heroic raid level but it doesn’t look like it will ever happen. As a result, the balancing effect has been lost. In addition, the Benthic grind, and now the Corruption grind, have diluted the effect of pure ilvl gear.
The 8.1 balancing mechanisms need to be restored, and then perhaps additional measures taken to balance PVE if needed.
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No. Most of the top end players play horde. There’s not much of anything they could do outside of extremely outlandish stuff that would make a bunch of people go alliance.
I foresee some players switching from Belf to Velf because of enhanced customization.
Returning players should also help address faction imbalance, as US historically has higher Alliance pops.
What about our more recent racials? How do they factor in?
KT MG and DID all seem strong to me.